Just this weekend, Novell released OpenSUSE 10.1 to the world. It was a little late, but we were still very excited. This is my initial review of the product.

The Operating System – now released under the OpenSUSE name – decends from the SuSE distribution of Linux. Novell – who owns the SUSE brand – has been releasing SUSE as both an official boxed release and as a community edition, labeled OpenSUSE. At this time, only the OpenSUSE version is available.

I downloaded the new version from www.opensuse.org and created a DVD ISO from the five CDs using this script, which I saw on the SUSE mailing list. I then used the DVD to upgrade an Athlon XP 2400 machine I have which was running SuSE 9.2 and was ready for a new version. The upgrade process took some work, as there were many applications which needed to be manually changed in YaST prior to the actual upgrading of the files. Once complete, however, I had a working system.

In my opinion, OpenSUSE 10.1 is: mostly harmless.