Planet Lowyat

Today, Novell has announced the availability of its second service pack (SP2) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 containing enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability.

Important Update:

• Virtualization. With Service Pack 2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 becomes the first and only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests, and the live migration of those guests across physical machines. In addition to the latest version of the leading open source hypervisor, Xen 3.2, SLES 10 SP2 ships with an updated version of virt-manager. This virtual machine management tool provides a summary of all live domains, along with detailed graphical views of virtual machine utilization and performance over time. These virtualization enhancements offer enterprises increased flexibility, and enable them to more quickly and easily manage both their physical and virtual systems.
• Systems Management. SLES 10 SP2 includes updates to the YaST management toolset, including first-boot enhancements and support for the Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol. It also includes updates to the YaST2 network and storage modules to support new bridge devices, FICON devices for mainframes, and VLANs, as well as support the online resizing of ext3 partitions.
• High Availability. SLES 10 SP2 includes the latest open source failover subsystem technology, Heartbeat 2.1.3, and adds a resource agent for iSCSI initiator, as well as hooks to SAP resource agents. It also includes updated tools for creating and managing file systems using OCFS2, offering improved support for simultaneous write access, and also offers new capabilities for managing XFS and ReiserFS file systems.
• Network Management. Included in SLES 10 SP2 is NetworkManager 0.7.0, for setting up and configuring active network connections. The product also includes support for IPv6, the next generation network layer for packet-switched internetworks.

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The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! There are many exciting enhancements and features in the new release. Among these is the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, installable live CDs and much more.

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

GNOME 2.22: Beta 1 includes GNOME 2.22.1 with plenty of new features and packages. Interested in helping with testing for GNOME in openSUSE 11.0? See the wiki for all the info you need.

YaST ported to Qt4: openSUSE’s administration and installation tool, YaST, has been ported to Qt4, providing beautiful styling for the installer, and an improved look for areas such as package management.

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