As you know openSUSE released the first beta in the 10.2 developmental cycle on the 26th and tuxmachines has been checking it out in preparation for our report. This feature and version freeze release came with quite a few annoying bugs, but most didn't apply to my testing. I did encounter a coupla problems of my own and little or no new eye candy was found. But how did the system perform overall?

The installer was the same as we've grown accustomed to basically. This release the installer went back to full screen (at least here) and something happened to the fonts. They seemed very jagged and faded out in places. That was weird. The only new feature I picked up on was the new types of installs. LVM appeared previously, but this release I noticed EVMS is now available (although there seems to be some bugs with this option). Reiserfs was still the default filesystem and reiser4 was still not available. One of the most annoying bugs concerns the installation of Grub. It will overwrite your MBR no matter what you choose in the configuration and I've seen reports that it won't even write it correctly rendering your system unbootable. I avoided this issue by choosing not to install a bootloader at all (which is my normal method anyway). But if you're gonna test this release, I'd suggest having a livecd handy. Most of my hardware was detected properly although, as stated earlier, I did have some minor issues.