openSUSE Project's Ludwig Nussel was happy to announce the release of the second Alpha milestone towards the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system, just in time for the openSUSE Conference.

Borrowing many of the core components from its bigger brother, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2, which is in development as well, OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 2 comes with a full GNOME 3.20 desktop environment update, the latest YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) system setup and configuration tool, and systemd 228.

Other components worth mentioning are GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.22, Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.2, Samba 4.4, and CMake 3.5. On the other hand, there are various components that haven't received new versions, such as the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, and it looks like there are many packages that fail to build.

"Some of those updates like cmake and glibc cause other packages to fail building. So the amount of broken packages in 42.2 has increased quite a bit, according to the dashboard we have 181 unresolvable or failed packages right now. Help to analyze and fix the issues is appreciated there," said Ludwig Nussel in the announcement.

openSUSE Leap 42.2 lands November 2, 2016

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is in early development stages, and this second Alpha build is here just for those brave enough to help the openSUSE devs with fixing bugs, or at least report them. The development cycle of openSUSE Leap 42.2 will continue with a first Beta release, due for the last week of August.

There will be a second Beta build as well, which should see the light of day sometime around the date of September 21, followed two weeks later, on October 6, by the first Release Candidate (RC). The last milestone, openSUSE Leap 42.2 Release Candidate 2, will arrive on October 18, 2016.

The final openSUSE Leap 42.2 release should hit the streets on November 2, but right now you can download the openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 2 ISO images for an early taste of what's coming to the stable GNU/Linux operating system for personal computing. In related news, the openSUSE Conference 2016 is taking place June 22-26 at the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany.