The much-awaited Beta release of openSUSE 12.1 is here! And just in time for your weekend Beta Pizza Party. So fire up tha t oven and warm up that download manager because its time to get ready for the latest awesome openSUSE on your computer.

If you’ve been following us, you know this release was originally called Milestone 6. However, the release team and its testers agreed this round of testing showed Milestone 6 to be so stable and ready for general testing, they decided to call it Beta. And that means that if you’ve been thinking about taking a pre-release of 12.1 for a spin before our final release in November, there’s no time like the present.

Testing is even easier nowadays with the ease of setting up a virtual machine so you won’t have to worry about affecting your actual production machine. Naturally, with any pre-release, you’ll want to check out the list of known bugs to make sure there’s nothing that catches you by surprise. And as with any release, we welcome your reports of any bugs not already found so we can make the final release of openSUSE 12.1 even more awesome.

So what are you waiting for? Call up your friends and get together for an awesome night of pizza, beer (or root beer), and start downloading here. We’re sure you’ll be just as excited as we are once you see 12.1 on your machine.