The YaST development team at openSUSE and SUSE is reporting on the latest improvements that should be available in the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 operating systems.

The 23rd YaST development sprint 23 took place last week, and we're looking at a lot of nice features coming soon to the in-house built installation and configuration tool for OpenSuSE and the SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions, such as integration of the self-update feature with the SUSE Customer Center (SCC) and Subscription Management Tool (SMT) servers.

Additionally, there will be various usability improvements and fixes in AutoYaST's dialogs with timeout, automatic integration of add-on repositories during installation, storage reimplementation for continuous integration, better support for ARM systems that use EFI, as well as major updates to the documentation and manuals of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system.

"With Leap 42.2 in Alpha phase and SLE12-SP2 in Beta phase, the YaST Team is concentrating the firepower in fixing bugs in the installer. We fixed more than 40 bugs in three weeks!," explained the YaST devs. "The world is getting full of cool ARM64 devices and both SUSE and openSUSE are actively working in supporting as many of them as possible."

LVM support in the new storage stack

Work on the YaST installer for openSUSE Leap 42.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 continues, and there will be another YaST development sprint soon, and we shall be able to see even more improvements to the self-update feature, as well as LVM (Logical Volume Management) support in the new storage stack.

In the meantime, the openSUSE Leap development team is preparing for the first Beta release of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system. The Beta should be out at the end of the month, on August 31, 2016, and it will be syncronized with the Beta build of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 2.