The OpenSuse project will stop supporting version 10.3 of the Linux distribution as of 31 October, a key member of the team has said.
The announcement comes in the same week that OpenSuse released the fifth milestone build of OpenSuse 11.2 and Novell — sponsors of OpenSuse — created a developer team dedicated to the project.
On Tuesday, Marcus Meissner, Suse security team leader, said the end of October would mark the end for OpenSuse 10.3, which was originally released in October 2007. The software included the 2.6.22 Linux kernel, KDE 3.5.7, Gnome 2.20 and OpenOffice.org 2.3.
After 31 October, those using the software will stop receiving new updates, including security and critical fixes, and it will be removed from Suse's download server, Meissner said in a mailing list message.
OpenSuse 11.0 will be supported until 30 June and OpenSuse 11.1 will run until 31 December next year, Meissner said.
Version 11.2 of the distribution is intended for release on 12 November, and developers released Milestone 5 of the software on Monday. The milestone release includes the final version of KDE 4.3 and the first beta of OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, as well as the Linux kernel 2.6.31-rc4, Xen 3.4.1 RC10, Gnome 2.27.5 and VirtualBox 3.0.2, according to the project team.
On Wednesday, Novell announced it had created a team of developers dedicated to OpenSuse, to be led by Klaas Freitag. Henne Vogelsang will take over as OpenSuse project manager and Stephan Kulow will continue as release manager for the next OpenSuse distribution, according to Novell.
Previously, developers worked on OpenSuse when they had spare time, but the new team will consist of more than 10 staff who will work exclusively on the project, Roland Haidl, director of operations and communities at Novell, said in a mailing list message.
