openSUSE 11.4 M6 Kills HAL, Brings WebYaST, Avoids SystemD

The openSUSE community is celebrating the end of January by releasing openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6. This new development snapshot brings several prominent changes, including the final removal of HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer), the migration to systemd from SysVInit has been pushed back to the next openSUSE release, and it now incorporates support for Novell's WebYaST.

Here's some of the key points from the release announcement for openSUSE 11.4 M6:

- The developers have been closely evaluating systemd as to whether it's ready to replace SysVInit within openSUSE. This was originally expected to happen for openSUSE 11.4, but due to "getting the last 10% of the integration perfect", it's now been delayed to the next release, openSUSE 11.5. (At least we still should see systemd makes its premiere with Fedora 15.)

- The Linux Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) has finally been stripped out of openSUSE. This has already occurred for many other Linux distributions, but it's now been done on the openSUSE side for removing this deprecated implementation. UDev, UDisks, UPower, and other software projects replace the HAL functionality.

- WebYaST has been integrated into openSUSE. WebYaST was originally designed for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as a way for system administrators and others to provide web-based administration and management to SuSE installations, but with 11.4 M6 it's now available to openSUSE users too.

- New package versions in openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6: X.Org 7.6, VirtualBox 4.0.2, GnuCash 2.4, KDE 4.6 RC2, and Xfce 4.8.

- openSUSE 11.4 is currently shipping with a version of the Mozilla Firefox 3.6 web-browser, but a Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta is expected to enter openSUSE 11.4 and it will then be update-able to the final release upon its availability.

- The artwork for openSUSE 11.4 should now be complete with new wallpapers, splash screens, and other branding.

Next up for openSUSE 11.4 is a release candidate in just about two weeks while the final release is slated to come in March.