WIth the release of the beta now imminent, here are the first screenshots (component/option,com_zoom/Itemid,50/catid,17/) – particularly highlighting some of the new stuff.
Today, after a series of speedtests, the current OpenLab 4.1 builds were essentially approved for shipping, with the exception of a few minor items. These items have since been addressed and I am fairly confident of passing sign-off tomorrow. One change to come out of these tests is in fact fairly major, though technically it was trivial to implement. Unlike any previous version of OpenLab, the next LIVEcd will not boot to a login screen, but will autologin the demo users, the installer can then be launched from a desktop icon. Users who prefer a dedicated install environment can still log out, the autologin is non-persistent, so you can subsequently log in as root just like before.The major motivation for the change is boottime on the LIVEcd, by cutting out the login process we save between 15 and 45 seconds on most machines. The other major decision made is more managerial than technical. The system that was number 4.1 was after a discussion on the size of the changes reversioned as 4.Z. The significance of the Z is that this will be the last release in the version 4 tree, with the next major tree expected to be post-KDE4 as OpenLab 5 sometime in 2007.This change is specific to the version number – not the version name. For all matters of practicallity, just think of this upcoming release as Conina-Beta.
OpenLab 4.1Beta is in it's final stages of preparation now – and on schedule for a release early next week.At this stage all the bug reports from the alpha are fixed and a few new features were added, as well as a number of version upgrades including new versions of amar0k (released last week), squashfs (released on Thursday) and the kernel (now shipping 2.6.17.11).Of course it always serves well to compare yourself with others to make sure you are on track. To this end I had a friend who uses $other_very_famous_distro send me their default kernel configuration file for comparison with my own.