SuSE Linux 10, announced a month ago Friday, is the first released from Novell since the company launched the open community project, an attempt to bring in volunteer developers, akin to what takes place on Mozilla's Firefox.
A replacement for SuSE Linux Professional, Linux 10 includes both the GNOME 2.12 and KDE 3.4 Linux desktops, Firefox, the latest preview release of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 application suite, spam blockers, the Apache Web server, and more than 1,000 other Linux applications and utilities.
Linux 10 can be installed either as a replacement for Windows or as a second OS alongside Microsoft's operating system. In the latter, SuSE 10 works in trial style, and doesn't disturb any existing software, including Windows, on the PC.
A boxed copy of Linux 10 retails for $60, but the distribution can be downloaded for free in images suitable for transferring to one DVD or five CDs. The single available mirror site, however, didn't respond to several requests by TechWeb; the same held true for downloads from the openSuSE.org site.
Users equipped with a BitTorrent client may have success downloading Linux 10.
The openSuSE.org site warned that it may take several days for the downloading kinks to work out. "As SuSE Linux 10.0 was released just on Oct. 6th the mirrors are still downloading all the files and it will take a few days until all are synced," the group's site read Friday. "Sorry for any inconvenience."