openSUSE Release Process » openSUSE 13.1 Release

We send the press a 'personalized' email. It contains some personal notes from whoever sends it (usually Jos/the CM).

Be sure to have it reviewed.

Example text below from the 12.3 release:
Hi XXX,

As the openSUSE community manager, I am pleased to provide to you the final version of openSUSE 12.3 for your evaluation in advance of its worldwide release on March 13. openSUSE 12.3 comes only six months after our previous release, which means we are back to our usual eight month cycle (12.2 was delayed by two months). Below is a link to the openSUSE 12.3 GoldMaster (final) for your testing pleasure. Also included is a feature overview and press release. The announcement is embargoed until Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 14:00 UTC.

Notable in openSUSE 12.3 is the addition of OpenStack (Folsom) packages as well as the move to MariaDB as default database. MySQL is still a part of our distribution, so not much will change for the average user as both databases have been part of openSUSE for a long time already.

And there is of course the ARM and ARM 64bit work our ARM team has been doing. We're currently at over 4000 build packages, putting us well ahead of any other Linux distribution supporting ARM's AArch64 architecture. Preview images for installation and testing will be made available when 12.3 is released. The ARM 32bit efforts are progressing too. We plan to release a stable openSUSE 12.3 for ARMv7 shortly after the x86 and x86_64 versions to be released on Wednesday the 13th.

In case you wonder and have followed the controversy, we support UEFI in this release and there's Secure Boot. But, in proper openSUSE fashion, we're not 200% confident about Secure Boot, in part due to the issues with Sony laptops (we will carry the patches making the issue less likely to hit our users). A wiki page is being built on https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:UEFI to keep our users informed of our ongoing efforts to solve Secure Boot.

There will be new SUSE Studio images for 12.3 available on release day. Upgrading existing images/appliances will also be possible on Wednesday, March 13.

http://software.opensuse.org has been building openSUSE 12.3 packages for a while and much software is already available. For example, the just released plasmate 1.0 is already built for 12.3!

I'm quite proud of what our desktop teams have done for this release. See http://news.opensuse.org/?p=15318 if you are interested in a preview. There's an awesome video introducing our default desktop, KDE, made by a volunteer (you won't believe he did that in his free time if you see it).

If you have any questions or would like an interview with someone from the openSUSE team, the wider community, the board or me, just let me know.

Kind regards,
Jos Poortvliet
openSUSE Community Manager

Materials we have for you

The goldmaster link:
http://download.opensuse.org/xxx
username 'xxx' pw 'xxx'

PLEASE do NOT share this, except perhaps with colleagues who will also observe the EMBARGO!

The official press announcement which we will send on March 13, 14:00
https://github.com/openSUSE/Press-Kit/raw/master/English/openSUSE%20123%20announcement.pdf

The feature guide, detailing many of the features coming in the 12.3 release.
https://github.com/openSUSE/Press-Kit/raw/master/English/Feature%20Guide.pdf

Here's a link to a zip on github containing the above as well as over 40 screen shots you can use any way you like. Note that I included some shots of ARM 64bit, cloud and server stuff (those are text screens mostly).
https://github.com/openSUSE/Press-Kit/archive/master.zip

preview of the announcement article on news.opensuse.org:
https://news.opensuse.org/?p=15299&preview=true