If you are feeling adventurous, the openSUSE project, which is creating the next generation of Novell's SUSE desktop Linux and its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server variant, would love to get a little help from you testing out the new SUSE 10.1 Beta 4 release of the development version of the operating system.

The openSUSE project warns that the beta release has "some rough edges," such as the partitioner not working right (it sometimes mixes up existing partitions and cannot make new ones), but if you are starting with a fresh install and a single partition, it apparently works alright. Incidentally, the project warned that this beta is, for other reasons, intended as a fresh install only, not as an upgrade of an existing Linux machine. (There is some suggestion that if you manually partition a disk using fdisk and then do an install, it works fine, but openSUSE is still testing this hypothesis.) Also, Novell's Yast system management tool and VMware virtual machine logical partitions (as distinct from the disk partitions discussed above) are not working perfectly together yet. The VMware partitions will work on SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta 4, but Yast can't see all of the partition's properties. Network installation over Samba doesn't work, but using HTTP, NFS, or FTP does work. There are also issues with the new package manager, which is a hybrid of Novell's yast2 and Ximian's libredcarpet packagers, now called libzypp. You should read the release notes before diving in.