THE OPENSUSE PROJECT, a worldwide Open Sourcery coven financed by Novell, today announced that openSUSE 11.0 is now available for download.

The new release has more than 200 new features and hundreds of application updates as well as a redesigned, simpler installer.

A choice of desktop environments are available, including Gnome 2.22 and KDE 4. OpenSuse 11.0 is also the first Linux distribution to include the 1.0 Banshee release which keeps all of your digital music and video ship shape.

Andreas Jaeger, chairman of the Opensuse Project Board reckons, “Opensuse 11.0 is a true reflection of the community that discussed, tested, developed, translated and promoted it.” All brown beer, beards and sandals, then.

The free OS is available as a full DVD image that includes both Gnome and KDE, which gives users the ability to perform custom software selection at installation, or Gnome and KDE live CDs. The Gnome and KDE live CDs enable users to run Opensuse without modifying their computer from the CD, and to perform an install of the Gnome or KDE desktops, respectively.

Or if you want 90 days of support, an actual plasticky disk thing, and a real paper startup guide you can cough up for the retail box from Novell. At time of writing there were no prices available, but we're sure our dear readers will put us straight on that one in the comments section below.

Also the download server was borked when we tried but you can give it a try for yourself here. µ

L'Inq
Novell