Copyright © 2010 Novell, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included as the file fdl.txt.
This is just the initial version of the release notes for openSUSE Factory. Find previous release notes referenced in the openSUSE wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Release_Notes#Last_version_of_the_Previous_Release_Notes.
This public beta test is part of the openSUSE project. Information about the project is available at http://opensuse.org.
Find information about known bugs for this beta in the openSUSE wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs. Please report all bugs you encounter using this prerelease of openSUSE Factory in the Novell Bugzilla at http://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports. If you would like to see anything added to the release notes, please file a bug report against the "Release Notes" component.
These release notes cover the following areas:
Installation: Read this if you want to install the system from scratch.
General: Information that everybody should read.
System Upgrade: Issues related to the process if you run a system upgrade from the previous release to this openSUSE version.
Technical: This section contains a number of technical changes and enhancements for the experienced user.
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The new Installation QuickStart guides you step-by-step through the installation process.
In the Start-Up Manual, find information about installation and basic system configuration.
The Reference Guide covers deployment, administration, and system configuration in detail and explains how to set up variuos network services.
The KDE and GNOME Quickstart guides give a short introduction to the desktops and some key applications running on it.
The KDE and GNOME User Guides guide you through using and configuring the desktops and help you perform key tasks.
The Application Guide introduces you to the key desktop applications such as browsers. e-mail clients, office applications and collaboration tools as well as graphics and multimedia applications.
The Security Guide introduces basic concepts of system security, covering both local and network security aspects.
Since quite some time, smbfs is no longer part of the kernel. The cifs component has replaced it. To avoid confusion with the name of the service, we finally renamed it accordingly.
During the upgrade of a system with an installed samba-client package, the state of the service will be saved, /etc/samba/smbfstab migrated to /etc/samba/cifstab, and the state of the service restored, if required.
The mount.cifs program that is being used to mount Samba/CIFS shares will not be allowed to be run as a setuid root program. mount.cifs has been the subject of several security bugs that have arisen due to some of the users using it as a setuid root program. For e.g., tools like smb4k on the distribution require mount.cifs setuid root. So there is a chance that users of such tools set the setuid bit. This program has not been properly audited for security and the Samba team strongly recommends that it not be installed as a setuid root program at this time.
To make that very clear, this release forcibly disables the ability for mount.cifs to run as a setuid root program. People are welcome to trivially patch this out, by setting CIFS_DISABLE_SETUID_CHECK to 1, but they do so at their own peril.
A security audit and redesign of this program is in progress by the Samba Team.