Many of you have eagerly been awaiting the release of NetworkManager 0.8.1. Well, it’s not completely done yet, but a first beta release just hit the mirrors about 12 hours ago.

I’m proud to announce that there are already packages for openSUSE available thanks to our great openSUSE Build Service. Packages exist currently for openSUSE 11.2 and openSUSE Factory.
A warning first: I did not even install the packages yet! So they might or might not work at all.

So, what is the nice new feature we all want from 0.8.1?

BT-DUN -> Dial-up Networking over Bluetooth connections! Yes, NM 0.8.1 should bring this and one as such there is one less action to be done on the console (currently I have to resort to wvdial to get my BT phone to work as a ‘modem’ for me…).

The repositories for the brave ones:
for openSUSE 11.2: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dimstar:/NetworkManager-0.8.1/openSUSE_11.2
for openSUSE Factory: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dimstar:/NetworkManager-0.8.1/openSUSE_Factory

Any comments regarding the packages are welcome, either here or in the various openSUSE Mailing-lists. Bug reports, as usual, can be submitted to bugzilla.novell.com.

PS: No, this will not fly into openSUSE 11.3. The repos are version and feature frozen and adding a beta of an upcoming release would just call for trouble.