Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by Novell. After acquiring SUSE Linux in January 2004, Novell decided to release the SUSE Linux Professional product as a 100% open source project, involving the community in the development process. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0, and as of November 2009 the current stable release is openSUSE 11.2.