openSUSE has announced the first Release Candidate for openSUSE 12.2 on the ARM architecture. Since the openSUSE Conference in 2011, the openSUSE ARM team has managed to bring up openSUSE ARM from nothing to a truly usable and functional distribution on the ARM version 7 architecture.

Jos Poortvliet points out that “if you realize that this is an entirely community driven effort, it becomes clear that someone with dedication can make incredible things happen in openSUSE.”

Andrew Wafaa, who continues to be heavily involved in the openSUSE-on-ARM initiative and now works for the UK CPU designer, remarks: "It was a fast and hard ride. Supporting a new architecture is always a lot of work, especially one as diverse and versatile as ARM's, but with the right tools and the right help it is possible to do it in record time!"

This release focuses on ARMv7 with the Cortex-A profile from ARM Ltd. Due to the complicated landscape of ARM devices, only a subset is supported at the moment: Texas Instruments’ OMAP3 & OMAP4, Marvell ArmadaXP 510 and Freescale I.MX51; the supported devices running with these SoCs are the Beagleboard, Beagleboard-xM, Pandaboard, Pandaboard-ES and the EfikaMX smarttop/smartbook. There is also an image for the VersatileExpress which is suitable for use in Qemu as well as a generic root file system tarball that users and developers may use to help bring up unsupported devices.

You can download the images from this link.