The OpenSUSE project is really starting to look exciting to me. With the recent release of Beta4 we are just 9 days away from the first release candidates of OpenSUSE 10.
One of the first difficulties of any Linux distribution is package management. Fedora uses Yum (not bad), Kubuntu uses apt (great!), Suse uses Yast (not good.) Yast was fully capable of doing everything the other package managers were but it suffered from two problems. 1) The newest version of Suse never had online packages available; 2) Older versions were really slow and pretty buggy. Steady progress on problem #2 has been going on since the 9.x releases, to the point were Yast is pretty nice to work with. Problem #1 was solved… with the creation of OpenSUSE.
So here are a couple of useful links for getting Yast working with online package repositories. A tutorial on setting up Yast; and the locations of OpenSUSE repositories.