Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Almost 2% of 2023 is already behind us. Week 1 is, from experience, always a still rather quiet week. Many contributors are still with their families or are just stretching some vacation. But, of course, only ‘many’ and by far not all. Tumbleweed managed to release 7 snapshots since the last review (1230, 1231, 20230101…20230105).

The main changes shipped were:

• Qt5 qtwebengine 5.15.12
• Mesa 22.3.2
• xorg-x11-server 22.1.6
• Linux kernel 6.1.2
• Poppler 23.01.0
• xz 5.4.0
• ImageMagic 7.1.0.57

Staging projects start to be more filled up again, mostly with a lot of python-* updates (too many to list). The main updates sticking out are:

• Python pytest 7.2.0
• Meson 1.0.0
• KDE Plasma 5.26.5
• Linux kernel 6.1.3
• GnuPG 2.4: breaks gpgme:qt and seahorse (fix for seahorse in the queue)
• Libzypp 17.31.7: PackageKit fix arrived
• Python Sphinx 6.1
• Boost 1.81.0: breaks libetonyek and LibreOffice
• Ruby 3.2 is being tested to become the default ruby version: YaST is failing
• Switch to openSSL 3: tracked in Staging:N

From time to time we should ask ourselves how are we doing. Are we successful, are we on the right track, are we heading to the right direction, are we fast enough, are we accelerating or slowing down?

This time I am talking about the openSUSE Linux Distribution and about the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

And here I quickly would like to note an important disclaimer with a short story.

I’ve completed the first version of a book of instructions to use Samba’s client Group Policy. You can download a pdf or ebook here, purchase a print copy from Amazon, or you can read the web version. I’m only charging printing cost for the physical book (in accordance with the license). Digital copies are all free.

The purpose of the book is to provide detailed instructions to get folks up and running using Samba’s client Group Policy. I’ve received numerous requests for help on the mailing lists, and many of the questions are simple ones. Previously none of this information was documented well anywhere.

If you encounter problems getting setup, or find errors in the book, please contact me. You can also contribute to the book if you wish.

Installing syslog-ng on Mac is easy, if you use Homebrew for 3rd party packages. Previously, you had to install dependencies and then compile syslog-ng from source. Now, a single command takes care of everything!

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-is-now-available-in-homebrew

Some maintenance operations caused a long downtime on our reference server. In the lines below you will find a detailed explanation of what happened. Impact Our reference server was offline for around 2 hours. The application responded with a maintenance message or with a 503 HTTP error (Service Unavailable). No one was able to work with the API or web interface during that time. Root Causes It is common to perform updating operations in our...

A few weeks ago I started to notice some problems with my computer and ultimately discovered that it had a RAM failure. It wasn’t quite obvious to me that the RAM was failing until I did some digging. I have previously written about that time-vacuum of an experience. Thinking the the worst, that the larger […]

In all my time using computers, I haven’t had a memory failure since the late 80s on Commodore 64 which was likely caused by a static discharge. Every computer since, laptop or desktop, traveling around the world, have not seen any sort of memory issue. I’ve gong through hard drives, replaced screens, keyboards and touch […]

Hack Week is the time SUSE employees experiment, innovate & learn interruption-free for a whole week! Across teams or alone, but always without limits.

This year the Hack Week was this week, the last week of January and for my first SUSE hack week I decided to work in something funny, LILS.

Linux Immersive Learning System (LILS)

I don't think that this is a good name, but don't focus on it. The main idea of this project is to create some basic machinery to be able to write "interactive" tutorials or games using the INK language.

This is not an original idea, indeed all I've done is something that's currently working on EndlessOS, and was the main idea behind the dead project Hack Computer, you can even take a look to the Hack app in flathub. But I wanted to work around this, and create something simpler, from scratch.

I wanted to build something simple, with just Python, and make it simple enough to be able to build other tools on top. The design is simple, an INK parser, with a simple game runner. In the INK script you can define commands, to do something special, and wait for events with listeners, to wait for an event in the OS to continue.

With this basic functionality it's possible to build different user interfaces for different environments. And the original idea was to make the commands and listeners something extensible with a simple API, but that's something that I have not done yet, it's all Python functions without extension point.

The code can be found in github.

The INK parser

The most complex part of this project is the INK language parser. The Ink parser is free software and there's a Linux version that you can use to parse and compile to json, but I wanted to create my own parser with Python.

I've spent most of the Hack Week time fighting with the parser and indeed was the most challenging and fun part, because I've not worked a lot with parsers and it's not something easy as pie 😛️.

I remember creating a java compiler long time ago, when I was in the Seville University, for the Language Processors course. We did that with ANTLR, so starting from that, and looking for a Python lib, I found the Lark project. So if you like regular expressions, writing a grammar is a lot more FUN.

At the end I was able to support some basic INK language with support for:

• Text
• Tag support
• Options, with suppress text support
• Knots, Stitches and Diverts
• Include other .ink files
• Variable definition and basic operations
• Knots and Stitches automatic visiting count variables
• Conditional options using variables

It still fails in some cases, the comments and TODO placed in between text is not detected correctly and there's a lot of complex stuff that's not supported yet, but with what's supported right now it's possible to create complex scripts with loops and complex game graphs, so it's good enough to build games just with it.

GNOME shell extension

To integrate with the system I've done a simple GNOME shell extension. The extension just shows the text as bubbles and options as buttons, it's really simple and I've no time to make it something ready to be used, but I was able to make something usable.

To be able to run the LILS python library from gjs I've created a simple dbus service that exposes the basic InkScript class functionality as a dbus API.

I was thinking about being able to change the desktop background, depending of the value of a background variable in the script and do something similar to play music and sounds, so it could be a cool game engine with some additions.

SUSE Hack Week

So this Hack week was really fun and I learned a lot. It's really great that SUSE does things like this, letting us work in different projects for a week, to learn, to grow or to just explore different paths.

Kraft, which was released as version 1.0 after long time of active development, is targetted to the Linux desktop. My firm conviction is that the Linux desktop is very suitable for the target group of Kraft: In the small office of craftsmen for example, a Linux desktop is a great work horse which is stable, very well adoptable and has a great amount of applications that are stable and maintained.

These are only the most obvious points why Kraft is so far only available for Linux.

But often enough switching to Linux is another hurdle that users have to go, coming from a more mainstream world. So it is great to learn that Kraft, as many UI applications, can be run unter the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows systems quite flawlessly.

It was tried with Windows 11 Home and the Kraft AppImage of 1.0.

The steps to run Kraft in WSL:

• Make WSL running on the Windows installation
• Install a X-server on the Windows machine
• Create a Debian or Ubuntu Linux subsystem
• Install a few extra packages into the Linux installation
• Download and run the Kraft AppImage 1.0

A more detailed howto and discussion can be found in the easy cash & tax forum. Thanks Thomas for bringing up the topic and providing the Howto!

As the year comes to a close, it is often filled with mixed emotions about my personal evaluation of my performance for the year. Many things were advanced, some things didn’t advance far enough and others may have even regressed a bit but I would say, over all, I am in a better position today […]