Ruby Default Switches in Tumbleweed
This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed roundup will look at five snapshots that have been released since last Friday.
Snapshots include switching the default Ruby for the rolling release along with software updates for packages like pidgin, parole, OpenSSL, php, sudo, tigervnc and more.
Snapshot, 20230222 updated just four packages. The major release of gnu-unifont-fonts 15.0.01 arrived in the snapshot and it introduced a couple new subpackages and cleaned up the spec file. The curses emulation library ncurses 6.4.20230218 added a patch and provided some configuration script improvements. The ibus-m17n 1.4.19 update added a parrot icon emoji and made some Weblate translations for the Sinhala language, which is spoken in Sri Lanka. There was also an update for Ark Logic video cards with the xf86-video-ark 0.7.6 update, which brings a decade worth of accumulated changes that has the ability to build against xorg-server 1.14 and newer out of the box.
Chat program pidgin updated to version 2.14.12 in snapshot 20230221; it fixed a crash when closing a group chat and updated the about box pointing people to another form of communication besides the mailing. The Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library for GNOME was updated. The 43.3+2 mutter package provided a fix that broke the windows focus where people with a full screen encountered a problem with layers transitioning between Wayland and X11. Binary tools package binutils 2.40 had a rebase and removed a package. A fix for the package that tracks the route taken by packets over an IP network; the traceroute 2.1.2 update fixed an unprivileged Internet Control Message Protocol tracerouting with the Linux Kernel. A couple other packages were updated in the snapshot including yast2-packager 4.5.16.
An update of openssl 3.0.8 arrived in snapshot 20230220. The updated fixed three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; a NULL pointer vulnerability was fixed CVE-2023-0401. A denial of service attack could be avoided with the CVE-2023-0217 fix to prevent a crash and CVE-2023-0286 prevents an attacker from reading member contents or enacting a DoS. Xfce’s media player parole 4.18.0 fixed a compilation warning, a memory lead when loading a cover image and updated translations and the copyright year. Tests to handle zstd 1.5.4 were made with the zchunk 1.2.4 update.
The default was changed in snapshot 20230218 from Ruby 3.1 to 3.2. The newer version adds many features and performance improvements. The release provides WASI based WebAssembly support that enables a CRuby binary to be available on a Web browser, a Serverless Edge environment, or other kinds of WebAssembly/WASI embedders. The release improved the regular expression matching algorithm and has a new feature of syntax_suggest, which was formerly dead_end integrated into Ruby.
The snapshot from last Friday, 20230217, had a lengthy amount of package updates. The sudo 1.9.13 update fixed a signal handling bug when running sudo commands in a shell script and fixed potential memory leaks in error paths. The lock key synchronization has been re-enabled in the native tigervnc viewer after being accidentally disabled in 1.11.0 thanks to the 1.13.0 update. An update of php8 8.1.16 was a security release that addresses CVE-2023-0567, CVE-2023-0568, and CVE-2023-0662, which an excessive number of parts in HTTP form uploads can cause high resource consumption and an excessive number of log entries. Rendering of color type 3 fonts were fixed with PDF render poppler 23.02.0 and inkscape 1.2.2 had four fixes for crash, five fixes for extension bugs and 13 improved user interface translations. Other packages to update in the snapshot were bind 9.18.12, webkit2gtk3 2.38.5 and more.
openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/08
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
The week having 7 days is defined. Tumbleweed reaching a daily snapshot is almost as defined. It’s pretty rare to do anything else. No surprise on this front this week when we delivered the 7 snapshots (0216…0222) to the users.
The most relevant changes delivered include:
- dav1d 1.1.0
- git 2.39.2
- mozjs 102.8.0 (used to power gnome-shell)
- PHP 8.1.16
- poppler 23.02.0
- samba 4.17.5
- Ruby 3.2 is now the default
- Python 3.11 modules are being shipped (the default python3 interpreter is still version 3.10)
- openssl 3.0.8
- binutils 2.40
- mutter 3.43+2: fix regression of 3.43 regarding window focus being ‘weird’
Staging projects are mostly cleared – except the long-running ones expected to be with us a bit longer. The main changes coming to Tumbleweed in the next few days/weeks are:
- SQLite 3.41.0: Take note of https://sqlite.org/quirks.html#dblquote which is enforced by this version when using the CLI
- KDE Plasma 5.27.1
- Podman 4.4.2
- Linux kernel 6.2 & linux-glibc-devel 6.2
- cURL 7.88.1
- zstd 1.5.4
- Mesa 23.0.0
- Gcc 13 as distro compiler (progress tested in Staging:Gcc7)
Post-mortem: Downtime on February 23, 2023
Safely clone a job on a production instance
When developing new openQA tests you will have to run a lot of verification and debug test runs. This is why I typically encourage people to do all openQA testing on their own instances, to prevent spamming of the production instances.
Flathub Brand Refresh
While Flatpak itself is an architecturally decentralized way to distribute apps, Flathub embraces the convenience for people to come to one place to install apps. There's some fairly big changes coming to Flathub that I'm extremely excited about, that will make sure the new wave of Linux apps doesn't fizzle out and we'll maintain a sustainable application ecosystem.
Thus there is no better time to refresh what has become a little dated, Flathub's visual identity. It centers around the core of what Flathub is — the apps themselves. The identity isn't very loud and shouty. The flashy colors and emphasis remains on the apps themselves, Flathub is the neutral platform for the apps to shine.
Take a peek at the brand guidelines to learn more about the new Flathub brand or download the logos in scalable format. The download buttons for app websites are also available.
Building a brand on neutral greys isn't quite an easy sell, but precisely targets the main point of the Flathub brand. It creates the stage for apps to shine. Flathub isn't flashy by itself. It allows the apps to be at the center of your attention.
If you've read until this point, you deserve a treat! Here's some eye candy from the early stages of the process. Wallpapers derived from the elemental shapes of the logomark. Clearly off limits now, but can't just throw them away, can I?
Big shoutout to razze for his ongoing work on the website and implementing the brand so quickly. Many thank yous to Tobias Bernard for significant involvment in this during the Berlin Mini GUADEC and Václav Vančura for sensible feedback.
Super Mario World Widescreen on the SteamDeck
Flathub Brand Refresh
While Flatpak itself is an architecturally decentralized way to distribute apps, Flathub embraces the convenience for people to come to one place to install apps. There’s some fairly big changes coming to Flathub that I’m extremely excited about, that will make sure the new wave of Linux apps doesn’t fizzle out and we’ll maintain a sustainable application ecosystem.
Thus there is no better time to refresh what has become a little dated, Flathub’s visual identity. It centers around the core of what Flathub is — the apps themselves. The identity isn’t very loud and shouty. The flashy colors and emphasis remains on the apps themselves, Flathub is the neutral platform for the apps to shine.
Take a peek at the brand guidelines to learn more about the new Flathub brand or download the logos in scalable format. The download buttons for app websites are also available.

Building a brand on neutral greys isn’t quite an easy sell, but precisely targets the main point of the Flathub brand. It creates the stage for apps to shine. Flathub isn’t flashy by itself. It allows the apps to be at the center of your attention.
If you’ve read until this point, you deserve a treat! Here’s some eye candy from the early stages of the process. Wallpapers derived from the elemental shapes of the logomark. Clearly off limits now, but can’t just throw them away, can I?
Big shoutout to razze for his ongoing work on the website and implementing the brand so quickly. Many thank yous to Tobias Bernard for significant involvment in this during the Berlin Mini GUADEC and Václav Vančura for sensible feedback.
Awareness Sessions About Projects Available for GSoC Applicants
Mentors and administrators of openSUSE are excited to be accepted as a mentorship organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code and will be available for potential mentee to discuss the projects that are listed on 101.opensuse.org.
There will be 15 minute sessions prior to all openSUSE community meetings where mentees can join our Jitsi meeting room to get in touch with members of the openSUSE community who can help them navigate the projects available during this year’s GSoC.
Community meetings are every Tuesday and Thursday and the times vary. The Tuesday session for mentee applicants starts at 15:15 UTC and the Thursday session begins at 19:45 UTC. Meeting times begin at 15:30 UTC and 20:00 UTC respectively.
Potential mentee applicants can view a list of projects on 101.opensuse.org and communicate directly with mentors leading the project through commenting on the GitHub issue listing the project of interest. Not all mentors are available during the time slotted for the awareness sessions, but those who are available will help the best they can with the information they have available about a project.
Sessions will be available from Feb. 23 - April 4. There are 15 projects listed this year. Some of the projects listed involve topics related to devops, artificial intelligence, security, cryptography, Kubernetes, containers and quality assurance. Many of the projects’ languages include Python, Rust, Perl, ReactJS, JavaScript, Ruby and more.
Installing a syslog-ng 4 development snapshot on FreeBSD
Unless there is a serious problem, FreeBSD ports usually contains the latest stable syslog-ng release. However, sometimes people want to compile a git snapshot to test a new feature or bugfix. To do that, one way is to generate a syslog-ng release tgz on FreeBSD and edit the syslog-ng port files yourself. However, this needs some practice. As such, an easier solution is to use my weekly development snapshots.
Learn how from my latest blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/installing-a-syslog-ng-4-development-snapshot-on-freebsd

syslog-ng logo
Syslog-ng 101, part 8: Macros and templates
This is the eighth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about network logging. Today, we learn about syslog-ng macros and templates. At the end of the session, we will know how to do a simple log rotation using macros.
You can watch the video on YouTube:
and the complete playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoBNbOHNb0i5Pags2JY6-6wH2noLaSiTb
Or you can read the rest the tutorial as a blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-101-part-8-macros-and-templates






