When it comes to my tech, I am reluctant to add anything that has the potential to become a technical liability that I cannot accommodate. I am also not interested in any tech that locks me into a cloud based ecosystem where my future with the technology is at the whims of some faceless corporation. […]

The November syslog_ng newsletter is now on-line:

• Testing syslog-ng 4.0

• syslog-ng Store Box federated single sign-on support via OpenID Connect (OIDC)

• Nightly syslog-ng container images

• Type support: working with sudo logs in syslog-ng 4.0

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2022-11-4-0-oidc-nightly-sudo

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of its modern lightweight host operating system Leap Micro 5.3.

This release has a new SELinux module for Cockpit that provides basic functionality for users to troubleshoot configurations and makes NetworkManager the default network configuration tool.

This release is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise SUSE (SLE) Micro 5.3 and is built on top of a SLE 15 Service Pack 4 update.

This ultra-reliable, lightweight and immutable operating system can be used for several compute environments like edge, embedded, IoT deployments and others.

The host-OS has automated administration and patching, so auto-updating gives users a persistent bootable system for their container and virtualized workloads.

Users should know that zypper is not used with Leap Micro, but transactional-update is used instead. One of the packages related to Leap Micro for developers is Podman. Podman gives developers options to run their applications with Podman in production.

Leap Micro has similarities of MicroOS, but Leap Micro does not offer a graphical user interface or desktop version. However, users can use Cockpit to manage their host OS through a web browser.

Large development teams can add value to their operations by trying Leap Micro and transitioning to SUSE’s SLE Micro for extended maintenance and certification.

Developers and professionals can build and scale systems for use in aerospace, telecommunications, automotive, defense, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, database, web server, robotics, blockchain and more.

To download the ISO image, visit get.opensuse.org.

KDE has been available as a FOSS for 26 years, it is still one of the most powerful and flexible desktop environments that are designed specifically for Linux systems. Initially, KDE meant “Kool Desktop Environment” but it was later changed to “K Desktop Environment”. KDE is 100% free to use and anyone can contribute to […]

Source

As the end of the year approaches, the YaST team is focusing more and more on evolving D-Installer with the goal to release an incomplete but decent prototype in December. But we also find time to improve (Auto)YaST with small corrections and not-so-small new features incorporated into openSUSE Factory and released as updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4.

So let’s go with a nice report including:

• A quick summary of the many recent improvements in D-Installer
• The new selection of product in the SLE images for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
• A glance at the AutoYaST support for the new security profiles feature
• Our new tool to visualize installation logs

Tons of Improvements in D-Installer

As mentioned above, we concentrated quite some firepower on D-Installer development which resulted in many new features that will be incorporated into the several prototypes that will be published during this week. You can review every one of these new features by checking their corresponding pull requests at GitHub. All of them contain nice descriptions with as many screenshots and videos as you may need:

• Possibility of installing ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) prototypes, in addition to openSUSE Tumbleweed, Leap and Leap Micro.
• Support for configuring networks: both wired and wireless.
• New consistency checks to prevent users from installing with configurations that makes little sense.
• Usage of D-Bus activation to handle the different D-Installer components.
• Initial D-Bus interface to configure the storage (eg. partitioning) setup. A new user interface will be built soon on top.

We also took the opportunity to fix several minor issues reported by our early testers. So a big thank to all of them.

Registering SLED from a SLE Image at WSL

In case you don’t know, Windows Subsystem for Linux is a compatibility layer that allows to run several Linux distributions inside a Windows machine. Of course, SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is one of those distributions, easily accessible from MS Store as an image for WSL.

Very recently, WSL gained the ability to execute graphical applications, which means now it also makes sense to offer SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) as part of the catalog of images available for WSL. But SUSE didn’t want to bloat MS Store with too many images.

Fortunately, (open)SUSE WSL images are configured on first boot using a YaST wizard. So we added a new step to that wizard on the SLES image allowing to continue with that product or to switch to SLED, guiding the user through the registration process that would be needed to access the SLED repositories.

As usual, you can check more details and more screenshots at the corresponding pull request at GitHub.

AutoYaST Support for the New Security Policies

In our previous report we presented the new feature to check for security profiles in all its interactive glory. But support for unattended installation was still not finished.

Now we added the missing AutoYaST bits. Check how to specify a security policy in the profile (as with the interactive feature, only DISA STIG is supported at the moment) and how AutoYaST would report any lack of compliance.

A New Viewer for the YaST Logs

But it’s not all new big features in YaST. As you all know, we also invest a significant part of our time fixing bugs, implementing small improvements and helping our users to diagnose problems. For all that, the YaST logs are a crucial source of information… maybe too much information. A pretty typical installation or upgrade of an openSUSE Leap 15.4 system can result in a log file of 13MiB (uncompressed) with more than 80.000 lines!

To improve the situation we implemented two things: some enhancements in the logging system and a new log viewer. Now YaST adds marks to the logs that group the information into sections. And the new log viewer understands those group marks and several other aspects of the YaST logs, making it possible to filter and to navigate the information.

See the full announcement with examples at this announcement.

Stay Tuned

As already mentioned, we plan to keep working on YaST and D-Installer. Regarding the latter, we hope to have more news to share before the year ends. So keep an eye on this blog!

From now on, as I want to reach as many as possible, you can also read sudo and syslog-ng news from me on Mastodon. You can find my account at:

https://fosstodon.org/@PCzanik

Mastodon is a decentralized network of servers. I chose a server called “Fosstodon” as it is focused on open source software. Some of the projects I participate in are already there: BastilleBSD and openSUSE. As usual, next to my usual syslog-ng and sudo posts, you will also sometimes hear from me about OpenPOWER and ARM with some occasional photos from my hiking trips :-)

Note: I plan to keep using Twitter as my main communications platform for sudo & syslog-ng. However, some of my most active followers, who liked, commented and retweeted my tweets regularly, left Twitter for Mastodon. I want to make sure that I can keep them updated about syslog-ng and sudo, and reach readers who are not available on Twitter.

This isn’t anything particularly earth shattering here, the point here is to make a kind of “CubicleNate bookmark” for me and to be openly criticized by those that know more than me on this subject. The problem I had was pausing and resuming properly using OctoPrint on my Ender3 Printer. I messed up more than […]

I like to dabble around in playing instruments, I am, by no means, a musician but doing a little noodling around from time to time can be quite gratifying. In my younger years, I did enjoy playing more than one instrument, today, I am taking on some new challenges, nothing crazy, I just happen to […]

Welcome to my new blog.

This is the successor of my previous blog on https://dragotin.wordpress.com.

After paying wordpress quite some money to get an advertise free blog I decided to get rid of that and have my own hosted blog where I do not have to pay for not having battle ships or girls underneath my articles. Yes, that is true: Readers sent me screenshots with this kind of images.

So I am starting this journey here with Hugo. Let’s see how that turns out :-)

One of the aspects that first attracted me to Linux was the choice in desktop environments. What I specifically thought was great when I made the switch to Linux from Windows was the KDE option at the time. I could shape and mold it to what I wanted my desktop to be, something I had […]