This is the sixth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about syslog-ng source definitions and how to check the syslog-ng version. Today, we learn about syslog-ng destinations and the log path. At the end of the session, we will also perform a quick syntax check.

You can watch the video on YouTube:

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-6-destinations-and-log-path

Back in 2012, I received a box of eight hundred openSUSE 12.1 promo DVDs, which I then set out to distribute to local Linux users’ groups, tech conferences, other SUSE crew in Australia, and so forth. I didn’t manage to shift all 800 DVDs at the time, and I recently rediscovered the remaining three hundred and eighty four while installing some new shelves. As openSUSE 12.1 went end of life in May 2013, it seemed likely the DVDs were now useless, but I couldn’t bring myself to toss them in landfill. Instead, given last week was Hack Week, I decided to use them for an art project. Here’s the end result:

Making that mosaic was extremely fiddly. It’s possibly the most annoying Hack Week project I’ve ever done, but I’m very happy with the outcome

The backing is a piece of 900mm x 600mm x 6mm plywood, primed with some leftover kitchen and bathroom undercoat, then spray pained black. I’d forgotten how bad spray paint smells, but it makes for a nice finish. To get the Geeko shape, I took the official openSUSE logo, then turned it into an outline in Inkscape, saved that as a PNG, opened it in GIMP, and cut it into nine 300mm x 200mm pieces which I then printed on A4 paper, stuck together with tape, and cut out to make a stencil. Of course, the first time I did that, nothing quite lined up, so I had to reprint it but with “Ignore page margins” turned off and “Draw crop marks” turned on, then cut the pages down along the crop marks before sticking them together the second time. Then I placed the stencil on the backing, glued the eye down (that just had to be made from the centre of a DVD!) and started laying out cut up DVD shards.

I initially tried cutting the DVDs with tin snips, which is easy on the hands, but had a tendency to sometimes warp the DVD pieces and/or cause them to delaminate, so I reverted to a large pair of scissors which was more effort but ultimately less problematic.

After placing the pieces that made up the head, tail, feet and spine, and deciding I was happy with how they looked, I glued each piece down with superglue. Think: carefully pick up DVD shard without moving too many other shards, turn over, dab on a few tiny globs of superglue, lower into place, press for a few seconds, move to next piece. Do not get any superglue on your fingers, or you’ll risk sticking your fingers together and/or make a gluey mess on the shiny visible side of the DVD shards.

It was another three sessions of layout-then-glue-down to fill in the body. I think I stuck my fingers together about six, or eight, or maybe twenty times. Also, despite my best efforts to get superglue absolutely nowhere near the stencil at all, when I removed the stencil, it had stuck to the backing in several places. I managed to scrape/cut that off with a combination of fingernails, tweezers, and the very sharp knife in my SLE 12 commemorative Leatherman tool, then touched up the remaining white bits with a fine point black Sharpie.

Judging from the leftover DVD centre pieces, this mosaic used about 12 DVDs in all, which isn’t very many considering my initial stash. I had a few other ideas for the remainder, mostly involving hanging them up somehow, which I messed around with earlier on while waiting for the paint to dry on the plywood.

One (failed) idea was to use a cutting wheel on my Dremel tool to slice half way through a few DVDs, then slot them into each other to make a hanging thingy that would spin in the wind. I was unable to make a smooth/straight enough cut for this to work, and superglue doesn’t bridge gaps. You can maybe get an idea of what I was aiming at from this photo:

My wife had an idea for a better way to do this, which is to take a piece of dowel, cut slots in the sides, and glue DVD halves into the slots using Araldite (that’s an epoxy resin, in case you didn’t grow up with that brand name). I didn’t get around to trying this, but I reckon she’s onto something. Next time I’m at the hardware store, I’ll try to remember to pick up some suitably sized dowel.

I did make one somewhat simpler hanging thingy, which I call “Geeko’s Tail (Uncurled)”. It’s just DVDs superglued together on the flat, hanging from fishing line, but I think it’s kinda cool:

Also, I’ve discovered that Officeworks has an e-waste recycling program, so any DVDs I don’t use in future projects needn’t go to landfill.

Update 2023-02-20: For photos of the mosaic, plus wallpapers made from the photos, see https://github.com/tserong/hackweek22

Our reference server stopped sending out email notifications on February 3th, 2023. In the lines below you will find a detailed explanation of what happened. Impact Our reference server wasn’t sending out email notifications (or only partially) to the users starting Feburary 3th, 2023 around 11:37PM until February 6th, 2023 13:06PM. Root Causes The problem was caused by an exception thrown in the SendEventEmailsJob due to not properly querying “hidden projects”, which made the job...

You can read it in English

Olá Geekos.

Estamos animados com o nosso novo fórum em português. Esperamos ter a sua ajuda para construir uma comunidade envolvente no nosso idioma e para a nossa querida distribuição Linux, o openSUSE.

O fórum em português está disponível em: https://forums.opensuse.org/c/portugues-portuguese/130

Com este novo canal, queremos unir a comunidade portuguesa de usuários do openSUSE e melhorar o apoio aos nossos usuários. Crie uma conta e comece fazer perguntas ou ajudar a responder dúvidas de outras pessoas.

Esse novo meio de comunicação é um complemento aos canais do Telegram e Matrix, e ainda continuaremos com o suporte nos diversos meios. O fórum oferece algumas vantagens em relação às mensagens instantâneas, como, por exemplo, uma melhor ferramenta de busca e armazenamento a longo termo.

Esperamos que o fórum cresça e melhore gradativamente com a sua ajuda.

Divirta-se!

---

#English

Hello Geekos.

We are excited to bring you our new Portuguese forum. We look forward to build, with your help, an engaging community in our language for our beloved Linux distribution, openSUSE.

The Portuguese forum is available at: https://forums.opensuse.org/c/portugues-portuguese/130

With this new place, we want to unite the Portuguese openSUSE community and continue to provide mutual support to our users. Do not hesitate to create an account, ask questions and help other users.

This new communication channel complements our Telegram and Matrix channels, and we will continue to provide support on each platform. The forum offers a few advantages compared to instant messaging, such as a better search mechanism and better long-term data retention.

We hope that the Portuguese forum will gradually grow and improve with your help.

Have a lot of fun!

You can read it in English

Olá Geekos.

Estamos animados com o nosso novo fórum em português. Esperamos ter a sua ajuda para construir uma comunidade envolvente no nosso idioma e para a nossa querida distribuição Linux, o openSUSE.

O fórum em português está disponível em: https://forums.opensuse.org/c/portugues-portuguese/130

Com este novo canal, queremos unir a comunidade portuguesa de usuários do openSUSE e melhorar o apoio aos nossos usuários. Crie uma conta e comece fazer perguntas ou ajudar a responder dúvidas de outras pessoas.

Esse novo meio de comunicação é um complemento aos canais do Telegram e Matrix, e ainda continuaremos com o suporte nos diversos meios. O fórum oferece algumas vantagens em relação às mensagens instantâneas, como, por exemplo, uma melhor ferramenta de busca e armazenamento a longo prazo.

Esperamos que o fórum cresça e melhore gradativamente com a sua ajuda.

Divirta-se!

---

#English

Hello Geekos.

We are excited to bring you our new Portuguese forum. We look forward to build, with your help, an engaging community in our language for our beloved Linux distribution, openSUSE.

The Portuguese forum is available at: https://forums.opensuse.org/c/portugues-portuguese/130

With this new place, we want to unite the Portuguese openSUSE community and continue to provide mutual support to our users. Do not hesitate to create an account, ask questions and help other users.

This new communication channel complements our Telegram and Matrix channels, and we will continue to provide support on each platform. The forum offers a few advantages compared to instant messaging, such as a better search mechanism and better long-term data retention.

We hope that the Portuguese forum will gradually grow and improve with your help.

Have a lot of fun!

This night of Linux Saloon chat was some of my most favorite I have had since this started. I would say that the show went completely off the rails but that would imply that it was a disaster. I would say that the conversation grew and flowered from the fertile ground tilled by the various […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

During this week, many developers took part in HackWeek, resulting in resources being deviated from regular distro maintenance to other areas of interest. I’m certain to see some great outcomes of this hackweek over the next weeks/months (see for example the thread on Creating a Leap replacement based on ALP). Of course, Tumbleweed has been keeping up with all the changes and supports everybody in getting their results delivered to users. And it did so by delivering the usual 7 snapshots in a week (0126…0201)

The main changes found in those 7 snapshots were:

• Node.JS 19.5.0
• Mesa 22.3.4
• pipewire 0.3.65
• btrfsprogs 6.1.3
• Systemd 252.5
• XTerm 378
• libnvme 1.3 and nvme-cli 2.3
• Boost 1.81.0

The next few snapshots might be really interesting though: Snapshot 0202, which is currently building, will be the first to have switched the default openssl implementation from openssl 1.1 to 3.0. This was a major project spanning quite a long period, but it finally ended.

Here is an overview of what the next week’s snapshot promise to deliver:

• Switched openssl by default to the 3.0 branch (currently 3.0.7)
• Mozilla Thunderbird 102.7.1
• GStreamer 1.22.0
• KDE Gear 22.12.2
• Rust 1.67
• KDE Plasma 5.27 beta (5.26.90)
• Binutils 2.40
• Enabling of python311 modules (keeping python 3.10 as the default interpreter in a first step)
• Staging:H still tests ruby 3.2 as the new default (yast2-packager is the only failing package left)
• Staging:L holds some packages breaking others stuff taking more time, like gpg2, and ant
• Staging:Gcc7 tests the impact of using GCC 13 as the default compiler

This hackweek I’ve been playing a bit around with my desktop computer which has AMD Radeon 6600 XT graphics card which is based on the RDNA2 architecture. The idea was to find a way to utilize it for Stable Diffusion Version 2 latent text-to-image diffusion model without invading the host too much with randomly downloaded modules, but still using the GPU for computing. The graphics card has “only” 8GB RAM which is apparently only a starter amount in this field, so I needed to also check if that’s enough.

Shortly, I found out that while the code is open source, the model data is unfortunately not as once again new licenses have been developed (OpenRAIL license family) by people who have not fully understood or wanted to understand the wisdom in The Open Source Definition (or free software definition either). So ultimately this is just about studying and using these models for fun, not for serious use. Hopefully open source models will be also developed at some point in the future. I just fear this will only happen a long time later, after the effects of having vague ethical points in a copyright license are felt and “this is not what we intended, how could we have anticipated these problems?” said by the people creating and utilizing the data. (continued hopefully with “hmm, how could we re-license all of this to CC-BY-SA?”)

Since my Hackweek time is more limited than intended, and I also ended up battling broken pypi modules and other things, I’ll just leave here a Docker container git tree and a sample image generated below. To put it short, it worked like a breeze until it broke, thanks pip/pypi/numpy/something. Anyway, when it works, it initializes InvokeAI based web UI for inputting to Stable Diffusion. And yes, the ROCm stack works nicely on my desktop computer - I downloaded and used stable-diffusion-2.1-768 model data only, disabled nsfw filter to save VRAM, and created 768x768 images - the VRAM use was around 6.5GB out of 8GB available according to radeontop, and it worked like a charm!

https://github.com/tjyrinki/sd-rocm

Many of the dockerfiles around were both woefully outdated and unlicensed so I could not use those other than for inspiration - these are MIT licensed.

Here is also image of the UI running in web browser (you can also use just Python CLI):

The shakiness of pypi installation has ended after yesterday now, and this time I’ll commit the final docker container result for later use.

As start let’s sort it out what is dependency and what is reverse dependency.

Dependencies and reverse dependencies in Linux distributions are important concepts to understand. A package dependency means that another package relies on it in order to function. For example, if package B requires package A to be installed in order to work, then package B is dependent on package A and is considered a reverse dependency of package A.

Several snapshots have updated in openSUSE Tumbleweed before and during Hack Week.

Leading up to FOSDEM, more packages are arriving, but this blog will give a small overview of the snapshots that have arrived since the last Tumbleweed blog.

Three packages landed in the 20230130 snapshot. One of those packages was C library libHX 4.10. The package plugged a memory leak in the formatter and provided some multiplatform-directory handling. A Python Package Index that implements a text object that escapes characters, so it is safe to use in HTML and XML was updated. This python-MarkupSafe package updated to version 2.1.2 provides a striptags addition that does not strip tags containing newlines. An update of yast2-trans in the snapshot added multiple translations to include several for Macedonian and Georgian languages.

Setting sizes were fixed in snapshot 20230129 thanks to the btrfsprogs 6.1.3 update. The copy on write filesystem improved error messages for mismatched references. An update of the kdump package in the snapshot fixed a calibrate build on s390 along with a few other minor fixes. A couple of German translations using Weblate were made in the libstorage-ng 4.5.67 update. A couple other packages were updated in the snapshot. The rubygem-globalid’s 1.1.0 version fixed CVE-2023-22799, which was vulnerable to a regular expression denial of service. The other package to update was neon 0.32.5.

Mesa 22.3.4 removed some build requirements in snapshot 20230128. The package also fixed some performance issues with Vulkan on Wayland KWin. An update of pipewire 0.3.65 fixed an error in the AVX code that could cause crackling and it added an Advanced Linux Sound Architecture plugin rule to tweak some buffer settings. The Linux audio and video package also made support that allows compressed formats to be decoded in hardware using ALSA on some devices using tinycompress. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Snapshot 20230127 updated remote desktop client remmina to version 1.4.29. The package had multiple changes to build and run with libsoup 3.0 and it allows for the building on a Wayland-only environment. An update of nodejs19 9.5.0 added a system control patch and a patch fixing unit test on s390. An update of GNU Compiler Collection 12 removed a patch that was included upstream and an update of xen took care of CVE-2022-42330 that could allow a malicious guest to cause a crash via a soft reset.

Both snapshot 20230126 and 20230125 arrived toward last week. A couple key packages respectively updated in those snapshots were bind 9.18.11, which fixed CVE-2022-3094, CVE-2022-3736 and CVE-2022-3924, and the new major version of libvirt; libvirt 9 had many incremental improvements and bug fixes. One of the new features it has is an external snapshot deletion that now makes it possible using the existing Application Programming Interface virDomainSnapshotDelete(); the flags that allow deleting children or children only are not supported.