Snapshot releases of openSUSE Tumbleweed were plentiful during the month of September with the rolling release delivering 27 snapshots out of 30 days in the month.

Since last Friday, four snapshots have been released.

Several libraries were updated in snapshot 20221003. An update of libva 2.16.0 was among those changed in the snapshot; the Video Acceleration Application Programming Interface for Linux simplified some mapping tables. Another library to update was libcap 2.66. This library made the Makefiles more robust to address an error and the package fixed some documentation typos. The links 2.28 package disabled the cache when following redirects from consent.google.com. An update of yast2-network 4.5.8 fixed an issue when writing the NetworkManager configuration without a gateway. The C library for parsing command line parameters, popt 1.19, fixed multiple resource and memory leaks. It also improved random number handling. There were several other packages to update in the snapshot including libbluray 1.3.3, tdb 1.4.7, python-cryptography 38.0.1 and more.

Text editor vim 9.0.0626 updated in snapshot 20221001 and it fixed a Common Vulnerability and Exposure; CVE-2022-3352. The text editor also fixed the command line window that remained visible when quitting with CTRL-C. An update of qemu 7.1.0 switched QEMU Linux use to emulate the same CPU as the one of the host by default. While controversial and tricky, it should be just fine for Linux users, according to the changelog. The emulator had some fixes for arm and added RISC-V support for privileged spec version 1.12.0. The package also provided optimisations and improvements for the vector extension for RISC-V. The update of php7 7.4.32 was a security release that fixed CVE-2022-31628, which had potential Denial-of-Service issues, and CVE-2022-31629, which had a vulnerability to enable network and same-site attackers to set a standard insecure cookie in the victim’s browser. The super-thin layer on the DBus interface fwupd updated to version 1.7.10. It had several fixes including checking for invalid depth requirements and aligning up addresses greater than 4GB.

A few GNOME packages were updated in snapshot 20220930. Both gnome-logs and the screen-reader speech/braille package orca transitioned from the beta release to version 43. The latter prevents double-presentation of notifications and it fixed the presentation of Nautilus items for GTK4. It also fixed a bug causing the wrong voice to be used. Both gnome-logs and orca updated translations while gnome-logs updated screenshots. GNOME’s spellcheck package gspell 1.12.0 had some small maintenance tasks and simplification changes, and pango 1.50.10, which is a text layout and rendering package, fixed line height computations. A total of three CVEs were fixed in the nodejs18 18.10.0 version, which only CVE-2022-35255 was considered to be greater than a moderate threat. The update of yast2 to version 4.5.15 allows for better detection of yast2-journal. Linux Kernel 5.19.12 had multiple Advanced Linux Sound Architecture for ASUS. Other packages to update in the snapshot were perl-Image-ExifTool 12.45 and xterm 373.

Packages to update in snapshot 20220929 were adwaita-qt-src 1.4.2, libqt5-qttranslations 5.15.6 and v4l2loopback 0.12.7.

It all started when…

Few weeks ago we have decided to create a dashboard where we can monitor the status of the SUSE Linux Enterprise maintenance update queue. Naturally there are tons of cool open source solutions to build this type of monitoring. Two decades ago I probably would have written a Perl or Python based monitoring script for the monitoring part and use the good old gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) to visualize the data and create an active page written in some silly web UI framework. Let’s just say that luckily those times has passed.

The openSUSE community is filled with tons of volunteers, professionals and hobbyists who contribute to the project and want to see it thrive.

One of the ways of doing this is to organize an openSUSE booth for an event.

Recently, security engineer Paolo Perego did this at an event in Rome called RomHack Camp. Perego learned quite a lot at the event that took place Sept 23 - 25 and shared his experience about the hacker camp on the openSUSE Project mailing list.

Perego wrote that people at the conference were surprised to see an operating system vendor having a booth and was able to let them know that openSUSE is also a project full of tools for open-source development.

“The people who previously heard about us thought that we produce a ‘derived’ distribution,” Perego wrote in a report to the community. “I explained that we use rpm, that we started back then like Slackware fork in the very early stages..

“Now (we) have our own identity, brand and added value services.”

In addition to Perego encouraging community members to reach out to contact newspaper, tech journalists and youtubers to promote openSUSE, he encouraged community members to take action.

“Most of the people who came to our booth were not aware of the existence of… openSUSE,” he wrote. “Perhaps if we participate in more events like this (it) can be the first step in changing that.”

Members can learn more about organizing an openSUSE booth on the project’s wiki page.

Along with its many distributions, openSUSE has several open-source tools like YaST, Open Build Service, openQA and several more for open-source developers and hobbyists.

There are times when you stumble upon an application that brings you big giant goofy smile on your face. This application is just that. 🤪 There is an application, built into Plasma, or at least it is a part of Plasma that came in automatically at some point in time without any fanfare and I […]

After using the procedure explained for years in the upgrade with zypper article, I decided to collect all these steps in a practical script, which take care of all the statuses and, when needed, asks for confirmations, or suggests how to proceed manually in particular situations.

Last weekend, I visited a special audio event in Budapest. Two local companies demonstrated their products built into a single audio system. The music was played from TIDAL using an audio PC and DAC made by Bodor Audio and a pair of speakers by NCS Audio.

If you read one of my earlier blogs, you know that I listen to a pair of Heed Enigma 5 speakers. It was a love at first sight during my university years. These speakers are omnidirectional which means that they have beautiful spatial sound. And best of all, they sound 3D not just in a single sweet spot, but almost everywhere in the room.

However, as I later learned the hard way and verified in a number of good discussions, omnidirectional speakers are, unfortunately, not omnivorous. They can amplify recording problems and some music sound a bit strange on them, like percussion music. That said, as they are just perfect for most of the music I listen to, I definitely do not want to replace my current speakers, especially because not even speakers costing an order of magnitude more can provide this level of spatial sound. But I keep my ears open if I can find speakers I can use when omnidirectional does not work for one reason or another.

All components of my current system were made in Hungary. This is also a reason why I was happy to learn about this audio event: most parts of the system we listened to was also made in Hungary. I am perfectly satisfied with my current audio sources, so my focus was on the speakers at the event, as apparent from my mini-review below.

NCS Audio Reference One Mk3

I must admit that I do not know much about the technical details of HiFi. I am a lot more interested in what I hear. So in this blog, I only write about what I heard at the event, but nothing about the technical parameters of the speakers. You can find those on the Reference One Mk3 product page at https://www.ncsaudio.eu/reference-one/.

As you could guess from my current pair of speakers, spatial sound is important to me. From the speakers I listened to in the past decades, only omnidirectional speakers provided me the kind of 3D sound I like. And the Reference One is no exception: not even in the perfect listening spot could it provide the level of spatial sound as omnidirectional speakers. However, the Reference One was a lot closer to the sound I like than most other traditional speakers I listened to.

When I listened to the first songs on the Reference One, I had the feeling that there is too much bass and that is why I cannot hear the acoustic guitar playing. Yes, I know, hearing the expression “too much bass” sounds strange from me, but it rather means “not enough middle” in this case. However, when I listened to the same song back at home, it turned out that I was only partially right. It was not a problem with the speaker but with the recording. Whenever the deep bass voice of the singer appeared, the sound engineers lowered the volume for everything else. I did not have a chance to listen to Apocalyptica or Pink Floyd at the event, but I bet they also sound nice. :-)

I mentioned that percussion music sounds a bit strange on my speakers. My guess is that the brain expects drums & and other short sharp noises to be directional, but it’s not what it gets with omnidirectional speakers. This is why I was especially curious how they sound on the Reference One speakers. There were a couple of percussion-heavy songs during the event and they sounded perfectly. The opening of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man sounded just unbelievably good.

We listened to many different kinds of music at the event. The Reference One was a true omnivore, no matter the genre: jazz, rock, classical or experimental, everything sounded well on these speakers. So, will I get a Reference One any time soon? Let’s just put it this way: not yet. I really love how it sounds, no questions about that. However, these speakers are way too large for my current music room, and can easily fill rooms three or four times bigger than mine. Also, my guess is that unlike me, my neighbors would probably not appreciate the level of bass the Reference One can provide. ;-)

Are you in dire need of an aarch64 worker on your own openQA instance, but no suitable hardware lying around? If speed is not your main concern, then don’t worry - you can just enable a qemu-emulated aarch64 worker on your openQA instance (probably x86_64). In this post we’re gonna explore how to setup an emulated aarch64 qemu worker on your own openQA instance in less than 10 minutes.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week’s been a little different from Tumbleweed as our regular release wrangler, Dominique, has been sick. Therefore I’ve stepped in and picked things up without our usual handovers which made things a little challenging, but I’m proud to be able to say we still released 5 snapshots in the last 7 days, including some pretty big changes.

The 5 snapshots (0922..0929 excluding 0924 and 0927) released during this week brought you these larger changes among many many smaller ones:

• bind 9.18.7 (Security and minor feature/bug fixes)
• libreoffice 7.4.1.2
• nodejs 18 as the default
• Mesa 22.2.0
• Kernel 5.19.10
• btrfsprogs 5.19.1
• mariadb 10.9.3
• gnome-shell-extensions 43.0
• libqt5 5.15.16
• perl-Mojolicious 9.27

In the next snapshot (0930) we expect the following fun stuff:

• Linux kernel 5.19.12
• Nodejs 18.10
• distrobox 1.4.1

In the staging projects, we currently test submissions like:

• distrobox as the default instead of toolbox for the MicroOS Desktop (Staging:C)
• KDE Plasma 5.26 (5.25.90 staged, Staging:K)
• LLVM 15: breaks all versions of PostgreSQL (Staging:M, almost ready)
• bash 5.2/readline 8.2 (breaks tre and also broke tcsh but fix already with these in Staging:A)
• fmt 9.0: Breaks ceph and zxing-cpp
• gpgme 1.18: breaks LibreOffice
• libxslt 1.1.36: breaks daps
• util-linux 2.38.1: this also brings a massive package layout change, which will probably take some time to settle. It’s part of the distro bootstrap and we have to be careful not to blow it out of proportion

Kmail has been my email application for almost 20 years. Even before I started using openSUSE I have been happily using this email application. I find it to be the most feature rich of all the email management applications and far better than any web client I have ever used. I can shape the layout […]

One of the primary issues preventing the last few holdouts from migrating away from SMB1 is a lack of Posix/UNIX extensions in SMB2+. SMB1 is definitely going away though in the near future.

To compensate, the community has been hard at work creating a new UNIX extension standard for SMB3. These have been in the works since as early as 2010, but have recently seen some renewed interest in completion. The Linux ksmbd server and cifs client both support SMB3 UNIX extensions. Several third party servers also offer support. Support from Samba server is nearing completion.

A critical part of implementing a new standard is documenting that standard. I, along with several other members of the Samba team, have collaborated on an open standard (not GPL), which fits neatly in with the other SMB protocol documents. The project is currently hosted on codeberg. The license is intentionally friendly to both opensource and closed source.

The details of the documentation are only now being written down, but have been hashed out over the past 12 years in various iterations. A preliminary version of the specification is available below.

If you have comments or suggested edits, please join the discussion on the samba-technical mailing list.