The rhythm of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots being released this week continues at a steady pace.

The rolling release appears to be producing consistent snapshots since the 20220903 release.

Two packages were released in snapshot 20220919. An update of libksba 1.6.1, which works with X.509 certificates, fixed rpmlint warnings and now ensures an Online Certificate Status Protocol server does not to return the sent nonce. The other package to update was xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin 0.4.5, which fixed the accidental toggling of the mute switch and compilation with GNU Compiler Collection 10.

An update of virtualbox 6.1.38 arrived in snapshot 20220918. This version upgrade fixed a couple Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Both CVE-2022-21571 and CVE-2022-21554 could allow virtual machine access and result in an unauthorized ability to cause a hang or repeatable crash. An update of the virtualbox-kmp package introduced initial support for Linux Kernel 6.0. The package also fixes the permission problem with /dev/vboxuser. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ibus-m17n 1.4.17, python-charset-normalizer 2.1.1 and python-idna 3.4, which updated to the recently announced Unicode 15.0.0.

Several packages were updated in snapshot 20220917. Static code analysis tool cppcheck 2.9 propagated condition values from outer function calls, and it enabled the evaluation of more math functions in valueflow. An update of dracut changed the default persistent policy and fixed “directories not owned by a package” caused by bash-completion directories not owned by the package. An update of yast2 4.5.14 removed some patterns from the code and yast2-network 4.5.7 had a change activating s390 devices before importing and reading the network configuration; otherwise the related Linux devices will not be present and could be ignored. Some other packages that updated in the snapshot were microos-tools 2.17 and python310 3.10.7, which solved a flaw in the language labeled as CVE-2020-10735.

An update of grep 3.8 arrived in snapshot 20220916; the package now warns that egrep and fgrep are both becoming obsolete in favor of grep -E and grep -F. An update of pipewire 0.3.58 fixes some regressions and potential crashes when starting system streams. The package while using the filter chain now warns when a non-existing control property is used in the config file. File-type identification package file 5.43 added zstd decompression support and support for ndjson.org. An update of gawk 5.2.0 now supports Terence Kelly’s persistent malloc allowing the utility interpreter to preserve its variables, arrays and user-defined functions between runs. Some other packages to update in the snapshot were fuse3 3.12.0, hdparm 9.65, ncurses and more.

Starting off the updates this week was snapshot 20220915. The snapshot updated ffmpeg-5 5.1.1, which addressed CVE-2022-2566. The package also fixed the use of an uninitialized value. The rsync 3.2.6 made some improvements in the file-list validation code and added a safety check for the file transferring package. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Read more about the packages arriving in Tumbleweed in the mailing list review.

In May of 2021 we took our first steps towards putting OBS builds into the continuous integration cycle with the SCM/CI feature. Thanks to the valuable feedback we received from users who started as early testers and became heavy users of the feature, we are ready today to push it out of the beta program, making it generally available in OBS. What Is This About? With the SCM/CI feature you can take advantage of source...

Last weekend I was in Vienna for EuroBSDcon, an event where BSD users are gathering from Europe (and all around the world). And while you could follow the event online, to me, the greatest value of the conference was not in the talks themselves (not to lessen their value of course, as they were fantastic) but rather in meeting people during the hallway session. The line-up consisted of sudo and syslog-ng users, BSD users and developers, and even some people from history books :-)

The venue

This year the conference took place in Vienna, in one of the buildings of the technical university. Talks were given in two large and small small auditoriums. Luckily, there was enough space for the hallway session too. And not just enough space, but also enough time for discussions. Coffee and tea helped us to stay awake :-) Wearing a mask was mandatory in the building, but luckily, we could take it off for drinking a coffee or when giving a talk.

The people

The best part of the event. At most conferences, people try to hide away their badges. Here, most of the badges were perfectly visible. Anyone less introvert than me could easily read names from badges and start a discussion with other participants.

To me, approaching people is not so easy. Luckily, I got some help during the event. I participate in various Bastille discussion groups, and one of the members introduced me to many interesting people from the BSD community. There was one case where I collected all my courage and asked for a selfie with someone without any help: Eric Allman. He is the creator of sendmail and syslog. I’m not that good at taking selfies, but luckily, he was patient :-) The first one, with masks on, was probably the best photo of the series, but I also wanted one with his badge and my syslog-ng t-shirt visible… Eric explained that he is still using the original syslogd, but was curious to learn what new features syslog-ng provides. He was surprised to hear that even syslog-ng is 24 years old already. :-)

The social event was fantastic in many ways. It was probably the nicest venue that I have ever visited for a conference event: the Vienna City Hall. The city of Vienna was one of the main sponsors of the event, with one of its council members opening it. The food and drinks were really good, but those just provided a comfortable environment to many good discussions.

The talks

Listing here everything would probably be too much, as I listened to more than ten talks all together. Neither of the keynotes were strictly BSD-specific, however both had a strong message also for the world of BSD. Frank Karlitschek of Nextcloud talked about decentralized infrastructure and the importance of open source and open standards. Dylan Beattie of Microsoft talked about legacy code and also a few words about the rockstar programming language :-)

From the more BSD-focused talks, Eirik Øverby described the very same problems I had 15+ years ago while running thousands of web servers: default kernel parameters and web server parameters are not so well-documented and need lots of experimentation and tuning to survive attacks.

Toshaan Bharvani, who participates in the work of the OpenPower Foundation, described the current status of FreeBSD on OpenPower and the resources available currently to developers. He also talked a few words about the upcoming Power SBC arriving hopefully mid-next year.

Netflix is active at open source events, and proudly explains how they use FreeBSD to serve the world with movies, using a FreeBSD-based platform. Almost every time they give a talk, the performance they demonstrate is doubled. This time, they explained the hardware and FreeBSD tuning they use to reach 800 Gbit from a single host.

My talk

This year, I gave a combined talk at EuroBSDcon about sudo and syslog-ng. The focus was on the very latest sudo features, and I also demonstrated how to work with the logs of these features from syslog-ng. Sudo logs, both traditional and JSON-formatted, are automagically parsed by syslog-ng. Parsed messages are easier to alert on in real-time in syslog-ng, and also more efficient to work with in various NoSQL databases, where name-value pairs enable easier searching and reporting. Of course, as I was talking at a BSD event, I also talked about the history and status of syslog-ng in FreeBSD ports.

There were some good discussions already before my talk. Python support both in sudo and syslog-ng resonated well with the audience. BSD users consider syslog-ng to be the best maintained logging application in ports, which I was very happy to hear. :-) Of course, I also learned about some technical problems – luckily, none of them cause any real problems, only some ugly error messages. Still, I’ll try to reproduce them. Version 4.0 syslog-ng news were also well-received, as many users use syslog-ng to forward log messages to Elasticsearch.

Next year

I hope you could feel from my blog that I really enjoyed this conference, both from the BSD and from the sudo / syslog-ng points of view. So I hope to participate the next EuroBSDcon as well!

This week I've started to work at SUSE. I'll be working as Python Specialist, in the packaging team, so I will go back to work on packaging and distribution after more than ten years. My first job in 2008 was working on a Ubuntu based local distribution, Guadalinex, so packaging and distribution work is not something new for me.

Python

Python was the first language that I fell in love. I learned to write code with C and C++, but when I discovered Python, in 2006, I found a really nice language to be able to create amazing things really fast and with a great community behind.

I'm very happy for this new opportunity to be able to collaborate to the Python distribution in all the SUSE flavours, and also to be able to collaborate in the creation of one of the most famous and used Linux distributions.

Tumbleweed

As part of this job change I've also installed SUSE Tumbleweed for the first time. Tumbleweed is a rolling release distribution with the latests packages. In the past I was using other rolling releases distributions like Arch, but this one looks more user friendly.

I've not spent a lot of time here, but from the point of view of a GNOME developer, I can say that it's a great distribution for development with updated packages, and it looks "stable". You can choose the desktop to use on installation and the GNOME desktop is there without any customization that I've detected, so it looks like it's a good vanilla GNOME desktop distribution.

Endless, it's not the end

I'm not working for EndlessOS now, but it's not the end. I've been working here for almost 4 years. At first I worked on the Hack Computer and after that project didn't work, I was working on the Endless Key.

During this time I've also collaborated a bit with the EndlessOS distribution, and I can say that's a really nice distribution to use, the ostree usage for the whole filesystem is a great idea, and the amount of content that comes with the installation is really good.

The EndlessOS Foundation Goal is to reduce the digital divide, providing content and tools for offline people, centered on kids. This is a great mission and in the future, if I find the opportunity to help my local community, I'll try to use the EndlessOS tools and content to provide good learning content for kids without online access.

I was very happy these years at Endless, and I've learned a lot from different great people. It's incredible the number of talented software engineers that are related to Endless, and for me it was a real privilege to be able to share this space and mission for a few years.

The future!

So there we go, I'm exited for this change, and also sad about leaving a great project, but life is change and we should go ahead and think about the future! And my future is green now.

And if you don't know how to pronounce it, here you've a music video:

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week was the week of the Linux desktop – as it is every week anyway. Specifically, we have seen all components from KDE (Plasma, Frameworks, Gear) being refreshed during the last week. Of course, this is not everything the 7 snapshots (0908…0914) brought you.

The main changes delivered this week were:

• KDE Plasma 5.25.5
• KDE Frameworks 5.98.0
• KDE Gear 20.08.1
• Squid 5.7
• pipewire 0.3.57
• Mozilla Firefox 104.0.2
• GTK 4.8.0
• Linux kernel 5.19.8
• LibreOffice 7.4.1

In the staging projects we are currently testing the integration of these updates:

• Meson 0.63.2
• GNOME 43: currently Release Candidate in staging, Final release is scheduled for Sept 21
• grep 3.8: declares egrep and fgrep as deprecated. Switch to grep -E resp grep -F
• LLVM 15: breaks all versions of PostgreSQL
• 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
• fmt 9.0: Breaks ceph and zxing-cpp
• gpgme 1.18: breaks LibreOffice
• libxslt 1.1.36: breaks daps

To keep the habbit alive, I continue to do a daily pixel routine, now covering almost all of the GNOME Circle apps.

I’ve been practicing the art of animation a little too in an effort to promote GNOME Circle on Twitter and Mastodon. Presenting all these GIFs would probably not be kind to Planet GNOME readers though. Perhaps I could compose a video in the future (no GIF support in Blender, strangely!). Keep grinding your (pointless) skills, kids!

Previously

 After the work to support 16384 columns in LibreOffice Calc I have also made sure that the feature works also in Collabora Online, thanks to the funding of NGI.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498.

 

 

 

 

Since the Calc core is the same, the underlying functionality works just like in LibreOffice. But the online functionality presented some additional challenges that needed handling, as having more cells in a spreadsheet may mean more data sent over the network, slowing things down. There definitely used to be problems with large spreadsheets, as the tiled rendering used by Online in fact was already limited to 500000 rows compared to 1048576 rows of the desktop version (in fact, git history shows that this started at only 1000 rows initially and then was continually raised over the time as things improved). So together with raising column count to 16384 I have raised this to the normal 1048576 rows as well.

While working on this, one of the problems I needed to handle was a rather unusual one - some automated tests were failing because of timing out. Only with debug builds, because they of course do more checks compared to optimized release builds. And the problem turned out to be how some tests checked resulting spreadsheets after some operations. Since testing Calc running in a browser is more complicated than testing the desktop version, what the tests did was to select a large number of cells (e.g. one entire row), paste that to the clipboard and then the clipboard data was present in browsers HTML data, so the testing framework could test it and verify it is as expected. And this failed with unoptimized debug builds because even though the spreadsheet was almost empty, the unoptimized code checked every cell involved and together it added up enough to exceed the test timeout. Ironically enough, a significant portion was spent in code that was trying to optimize the size of the clipboard data. So I needed to improve the tests and optimize handling of unoptimized code, as strange as it may sound.

Now with hopefully all performance problems solved, Collabora Online 22.05 should support these spreadsheet sizes just as fine as the desktop version.

This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots had several KDE packages updated and an update affecting scripts related to grep.

In addition to some changes with YaST affecting grep, the rolling release had snapshots updating Plasma, Gear and Frameworks in that order.

Snapshot 20220914 is finishing testing and the snapshot could be released before this article is published, which would make this week another full week of snapshots if the testing passes openQA.

Frameworks 5.98.0 arrived in snapshot 20220913. The update deduplicated color loading codes with KConfigWidgets and Kirigami had a fix for a potential crash in imagecolors. Frameworks also delivered a lot of additions and fixes to KTextEditor. There were some fixes of inconsistencies in the completion config tab and KTextEditor enabled the clipboard history with non read-only. An update of fetchmail 6.4.33 removed an upstream patch and a wrapper script for HTMLDOC was added for use with Flatpak because the snapd version was broken. Audio format flac 1.4.0 added a FMA instruction set extension to speed up audio for x86_64 CPUs. There is also now a set of files available to test whether a FLAC decoder implements the format correctly. The update of libstorage-ng 4.5.44 fixed the resizing of Linux Unified Key Setup and did some Czech translations. Also updated in the snapshot was the 4.5.4 versions of yast2-bootloader and yast2-kdump.

Just a few packages were updated in snapshot 20220912. Caching proxy package squid 5.7 fixed a regression and a handful of bugs. The package now supports OpenSSL 3.0. An update of the smartcard middleware library pcsc-lite 1.9.9 made some minor improvements and improved the log from the smartcard daemon to log the return code in text instead of hex. A fix to a missing comma in the JSON output of tree 2.0.4 was made and yast2-trans had multiple translations updates for German and Czech.

Device mapper package multipath-tools had its second update of the week in snapshot 20220911. The other package to update in the snapshot was the font drawing library libXft 2.3.6, which fixes a regression in 2.3.5 for dimension-length checks.

The 20220910 snapshot focused on a VERY IMPORTANT update to autoyast2 4.5.4, which replaced egrep with grep -E. This is important to Tumbleweed users to pay attention to as the package replaces obsolete egrep with grep -E. Both egrep and fgrep are deprecated in favor of grep -E and grep -F and a deprecation warning output can break output-parsing scripts. This grep -E change also were listed in yast2 4.5.13, yast2-printer 4.5.2 and yast2-scanner 4.5.1 version updates. The kernel-source updated to 5.19.8. The Linux Kernel had a fix for a memory leak for virtual multilayer switch Open vSwitch. The kernel added a Rosewill USB adapter dongle to the device tables and most of there fixes were related to Bluetooth in this kernel update. Other packages to update in the snapshot were a Plymouth 22.02.122 version, gnome-browser-connector 42.1, ibus-table 1.16.12 and more.

KDE applications were updated in snapshot 20220909 with the update of Gear 22.08.1. Updates to video editor Kdenlive fixed a broken paste clip if trying to paste an invalid clip. The package also made sure that tasks are properly terminated upon closing and had a fix for an incorrect lock that could cause corruption. Some logic and internationalization fixes were made in KMail. News on the starting page was disable with KDevelop as the section is currently unmaintained. Network Time Protocol (NTP) package chrony improved stability with hardware timestamping in its 4.3 version update; it also improved the filter option to better handle missing NTP samples. Some changes with the yast2-core 4.5.4 and yast2-hardware-detection 4.5.1 updates are important for Tumbleweed users becasuse these packages replaced obsolete fgrep with grep -F; egrep and fgrep are both deprecated in favor of grep -E and grep -F. There is a deprecation warning output that can break output-parsing scripts, so be careful Tumbleweed users. Another package to update in the snapshot was multipath-tools.

KDE users received the update of Plasma 5.25.5 in snapshot 20220908, which seems to address a few touchy topics. This bugfix version disabled the Plasma Desktop drag and drop for touch; it conflicted with drag/flick scrolling. The drag and drop was deemed less important than scrolling or opening the context menu for touch. Some brightness actions were changed with PowerDevil and configuration modules for Plasma Workspace now considers the GTK theme setting when computing the default state. A problem with scrolling animations was also fixed in the gtk4 4.8.0 package update. The snapshot also improved the handling of OpenType-font features with the toolkit. Another package to update in the snapshot was Mozilla Firefox 104.0.2. The package fixed a bug making it impossible to use touch or use a stylus to drag the scrollbar on pages. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ipmitool 1.8.19.0, libssh 0.10.4, yast2-network 4.5.6 and more.

I worked from home all my life, or at least that’s what I thought. Recently I learned that what do is actually called “hybrid” work. I do most of my work from home, however I also regularly visit the office. I can work a lot more efficiently at home, so, I work from there. Once a week I’m at the office where I do not progress that well with my tasks. Still, I find these visits very important.

This is a follow-up post to my working from home blog from last week.

Meetings

When I started working at my current workplace more than a decade ago, I had a saying that “I only work four days a week for Balabit”. When someone asked me what I do on the fifth work day, I said that “I go to the office for a full day of meetings.”. At that time I considered any meetings a waste of time, taking time from doing actual work.

As a first step I learned that meetings can actually be useful. What I work on between meetings, the main targets of the next software release for example are all decided in meetings. I need to participate to take part in the decisions. Of course I still consider that many meetings could easily be replaced by a few e-mails. However, I quickly remove those from my calendar. There are topics however, that are not easily discussed in e-mail threads. Talking with interested participants in real-time can speed up the discussions and lead to a decision quicker.

In person

The pandemic also taught me that meeting people in person regularly is important as well. Yes, virtual meetings are just as efficient as IRL meetings. In some ways even better, as during less interesting topics you can catch up with your e-mails without disturbing others. But normally meetings have a few fixed topics, and when the discussion is finished or the meeting time is over, people leave and do so with a lot less wasted time. Or is it really wasted time?

Virtual meetings can completely fulfill their jobs. However, many of the best discussions and ideas are born after meetings, in the kitchen or around the water cooler. These are informal discussions where there is no formal agenda, no fixed participants list, just a few random people meeting without any planning. Rushing back to your desk or avoiding the office completely makes these random encounters impossible.

Going hybrid

Many people – including me – are (a lot) more efficient when working from home. That is where work can be done. In the office it is a lot less efficient. Meetings, people talking around you, lots of interruptions. Why do I still say that visiting the office regularly is very important? Because you can meet random people in person. Why is meeting random people is important?

• In regular meetings people talk to close colleagues. You do not see outside your silo. In the kitchen you might run into members of other teams, join discussions with higher management, or the other way around. This can help to break down silos, listen to different views of the same problems.

• In an informal discussion people are more open to share why a problem frustrates them. If the other side better understands a problem and why is it frustrating, there is a better chance to resolve it quicker.

• Even when starting to talk about the weather with someone you just met at the coffee machine, the discussion can easily lead to something useful from the work point of view.

• Learning about a common hobby with your colleague can bring you closer together, and gain you more attention from the colleague even when discussing work.

These random in person encounters in the office can create tremendous value. Working from home is more efficient in most cases, that is how most people in IT can work through their task lists systematically with minimal interruptions. However, random discussions in the office can break down silos, facilitate quicker problem solutions and even lead to groundbreaking new ideas. This is why in most cases hybrid is better than both in office or full remote.

Happy Hours

If you really cannot get to the office regularly, for example because you moved far and away while remote work was mandatory during the pandemic, you should still visit the office every once in a while. A good occasion is the Happy Hours in the office, when people stay in the office after work and have some great discussions next to a hamburger or other fine food. You can even meet some of the otherwise full-remote colleagues on these special evenings. These events also help team bonding which is especially important when team members rarely see each-other in real life. And, of course, the informal discussions have all the benefits I listed earlier.

What do you think?

Of course, in a more strict interpretation, hybrid means that everyone works where it is the most efficient. From this point of view, the kind of office day I describe is just socializing. In my view going to the office with an open mind and talking to random people you meet there is beneficial, even if you cross out less tasks from your to-do list on office days. These discussions open new perspectives and can be huge productivity boosts, even if somewhat unpredictable. So, it even fits the stricter definition of hybrid: you spend part of your work hours in the office to be more efficient: probably not always on the day you are in the office, but in the long run.

What do you think? You can reach me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

I make it a point to buy new software for old computers at least annually. One particular game that I rather enjoy is called “PETSCII Robots” by The 8-Bit Guy, David Murray. Here is the first video published about the game. In short, this is a blast to play on the Commodore 64 or VIC-20. […]