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.

You are being constantly tracked, surreptitiously, through the web. Various sites are tracking you with the intent of selling you products or selling your information. It’s one thing if a website inquires basic information when you are visiting, it is another thing when a website stalks you across the internet. I believe this to be, […]

It’s Hackweek and I’m back at working on the GeekOops project. One of the more annoying tasks that I have been postponing already since some time is to adjust the molecule workflow to work with cgroups 2.

The joy of Hack Week has begun!

This week is special for openSUSE and open-source contributors because it begins with the 22nd Hack Week and ends with the return FOSDEM, which is the globe’s largest open-source community event.

Hack Week runs through Feb. 3 and gives any open-source contributor a playground to experiment, innovate, collaborate and learn together.

Individuals and companies can join openSUSE contributors and development teams from SUSE for an entire week of collaborating on projects found at hackweek.opensuse.org.

Anybody can create, join or view projects listed on the site.

One of the projects listed in this year’s efforts is to investigate the current status of distrobox support of desktop environments. It looks to use GNOME as an example and check the desktop environments possible role to integrate with the gdm-container with the latest ALP image. Another project someone listed is to explore the immutable aspects of Steam Deck OS to gain some inspiration to help with ALP development.

Some projects are focusing on Rancher and Kubernetes. One project is looking at K3s Control Planes as a service and another projects looks to develop new functions to generate an upgrade image list from KDM JSON data.

Projects do more than just finding solutions and advance new technologies. One of the more popular projects aims to port some old classic 90s games like Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares.

There are more than 100 projects listed on the Hack Week site.

Companies, hobbyists and technologists are encouraged to participate. There is no affiliation one needs to participate in Hack Week. Just join and have a lot of fun!

Hack Week has been running since 2007 and the people involved with it have produced several useful open-source projects like Weblate, openQA and openSUSE MicroOS.

As we gear up for the release of GNOME 44, let's take a moment to reflect on the visual design updates.

We've made big strides in visual consistency with the growing number of apps that have been ported to gtk4 and libadwaita, embracing the modern look. Sam has also given the high-contrast style in GNOME Shell some love, keeping it in line with gtk's updates last cycle.

The default wallpaper stays true to our brand, but the supplementary set has undergone some bolder changes. From the popular simple shape blends to a nostalgic nod to the past with keypad and pixel art designs, there's something for everyone. The pixelized icons made their debut in the last release, but this time we focus on GNOME Circle apps, rather than the core apps.

Another exciting development is the continued use of geometry nodes in Blender. Although the tool has a steep learning curve, I'm starting to enjoy my time with it. I gave a talk on geometry nodes and its use for GNOME wallpaper design at the Fedora Creative Freedom Summit. You can watch the stream archive recording here (and part2).

As we gear up for the release of GNOME 44, let’s take a moment to reflect on the visual design updates.

We’ve made big strides in visual consistency with the growing number of apps that have been ported to gtk4 and libadwaita, embracing the modern look. Sam has also given the high-contrast style in GNOME Shell some love, keeping it in line with gtk’s updates last cycle.

The default wallpaper stays true to our brand, but the supplementary set has undergone some bolder changes. From the popular simple shape blends to a nostalgic nod to the past with keypad and pixel art designs, there’s something for everyone. The pixelized icons made their debut in the last release, but this time we focus on GNOME Circle apps, rather than the core apps.

Another exciting development is the continued use of geometry nodes in Blender. Although the tool has a steep learning curve, I’m starting to enjoy my time with it. I gave a talk on geometry nodes and its use for GNOME wallpaper design at the Fedora Creative Freedom Summit. You can watch the stream archive recording here (and part2).

Previously, Previously, Previously

Our first distro exploration for 2023 was GeckoLinux, a series of spins of openSUSE that makes an easy on-ramp to get into openSUSE with the desktop of your choice. You have the option of going with the static core of openSUSE Leap or the rolling Tumbleweed with these desktops: There is also an option to […]

The XRechnung format is a E-Government standard for electronic invoicing. At some point it will be mandatory for every company dealing with German governmental partners to send the invoices in this XML format.

Many commercial vendors have already caught up and provide ways to generate XRechnung formatted documents with their software. However, to my knowledge, the availability of open source end user software is very limited. Since the standard itself is at least very open and transparently documented, so I think it is worthwhile to also support it with free software on the desktop.

Kraft, the desktop software for invoicing and efficient office work in the small enterprise, supports export of XRechnung documents since a while.

Over the weekend I created a new little project that adds a viewer for XRechnung documents called xrview.

A german city was looking for something to evaluate processes in a Linux- and KDE based productivity work environment.

Technically it is not very sophisticated: It renders the provided XML file using XSL styles officially provided by the Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards in a two step process to HTML, which is displayed in a web view. Some values of interest are extracted from the XML and displayed in a detail pane on the left side.

This is just a POC and has to be continued, but the time was good to kickstart this project.

Maybe anybody is interested to create a PR to help to improve digitalization in Germany?

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week, we had to hold back two snapshots again after a long time. 0120 and 0121 were tested but considered too risky to send out (issues with transactional-updates and microos-tools detected). So, instead, you only got five snapshots this week (0119, 0122, 0123, 0124, and 0125).

The main changes delivered during this week were:

• Linux kernel 6.1.7 & 6.1.8
• GCC 13.0.1
• Mozilla Firefox 109.0
• IceWM 3.3.0 & 3.3.1
• LLVM 15.0.7
• LibreOffice 7.4.4.2
• libxmlb: the first lib in the repo with hwcaps enabled subpackage: libxmlb2-x86-64-v3, Nothing triggers auto-installation of those packages yet. That is a feature to be worked out yet.
• GNOME now identifies as 43.1 in its control center
• Dracut 059
• Libvirt 9.0.0
• Wine 8.0 final release

The following week is difficult to predict. As you might have heard, Hackweek is going on. Some resources thus deviate and there might be fewer submissions – or more if things go nicely and new stuff appears sooner. In any case, the Staging projects currently hold these items:

• KDE Plasma 5.27 beta (5.26.90)
• GStreamer 1.22.0
• Staging:H still tests ruby 3.2 as the new default (some yast modules failing to build)
• Staging:L holds some packages breaking others stuff taking more time, like boost, gpg2, and ant
• Staging:Gcc7 tests the impact of using GCC 13 as the default compiler

In a previous article I have shown how to handle the D-Bus resources provided in general and in particular by the Konsole and Yakuake D-Bus services, and take advantage of them in a Bash script. This time we will explore more services that provide useful features to embed in our Bash scripts.