The first six days of December have brought openSUSE Tumbleweed users six snapshots and developers plenty of conversation.

More than 200 messages about changing parts of the rolling release’s microarchitecture have been posted this past week on the Factory mailing list, but during this time Tumbleweed keeps rolling forward updating packages like vim, mutt and more.

Just a handful of packages arrived in snapshot 20221206. An update to urlscan 0.9.10 was one of those packages, and it added * as an allowed URL special character. There was a reversion of libX11 to 1.8.1 because of a hang/crash experienced by both Gentoo and openSUSE. The Python tool for working with audio files provided track and disc number support for JSON and YAML plugins; this eyeD3 package, which seems like a great name for having a cool logo, updated to version 0.9.7, but it removed Python 3.6 support. The Pidgin chat plugin purple-mattermost updated to version 2.1 and will fetch the last 60 messages when a channel is joined for the first time. The self explanatory package perl-Bootloader 0.940 added some basic support for systemd-boot.

In snapshot 20221205, some stubbornness in finding a font appears to have been resolved with updating the PDF rendering package poppler to version 22.12.0. The email client mutt updated to version 2.2.9 and updated the gpgme autoconf files to the latest versions. It also fixed a non-printable keyname and added explicit void to 0-parameter function definitions. The virt-what package that is used to detect if a program is running in a virtual machine updated to version 1.25; the package now detects AWS arm virtual instances as KVM and added support for Alibaba Cloud Linux and VMware ESXi on arm. A few other packages were updated including newt 0.52.23 and qpdf 11.2.0.

NetworkManager 1.40.6 arrived in snapshot 20221204. It restored and set up an empty port configuration. The package also made some various documentation fixes and had a non-exported Application Binary Interface for the client library. An update of glib2 2.74.3 fixed a couple regressions and had a fix for GVariant type depths checks on text format variants. The low level core library also made a switch to a stricter Application Programming Interface because a GTask tag provided an error return path. Quite a few RubyGems rspec packages were updated. Besides the many that were bumped up to version number 3.12.0, the rubygem-rspec-mocks package had improvements for diff output when diffing keyword arguments against hashes. Macedonian translations using Weblate were made with the update of libstorage-ng 4.5.54 and a couple GNOME 43 packages were updated like gnome-software 43.2, which fixed search for apps providing some feature under rpm-ostree. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot.

An update of autoyast2 4.5.11 in snapshot 20221203 avoids a potential crash when an autoinst.ycp file is empty or missing. For those who don’t know, YCP stands for YaST Control Programming language, which was ported to Ruby through ycp-killer and other libraries and tools. An update of openblas_pthreads 0.3.21 had a few Intel SkyLakeX compilation fixes, and the package fixed a Power10 performance regression. A spec flag was introduced with the git + update to samba.

Snapshot 20221202 had Mozilla Firefox 107.0.1 fixed an issue where color management was not available for some users and the browser fixed another issue where the DevTools User Interface was not accessible when an alert dialog was displayed. A new class to allow for a unified definition of hardware architecture filters was added with the 4.5.20 yast2 update. An API fix was made in the gedit 43.2 update and some translations were made for the text editor as well. Vim was another text editor to receive an update in the snapshot, and it had some extensive fixes; vim 9.0.0978 fixed a crash when typing a letter in a terminal window, fixed a continuous integration failure in sound dummy, fixed leaking memory from autocmd windows and fixed an invalid memory access along with many other fixes. Several changes were made with the GTK3 3.24.35 update. The cross-platform widget toolkit fixes problems with motion compression, refactored handling of Instant-Messaging client updates, dropped an upstream patch and added support for titlebar gestures. Other packages to update in the snapshot were pango 1.50.12, hxtools 20221120, libostree 2022.7 and more.

Starting off the month pipewire was updated to version 0.3.61 in snapshot 20221201. It fixed a bug n audioadapter that could cause crashes when switching bluetooth profiles. The Linux and flac 1.4.2 , which is an audio format similar to MP3 that is compressed with flac without any loss in quality, made its console output more uniform across different platforms. The package for open source smart card tools and middleware, opensc, updated for version 0.23.0. The package had some general improvements and added support for symmetric encrypt and decrypt, wrap and unwrap operations, and an initialization vector. A couple other packages updated in the snapshot like freecell-solver 6.8.0 and kernel-firmware 20221130, which updated some firmware for for advance MediaTek) wifi chips.

Welcome to the second part of my syslog-ng tutorial series. In this part, we cover some of the basic concepts behind syslog-ng.

Last time we defined syslog-ng as an enhanced logging daemon with a strong focus on portability and high-performance central log collection.

Let us pull this sentence apart, as all words are here for a reason. The original syslog implementation was pretty simple: it collected log messages from applications and sorted them to various files. Syslog-ng enhanced this with message parsing, advanced filtering and many more log sources and destinations. Daemon means that it is an application normally running continuously in the background. Portability means that syslog-ng runs not just on Linux, but also on various BSD and UNIX systems as well. High performance means that syslog-ng is implemented in C and thus it is fast and resource efficient. Depending on the configuration, even a Raspberry Pi can collect tens of thousands of log messages a second.

You can watch the video on YouTube:

Or you can read the rest of my blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-101-part-2-basic-concepts

You might already use the email channel to get notified about build failures on package builds. From now on you can also subscribe to receive those notifications through the web channel and review them directly in the Open Build Service. The checkboxes in the my/subscription area, that used to be disabled, are now usable. Just check the ones you are interested in for the web channel and start to receive the notifications for build failures...

After yesterday’s deployment, we faced a downtime on our reference server. In the lines below you will find a detailed explanation of what happened. Impact Our reference server was offline for 20 minutes. The application responded to every request with a maintenance message. No one was able to work with the API or user interface during that time. Root Causes After deploying changes to production the application could not load some of our Ruby gems...

Maybe you have read this announcement in openSUSE forums and asked yourself what this will mean for the way you use the forums. Even more when you may not understand, or only vaguely understand, what the words vBulletin and Discourse mean.

You will understand that the website forums.opensuse.org runs software that handles not only the interface with you, but also stores and manages the threads with the posts, and the user administration of the forum members. The software package used is named vBulletin. It is a commercial package and as such brings considerable costs.

Because all software that stays alive will move to new versions, this is also the case with vBulletin. That will mean that all of the adaptions that were made in the openSUSE instance had to be converted to the new version. At such a moment, it is time to look if a different solution might be better. We will not burden you with all the details, but the result is that vBulletin will be replaced by a different and open-source (which fits into the openSUSE philosophy) product: Discourse.

This will not be an easy move for many, including the forums’ staff. Many things will have to be addressed after we switched over, but we can mention a few things that will come up first in most members thoughts (we think).

Accounts: As the login facility is not bound to vBulletin but to the general SUSE login feature, there will be no change there, and all members will be able to login as earlier.

Old threads: Threads will be moved to the new environment and be available. Their layout maybe disfigured here and there, but we expect that solutions to problems will still be understandable. As said, it will look very different, please try to cope with that.

We expect a lot of questions and problems to arise. There is of course an “About the forums’ section where you can start threads. Be prepared that the staff has to deal with all of them in their spare time and will, like you, not feel at home in the beginning.

Planned Forum outage will be from Dec. 11 to 13 for the migration. That includes export and import of users and threads, testing and managing the headache.

Thank you for bearing with us in advance.

Now that the headline got your attention, let's start with the good news - D-Installer development is progressing just fine. What's the matter then? To answer that question is important to make a difference between D-Installer itself and the live ISO image we provide for everyone to test it.

So let's break this post into sections.

New prototype of D-Installer available for testing​

As you all know, D-Installer is a new application being developed by the YaST Team that will allow to install any (open)SUSE operating system into any virtual or physical machine. It can be controlled via a D-Bus API, a command-line interface or a modern web front-end. It can run directly on top of any Linux system and can also be executed as a container. So you can run D-Installer using the live ISO we provide for testing or you could use it from your currently installed Tumbleweed (eg. to install Leap Micro in another disk) or even as a container on top of Iguana.

Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, there are a couple of new features that deserve some attention.

The most visible change is the new screen to configure the storage setup. It's the first step towards the vision we documented a couple of months ago. Functionality-wise it brings the ability to install the system using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and/or full-disk encryption. The exact type of encryption depends on the operating system being installed. For the prototype of ALP ContainerHost, D-Installer will use LUKS2 adjusting some settings to ensure everything works with the provided version of GRUB. The usage of LUKS2 opens the door for future possibilities, like unlocking the encrypted devices on boot using the system's TPM (Trusted Platform Module) instead of entering a passphrase.

Beware the new screen comes also with some other changes. When making space for the new operating system into the selected disk, previous versions of D-Installer mimicked some default behaviors of YaST like trying to keep alive as many partitions as possible or reusing existing LVM structures. That's not the case anymore. We plan to implement a user interface to decide exactly what to delete, keep or resize. But in the meantime D-Installer will go full throttle and delete all previous content in the chosen disk. You have been warned. 😉

Another relevant improvement is the ability to properly configure the boot loader on AArch64 systems. Previous prototypes messed up the selection of GRUB-related packages on non-x86 systems, but now D-Installer is more capable of handling different hardware architectures. At the YaST Team we don't have that many different Aarch64 systems at hand, so we would really appreciate any help testing whether this works consistently. You can do it by grabbing the aarch64 version of the testing live ISO... which leads us to our next topic.

The D-Installer testing ISO image​

As you already know, the most convenient way of testing the prototypes of D-Installer is using the already mentioned live ISO images we constantly build with the latest development version of D-Installer. But, to be honest, we don't have that much time (or knowledge) to invest on those images and there is a lot of room for improvement.

First of all, almost 1 GiB is clearly too much for an image that doesn't even include the packages of the operating systems to be installed (everything is fetched from online repositories). Beyond the size of the ISO, running X11 and Firefox may not be the most memory-efficient way to connect to a local web interface. There is already an open issue suggesting alternative components and approaches, but it's something that can hardly be addressed by the YaST Team in the short term.

Talking about the graphical environment and the web browser. There is actually no need to run them unconditionally when the system boots, like our current live image does. Adding some modularity to the boot process of the image could result in a much smaller memory footprint in scenarios in which the installation process is driven from another device or from the command-line interface.

Moreover, since our live ISO is just an slightly customized version of openSUSE Tumbleweed we are suffering the consequences of some performance problems present in the latest versions. We reported the problem as bug#1205938 and we really need some way to fix it or to work around it. The slowdown described at that bug report can completely ruin the overall experience of using the D-Installer live ISO image.

Join the fun​

The future looks pretty bright for D-Installer now that the general infrastructure is set and we can keep adding all the currently missing features reusing the power of YaST. So please join us in the adventure.

Of course, the easiest way to contribute is by testing the new release and giving us your valuable constructive feedback, so we can keep evolving the current prototype. Additionally, it would be great if you could help to improve the current testing live ISO image or to fix the mentioned performance issue at Tumbleweed. We would also welcome any kind of support in the area of containerization and Iguana.

In all cases, and for any other matter, you know where to find us!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

There seems to be no stopping Tumbleweed. It has again been rolling at full speed, with 7 snapshots (1125…1201) released this week. As usual, some smaller, some larger ones.

Let’s dive right in and see what changes have been delivered:

• Icewm 3.2.2
• VLC 3.0.18
• Ruby 3.1.3: There was an issue that ruby extensions are newly looked for in vendor_ruby/3.1.0/x86_64-linux-gnu, where the ‘-gnu’ part is new. All ruby packages in Tumbleweed have been rebuilt to follow this change
• SQLite 3.40.0
• Meson 0.64.1
• Python setuptools 65.6.3
• gawk 5.2.1
• libgcrypt 1.10.1: MD5 is disallowed in FIPS mode now
• Systemd 252.2
• LibreOffice 7.4.3RC2
• Bash 5.2.12
• KDE Plasma 5.26.4
• Cryptsetup 2.6.0
• Linux kernel 6.0.10
• Tcl/Tk 8.6.13
• ffmpeg has been switched to use version 5.x by default; ffmpeg-4 is still available and used by some packages

As that list got so long, it’s no surprise that the staging projects do not carry a lot of changes to be tested at the moment – not a lot, but still some, namely:

• rubygem-rspec 3.12.0: The remaining YaST fixes have been incoming and if nothing new comes up, this should be shipped next week
• Podman 4.3.1: fails the openQA tests
• Python pytest 7.2.0
• Switch to openSSL 3: tracked in Staging:N, main failures are nodejs18, nodejs19, openssh, mariadb

And I’m sure we will see many more changes that developers and packagers are currently preparing, but that has not yet been submitted.

A steady pace of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots arrived to users this week and there were tons of conversation on the openSUSE Factory mailing list regarding plans to advance the rolling release’s microarchitecture and discussions about the mitigation plan/call for help.

The changes to x86-64-v2 are expected to take place in the first quarter of the 2023 new year and forthcoming changes will be communicated on both the mailing list and blog.

A single package arrived in snapshot 20221128. The Skype plugin for chat client Pidgin, skype4pidgin, updated to version 1.7. The plugin fixed the loss of admin rights when joining a room, problems with file transfers through the client and issues where people were not appearing as being online.

An update of gawk 5.2.1 arrived in snapshot 20221127. The utility fixed issues with the debugger, dropped a few patches and addressed some subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to functions. The general purpose cryptographic library package libgcrypt, which is based on code from GnuPG, updated to version 1.10.1 and fixed minor memory leaks. The package was updated to improve support for PowerPC architectures and it added the hardware optimizations configuration file hwf.deny to the /etc/gcrypt/ directory. There was also a git+ update of kdump, an update of heaptrack 1.4.0, iputils 20221126 and libeconf 0.4.9, which added new Application Programming Interface calls and fixed some compiling issues.

Snapshot 20221126 updated five packages. A memory leak and buffer overflow were fixed in the libpng16 1.6.39 update. Some code cleanup was made with the libstorage-ng 4.5.53 update and libzypp 17.31.6 avoids calling getsockopt when info is already known and the patch is expected to fix logging on Windows Subsystem for Linux. An upgrade of macros were made for both the coming Leap 15.5 and Fedora 37 in manpages-l10n 4.16.0. An update of python-setuptools 65.6.3 fixed logging errors and improved the reproducibility of clib builds by sorting the sources.

A major version update of text editor nano updated in snapshot 20221125. Nano 7.0 allows for unicode codes to be entered (via M-V) without leading zeroes and by finishing short codes. The new major version now allows string binds containing bindable function names between braces. The braced function names may be mixed with literal text. Nano was not the only text editor to update in the snapshot. An update of vim 9.0.0924 freed memory when executing mapclear, unmenu and delfunc at the more prompt. The package also fixed Amazon Web Services configuration files that were not recognized. An update of video media player VLC 3.0.18 fixed color regression and some rendering and performance issues with older GPUs. Several more packages were update in the snapshot including apparmor 3.1.2, image processing framework gegl 0.4.40, openvpn 2.5.8 and more.

The email announcement for snapshot 20221124 was not sent due to an error with the preparation of the changelog, but the snapshot did go out.

The 7.0.4 version update of virtualbox arrived in snapshot 20221123. The new major version had multiple Graphical User Interface changes to include fixing a regression in the new virtual machine wizard. Oracles’ VM package also added support for the Secure Boot feature. An update of sudo 1.9.12p1 fixed a Common Vulnerability and Exposure that had the potential out-of-bounds write for passwords smaller than eight characters when the password authentication is enabled. CVE-2022-43995 does not affect configurations that use other authentication methods like PAM, AIX authentication or BSD authentication. An update of mariadb 10.10.2 had InnoDB storage crash recovery fixes and improved optimization of joins with many tables, including eq_ref tables.

After yesterday’s deployment, we faced a downtime on our reference server. We want to share with you a detailed explanation of what happened. Impact Our reference server was offline for 13 minutes. The application responded to every request with a maintenance message. No one was able to work with the API or user interface during that time. Root Causes After deploying changes to production the application could not load some of our Ruby gems anymore...

Welcome to the first part of my syslog-ng tutorial series. In this part, I give you a quick introduction what to expect from this series and try to define what syslog-ng is.

I plan to release parts of my tutorial around every week. Of course, the Christmas holidays and the upcoming conference season may cause some delays. Each part will be released as a blog accompanied by a video. It is up to you, which version you follow. However, even if you go with the video, it is worth visiting the blog: you will be able to copy and paste configuration samples from there.

You can watch the video on YouTube:

Or you can read the rest of my blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-101-part-1-introduction