KDE has been available as a FOSS for 26 years, it is still one of the most powerful and flexible desktop environments that are designed specifically for Linux systems. Initially, KDE meant “Kool Desktop Environment” but it was later changed to “K Desktop Environment”. KDE is 100% free to use and anyone can contribute to […]

Source

As the end of the year approaches, the YaST team is focusing more and more on evolving D-Installer with the goal to release an incomplete but decent prototype in December. But we also find time to improve (Auto)YaST with small corrections and not-so-small new features incorporated into openSUSE Factory and released as updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4.

So let’s go with a nice report including:

• A quick summary of the many recent improvements in D-Installer
• The new selection of product in the SLE images for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
• A glance at the AutoYaST support for the new security profiles feature
• Our new tool to visualize installation logs

Tons of Improvements in D-Installer

As mentioned above, we concentrated quite some firepower on D-Installer development which resulted in many new features that will be incorporated into the several prototypes that will be published during this week. You can review every one of these new features by checking their corresponding pull requests at GitHub. All of them contain nice descriptions with as many screenshots and videos as you may need:

• Possibility of installing ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) prototypes, in addition to openSUSE Tumbleweed, Leap and Leap Micro.
• Support for configuring networks: both wired and wireless.
• New consistency checks to prevent users from installing with configurations that makes little sense.
• Usage of D-Bus activation to handle the different D-Installer components.
• Initial D-Bus interface to configure the storage (eg. partitioning) setup. A new user interface will be built soon on top.

We also took the opportunity to fix several minor issues reported by our early testers. So a big thank to all of them.

Registering SLED from a SLE Image at WSL

In case you don’t know, Windows Subsystem for Linux is a compatibility layer that allows to run several Linux distributions inside a Windows machine. Of course, SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is one of those distributions, easily accessible from MS Store as an image for WSL.

Very recently, WSL gained the ability to execute graphical applications, which means now it also makes sense to offer SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) as part of the catalog of images available for WSL. But SUSE didn’t want to bloat MS Store with too many images.

Fortunately, (open)SUSE WSL images are configured on first boot using a YaST wizard. So we added a new step to that wizard on the SLES image allowing to continue with that product or to switch to SLED, guiding the user through the registration process that would be needed to access the SLED repositories.

As usual, you can check more details and more screenshots at the corresponding pull request at GitHub.

AutoYaST Support for the New Security Policies

In our previous report we presented the new feature to check for security profiles in all its interactive glory. But support for unattended installation was still not finished.

Now we added the missing AutoYaST bits. Check how to specify a security policy in the profile (as with the interactive feature, only DISA STIG is supported at the moment) and how AutoYaST would report any lack of compliance.

A New Viewer for the YaST Logs

But it’s not all new big features in YaST. As you all know, we also invest a significant part of our time fixing bugs, implementing small improvements and helping our users to diagnose problems. For all that, the YaST logs are a crucial source of information… maybe too much information. A pretty typical installation or upgrade of an openSUSE Leap 15.4 system can result in a log file of 13MiB (uncompressed) with more than 80.000 lines!

To improve the situation we implemented two things: some enhancements in the logging system and a new log viewer. Now YaST adds marks to the logs that group the information into sections. And the new log viewer understands those group marks and several other aspects of the YaST logs, making it possible to filter and to navigate the information.

See the full announcement with examples at this announcement.

Stay Tuned

As already mentioned, we plan to keep working on YaST and D-Installer. Regarding the latter, we hope to have more news to share before the year ends. So keep an eye on this blog!

From now on, as I want to reach as many as possible, you can also read sudo and syslog-ng news from me on Mastodon. You can find my account at:

https://fosstodon.org/@PCzanik

Mastodon is a decentralized network of servers. I chose a server called “Fosstodon” as it is focused on open source software. Some of the projects I participate in are already there: BastilleBSD and openSUSE. As usual, next to my usual syslog-ng and sudo posts, you will also sometimes hear from me about OpenPOWER and ARM with some occasional photos from my hiking trips :-)

Note: I plan to keep using Twitter as my main communications platform for sudo & syslog-ng. However, some of my most active followers, who liked, commented and retweeted my tweets regularly, left Twitter for Mastodon. I want to make sure that I can keep them updated about syslog-ng and sudo, and reach readers who are not available on Twitter.

This isn’t anything particularly earth shattering here, the point here is to make a kind of “CubicleNate bookmark” for me and to be openly criticized by those that know more than me on this subject. The problem I had was pausing and resuming properly using OctoPrint on my Ender3 Printer. I messed up more than […]

I like to dabble around in playing instruments, I am, by no means, a musician but doing a little noodling around from time to time can be quite gratifying. In my younger years, I did enjoy playing more than one instrument, today, I am taking on some new challenges, nothing crazy, I just happen to […]

Welcome to my new blog.

This is the successor of my previous blog on https://dragotin.wordpress.com.

After paying wordpress quite some money to get an advertise free blog I decided to get rid of that and have my own hosted blog where I do not have to pay for not having battle ships or girls underneath my articles. Yes, that is true: Readers sent me screenshots with this kind of images.

So I am starting this journey here with Hugo. Let’s see how that turns out :-)

One of the aspects that first attracted me to Linux was the choice in desktop environments. What I specifically thought was great when I made the switch to Linux from Windows was the KDE option at the time. I could shape and mold it to what I wanted my desktop to be, something I had […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week (the last weekend) has been a bit of a challenge for many of our users, due to an ill-prepared sudo config change. It was attempted to closer align how sudo works on other distros (using user’s password instead of root’s) but the configuration was far from complete and made nobody able to sudo anymore (su still worked, luckily). A heartfelt apology if you were hit by that. The change was reverted on Monday (through the update channel) to get you back to the usual config asap. But of course, the week was not defined by that one incident. Tumbleweed has been rolling on steadily with daily snapshots (1104…1110).

The main changes delivered during this week were:

• KDE Gear 22.08.3
• Qt 5.15.7 (broke Deepin/qt5platform-plugins, I submitted a fix for that to the devel project)
• Libvirt 8.9.0
• SQLite 3.93.4
• cmake 3.24.2
• PostgreSQL 15.0 (final release, out of RC)
• Mozilla Firefox 106.0.5
• Linux kernel 6.0.7
• GNU Make 4.4
• git 2.38.1
• gnome-shell & mutter 43.1
• Mesa 22.2.3
• KDE Plasma 5.26.3
• gnutls 3.7.8
• systemd 251.8

Quite the list that accumulated there over just one week. And of course, these are just the major changes.OBS reports for the last week: During this period 902 commits were added to packages in this project. Out of those commits, 714 were version updates

The staging projects are currently testing these updates:

• icu 72.1 (nodejs fixes were submitted, needs retesting)
• icewm 3.2.0
• Linux kernel 6.0.8
• Python (all versions): Fixes for CVE-2022-45061
• postgresql10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 – all bump to their latest minor version
• rubygem-rspec 3.12.0: YaST is in the progress of catching up with the needed changes
• FFmpeg-5 as default (ffmpeg-4 will stay around, and spec files can pin to it)

This week saw a new all-time high of continuous openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released, which surpasses the previous streak of 26.

That streak continues and the snapshots have provided a few major version software updates along with several bug fixing updates.

The latest snapshot bringing the distribution to an all-time high of 29 is 20221109. This snapshot updates Mesa and Mesa-drivers to versions 22.2.3. The 3D graphics package dropped a package related to Intel Vulkan Application Programming Interfaces and it fixed some regressions affecting continuous integration. An update of libzypp 17.31.5 created a .no_auto_prune in the package to prevent an auto cleanup of orphaned repositories. The text-based user interface writer package ncurses 6.3.20221105 fixed another memory leak and added a few patches from October. Other packages to update in the snapshot were mobile-broadband-provider-info 20221107, elfutils 0.188, perl-Image-ExifTool 12.50 and a half a dozen more.

A major version package update in snapshot 20221108 was made to paper setting package libpaper 2.0.3. The package fixes a segmentation fault when /HOME is unset. The package also dropped a patch and fixed a space leak in case of an error parsing paper specifications. Developers will not have to worry about two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures fixed in git 2.38.1. A fix for surprising behavior with --local clone optimization had resolved CVE-2022-39253 and a fix for CVE-2022-39260, which could be exploited by victims who had git shell exposed as a login shell, and have enabled its interactive mode by creating the directory /HOME/git-shell-commands. A fixed migration to OpenSSL 3 was made in the nodejs19 19.0.1 update. An update of bind 9.18.8 added new features like support for parsing and validating the dohpath service parameter, which added DNS record type SVCB. The package now logs the supported cryptographic algorithms during startup and in the output of named -V. GNOME’s gedit 43.1 had a fix that cut text off at the bottom in certain situations, and dnsmasq 2.87 added snooping of IPv6 prefix-delegations to the DHCP-relay system. Other packages to update in the snapshot were libsoup 3.2.2, a few GNOME 43.1 updates and several other packages.

The 20221107 snapshot was super small. It updated xterm 375, which fixed a couple regressions and changed the default for sixel scrolling resource to better match VT330/VT340 DECSDM settings. Fingerprint reading package libfprint had a fork allowing the loading of external modules and the non-free modules will be included in Packman repositories, according to the changelog. The make 4.4 version warned of future backward-incompatibility for the next release with several warnings for build requirements and other backward-incompatibility issues. There were also several new features and functions in the minor update like a function that “allows user-defined functions to define a set of local variables: values can be assigned to these variables from within the user-defined function and they will not impact global variable assignments.”

Snapshot 20221106 updated a few packages as well. Mozilla Firefox 106.0.5 had a fix for crashes experienced by users with Intel Gemini Lake CPUs. Linuxl kernel-firmware 20221031 added firmware for Cirrus CS35L41, which is the industry’s first 55 nm smart audio amplifier solution for mobile devices. The update of the kernel-source to version 6.0.7 also focused on audio having several Advanced Linux Sound Architecture changes. There were a few USB adjustments made with the DWC3 driver in the kernel as well. XML security library xmlsec1 1.2.36 had a migration to OpenSSL 3.0 Application Programming Interfaces and the package deprecated OpenSSL before 1.1.0 and LibreSSL before 2.7.0.

The Guy Fawkes Day snapshot, 20221105, seemed fitting to have an update of firewalld 1.2.1 and configuration-management library augeas 1.13.0. The firewalld package fixed nftables with dropping invalid packets before a zone dispatch, and the package added documentation protocols to rich language to extend current zone elements. Augeas improved readline integration to handle quoting issues and a new lens to parse the /proc/cmdline parameters that were added. Another major version in this week’s snapshot was the translation from the release candidate (RC) to the official postgresql 15 release. The package has noticeable gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, and it improves on its in-memory and on-disk sorting algorithms; according to the announcement benchmarks show speedups of 25 to 400 percent based on which data types are sorted. A few other packages were updated.

Snapshot 20221104 updated KDE Gear 22.08.3. An update of KDE file manager Dolphin fixed the opening of a new window unnecessarily, and Bahrain, which was not showing in Asia on KGeography maps, was fixed, so make sure to tell the people you know using Plasma that Bahrain isn’t some mystical island continent like Australia, only smaller. KDE Gear 22.08.3 also had an update for its travel reservation package KItinerary, which added an Italo train ticket extractor script, so ticket checkers in Italy will have less awkward conversations. An update of sqlite3 3.39.4 fixed a long-standing problem that in rare cases caused database corruption if the application uses an application-defined page cache. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot including libvirt 8.9.0, php7 7.4.33 and more.

There were a few packages worth mentioning in the two snapshots that started off the week. Snapshot 20221103 updated btrfsprogs to version 6.0, and it now has a option -O that accepts values from -R to unify the interface, but -R will continue to work. The file system utilities also put in some experimental mkfs support for block-group-tree related to RC Linux Kernel 6.1. A couple of regressions made their way into xwayland 22.1.4 like a double-scroll wheel event and a key repeat, which were fixed with the 22.1.5 update. Snapshot 20221102 updated to the 6.0.6 kernel-source and mpg123 to version 1.31.1.

The continuous streak of Tumbleweed snapshots stands at 29.

I have heard way to often the question from Linux and specially SUSE Linux users that “How can I check the changelog of a package or new version of a package available on the repository, but not yet installed”.

There was no easy answer for that question, so I have decided to make a little tool for that.

How it is done

All the enabled repositories have a bunch of configuration files in a well structured directory tree under the /var/cache/zypp/raw/.