Yes, Microsoft has its own Linux distribution, called CBL-Mariner. It is an internal Linux distribution by Microsoft used for cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. And even if it is not installed in the OS by default, CBL-Mariner also includes syslog-ng.

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/installing-syslog-ng-on-microsoft-linux to learn how to install syslog-ng on it and what features are available.

The idea came from Tina Müller who was giving and awesome demo of the Vosk library. I quickly checked out the Alphacephei pages.

I fundamentally like when a cool library has Python APIs.

Vosk is an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. It enables speech recognition for lots of languages. The vosk models are small (50 Mb) but still provide continuous large vocabulary transcription, zero-latency response with streaming API.

Installing vosk library on my openSUSE Tumbleweed goes like

The fifth chapter for 2022 of the regular development reports from the YaST Team is on its way. We are just ironing up some details while we wait for the videos of the recent openSUSE Conference 2022 to be online. But fear not, we will not meanwhile abandon you into boredom. Quite the opposite, we have exciting news to share with you all!

Enjoy YaST Without Installing it

We all know how awesome YaST can be for administering your (open)SUSE system. From managing the software repositories and the installed software to adjusting the systemd services and sockets. From creating LVM logical volumes to configuring Kdump (or fadump). From inspecting the systemd journal to fine-tuning the boot loader. From configuring network interfaces to adjusting the mitigations for CPU vulnerabilities. From setting the firewall configuration to managing your subscriptions to the different SUSE products… and so much more!

But all that comes with a pretty obvious price. You must install YaST and all its dependencies in the system you want to manage. Those dependencies include the Ruby runtime, either ncurses or Qt (depending if you want the text-based or the fully graphical interface) and some other packages or libraries depending on what you want to achieve. For example, you need libzypp to install software or to manage the repositories.

What if you don’t want to pay that price? Well, we have an special offer for you! Now you can use YaST to administer your system without installing YaST or any of its dependencies. Ideal for lovers of minimal systems like the MicroOS variants of SUSE and openSUSE. All you need is a container engine like Docker or Podman… and you are using one anyways if you are using MicroOS, isn’t it?

How does it Work?

Another great news is that there is no black magic involved, just a bit of shell scripting. You can check the technical details at the yast-in-container repository. That tool only depends on Podman (or alternatively Docker) and offers a series of commands that are equivalent to the corresponding yast and yast2 command. The main difference is that those new commands grab YaST and run it in a container that will be transparently used to administer the host system. For example, the following commands would open the corresponding YaST module to manage repositories. The first in text mode and the second command with the full Qt graphical interface:

$ yast_container repositories
$ yast2_container repositories

As you would expect, if the commands are executed without specifying any argument they will open the corresponding version of the YaST control center, displaying only the modules that are currently expected to work in a container (more about that below).

Let’s imagine a pretty extreme example:

• You start with a minimal system with no YaST, no Ruby, no zypper or libzypp… not even with the rpm command being available! All you have is Podman and internet access.
• You can execute yast_container and it will download (if needed) and launch your containerized version of YaST, so you can enjoy all the usual YaST features to manage repositories and their GPG keys, to install and uninstall software, etc.
• When you are done, you just quit the contanerized YaST and you are back to your minimal system without a trace of YaST or zypper, but with all software packages and repositories configured at your will.

Remote Access Through SSH, X11… or a Web Browser!

You can of course use this nice YaST-in-a-box to manage your local system. If you install the yast-in-container package in a system with graphical interface you will even get a nice icon to launch it.

But what about remote administration? Of course, you can do it in the usual YaST way. That is, using the great text-based interface through SSH or even opening a remote graphical session with X11 or VNC. But those solutions require you to have some specific software installed in the device you are going to use for the remote access. But, if you don’t need to install YaST in the system to be managed, why would you need to install something on the other edge? The good news is that you don’t really need to - you only need a web browser!

Alongside the already mentioned commands to run YaST containerized on text and graphical modes, the package also includes a third one called yast2_web_container that will run YaST in a web session that you can later access by simply pointing your browser to the port 4984 of the system to be managed.

Ok, is not a modern mobile-first web interface but rather the graphical version of YaST running inside a browser window. But that should be enough for many cases. Authentication and certificates can be easily configured to secure that YaST instance.

What can I do?

By now you may be wondering - can this containerized version of YaST do everything a regular installed YaST can do? The answer is - not yet. As mentioned, the YaST control center in the container displays only the supported modules. Alternatively you can run yast2_container -l to list the supported modules.

The good news is that we plan to adapt more modules to be able to work in such an environment. And the even better news is that we expect most of them to be really easy to adapt. Basically all the YaST pieces that are used during a regular installation should be fairly easy to adapt. That includes the Partitioner, boot loader configuration, kdump, CPU mitigations and many more.

On the other hand, we don’t plan to adapt every single YaST module out there. For example, modules to administer services like Samba, an iSCSI target or the DHCP server will likely not be adapted unless we detect a real need for any of them.

Future plans

As mentioned, we are already adapting more YaST components to be able to run containerized. But that’s not the only plan we have to move this nice project forward. We also want to reduce the size of the images downloaded and used by the containers, improve how VNC is used internally to provide the web access, rely on SLE BCI to build the whole system… there is plenty of room to keep having fun!

In addition, we have mentioned the MicroOS variants as possible candidates to make use of a containerized version of YaST. But the transactional nature of such distributions may challenge how some YaST modules work, no matter whether they run containerized or directly in the system. For example, the way to install software packages is completely different. So, in addition to the mentioned improvements to our containerized YaST, we are considering to adapt some parts of YaST as a whole to better handle the administration of transactional systems.

And, of course, we will keep you updated on all the steps through our usual channels. So stay tuned!

Flatpak has been at the center of the recent app renaissance, but its visual identity has remained fairly stale.

Without diverging too much from the main elements of its visual identity we’ve made it more contemporary. The logo in particular has been simplified to work in all of the size scenarios and visual complexity contexts.

There’s definitely a few spots where the rebrand has yet to propagate to, so please refer to the guidelines if you spot and old coat of paint.

If you’re giving a talk on Flatpak, feel free to make use of the LibreOffice Impress Template.

Have you installed openSUSE Leap 15.4? And now what to install? What about proprietary codecs? And the multimedia codecs? It took a while but it’s over! The Cool Package is a process that installs some software necessary for the day to day of a SUSEIRO and solves all dependency problems. The Cool Pack provides:

• Thunderbird
• Codecs
• VLC
• KDEnlive
• DVDAuthor
• MPV
• ffmpeg
• Lame
• E outros…

Then the 1-click Install button. to solve these issues as this button installs the first important software for daily task such as: Thunderbird email client, VLC, MPV, proprietary codecs and video editors. Any questions, criticism and suggestions at cabelo@opensuse.org

openSUSE Leap 15.4 was released on 8th June 2022.

Leap is binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) as it shares the same source. Therefore, you can switch a Leap instance to SLE and benefit from paid support without any hassle. This comes very handy in environments where you build and test on Leap but deploy on SLE — lift & shift can't be any simpler.

Leap 15.4 is a minor release but coinciding with this release, the openSUSE Project introduced a new version of Leap designed for containers and virtualised workloads. It's called Leap Micro. The current version is 5.2.

Leap Micro shares same source as SLE Micro.

In order to celebrate this release, we organised a virtual openSUSE Beer Party in Mauritius.

Hello everyone! The openSUSE Mauritius community will host a virtual #openSUSE Beer Party TODAY 16h30 — 19h00 to celebrate the Leap 15.4 release. They will do a Leap 15.4 installation live and talk about the openSUSE local mirror. Here is the link to join: https://t.co/D6DpmheC3D pic.twitter.com/SBxiXHrwGA— MSCC (@MSCraftsman) June 10, 2022 Embedded JavaScript

The virtual party was held using the Jitsi Meet platform provided by MIXP. Since it's hosted locally, we expected a smooth quality in video and audio.

Chittesh & Aditya joined the call early on.‌

We're at https://t.co/6oTYOsRycW doing an #openSUSE Leap 15.4 installation & celebrating the recent release. 🍻🥳 pic.twitter.com/AxUuh18Mg1— Ish Sookun (@IshSookun) June 10, 2022 Embedded JavaScript

I had to juggle between doing a few things at home, handling the kid and getting back to call. Sandeep & Nirvan joined us too, and by the end, David joined the call, for the geek chat.

We installed Leap 15.4 in a VM. While chatting with Chittesh & Aditya, I selected the server profile from the installer instead of a GNOME Desktop. Facepalm!

After the installation, I installed patterns-gnome-gnome to have a full blown GNOME Desktop. Sandeep commented downloading of the packages appeared slow. Yes, indeed. So, here I manually switched the repo to mirror.opensuse.mu the ~700 packages downloaded in ~5 mins.

openSUSE Bar

A while later, I joined the openSUSE Bar at meet.opensuse.org/bar. It was nice to have a catch-up with Gertjan after a long time.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Another week is over and many people had the pleasure to meet in person at the openSUSE conference ’22 this year. I hear it was a great event, with lots of fun. Exactly, what the openSUSE community stands for. And as usual, the same openSUSE community also works without interruption on the rolling release: openSUSE Tumbleweed. In this week, we have seen daily snapshots (0602…0608).

The main changes included in these snapshots include:

• Bind 9.18.3
• Poppler 22.06.0
• libdrm 2.4.111: libkms has been removed
• Linux kernel 5.18.1 & 5.18.2
• Mozilla Firefox 101.0
• Mesa 22.1.1
• Wine 7.10

Looking at the current staging projects and the release schedule of some upstream, next week promises to be interesting. We are currently working on:

• openssl 1.1.1o
• KDE Plasma 5.25.0
• KDE Gear 22.04.2
• Systemd 251.2
• SELinux 3.4
• Python 3.10 as the default interpreter: all build fails should be addressed and first, preliminary openQA results looked good. Almost there!
• krb5 1.20.0: breaks samba
• Sphinx 5: breaks qemu

Announcement

As previously discussed on the Kubic Project mailing lists, the Kubic Project is now officially wound down.

Kubic is no longer available for download, and will no longer be maintained.

openSUSE MicroOS, once an offshoot of the Kubic Project, will now take more of a prominent role for those of us contributing who previously needed to split our attention between them.

Users wishing to run kubernetes workloads atop of an openSUSE base are recommended to install openSUSE MicroOS and then install k3s.

Users who prefer the kubernetes RPM packages and containers formerly offered by the Kubic Project may continue to use them, as they will be maintained by a new community maintainer going forward. Please understand this effort is entirely voluntary and on a ‘best effort’. It is not expected to be as polished an experience as previously offered under Kubic. Exact details regarding any installation/migration/upgrade steps using those packages will be communicated via the Kubic mailing list and openSUSE wiki.

All of the ‘non-kubernetes’ official openSUSE containers that were jointly maintained by the MicroOS and Kubic Project teams will continue to be maintained and supported for MicroOS. You can get them, as always, direct from registry.opensuse.org

Thanks for everyones contributions over the years, and we look forward to seeing where we can take MicroOS with this more focused approach.

The Kubic/MicroOS Team

I build the openSUSE Leap 15.4 version available on AWS. In addition to multipurpose, complete stable and easy to use. It is intended for users, developers, administrators, and any professional who wants openSUSE features on the server.

This release provides full compatibility (same source) with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 (SP4) binary packages, openSUSE Leap 15.4 makes it easy to migrate if necessary to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) or vice versa almost immediate.

It is worth paying attention to some packages such as the Linux kernel 5.14 which is fully maintained by SUSE and with support for Raspberry Pi 4 embedded hardware. In addition to the packages It is worth noting the Artificial Intelligence (AI) packages such as Grafana, ONNX, Prometheus, PyTorch and TensorFlow Lite, and the Linux kernel 5.3.18 which is fully maintained by SUSE and supports Raspberry Pi 4 embedded hardware.

This distribution caters for beginners, experienced users and ultra geeks, in short, it’s perfect for everyone! Suggestions at cabelo@opensuse.org, AMI image link here: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-lyboctxh3gu76octxh3gu76

Source: https://assuntonerd.com.br/2022/06/09/opensuse-leap-15-4-disponivel-na-aws/

Summer is coming and I've got a couple of posts cooking that may turn out mildly interesting, but — time constraints being what they are — in the meantime there's this.

Chafa

I (judiciously, as one might opine) pulled back from posting about every single feature release, but things have kept plodding along in quiet. ImageMagick is finally going away as per a buried remark from 2020, which means no more filling up /tmp, no more spawning Inkscape to read in SVGs, and so on. There's also lots of convenience and robustness and whatnot. Go read the release notes.

As for eye candy, I guess the new 16/8-color mode qualifies. It's the good old "eight colors, but bold attribute makes foreground bright" trick, which requires a bit of special handling since the quantization step must apply two different palettes.

With this working, the road to ANSI art scene Naraka nirvana is short: Select code points present in your favorite IBM code page, strip newlines (only if your output is 80 columns wide), and convert Chafa's Unicode output to the target code page. You'll get a file worthy of the .ANS extension and perhaps a utility like Ansilove (to those who care: There's some mildly NSFW art in their Examples section. Definitely don't look at it. You've been warned).

Taken together, it goes something like this:

$ chafa -f symbol -c 16/8 -s 80 -w 9 --font-ratio 1 --color-space din99d \
    --symbols space+solid+half+stipple+ascii they_wont.jpg | tr -d \\n | \
    iconv -c -f utf8 -t cp437 > they_wont.ans
$ ansilove -f 80x50 -r they_wont.ans -o top_notch_blog_fodder.png

It's a bit of a screenful, but should get better once I get around to implementing presets.

Finally, I added a new internal symbol range for Latin scripts. It's got about 350 new symbols to work with on top of the ASCII that was already there. Example anim below; might be a good idea to open this one in a separate tab, as browser scaling kind of ruins it.

Thanks

Apart from the packagers, who are excellent but too numerous to list for fear of leaving anyone out, this time I'd like to thank Lionel Dricot aka Ploum for lots of good feedback. He develops a text mode offline-first browser for Gemini, Gopher, Spartan and the web called Offpunk, and you should check it out.

One more. When huntr.dev came onto my radar for the first time this spring, I admit to being a little bit skeptical. However, they've been a great help, and every interaction I've had with both staff and researchers has been professional, pleasant and highly effective. Big thumbs up. I've more thoughts on this, probably enough for a post of its own. Eventually.

A propos

I came across Aaron A. Reed's project 50 Years of Text Games a while back (via Emily Short's blog, I suspect), and have been following it with interest. He launched his kickstarter this week and is knocking it out of the park. The selection is a tad heavy on story/IF games (quoth the neckbeard, "grumble grumble, Empire, ZZT, grumble"), but it's really no complaint considering the effort that obviously went into this.

Seems low-risk too (the draft articles are already written and available to read), but I have a 75% miss rate on projects I've backed, so what do I know. Maybe next year it'll be 60%.