Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We reach the end of a week crowded with snapshots. We published 7 snapshots in total since my last review (0804…0810). The number of failed packages is quite high currently in Factory, so I’d like to ask everybody to help out on that front (https://tinyurl.com/ysy4nnnz)

The major updates delivered this week are:

• Mesa 22.1.4
• Mozilla Firefox 103.0.1
• AppArmor 3.0.6
• gdb 12.1
• Linux kernel 5.18.15 & 5.19.0
• libvirt 8.6.0
• nvme-cli 2.1.1
• Poppler 22.08.0
• KDE Plasma 5.24.4
• Samba 4.16.4
• Plymouth 22.02.122
• RPM 4.17.1, with some significant rework on the spec, i.e previously bundled things like debugedit and python-rpm-packaging are split out)
• Virt-Manager 4.1.0
• Postfix 3.7.2
• GNOME 42.4 (mostly complete, gnome-shell, mutter, and gnome-desktop missing)

In the staging area, the following updates are being prepared and worked on:

• glibc 2.36
• Linux kernel 5.19.1
• Binutils 2.39
• Shadow 4.12
• wxWidgets 3.2.0: breaks build of wxPython
• fmt 9.0: breaks ceph and zxing-cpp

Consecutive openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been rolling out to users each day this week.

Among the few major version releases this week are the 5.19 Linux Kernel and the 5.1 HarfBuzz version, which both arrived in snapshot 20220810.

Snapshot 20220810 also brought tons of other packages. Highlights being discussed about the release of kernel 5.19 point to increased arm support, TCP improvements related to larger IPv6 package sizes, and graphical improvements for Intel and AMD GPUs. The text shaping engine harfbuzz 5.1 fixed regressions in bitmap font rendering, improved support for some Arabic and Hebrew fonts and improved the handling of command line options. The hplip 3.22.6 package added support for several new printers and added support for new distros that were recently released. There were Italian and Serbian translation changes in the gnome-software 42.4 update, which also fixed detail text when it contains markup. An update of webkit2gtk3 2.36.6 fixed the handling of touchpad scrolling on GTK4 builds as well as several crashes and rendering issues. Other packages to update in the snapshot were postfix 3.7.2, ModemManager 1.18.10, mutt 2.2.7 and more.

The open-source antivirus engine ClamAV updated to the 0.103.7 version in snapshot 20220809. The updated package allows for the skipping of files in solid archives and upgrades the UnRAR library to version 6.1.7. An update of the Remote Desktop Protocol package freerdp 2.8.0 backported several items and prevent out of bound reads for ffmpeg. The kernel-firmware package provided several Intel Bluetooth updates and added firmware for audio amplifier chip Cirrus CS35L41. Also in the update was the atomic updates package transactional-update, which transitioned from release candidate to the actual 4.0.0 version. The package used in MicroOS added a method to delete a snapshot and changed the “List” method of snapshot D-Bus. An update of yast2-trans enhanced several Swedish translations. A majority of the remaining packages in the snapshot were RubyGems updates.

While the successor of snapshot 20220808 had RubyGems updates, this snapshot had mostly Python Package Index updates. Among the updated PyPI package were python-httpx 0.23.0, python310-pyparsing 3.0.9 and python-kiwisolver 1.4.4. An update of python-setuptools went from the 58.3.0 version to 63.2.0; this newer python-setuptools included performance optimization, removed some packaging dependencies and fixed some broken functionality appearing in version 60.8.0. Two other important packages to update in the snapshot were virt-manager 4.1.0, which refreshed and dropped patches, and rpm 4.17.1, which fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; CVE-2021-3521 was a flaw in RPM’s signature functionality.

Snapshots 20220807 and 20220806 both had several RubyGems updated. The 20220807 snapshot updated the boot processing package plymouth to a 22.02.122 version, which updated a script for source-code beautifier uncrustify. Another major version to arrive this week was an update of hwinfo 22.0. The hardware information tool improved treatment of NVME devices, fixed a compiler warning and added a new NVME hardware class.

KDE fans received an update in snapshot 20220805. KDE’s Plasma 5.25.4 arrived in the snapshot and added keyboard navigation support in the Plasma Desktop. The power consumption controller PowerDevil updated battery notifications and now shows a notification when AC voltage is plugged in when the battery drains. GNOME’s text editor gedit 42.2 fixed text cut off situations and updated translations. An aws-cli 1.25.45 update added requirements in the spec file for setup.py. Almost a year’s worth of updates arrived in the libostree 2022.5 version. The version provided fixes for s390x SE, Application Programming Interface additions and fixed Rust bindings.

Version 4.0 of syslog-ng is right around the corner. It hasn’tyet been released; however, you can already try some of its features. The largest and most interesting change is type support. Right now, name-value pairs within syslog-ng are represented as text, even if the PatternDB or JSON parsers could see the actual type of the incoming data. This does not change, but starting with 4.0, syslog-ng will keep the type information, and use it correctly on the destination side. This makes your life easier, for example when you store numbers to Elasticsearch or to other type-aware storage.

From this blog, you can learn how type support makes your life easier and helps you to give it a testdrive on your own hosts: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/type-support-getting-started-with-syslog-ng-4-0

Last week I became a Discogs user. Why? I have been browsing the site for years to find information on albums. Recently I also needed a solution to create an easy to access database of my CD/DVD collection. Right now I am not interested in the marketplace function of Discogs, but that might change in the long term :-)

Information overload

For many years when I searched for an album, the first few hits were from YouTube and Wikipedia. Nowadays the first few results are often from Discogs. While Wikipedia sometimes provides some interesting background information about the creation of an album, Discogs has more structured and uniform information about albums. It also lists the many variants of the same album. Even for artists where I thought that I have all albums in my collection (like Mike Oldfield), I can find albums I have never heard about before. It is also easy to see who a given artist was working with and using TIDAL I can instantly listen to some really interesting (or awful…) music right away.

My collection

I only have a few hundred CDs, but that is already more than I can remember. When I am in a CD shop, I happily buy new CDs from artists I have never heard about before, as I can be sure that I do not already have that disc. However, when it comes to Solaris, Mike Oldfield or Vangelis, I can never be sure if I already have an album. Of course I tried some DIY methods, but it was difficult to maintain the lists and they were never at hand when I really needed them.

Discogs provides an easy to use mobile application to scan bar codes on the back of CDs. This can speed up adding new items to my collection tremendously. Of course not all bar codes are in available in Discogs, but until now there was only one CD that I could not find at all. The more difficult part is when it lists dozens of disks for the same bar code: various (re)prints of the the same album from around the World. I must admit that I am lazy here and just take an educated guess… I can use the same mobile app to check my collection when away from home.

A few weeks ago I realized that I have a duplicate album, and while entering my collection into Discogs, I discovered another one. I have no plans for selling them, I already know which of my friends would be happy to receive them. But in the long term it could be interesting to buy a few CDs which are otherwise impossible to buy here in Hungary.

Discogs also gives a price estimate for most CDs. It was a kind of surprising: some of my most expensive disks are not worth too much anymore, as they were printed in large numbers. On the other hand I have a large collection of Hungarian progrock music, and the price of those is much higher than I paid for them originally.

You can find my collection at https://www.discogs.com/user/pczanik/collection. The list is constantly growing, as I am still just at less than a half of my collection. The next time I visit my favorite CD shop, Periferic Records - Stereo Kft., I will have an easier job when I see a CD from a familiar artist :-)

GNOME 43 Wallpapers

Evolution and design can co-exist happily in the world of desktop wallpapers. It's desirable to evolve within a set of constraints to create a theme in time, set up a visual brand that doesn't rely on putting a logo on everything. At the same time it's healthy to stop once in a while, do a small reflection on what's perhaps a little dated and do a fresh redesign.

I took extra time this release to focus on refreshing the whole wallpaper set for 43. While the default wallpaper isn't a big departure from 3.38 hexagon theme, most of the supplemental wallpapers have been refreshed from the ground up. The video above shows a few glimpses of all the one way streets it took for the default to land back in the hexagons.

GNOME 42 was the first release to ship a bunch of SVG based wallpapers that embraced the flat colors and gradients and benefited from being just a few kilobytes in file size. It was also the first release to ship dark preference variants. All of that continues into 43.

Major change comes from addressing a wide range of display aspect ratios with one wallpaper. 43 wallpapers should work fine on your ultrawides just as well as portrait displays. We also rely on WebP as the file format getting a much better quality with a nice compression ratio (albeit lossy).

What's still missing are photographic wallpapers captured under different lighting. Hopefully next release.

Blender's geometry nodes is an amazing tool to do generative art, yet I feel like I've already forgotten the small fraction of what can be done that I've learned during this cycle. Luckily there's always the next release to do some repetition. Thanks to everyone following my struggles on the twitch streams.

The release is dedicated to Thomas Wood, a long time maintainer of all things visual in GNOME.

GNOME 43 Wallpapers

Evolution and design can co-exist happily in the world of desktop wallpapers. It’s desirable to evolve within a set of constraints to create a theme in time, set up a visual brand that doesn’t rely on putting a logo on everything. At the same time it’s healthy to stop once in a while, do a small reflection on what’s perhaps a little dated and do a fresh redesign.

I took extra time this release to focus on refreshing the whole wallpaper set for 43. While the default wallpaper isn’t a big departure from 3.38 hexagon theme, most of the supplemental wallpapers have been refreshed from the ground up. The video above shows a few glimpses of all the one way streets it took for the default to land back in the hexagons.

GNOME 42 was the first release to ship a bunch of SVG based wallpapers that embraced the flat colors and gradients and benefited from being just a few kilobytes in file size. It was also the first release to ship dark preference variants. All of that continues into 43.

Major change comes from addressing a wide range of display aspect ratios with one wallpaper. 43 wallpapers should work fine on your ultrawides just as well as portrait displays. We also rely on WebP as the file format getting a much better quality with a nice compression ratio (albeit lossy).

What’s still missing are photographic wallpapers captured under different lighting. Hopefully next release.

Blender’s geometry nodes is an amazing tool to do generative art, yet I feel like I’ve already forgotten the small fraction of what can be done that I’ve learned during this cycle. Luckily there’s always the next release to do some repetition. Thanks to everyone following my struggles on the twitch streams.

The release is dedicated to Thomas Wood, a long time maintainer of all things visual in GNOME.

Yesterday, I attended an open source event organised by OSCA Mauritius and OceanDBA.

I was invited to speak at the event and I chose to explain a little about openSUSE, its different distributions and how we have managed to set up two mirrors to improve the performance of openSUSE updates in Mauritius.

Girish is a representative for OSCA Mauritius and he works at OceanDBA. He put all the effort into organising this event. At about 09h30, the conference room at Flying Dodo was almost full. Girish welcomed everyone and introduced the presentation themes for the day.

First presentation – Linux Kernel history by Chittesh Sham

Chittesh is a DevOps Engineer at Corel Corporation. He did a presentation on the Linux Kernel. He tried to summarise three decades of Linux history in one presentation. It was a very informative and fun prez.

Second presentation – Bash Scripting by Shravan Dwarka

Shravan is a Linux System Engineer at OceanDBA. He did a presentation on the Bourne Again SHell (Bash).

After explaining about Shells, Shravan gave a scenario where a database administrator had to automate backups and perform backup retention.

He then explained line by line how he wrote a Bash script to execute the backup.

Final presentation – openSUSE Mirrors in Mauritius

My presentation was last. It's been a while since I set up two openSUSE mirrors in Mauritius. Any openSUSE user on the island will now benefit from fast updates without having to configure anything on their openSUSE machine.

This event was an opportunity to make a public announcement about the mirrors and explain the process behind. That is, how I contacted sponsors for server/bandwidth in Mauritius and got in touch with the openSUSE Heroes to build the repo mirrors.

However, first I did a history lesson about S.u.S.E, SUSE and openSUSE. I clarified that openSUSE is a project and the various distributions have names like Leap, Leap Micro, Tumbleweed and MicroOS.

Then, I showed the tickets that I opened at openSUSE to get the ball rolling. Within a few days we had the mirrors set up.

I mentioned that the domain opensuse.mu is sponsored by the openSUSE project itself. Then, the Heroes created the records to point the domain & sub-domains to servers in Mauritius, sponsored by cloud.mu and Rogers Capital Technology Services.

While speaking about the mirrors, I explained how MirrorBrain works. It is an open source framework to run a content delivery network for mirror servers. The two openSUSE mirrors in Mauritius are mirror.opensuse.mu and mirror.rcts.opensuse.mu. To show how MirrorBrain works with these two servers, I opened get.opensuse.org to download the latest release of openSUSE Leap 15.4.

I selected the offline installation image and we checked the URL from which the image was downloading. It was the Rogers Capital Technology Services (RCTS) mirror server.

I SSH'ed on the cloud.mu mirror server to show how the rsync is done from the restricted rsync server of openSUSE.org. I did not SSH on the RCTS server because it requires a VPN (RCTS engineers take security very seriously 🤓). My VPN setup was on a different machine than the one I was doing my presentation on.

I explained the difference between rsync.opensuse.org and stage.opensuse.org, the former being a public rsync server. It can be used by anyone wishing to run a private openSUSE mirror for home or office use.

The conference room was packed with attendees which is a promising thing for an open source event.

At the end of the event, Joffrey Michaïe, the founder and CEO of OceanDBA addressed the attendees. He thanked the wonderful audience for showing up to the event. Joffrey explained that OceanDBA's business is built on open source technologies and that they have the open source philosophy at the heart of the company.

He was glad to see a lot of young folks attending the event and said that his company would be keen to sponsor such events again in the future. He mentioned that at the moment there are about fifteen open positions at OceanDBA and anyone wishing to apply could reach out to him directly or talk to any other personnel of the company.

The Managing Director of Rogers Capital Technology Services, Dev Hurkoo, and the Roshan Patroo, Manager at RCTS, attended the event. We met after my presentation. They both told me that they were impressed by the attendee turn-out for an open source event. Dev expressed his interest to support open source activities in the future too.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

I was in the fortunate situation of enjoying two weeks of offline time. Took a little bit of effort, but I did manage to not start my computer a single time (ok, I cheated, checked emails, and staging progress on the phone browser). During this time, Richard has been taking good care of Tumbleweed – with the limitations that were put upon him, like reduced OBS worker powers and the like. In any case, I still do want to give you an overview of what changed in Tumbleweed during those three weeks. There was a total of 8 snapshots released (0718, 0719, 0725, 0728, 0729, 0731, 0801, 0802). A few of those snapshots have only been published, but no announcement emails were sent out, as there were also some mailman issues on the factory mailing list.

Those snapshot accumulated the following changes:

• Linux kernel 5.18.11
• Pipewire 0.3.55 & 0.3.56
• nvme-cli 2.1~rc0
• XOrg X11 SFFmpeg21.1.4
• ffmpeg 5.1
• qemu 7.0
• AppArmor 3.0.5
• Poppler 22.07.0
• polkit: split out pkexec into seperate package to make system hardening easier (to avoid installing it jsc#PED-132 jsc#PED-148).

The next snapshot being tested is currently 0804, which mostly looks good with some ‘weird’ things around transactional servers. This snapshot and the current state of staging projects promise to deliver these items soon (for any random value of time to fit into ‘soon’):

• Mesa 22.1.4
• Mozilla Firefox 103.0.1
• AppArmor 3.0.6
• gdb 12.1
• Linux kernel 5.18.15, followed by 5.19
• libvirt 8.6.0
• nvme-cli 2.1.1 (out of RC phase)
• KDE Plasma 5.25.4
• Samba 4.16.4
• Postfix 3.7.2
• RPM 4.17.1, with some major rework on the spec, i.e previously bundled things like debugedit and python-rpm-packaging are split out)
• python-setuptools 63.2.0
• Python 3.10.6
• CMake 3.24.0

There have been a lot of changes going on for me in the past few months. Without going onto a lot of details that I would rather not share, I’ve changed a lot in my personal and online life and I’ve taken on some new interests and possible changes in my future.

This blog has been running in one form or another for many years and I don’t want to get rid of it but it will be mainly focused on things that interest in me in the Usenet world.

My new blog is https://blog.syntopicon.info and it will be my new general-interest blog but also focused on my other upcoming interests that I’m not going to share here as much.

This blog is being moved to https://blog.theuse.net

By the way, why did I start hosting my own wordpress server again when I have an account on wordpress.com? Because worspress.com sucks. You can no longer create new blogs without a paid account. For the same cost of a paid account, I was able to buy a VPS server and have total control of everything and have plenty of resources left over to restart my usenet server, gemini server, and other services.

The openSUSE Tumbleweed produced five snapshots since last Thursday that have so far been released.

Among some of the packages updated this week besides those listed above in the headline were curl, ffmpeg, fetchmail, vim and more.

Snapshot 20220802 was released a couple hours ago and updated just four packages. The update of webkit2gtk3 2.36.5 fixed video playback for the Yelp browser. It and webkit2gtk3-soup2 also fixed a couple Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. An update of yast2-trans provided some Slovak translations.

The update of xen 4.16.1_06 arrived in snapshot 20220801 and it offered several patches. One of those was a fix for a GNU Compiler Collection 13 compilation error and xen also addressed a CVE; CVE-2022-33745 had a wrong use of a variable due to a code move and lead to a wrong TLB flush condition. Another of the packages to arrive in the snapshot was an update of fetchmail 6.4.32; the package updated translations and added a patch to clean up some scripts. Many changes were made in the mozilla-nss 3.80 update, which added a few certificates and support for asynchronous client auth hooks. The package also removed the Hellenic Academic 2011 root certificate. Terminal multiplexer, tmux, updated to 3.3a and added systemd socket activation support, which can be built with -enable-systemd.

Snapshot 20220731 had many packages updated. ImageMagick jumped a few minor version to 7.1.0.44. The imaging package eliminated some warnings and a possible buffer overflow. The curl 7.84.0 update deleted two obsolete OpenSSL options and fixed four CVEs. Daniel Stenberg’s video went over CVE-2022-32205 at length, which could have effectively caused a denial of service possible for a sibling site. An update of kdump fixed a network-related dracut handling for Firmware Assisted Dump. An update of codec2 version 1.0.5 fixed a FreeDV Application Programming Interface backward compatibility issue in the previous minor version. An update of inkscape 1.2.1 fixes five crashes, more than 25 bugs and improved 15 user-interface translations. PDF rendering library poppler updated to version 22.07.0 and fixed a crash when filling in forms in some files. It also added gpg keyring validation for the release tarball. The 2.3.7 version of gpg2 fixed CVE-2022-34903 that, in unusual situations, could allow a signature forgery via injection into the status line. Other key packages to update in the snapshot were unbound 1.16.1, libstorage-ng 4.5.33, yast2-bootloader 4.5.2 and kernel-firmware 20220714.

The 20220729 snapshot delivered yast2 4.5.10, which jumped four minor versions; the new version added a method for finding a package according to a pattern and fixed libzypp initialization. Text editor vim 9.0.0073 fixed CVE-2022-2522 and a couple compiler warnings. Linux Kernel security module Apparmor 3.0.5 fixed a build error, had several profile and abstraction additions and removed several upstreamed patches. Both GCC 12 and ceph had some minor git updates with versions 12.1.1 and 16.2.9 respectively.

The 20220728 snapshot had two major version updates. The 7.0 version of qemu had a substantial rework of the spec files and properly fixed CVE-2022-0216. The generic emulator and virtualizer had several RISC-V additions; support for KVM and enablement of Hypervisor extension by default. The package also added new audio-dbus and ui-dbus subpackages, according to the changelog. The other major release was adobe-sourcehanserif-fonts 2.001. The new version added Hong Kong specific subset fonts and variable fonts for all regions for the decorative font. Another package to update in the snapshot was ffmpeg. The 5.1 version brought in IPFS protocol support and removed the X-Video Motion Compensation hardware acceleration. The snapshot also updated bind 9.18.5, sqlite2 3.39.2, virtualbox 6.1.36, zypper 1.14.55 and many other packages.