The first computer “love” is the Commodore 64 and I get real excited about new developments and uses of modern tech to allow the 40 year old computer to persist. it’s really quite amazing what is now an obscure, old, 8-bit machine has what is arguably a more flourishing existence than it ever has. I […]

This is the fifth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time we had an overview of the syslog-ng configuration and had our first steps working with syslog-ng. Today we learn about syslog-ng source definitions and how to check the syslog-ng version and its enabled features.

You can watch the video on YouTube:

Or you can read the rest the tutorial as a blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-101-part-5-sources

Originally I was going to make a video of applying a screen protector to the SteamDeck but… why? It’s not like it would be all that interesting and would probably be another turd of a video so just a blathering is just as well. The production time for writing something out is far, far less […]

Collaboration is the heart of the OBS project. Therefore, we have been working on the request page redesign for a while, the page where most of the collaboration happens. This time, we have focused on improving the handling of requests with multiple actions, facilitating the review process by enhancing the code changes and helping out with decision-making, among others. The request redesign is part of the beta program. We started the redesign of the request...

The openSUSE Project was inspired by Fedora’s efforts to make Cisco’s OpenH264 codecs and FDK AAC available to its users that members reached out to Cisco’s open-source team to do the same for its user base.

An obstacle to overcome is the current limitation for free redistribution of the codecs is 100,000 users, so board member Neal Gompa and openSUSE’s Leap release manager Lubos Kocman proposed a way to simplify the codec installation in openSUSE.

The codec library, which supports H.264 encoding and decoding, is suitable for real-time-application use like WebRTC. The simplification of the installation will make out-of-the-box use much easier for openSUSE users.

Cisco, which the openSUSE Project is very thankful for their efforts, agreed to an approach on OpenH264 re-distribution via a Cisco-owned infrastructure to openSUSE users. A release workflow for OpenH264 was envisioned and a three-step approach handled via a set of scripts in openSUSE Release Tools. 

A workflow script triggers and sends Cisco an email with an archive containing OpenH264 rpm packages to Cisco; it makes a snapshot of data that is then sent or “POSTed” for manual extraction of a Cisco binaries. The process ensures that the project always has a set of related binaries in the Open Build Service. 

An archive is created and sent by one of multimedia:libs:cisco-openh264 project maintainers. 

The package is signed in OBS by the openSUSE key, so the origin of the package can be verified. The repository metadata is published by OBS under codecs.opensuse.org/openh264.

The archive must contain only packages with Cisco OpenH264 and related OpenH264 GStreamer plugins. Addition of any other content outside of the agreement, especially other codecs, under the agreement from Cisco would lead to a violation.  

Potential improvements have already been discussed to improve the existing workflow, but the initial efforts are set to provide openSUSE a more simplified experience after installation. 

Or enable repo manually by running the following:

Leap

sudo zypper ar http://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Leap repo-openh264

Tumbleweed or MicroOS  

sudo zypper ar http://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Tumbleweed repo-openh264

Installation

sudo zypper in gstreamer-1.20-plugin-openh264

The openh264 repository will be enabled by default on all new installations of openSUSE Tumbleweed starting with the next snapshot iso build. It will be also available as part of openSUSE Leap 15.5 Beta. 

Alternatively, using the openSUSE-repos for repository management will provide users an openh264 repo definition as part of the latest update. Users will need to remove old duplicate repo definitions manually as found in the project README file.

AAC has already been part of the distribution for several months.

I was doing some preparation for my weekly tutoring activity and when I realized I misspelled “science” on a particular file that I end up sharing with parents. Somehow, I spelled “scoence” and almost published the file spelled as such. I realized that somewhere along the line, Dolphin, the most amazing file manager wasn’t doing […]

The second Linux Saloon Live was a News Flight Night with a flight of topics sourced from all around the internet from the Linux Saloon bunch. The main topic of the show revolved around a Strawpoll that Aris made asking, “Have you ever built a desktop.” A simple question that made for some incredibly interesting […]

This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots will switch the RPM and repository signing key of Tumbleweed from 2048 bit RSA to a 4096 bit RSA key.

This switchover was necessary to meet current security recommendations. If you are regulary updating your Tumbleweed installation, the key will already be imported to the RPM keyring, and also in the openSUSE-build-key package.

The GPG fingerprint of the new key:

pub   rsa4096/0x35A2F86E29B700A4 2022-06-20 [SC] [expires: 2026-06-19]
      Key fingerprint = AD48 5664 E901 B867 051A  B15F 35A2 F86E 29B7 00A4
uid   openSUSE Project Signing Key <opensuse@opensuse.org>

Note that openSUSE Leap 15.4 and 15.5 will also switch to using this key, and also the openSUSE Backports and SLE repositories will switch to 4096 bit RSA keys in 2023.

If you have questions about this, feel free to reach out to the Factory or Security mailing lists at Lists.

Here is the whole GPG key if you want to import it manually:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.15 (GNU/Linux)
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=nMh8
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

For Tumbleweed, things are steadily rolling. Updates come in (mostly pre-tested in devel projects), are staged, pass staging (most requests pass in a day), and are then added to a snapshot. Sounds rather unspectacular. Of course, this is the optimal case, which does not work in some cases (as seen on the ‘future changes’ that have been carried over for a few weeks already). But all that does not have an impact on users’ workstations, as we simply do not deliver those aspects which are known not to be ready.

With all this going on, we have again delivered 7 snapshots during the last week (0112…0118), containing the following, noteworthy changes:

• File 5.44
• Mesa 22.3.3
• Salt 3005.1
• NetworkManager 1.40.10
• Fuse 3.13.0
• Pipewire 0.3.64
• KDE Frameworks 5.102.0
• Linux kernel 6.1.6
• Node.JS 19.4.0
• python Sphinx 6.1.3
• libraw 0.21
• RPM: added support for x86_64 microarchitecture. This was the last bit missing to allow packages to start shipping hardware-optimized libraries (glibc hwcaps enabled loading)

In the staging areas, we are currently testing the impact of these changes:

• Linux kernel 6.1.7
• Mozilla Firefox 109.0
• Mesa adding support for Rusticl (See https://docs.mesa3d.org/rusticl)
• LibreOffice 7.4.4.2
• LLVM 15.0.7
• Boost 1.81.0: breaks libetonyek and LibreOffice
• GnuPG 2.4: breaks gpgme:qt
• Ruby 3.2 to become the default ruby version: YaST is failing
• Switch to openSSL 3: Progress tracked in Staging:N
• Initial tests to set GCC 13 as the system compiler

The openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories are scheduled to change their signing key from the now-used 2048 RSA key to a new 4096bit RSA key. The new public key has been rolled out to the systems since snapshot 20220811, which should make the migration to the new key transparent for all regularly updated systems. Please see the extra announcement on the mailing list

Besides all this, please keep in mind that the repositories for i586 installations are going to change. i586 is being split out from the main repositories and handled like the other ports (arm, powerpc, s390x). Anybody can already change the repo manually and perform tests, by end of January, we will deploy code that will switch the repositories automatically. By end of March, we expect all users to have migrated their repositories and we will remove all i586 RPMs from the published repositories (-32bit.x86_64 will remain for wine/steam). More details on this can be found in this post

This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots had a steady amount of software packages in each of the daily releases.

While vim, Node.js and Salt updates made the headlines, AppStream, KDE Frameworks and the Linux Kernel provided several important updates.

In the most recent 20230118 snapshot, manpages-l10n moves to version 4.17.0, which now actively has Swedish maintained. The package also adds a new language. A week’s worth of fixes came in the ncurses 6.4.20230114 update. The package improves configure-script macros vs compiler warnings and it has a fix to avoid a conflict with pre-existing usage in vim. Two openSUSE packages updated in the snapshot. A change to allow both swap and none as paths for swap in fstab were made with the libstorage-ng 4.5.64 update. An update to identify Dell storage devices with the extension of regular expressions was made in yast2-storage-ng 4.5.16. The diffutils utility program used for creating patch files updated to version 3.9, but did not list any fixes for the platform, according to the changelog. Other packages to update were python-httpx 0.23.3 and python310-packaging 23.0.

Both the Node.js and the Linux Kernel updated in snapshot 20230117. The 6.1.6 kernel-source update enabled headset microphones with more Dell laptops through Advanced Linux Sound Architecture changes, and netfilter nftables consolidated set descriptions and added a function to create set stateful expressions. The nodejs19 package update to 19.4.0 improved timeout defaults handling. The package also had a change with an impact of less RAM for AArch64 and 32-bit arm. Fixes to handle btrfs subvolumes were made with GNOME’s tracker-miners 3.4.3 version. Georgian and Macedonian language changes were made with a yast2-trans update and a few other libraries were updated in the snapshot.

With the exception of three other packages in snapshot 20230116, KDE Frameworks updates took the majority of data packets for users who did a zypper dup. Frameworks 5.102.0 fixes a crash with KTextEditor and adds a missing KWindowSystem dependency. The Plasma Framework update centers a panel popup only if it would cover two-thirds of its panel widget and it adds a function to open a context menu. Another Frameworks update was made to the barcode namespace generator; Prison adds the 2.0 version of decoder ZXing. KDE hex editor okteta cleaned the spec file in version 0.26.10 and improved translations. An update of perl-Image-ExifTool 12.54, which is a command-line interface for reading and writing meta information, adds support for a number of new XMP tags, which included the decoding of Nikon, Fujifilm and Canon tags. An update of mpg123 1.31.2 fixed a build error that was network related.

Two packages were released in the 20230115 snapshot. An easier initial setup was made with the perl-Bootloader 0.941 update. The other package, python-Pygments, updated to version 2.14.0. This syntax highlighting package had a number of changes and improves parentheses handling for function definitions. The new version also fixes number and operator recognition.

Vim was among the several updates in snapshot 20230114. The text editor updated to version 9.0.1188 and fixes a memory leak when using class functions, yet the new release may provide an unexpected output when autoloading a script for an interactive operation. A newer 0.15.6 version of AppStream’s cross-distribution efforts added a patch to support meson 0.59, which is meant for the next minor version of Leap. The software component for metadata standardizing also added an Application Programming Interface for content rating descriptions and ratingIds. There were a few fixes with the NetworkManager 1.40.10 update. One of those fixes an evaluation of the autoconnect function and another ensures that dnsmasq is stopped after changing the dns backend and restarting the service. There were various other fixes in the package. An update of pipewire 0.3.64 had a mass amount of info about the update. It cleared some old buffer memory on ports to fix some bus errors, and now makes it possible to assign custom port names to the ports from an adapter. The audio and video package fixed an error in the quantum and rate calculations that could cause nodes to run with these wrong computations when multiple rates were allowed. Several patches were removed with the package update. The utility library for ndctl had a major version update. Version 75 had many improvements and added master-passphrase removal support. Other packages to update in the snapshot were gtksourceview5 5.6.2, libstorage-ng 4.5.63 and more.

Salt 3005.1 added a missing patch after a rebase to fix collections mapping issues, which arrived in snapshot 20230113. The release was full of patches and one of the fixes ensures the default values for interprocess communication buffers are the correct type. The new version also fixes an architecture parsing issue in apt source files. Mesa 22.3.3 fixes a broken graphics in a game, a hang with Plasma and a crash when creating graphics pipeline libraries with a module identifier. Some updates for Xfce packages also became available in the snapshot. The file manager thunar 4.18.2 prevents a crash for copy+overwrite via DBus and also prevents a rare crash when closing thunar. Another update was made to xfce4-panel 4.18.1, which fixes a sync timeout issue. A few more packages were updated in the snapshot.

The snapshot that began the week, 20230112, had file updated to version 5.44.