Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We’re slowly reaching the end of the year, and some people have less time for openSUSE, as the holiday season is upon us. Others use their free time from work to contribute more time to openSUSE. In any case, we’re not seeing any slowdown just yet and Tumbleweed keeps moving, again with 7 snapshots released during this week (1209…1215).

The main changes in these snapshots are:

• KDE Gear 22.12.0
• KDE Frameworks 5.101.0
• Linux kernel 6.0.12
• Python 3.10.9
• RPM 4.18.0
• systems 252.3
• GNOME Shell & Mutter 43.2
• Xen 4.17.0
• git 2.39.0
• Protobuf 21.11
• strace 6.1
• pipewire 0.3.62
• procps 4.0.2: the default install remains with procps 3 for now. The last tests showed that things like salt did not like procps4, thus we only offer it as an addon for now, and to help identify issues
• pcre2 10.42
• gcc13: first round: we change the libraries (like libgcc, libstdc++, …) to be provided by gcc13.The compiler used is still gcc12

With GCC 13 library switch done, one of the more complex stagings could be checked in, leaving room for all the rest. Currently, we’re testing submissions in these areas:

• Linux kernel 6.1
• Boost 1.81.0: breaks libetonyek and libreoffice
• util-linux 2.38.0
• Ruby 3.2 (currently RC) is being tested to become the default ruby version (switch would happen when ruby 3.2 sees a final release)
• Switch to openSSL 3: tracked in Staging:N, main failures are nodejs18, nodejs19, OpenSSH, mariadb
• Python pytest 7.2.0

Updates for sound, image and system components arrived this week throughout several openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, and the arm images are rolling again, according to notes from the project’s release engineering meeting.

For those NVIDIA users, testers with aarch64 servers and NVIDIA cards are wanted. Proprietary drivers are now available for aarch64, which is only for the G06 version.

Snapshot 20221214 might bring a smile to people’s face as the GNOME webcam application cheese updated from the 43 Alpha version to 43.0; the transition to the new version involves removing glibc-debug environment variables and updating translation. Online webcam users will also sound better as both pipewire 0.3.62 and wireplumber 0.4.13 updated in the snapshot. The updated PipeWire version fixed regressions in screen sharing that was caused by a race when activating links and driver nodes. Support for bluetooth offloading was added that allows for the reception, decoding and playback to happen completely in hardware, which required some support found in the WirePlumber update. The git control system updated to version 2.39.0. The minor version expanded git grep checkouts and had some changes for get branch for editing a branch before switching. Other packages to update in the snapshot were strace 6.1, dracut, kdump and more.

A couple GNOME packages were updated in snapshot 20221213. Besides updates to the 43.2 versions of gnome-shell, which had multiple fixes including one to the screencasting User Interface (UI) being erroneously disabled, and mutter, which fixed recalculating the viewport after a windows resize for a display server, the snapshot was filled with an enormous amount of RubyGems. Among those, rubygem-ruby-parser 3.19.2 fixed bug parsing array patterns; rubygem-regexp-parser 2.6.1 fixed the scanning of two negative lookbehind edge cases; rubygem-puma 6.0.0 is dropping Ruby 2.2 and 2.3 support; and rubygem-bootsnap 1.15.0 added a read-only mode for environments where the updated cache would not be persisted. Several other RubyGems were updated in the snapshot as well as a couple Perl packages.

If 20221213 was a RubyGems snapshot, then snapshot 20221212 was a KDE Frameworks snapshot. Frameworks 5.101.0 was made available to rolling release users within 48 hours of its release. The bug fixing released deprecated a few aspects of the KWindowSystem package and moved X11-specific functions to a new KX11Extras class. The KTextEditor fixed a default setting mark when ctrl is pressed. The Kirigami UI framework fixed many memory leaks caused by Qt.createComponent. The action button also fixed broken attached properties due to import changes. A few other behaviors were deprecated with the KIO system library that provides access to files, web sites and other resources. The lightweight display manager lightdm updated for version 1.32.0. The package made use of Python 3 in tests and improved upon methods of determining a Wayland session.

Two GNOME packages were updated in the snapshot. There were updated translations in gnome-characters 43.1 and the package also updated to Unicode 15. Translations came in the update of gnome-remote-desktop 43.2 as well, and it removed a stray line of new code. The arpwatch-ethercodes 20221212 package also updated in the snapshot, but lacked any commit messaging. A Common Vulnerability and Exposure was fixed with the rpm 4.18.0 update. CVE-2021-35938 was fixed and would occur when rpm sets desired permissions and credentials after installing a file. A local unprivileged user could have used the flaw to exchange the original file with a symbolic link to a security-critical file and escalate their privileges on the system. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Just one package was updated in snapshot 20221211. The libass 0.17.0 version, which is a portable subtitle renderer for Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha subtitle format, fixed various parts related to automatic line breaks. The release had a major feature, which appears to be related to LayoutResX and LayoutResY headers.

Snapshot 20221210 had a Linux Kernel update. The 6.0.12 kernel-source fixed a wifi buffer overflow related to cfg80211 subsystem and fixed error handling. An update of systemd 252.3 dropped a patch and added a few backports. Text editor vim 9.0.1040 had a multitude of changes; it had a fix for when kitty keyboard function keys may not work, and it had a fix for when tests may get stuck in a buffer with a swap file. An update of Xen took care of CVE-2022-33746, which added some pre-emptive checks that were needed. Other packages to update were libpaper 2.0.4, wavpack 5.6.0 and yast2-kdump 4.5.7.

Starting off the week, audacity 3.2.2 was updated in snapshot 20221209. The update fixed a crash when editing some macro parameters, and it no longer quietly discards changes but instead asks if changes should be saved before quitting. The package also fixed some play commands getting stuck in play mode. Another KDE update that landed in the snapshot the day after its upstream release was Gear 22.12. A new feature in the release is a Selection Mode; hit the spacebar or tap the hamburger menu and check the select files and folders checkbox and a light green bar will appear. Text editor Kate added a welcome window when launching and the new window allows for the creation of a new file, an opening of an existing file from a list of recent files, and it offers some documentation. Video production editor Kdenlive improved its integration with other video applications, and users can now send Kdenlive timelines as backgrounds to the vector animation utility Glaxnimate. The yast2-users 4.5.3 version was also updated in the snapshot.

The openSUSE Project will have a workshop on Jan. 10 at 15:30 UTC at meet.opensuse.org/meeting that will focus on increasing mentorship for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

There is a long tradition of the openSUSE Project participating in the GSoC and community members that want to participate as either a mentor or mentee are encouraged to attend.

The workshop gives attendees a chance to generate project ideas and list them on 101.opensuse.org for this year’s application, which is open between Jan. 23 and Feb 7.

The workshop will give mentors, mentees and people who would like to get involved with mentoring enough time to describe several project ideas before the administrators submit the GSoC application.

Participants are encouraged to create an outline of some project ideas before the workshop on the event’s etherpad.

Mentors, mentees and administrators who participated in previous Google Summer of Code programs will attend the workshop.

Welcome to the third part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Today we cover the various syslog-ng editions (open source, commercial and appliance), and where to get them from. The focus of this tutorial series is the Open Source Edition (OSE), but to avoid confusion, I also briefly introduce the other two.

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-3-syslog-ng-editions-and-where-to-get-them-from

This is a boring, but important part, do not skip it! :) From the next part the focus will be configuration.

Users of openSUSE Leap 15.3 will not be receiving security and maintenance updates once the version goes EOL (end of life) on the last day of 2022.

Marcus Meissner gave users advanced notice on the announcements mailing list on Nov. 30, but the lifecycle of Leap is frequently communicated to users.

An EOL ends updates for the operating system minor version and those who continue to use EOL versions will be exposed to vulnerabilities because these discontinued versions no longer receive security and maintenance updates. This is why users need to upgrade to the newer minor release; openSUSE Leap 15.4!

Users can upgrade from 15.3 to 15.4 by downloading the iso image or following the instructions on how to upgrade, which is found on https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade.

For new installations, download openSUSE Leap 15.4 images at https://get.opensuse.org/leap/. The Leap 15.4 release is expected to be maintained and supported with security patches until it reaches its EOL in November 2023. Leap 15.5 is expected to be released at the beginning of June 2023, according to the roadmap.

Users interested in changing from the point release version can look at moving to Tumbleweed, which has frequent updates, or to a next generation operating system like MicroOS.

Make sure to backup your /home directory and any configuration files you want to save.

ALP - The Adaptable Linux Platform – is a new operating system from SUSE to run containerized and virtualized workloads. It is in early prototype phase, but the development is done completely openly so it’s easy to jump in to try it.

For this trying out, I used the latest encrypted build – as of the writing, 22.1 – from ALP images. I imported it in virt-manager as a Generic Linux 2022 image, using UEFI instead of BIOS, added a TPM device (which I’m interested in otherwise) and referring to an Ignition JSON file in the XML config in virt-manager.

The Ignition part is pretty much fully thanks to Paolo Stivanin who studied the secrets of it before me. But here it goes - and this is required for password login in Cockpit to work in addition to SSH key based login to the VM from host - first, create config.ign file:

{
  "ignition": { "version": "3.3.0" },
  "passwd": {
    "users": [
      {
        "name": "root",
        "passwordHash": "YOURHASH",
        "sshAuthorizedKeys": [
          "ssh-... YOURKEY"
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "systemd": {
    "units": [{
      "name": "sshd.service",
      "enabled": true
    }]
  },
  "storage": {
    "files": [
      {
        "overwrite": true,
        "path": "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/20-enable-passwords.conf",
        "contents": {
          "source": "data:,PasswordAuthentication%20yes%0APermitRootLogin%20yes%0A"
        },
        "mode": 420
      }
    ]
  }
}

…where password SHA512 hash can be obtained using openssl passwd -6 and the ssh key is your public ssh key.

That file is put to eg /tmp and referred in the virt-manager’s XML like follows:

  <sysinfo type="fwcfg">
    <entry name="opt/com.coreos/config" file="/tmp/config.ign"/>
  </sysinfo>

Now we can boot up the VM and ssh in - or you could log in directly too but it’s easier to copy-paste commands when using ssh.

Inside the VM, we can follow the ALP documentation to install and start Cockpit:

podman container runlabel install registry.opensuse.org/suse/alp/workloads/tumbleweed_containerfiles/suse/alp/workloads/cockpit-ws:latest
podman container runlabel --name cockpit-ws run registry.opensuse.org/suse/alp/workloads/tumbleweed_containerfiles/suse/alp/workloads/cockpit-ws:latest
systemctl enable --now cockpit.service

Check your host’s IP address with ip -a, and open IP:9090 in your host’s browser:

Login with root / your password and you shall get the front page:

…and many other pages where you can manage your ALP deployment via browser:

All in all, ALP is in early phases but I’m really happy there’s up-to-date documentation provided and people can start experimenting it whenever they want. The images from the linked directory should be fairly good, and test automation with openQA has been started upon as well.

You can try out the other example workloads that are available just as well.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

A very bad thing happened: we missed one snapshot this week! Only 6 out of 7 made it through QA. Snapshot 20221207 has been declined to be published (a python module update broke ansible, and a few more issues). Nevertheless, let’s focus on the positive: you received 6 snapshots to apply on your machine (1202..1206, 1208).

The most interesting changes in those releases were:

• Mozilla Firefox 107.0.1
• gtk 3.24.35+10 (upstream version 3.24.35, 10 commits ahead in the git branch)
• pango 1.50.12
• rubygem-rspec 3.12.0
• libX11 downgraded from 1.8.2 to 1.8.1 (boo#1205818, boo#1205778)
• NetworkManager 1.40.6
• poppler 22.12.0
• Podman 4.3.1

Staging projects are currently busy testing the following:

• Linux kernel 6.0.12
• KDE Gear 22.12.0
• protobuf 21.11
• systems 252.3
• Python pytest 7.2.0
• Ruby 3.2 (currently RC) is being tested to become the default ruby version (switch would happen when ruby 3.2 sees a final release)
• Switch to openSSL 3: tracked in Staging:N, main failures are nodejs18, nodejs19, OpenSSH, mariadb
• gcc13: the usual 2-phase approach: first (this round) we change the libraries like libgcc, libstdc++, …) to be provided by gcc13. Somewhere down the line, the entire distribution will be rebuilt by that compiler (not scheduled yet)

Taking Linux seriously since 1998, I gained experience in the GNU/Linux operating system that allowed me to build, contribute and make the openSUSE Leap 15.4 Micro platform available on the AWS cloud for everyone for free worldwide (all regions of the world).

Using software engineering work focused on GNU/Linux system optimization, I make available the minimalist version of openSUSE Leap 15.4 on AWS. In addition to being multipurpose, complete, stable and easy to use, it is intended for users, developers, administrators, and any professional who wants openSUSE resources on the server. It’s great for beginners, experienced users and ultra geeks, in short, it’s perfect for everyone!

The openSUSE Leap 15.4 Micro operating system provides less computational resource consumption. With less disk and memory and disk consumption, this operating system allows the use of modest virtual machines like t2.nano without compromising performance.

Suggestions in cabelo@opensuse.org
Information here: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-763pijt3fq6ne

Following are the main advantages:

Disadvantage: Does not have YAST!

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.