Some here might not know it, but some teams from the 'SUSE Quality Engineering Linux Systems Group' use the Redmine installation here at https://progress.opensuse.org/ to track the results of the test automation for openSUSE products. Especially openQA feature requests are tracked and coordinated here.

As the plain Redmine installation does not provide all wanted features, we included the "Redmine Agile plugin" from RedmineUP since a while now. Luckily the free version of the plugin already provided nearly 90% of the requested additional features. So everybody was happy and we could run this service without problems. But today, we got some money to buy the PRO version of the plugin - which we happily did :-)

There is another plugin, named Checklist, for which we also got the GO to order the PRO version. Both plugins are now up and running on our instance here - and all projects can make use of the additional features.

We like to thank SUSE QE for their sponsoring. And we also like to thank RedmineUP for providing these (and more) plugins to the community as free and PRO versions. We are happy to be able to donate something back for your work on these plugins. Keep up with the good work!

We go further with the SCM/CI workflow integration in OBS. You, beta testers, had difficulties in understanding why your integration failed when something did not go as planned. This is solved with the new workflow runs UI feature, with detailed information about every workflow that ran once you triggered a workflow token. Keep reading for more details. Do not forget this feature is under the the beta program. Join! We started off the continuous integration...

I’ve created a couple of minisites for key OS components, built using no frameworks, but plain CSS. Just having CSS grid and variables made it viable for me to avoid using frameworks recently. Having includes/imports one wouldn’t even need Jekyll.

The founding stone on all of these is the pixel art, which is now becoming my favorite art form.

If you maintain an upstream OS component and are looking to replace a wiki or a markdown readme with a simple site, I’ve created a template to get you started quickly.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week, we had a little bit of a fight with our snapshots in openQA: not because of openQA, but actually because some issues could not have been in staging but became visible in the full product tests (e.g. ncurses memory leak, which manifested while installing a full Tumbleweed fro the net installer). So, out of the 7 snapshots produced and tested, we only managed to publish 3 (1111, 1116, and 1117).

the main changes included in those snapshots were:

• Coreutils 9.0
• X.Org 21.1.1: NVidia users please read https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/R7D252KCMUQBZSW46K7URSVP7F57GBXF/
• KDE Frameworks 5.88.0
• KDE Plasma 5.23.3
• Libreoffice 7.2.3.1
• SELinux 3.3
• PostgreSQL 14.1
• Samba 4.15.2
• Xen 4.16.0

The currently being tested snapshot and staging projects promise these changes in the future:

• Linux kernel 5.15.2: kernel modules compressed using zstd
• ICU 70.1
• Mesa 21.3.0
• cmake 3.22.0
• pipewire 0.3.40, with a move to from pipewire-media-session to wireplumber; currently failing openQA
• Rust 1.56
• Bash: moving away from update-alternatives to handle /bin/sh; To allow busybox to step in as ‘sh’ provider. We are switching to a package replacement model (e.g. bash-sh, busybox-sh). Those packages will install the relevant /bin/sh symlinks
• tbb 2021.4
• openSSL 3.0: No visible progress in the staging. Main blockers so far seems to be python 3.6 and python-cryptography

Today I’d like to point out an amazing new tool: The Container Layer Analyzer, written by Dan Čermák. Dan also wrote a comprehensive blog post about it, which explains it much better than what I do here.

There were a total of four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week.

Snapshot 20211117 gave KDE users the Plasma 5.23.3 update. The bug-fix release had changes for the systemsettings5 package, which had a fix for a touchscreen click. The plasma-desktop had a fix involving drag and drop that reset a position and overlap; the package also had a fix showing an inactive kwin console. The kwin package also made some fixes that prevented crashing of screencasting and provided a couple fixes for Wayland. The update of kplotting was the single KDE Frameworks 5.88.0 package updated in the snapshot; the rest came in the previous day’s snapshot. Xfce users also had an update in the snapshot with xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 2.6.2, which provided a fix for the menu not toggling after pressing escape. The package also fixed shifting the background when showing the menu. Other packages to update in the snapshot were fribidi 1.0.11 and restorecond 3.3, which is a daemon that watches for file creation.

Many of the KDE Frameworks 5.88.0 packages arrived in snapshot 20211116. Updates to improve the Open/Save Advanced Dialog were made to KTextEditor, and plugin KParts deprecated unused and internal methods. Small improvements were in the Application Programming Interfaces documentation for Kirigami; the User Interface framework package also fixed issues with setting components on a tablet. The plasma-framework package added additional keyboard navigation, increased tab margins for visual styles and gave breeze buttons a more realistic shadow. KDE users weren’t the only ones to gain fixes and features from the very large snapshot. An updated of btrfsprogs 5.15 made new defaults for mkfs and fixed warnings regarding a v1 space cache when only v2 (free space tree) is enabled. GTK4 disabled SassC build requirement when building from git and dropped a configuration that is related 32-bit and likely not being consumed, according to the changelog. Both ruby 2.7.4 and 3.0.2 were updated in the snapshot to address a few Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. The update of mariadb 10.6.5 dropped some patches and had no effect from CVE-2021-35604, which affected other database management systems. Two CVEs were fixed in the postgresql14 14.1 update; one of those made the server reject extraneous data after an SSL or GSS encryption handshake. The update of libreoffice 7.2.3.1 dropped two patches. Vim 8.2.3587, xen 4.16.0 and yast2-network 4.4.31 were among many packages and libraries to update. There were more than 30 additional packages to update in the snapshot.

Just two package came in snapshot 20211111. The major version of coreutils 9.0 arrived in the snapshot. The chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks, which was a bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0. Several more bug were fixed and there were new features added like cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc. cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils will introduce no future standalone checksum utility. There were a large amount of bug fixes and new features in the update of xorg-x11-server to version 21.1.1. X server now correctly reports display DPI in more cases, which may affect rendering of client applications that have their own workarounds for hi-DPI screens.

The snapshot to start the week off was 20211110. This snapshot updated Mozilla Firefox to version 94.0.1, which gives power users an about:unloads to release system resources by manually unloading tabs without closing them. Vim also had an update in this snapshot to version 8.2.3582; the text editor had some reading of uninitialized memory when giving spelling suggestions. Other packages to update in the snapshot were xwayland 21.1.3, ceph 16.2.6.462, and several pypi packages.

The Tumbleweed-Review sent to the Factory mailing list reveals that Linux Kernel 5.15.2 (with kernel modules compression using zstd), ICU 70.1, Mesa 21.3.0 and cmake 3.22.0 are being tested and are in the staging projects for future release.

One of the most popular applications to feed Splunk with syslog messages is syslog-ng. However not everyone is happy to work on the command line anymore. This is where syslog-ng store box (SSB), an appliance built around syslog-ng, can help. The SSB GUI provides you not only with an easyto-use interface to configure most syslog-ng features, but also a search interface and complete log life cycle management. It can forward log messages to several destinations, recently also to Splunk’s HTTP Event Collector (HEC).

From this blog you can learn about how SSB fits into your logging infrastructure and how to configure SSB for Splunk: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/sending-logs-from-syslog-ng-store-box-to-splunk

In this blog post I present you a small script, which can help you to remove empty job groups from your own openQA instance. This is helpful if you have a development instance with a lot of job groups, that you never use. This script can help you to tidy the list of dangling job groups.

Can you hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 file? Most people cannot. But even if only one in ten can hear something, that means hundreds of millions of people. However, even if you can hear the difference, there is a good chance that the recording you love is not available in better than CD quality. Still, this problem is not as big as you first think. Let me show you why!

The topic of high-resolution audio (or HiRes audio for short) comes up often in my discussions. In this blog, I try to summarize my experiences in a few simple points. Note: everything I write here is based on what I hear. I did not do any research or had any formal education about audio.

Equipment

A HiRes sticker on an audio equipment does not mean that it sounds good. All it means that you paid extra for that sticker. For example, the headphones output on my good, old MacBook Pro does not support HiRes audio, yet still I use that whenever I need to use headphones. I use that even if I have a dedicated DAC / headphones amplifier supporting HiRes audio. My company laptop, on the other hand, also supports 192kHz. Using it, I could easily spot the difference among various audio resolutions. However, even without HiRes audio, the headphones output of that old MacBook Pro sounds a lot better. I had a similar case over a decade ago: long after the EFIKA MX from Genesi reached end-of-life, I still used it to listen to music. I had similar experiences with speakers and hifi systems as well.

So in short, a HiRes sticker alone does not solve your music listening problems. A low-cost device without supporting HiRes can still sound (a lot) better. You need to have quality audio equipment in order to actually enjoy the difference.

Environment

Do you live next to a busy street or a highway? Does your computer have loud cooling? Is there air conditioning is in your room? You do not have air conditioning and it’s too hot to stay there with closed windows? Then, I have some bad news for you. While you might hear the difference between mp3 and CD even in a noisy environment, the advantages of HiRes audio are fully (or at least mostly) lost in such cases.

To appreciate the quality of HiRes recordings, you need an environment where you can actually hear the difference.

Time

Do you have time dedicated to listening to music? My experience is that MP3 quality music can sometimes annoy the hell out of me, even if I listen to it as background music. I can still sense the missing details and my brain works hard trying to figure out what is wrong. However, listening to CD quality or HiRes audio does not make much difference when played in the background. Your mileage may vary, but I can really appreciate the added quality of HiRes audio only when I am focusing on the music.

If you do not have the time or the mood to focus on the music and nothing else, listening to HiRes audio does not have any added value.

Music

In the introduction, I mentioned that not all music is available in HiRes quality. And I am not worried about this. I have a quite large CD collection. I listened to many of those in various HiRes formats: FLAC, DSD or MQA (on TIDAL). I can hear the difference. But for many of the music I listen to, I need to listen carefully. With 3x the price and 3x the storage area, there is often only minimal improvements in audio quality. The “Atom Heart Mother” album by Pink Floyd in 192kHz/24bit set me back with more than 3 months of subscription fee for TIDAL. Was it worth it? Definitely. A good recording became even better: all the little noises became completely life-like. However, another album I bought at the same time for the price did not feel anything special.

Of course, there are genres which make better use of HiRes. No wonder that most of the HiRes capable equipment is sold with jazz or classical recordings. Luckily, there are many albums belonging to these both on TIDAL or HDTracks. However, my guess is that much of the albums available in HiRes formats do not make much use of the extra audio quality. They are sold in HiRes format only to generate some extra income for the musician and/or record label.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is no easy and straightforward answer for my initial question. You need the right equipment, the right environment, dedicated time and suitable music to enjoy the advantages of HiRes audio. And, of course, a good pair of ears is also a prerequisite. :-)

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Tumbleweed keeps being predictable when it comes to the update cadence. This week, we could publish 5 fully tested snapshots (1104, 1105, 1106, 1107, and 1110).

The main changes contained in these snapshots were:

• Mozilla Thunderbird 91.3.0
• Mozilla Firefox 94.0.1
• KDE Gear 21.08.3
• Meson 0.59.4
• GNOME 41.1
• Libvirt 7.9.0
• More improvements to rpmlint 2

Based on the staging projects and the snapshot currently under build, we predict to be able to deliver these items soon:

• Coreutils 9.0
• X.org server 21.1: the reported DPI change has been reverted, as it was much more intrusive than anticipated
• XEN 4.16.0
• Linux kernel 5.15.1: in a later step, the compression method for kernel modules will be changed from xz to zstd
• Rust 1.56
• ICU 70.1
• Bash: moving away from update-alternatives to handle /bin/sh; To allow busybox to step in as ‘sh’ provider, we are switching to a package replacement model (e.g. bash-sh, busybox-sh). Those packages will install the relevant /bin/sh symlinks
• tbb 2021.4: breaks opencv3
• gc 8.2.0: breaks texlive and guile
• openSSL 3.0: No visible progress in the staging. Main blockers so far seems to be python 3.6 and python-cryptography