A three parts blog series:

The syslog-ng disk buffer is one of the most often used syslog-ng options to ensure message delivery. However, it is not always necessary and using the safest variant has serious performance impacts. If you utilize disk-buffer in your syslog-ng configuration, it is worth to make sure that you use a recent syslog-ng version.

From this blog, you can learn when to use the disk-buffer option, the main differences between reliable and non-reliable disk-buffer, and why is it worth to use the latest syslog-ng version.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/when-not-to-use-the-syslog-ng-disk-buffer

Last time, we had an overview of the syslog-ng disk-buffer. This time, we dig a bit deeper and take a quick look at how it works, and a recent major change that helped speed up the reliable disk-buffer considerably.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/how-does-the-syslog-ng-disk-buffer-work

Most people expect to see how many log messages are waiting in the disk-buffer from the size of the syslog-ng disk-buffer file.. While it was mostly true for earlier syslog-ng releases, for recent syslog-ng releases (3.34+) the disk-buffer file can stay large even when it is empty. This is a side effect of a recent syslog-ng performance tuning.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/why-is-my-syslog-ng-disk-buffer-file-so-huge-even-when-it-is-empty

It’s back. No, not the McRib. It’s Hack Week.

The coveted Hack Week 21 runs from June 27 to July 1 and has both virtual and physical participation elements. Hack Week is put on for openSUSE contributions and gives any open-source contributor and SUSE employees a playground to experiment, innovate, collaborate and learn for an entire week.

People all over the world can create, view or join projects on hackweek.opensuse.org. The projects range from the packaging of freeware games to improving full-disk encryption and from learning network related knowledge to writing a software.opensuse.org replacement. There is even a project using solar panels to regulate water heating. There are more than 80 projects for this year’s Hack Week.

Companies, hobbyists and technologists are encouraged to participate. There is no affiliation one needs to participate in Hack Week.

The efforts are all about being innovative and providing solutions for users, developers and industry. The theme for this Hack Week is Hacking for Humanity!

Hack Week has been running since 2007 and you can find out how it works by joining a project.

With the introduction of the workflows, a wide range of integrations became available for individual users. Now those integrations start to get interesting at team level too. But, until now, you could not use the same workflow token with a group of users. We’ve fixed that for you. We started off the continuous integration between OBS and GitHub/GitLab in May 2021, then made some improvements in June 2021. We introduced advanced features like reporting filters...

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 24 contained again some public holidays for my place, but as in the past, this has never stopped Tumbleweed from rolling. After all, it’s all our contributor’s work making it go as smoothly as it is. And their great work has paid off once again, as we could finally, after months and months of preparation, testing, fixing, and redo, make the switch of the default python interpreter to version 3.10. This resulted in a rather large rebuild of the distro, as all python3- symbols needed to move to the correct python subpackage again. As a positive side effect, the recently introduced SOURCE_FORTIFY=3 is now enabled on all binaries. With the rebuild taking a bit longer, we have still managed to publish 5 snapshots this week (0609, 0611, 0612, 0613, and 0614)

The main changes delivered this week include:

• GNOME 42.2 – the missing pieces are now finally also there
• GTK 4.7.0
• openssl 1.1.1o
• KDE Gear 22.04.2
• KDE Plasma 5.25.0
• python 3.10 as the default python3 interpreter; pymodules are still built for python 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10

The python 3.10 switch also took a bit of a toll on the stagings, as they all needed to be rebased on top of that change and all competed for build powers. That in turn means they are all filled with the new, good stuff:

• Linux kernel 5.18.4
• Mozilla Firefox 101.0.1
• KDE Frameworks 5.95
• Inkscape 1.2
• systemd 251.2
• SELinux 3.4
• krb5 1.20.0: breaks samba
• Sphinx 5: breaks qemu

The community workgroup (CWG) for the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) would like to update you on what has happened since the openSUSE Conference 2022. Make sure to check the panel discussion with the ALP steering committee and other talks from oSC22 as they become public.

First, there is a new official communication channel! We’re using the “openSUSE ALP” matrix channel, bridged with https://discord.gg/opensuse and ircs://libera.chat/#opensuse-alp. We’ve got you covered! This is the best way how to consume updates.

We have revisited the way we would like to communicate updates on ALP. The idea is to switch away from a digest report for all workgroups to something a bit easier to follow and more exciting to read.

We’ve invited SUSE’s newly appointed Engineering Director Marco Varlese to the weekly ALP CWG meeting, and we have great news to share!

We’ve received confirmation about the upcoming Roadmap. A delivery of the Proof of Concept is expected in September, and the public availability of an ALP Based product is projected for September 2023.

Next Tuesday, June 21, Marco will work with Robert Sirchia from the SUSE’s Community team on a suse.com article about the strategy and vision for the Adaptable Linux Platform. We’d like to then interview individual work groups and share some updates in a story-telling way and communicate better how they fit into the bigger picture shared by Marco. Dan Čermák will put together a sorted list of WGs by the impact on the openSUSE community. This will make sure that the interviews are as relevant as possible.

We’ve had Quality Engineering over this week. For next Tuesday, we’ve invited Jiří Šrain and Frederic Crozat from the ALP steering committee, with whom we’d like to discuss building of the community part of ALP, essentially the Package Hub for ALP. The remaining items on our radar are a test instance of Fedocal and centralized documentation.

The community platform is being referred to as openSUSE ALP during its development cycle with SUSE to be concise with planning the next community edition.

Base Container Images (BCI) are a SUSE offer for a variety of container images suitable for building custom applications atop of the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). They are a suitable building platform for different container applications and are available for free without subscription. In this blog post I’m covering how we test BCI before they are released and how you can run individual tests on them.

Building our products in an open and transparent way allows us to rethink the way how we test.

Jose Lausuch from our ALP Quality Engineering was invited to the Community Workgroup weekly meeting to speak about current plans of Quality Engineering for ALP.

Jose mentioned that the QE Workgroup would like to start testing existing ALP images with the existing MicroOS test suite. The effort is coordinated in poo#112409.

Let’s start with what we already have and run it against ALP in openqa.opensuse.org (o3). We’d initially cover KVM and self-install images for x86_64 and aarch64. VMware and possibly others would come later.

Once we have a proof of concept, other QE experts will jump to cover specific testing areas (virtualization, containers, public cloud, yast) and contribute to ALP as well back to upstream, which is in this case MicroOS.

We hope that this new model will raise community interest in contributions to the Quality Engineering area, as this has been always a challenge.

Jose already submitted the initial ALP job group to o3 and started adding some code to the upstream test repository.

The openSUSE community has been having community meetings on a regular basis for some time and attendees in the latest meeting have expressed a desire to grow the communications and marketing team.

The project has a Telegram marketing group and a #marketing channel on discord.

Gaining people interested in helping with marketing, communications and planning comes at a time where several Work Groups are focused on the formation of an Adaptable Linux Platform, which has yet to formalize (or change) the name for the community platform.

There are some immediate aspects that can be addressed by the team like a thorough review of the bare necessities of the communications and marketing effort plans from previous years and how these can be adjusted or improved.

The Thursday community meeting plans to have a regular marketing segment as part of the weekly update. People interested in joining the group should reach out to @profetik777 on the Telegram marketing group.

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