Most people know me as a Linux and/or FreeBSD guy, and they are right. I use openSUSE and FreeBSD most of my time. However, I am not a fanatic who tries to solve everything using a single OS and I am curious as well. Most other operating systems I use are running in virtual machines, but I also have two computers: a Windows desktop and an old MacBook Pro. Both received a major software upgrade during the weekend. Or did they?

Windows 11

While Microsoft promised that the Windows 11 roll-out will take a year with most users receiving it only next year, my desktop received the possibility to upgrade just three weeks after release. I have many applications that proved to be problematic during earlier Windows updates. My main application is Capture One, a photo editing software. There are also many audio applications, traditionally even more sensitive to any kind of change in the operating system: Ableton Live and software synthesizers from Native Instruments, Expressive-E, Cherry Audio, and others.

I took a big breath and started the upgrade process. It went perfectly well. There were a couple of reboots and that’s all. Well, maybe a bit more. Once Windows 11 was installed, there were many updates available for it, and as I have an AMD Ryzen-based system and many of the updates were AMD-related, I quickly installed all updates as well. Once the installation and updates were ready, I started to test and clean-up the system. I deleted many of the freshly installed applications and cleaned up the start menu. After testing if the most critical applications still work, I did a disk clean-up to remove temporary files, the previous version of Windows and so on.

Out of all my Windows updates, this was the least drastic and problematic. Of course, there are some visible changes in Windows, but luckily not too much. I moved back the start menu to the left. Most of the changes made the whole system more logical, and much of the chaos around configuring Windows is resolved. Best of all: an already extremely fast machine now feels even faster.

MacOS Monterey

A couple of years ago I bought a MacBook Pro. I hate Apple products for many reasons: they are very expensive, and as a technical user I find that they are not too flexible. Still, there are quite a few people who like Macs and even would love to run syslog-ng on them, so I mostly bought my MacBook Pro to test and compile syslog-ng on it. However, just like any of my other devices, I use it for music too. I have a Moog software synthesizer running together with Garage Band, and I also use it for TIDAL, as out of all my TIDAL-capable devices, this one has the best headphone amplifier. :-)

The upgrade to Monterey was not so smooth. When I first started it, it was a 2.5GB download, but the installation failed. My second attempt had a 12.5GB download and while it was a bit slower, it was successful. I must admit that I did not notice any changes after the OS upgrade, but that’s no wonder: the look and feel stayed the same and I do not use the apps that changed.

I tried the Moog synth and a few more apps and they worked just fine. However, homebrew breaks with all kinds of strange errors. As it is needed to compile syslog-ng, I will investigate it, but that’s something for next week. Now I enjoy the long weekend and use my MacBook Pro only for music.

What’s next?

Windows 11 has WSL 2. It means that Linux is practically running in a virtual machine and behind a NAT. WSL 2 provides close to native performance, so I will try to figure out if I can run an externally available syslog-ng server inside.

On the latest MacOS I’ll most likely reinstall homebrew from scratch, and then check if syslog-ng still compiles and works.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is on a roll this week.

The week prior put together frequent Tumbleweed snapshots and the rolling release has been delivering continuous daily software updates since Oct. 27.

Updated documentation for the --whitespace-off feature in urlscan 0.9.7 was made in the latest 20211102 snapshot. Two other packages were also included in the snapshot; both packages were 2.0.99.2 versions of the Chinese input method ibus-sunpinyin and sunpinyin 2.0.99.2.

Snapshot 20211101 updated two packages. The general-purpose parser bison updated to version 3.8.2. It removed support for the YYPRINT macro and added a new C++ native GLR parser. The other package to update in the snapshot was gdb 11.1; the debugger added many maintenance scripts and removed several obsolete Fedora patches. The gdb package now supports general memory tagging functionality if the underlying architecture supports the proper primitives and hooks, which is currently only enabled for the AArch64 Memory Tagging Extension.

The 20211031 snapshot updated 3D Graphics Library Mesa 21.2.5 and Mesa-drivers 21.2.5. The version bumps had fixes for the Panfrost driver stack. Some bug fixes were also made for the Radeon Vulkan driver that fixed a couple game issues and a GPU hang. There were codecs and format fixes in the ffmpeg-4 4.4.1 update. Several 5.15.2 versions of the libqt5 suite were updated in the snapshot and the 1.21.2 version of wget updated support for autoconf 2.71.

Linux’s Bluetooth protocol stack was updated in snapshot 20211030. The newest version of bluez 5.62 fixed an issue involving the Audio Video Control Transport Protocol (AVCTP) browsing channel and missing Enhanced Re-Transmission Mode (ERTM); the software package also added support for certain types of connection failures. PipeWire 0.3.39 brought stability and compatibility improvements in JACK apps as well as bringing better Bluetooth compatibility with more devices. Turkish and Hindi languages were updated in the yast2-trans package. Other packages to update in the snapshot were freecell-solver 6.6.0, sshfs 3.7.2 and python-SQLAlchemy 1.4.25.

KDE’s Plasma 5.23.2 bugfix release arrived in snapshot 20211029. Some functionality was restored with the plasma-desktop folder and the task manager prevents some useless component creation. KWin had a Wayland fix that ignored the keyboard RepeatRate. An update of flatpak 1.12.2 updated translations, improved diagnostic messages when seccomp rules cannot be applied and fixed the error handling for syscalls that were blocked when not using --devel. An update of autoyast2 4.4.19 avoided an internal error when checking a signature and added some elements to the partitioning schema, which was reflected in the yast2-schema 4.4.4 update. Other packages to update in the snapshot were software package and dependency manager yarn 1.22.17), kernel-firmware 20211027, libstorage-ng 4.4.53 and libsoup 3.0.2.

Both ncurses 6.3.20211021 and pcre2 10.38 were updated in the 20211028 snapshot.

Last week I participated the OpenPower Summit. I enjoyed it, even if I was on sick leave with a fever. There were many interesting talks, ranging from open source and education through Power10 to instruction development. All sessions were recorded. Hopefully recordings will also be shared, as I did not have the strength to visit all the sessions I wanted. And, as usual, some of the interesting talks were given in parallel.

Keynotes

James Kulina, Executive Director of the OpenPower Foundation, opened the conference with a short overview of the topics. The keynote talks were given by the sponsors of the event. It was a pleasant surprise: even if companies and product names were mentioned, most of the talks were not marketing talks but deeply technical. As someone, who is involved in open source, I especially enjoyed two of the talks:

• Michael Gielda of Antmicro talked about “Software-driven Hardware in the Data Center: LibreBMC, Renode, RowHammer Test Platform and more”
• Rob Mains of CHIPS Alliance talked about “Building an Open Source Hardware Ecosystem: From Foundations to Rooftops”

Education

The next talk I listened to was given by Wu Feng of Virginia Tech: A Vision for Transforming 21st-Century Pedagogy via Open Standards: OpenPOWER. He gave an overview of computer architecture education for the past few decades and then introduced us to his latest work: a new curriculum based on the POWER architecture. The POWER ISA is not the new kid on the block, but as you can see from the Power10 and the Libre-SOC talks, it is still continuously evolving. Small scale testing of the new curriculum starts already early next year!

Libre-SOC

I am not a hardware engineer, but it was still fascinating listening to Luke Leighton talking about his work on Libre-SOC: Draft SVP64 in-place Matrix Multiply and FFT / DCT for OpenPOWER. He is working on extending the Power ISA with various instructions.

Open source laptop

Prepare yourself to switch computing to Open Hardware Power Architecture was a talk by Roberto Innocenti. He talked about the open source laptop he is working on, of course with a POWER CPU at its heart. Due to the pandemic they are quite behind schedule. Some parts to build the first working prototypes are still missing.

OpenPOWER working groups

The last talk I joined was given by Toshaan Bharvani, who talked about the various existing and planned working groups of the OpenPOWER foundation. There are a number of working groups I found interesting and worth to join, however there was one which really sparked my interest: the POWER π working group. As you might have guessed from the name: they are working on a small single board computer, probably still larger than a Raspberry Pi. It will feature a POWER CPU and have a $150 price point.

Summary

When talking about POWER I’m sometimes accused that I’m beating a dead horse. As you can see from just a small selection of talks at the OpenPOWER Summit 2021, the community around POWER is quite lively. Curriculum, new instructions and various new hardware are under development. If all goes well, POWER will be a lot more accessible to users and developers hopefully already next year!

The release manager for openSUSE Leap has announced the release of the first quarterly iso image update for the 15.3 release

Dubbed as respins, these updates refresh the iso images based on General Availability (GA) release and contain all the updates for the past quarter.

“The openSUSE release team has over time received quite some requests to provide regular refreshes of install media,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman in an email to the project. “Some of these 15.X requests date back to the 15.2 development cycle.”

Respins allow users to take advantage of the latest bug fixes and updates immediately, which helps reduce bandwidth use of the download and online updates after an installation.

As both Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise, which also had a quarterly rebuild, are connected, a rebuild of Leap 15.3 became available. More information about the release of the quarterly builds can be found on the Leap Roadmap or in the email written by Kocman.

Users can download the updated iso at get.opensuse.org.

For the first time ever I actually finished a monthly challenge.

Off to the Nodevember!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Despite a few technical difficulties (openQA workers were updated to Leap 15.3), we managed to release 4 snapshots to the public (built and tested 7). You have received snapshots 1021, 1024, 1025, and 1027.

The main changes included were:

• librsvg 2.25.2
• systemd 249.5
• KDE Plasma 5.23.1
• file 5.41
• Virtualbox 6.1.28
• Linux kernel 5.14.14
• RPM 4.17.0
• Mozilla Thunderbird 91.2.1
• PHP 7.4.25

Quite a few staging projects are currently in use, and these items are being tested:

• Meson 0.59.3
• KDE Plasma 5.23.2
• X.Org server 21.1.0
• Bison 3.8.2: breaks gdb (boo#1191612)
• Coreutils 9.0: blocked by nodejs16 (sr to devel prj pending for 2 weeks)
• openSSL 3.0.0: no active progress

This is more like a self-written notes post about a problem I’m facing, since my laptop’s web camera is starting to deteriorate. I’ll update the post if I find more useful bits of how to tweak with USB. For the first few weeks I was suspecting a Tumbleweed problem, but eventually I booted up Ubuntu LTS from USB stick and managed to see the problem also there.

dmesg goes like follows

[46253.245741] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.2/input/input195
[46254.233519] usb 1-5: USB disconnect, device number 97
[46254.234502] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46254.687974] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 98 using xhci_hcd
[46254.895417] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=58f4, bcdDevice=72.79
[46254.895422] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=1, SerialNumber=2
[46254.895424] usb 1-5: Product: Integrated_Webcam_HD
[46254.895425] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[46254.895426] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: XXXXXXXXXXXX
[46254.899284] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:58f4)
[46254.906277] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.0/input/input196
[46254.907449] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:58f4)
[46254.909691] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.2/input/input197
[46256.877289] usb 1-5: USB disconnect, device number 98
[46256.878499] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.882484] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.886482] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.890482] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.894500] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46258.187945] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[46259.167940] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[46259.167971] usb usb1-port5: attempt power cycle
[46260.235968] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

I tried opening the laptop and using some duct tape to the cable running to the camera, but while it seemed better at first, it seems it now continues to be as it was before. The camera still works from time to time, especially if I don’t touch the laptop by any means, using external keyboard and mouse. But when it breaks, it sometimes causes a stall of a few seconds.

I have the option to disable web camera in UEFI setup, but I’d rather find a way to power it off and on during runtime. I’ve tried eg

echo '1-5' | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

But the device does not seem to exist. Meanwhile, I mixed up the bus/device/port concepts since Bus 001 Device 005 in lsusb is actually the Bluetooth device:

# Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0489:e0a2 Foxconn / Hon Hai

But at least I managed to try out the usb_modeswitch trick found from the web, which I’d like to apply to the webcam too:

> sudo usb_modeswitch -v 0489 -p e0a2 --reset-usb
Look for default devices ...
 Found devices in default mode (1)
Access device 005 on bus 001
Get the current device configuration ...
Current configuration number is 1
Use interface number 0
 with class 224
Warning: no switching method given. See documentation
Reset USB device .
 Device was reset
-> Run lsusb to note any changes. Bye!

Rolling release users had a variety of package updates this week to include updates of rpm, Plasma, rsyslog, webkit2gtk3, systemd, AppStream and more, which were updated throughout the week’s four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots.

The latest snapshot to be released, 20211027, updated eight packages. Mozilla Thunderbird 91.2.1 increased the memory required per threads for AArch64 to avoid an out of memory state and the email client also had Link Time Optimization enabled for Tumbleweed. The php7 7.4.25 update was a security release focusing on bug fixes like one that affected high memory usage during encoding detection and another fix addressed Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure–2021-21703. The 9.22 version of the real-time web framework perl-Mojolicious added a referer method and fixed the response status log message to use the trace log level instead of debug. A second release this week of mpg123 updated the package to version 1.29.2, which had a single fix for a non-live-decoder safeguard. AppStream, which is a cross-distribution package for standardizing software component metadata, updated to version 0.14.6; the new version updated documentation and added support for source locales. The package also added support for image and video screenshot handling and the changed states that it added Fedora to the continuous integration environment.

Snapshot 20211025 had an update of rpm 4.17.0. The update had many improvements, new translations and python generators and debuginfo extraction have been split into a separate upstream project. The rsyslog had two updates in Tumbleweed this week and this snapshot brought in version 8.2110.0, which fixes a couple of bugs affecting configurations. The 5.14.14 Linux Kernel had a whole bunch of fixes for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture and Btrfs. There were also several 4.2.20 library updates for libyui , which implemented the C++17 standard for package plugins. Another update in the snapshot was the update of the Free Remote Desktop package freerdp 2.4.1; the package update addressed two CVEs and one of those was an improper client input validation for gateway connections that would allow to overwrite memory.

Snapshot 20211024 provided the Plasma 5.23.1 update. This first minor update had a fix for its Discover app store to prevent a Flatpak crash when a source is disabled. KDE’s Plasma X Window Manager and Wayland Compositor KWin fixed the downloading software-rotated textures for PipeWire handling. Plasma Desktop fixed the “clear emoji history” action. The 6.1.28 version update of virtualbox fixed some audio issues and brought more administrative control over network ranges. The hypervisor also fixed a virtual machine black screen issue that happened on first resize after restoring from saved state. An update of webkit2gtk3 2.34.1 fixed a couple crashes affecting the WebKit rendering engine; one of the crashes would happen when loading videos on reddit. Several patches were removed from Ian Darwin’s open-source reimplementation of the file(1) command tool in version 5.41; the package added a new flag and requires that the match is a full word and not a partial word match. A version jump from libstorage-ng 4.4.44 to version 4.4.51 brought translations for Czech, Japanese and Slovak languages. The storage package also simplified parted flag handling. Other packages to update in the snapshot were acpica 20210930, java-11-openjdk 11.0.13.0, graphic visualization package graphviz 2.49.1 and more than a dozen other packages.

An updated 1.9.19 version of the audio package JACK was released in snapshot 20211021. The new version added an argument to wait for a soundcard to become available and fixed a collection of documentation. The systemd service manager update to version 249.5 dropped the list of valid net naming schemes and the update allows for extra net naming schemes to be defined during configuration. ImageMagick 7.1.0.10 improved the algorithm for automatic calculation of point size for captions and labels. The 4.7.0 version of iso-codes updated translations for Indonesian; the International Organization for Standardization package also added common names for South Korea and North Korea. The rsyslog package improved the error message output on Transport Layer Security failures in version 8.2108.0; the super-speedy logging system also added parameter ignoreolderthanoption and instructs the Text File Input Module not to ingest a file that has not been modified in the specified number of seconds. Audio player and decoder library mpg123 1.29.1 fixed the reporting of device property flags for buffer libmpg123. Several Python Package Index versions were updated in the snapshot; python-apipkg had a major update to 2.1.0: python-cachetools 4.2.4 added submodule shims for backward compatibility; and python-greenlet fixed a potential crash and a leak in version 1.1.2. Other pckages to update in the snapshot were libzypp 17.28.6, mc 4.8.27, thai-fonts 0.7.3, gnome-clocks 41.0 and more.

As you might have already noticed from my blogs, I am a music maniac. One of the factors influencing your music listening experience is what speakers you use. I was lucky right from the beginning, my parents are music maniacs as well. In this blog I introduce you to the speakers I listened while living at my parents, and three pairs of speakers I bought myself.

I must admit that I never did a really thorough research about speakers and acoustics. I always listened to my ears, how much I like what I hear. This made my journey in listening to music a bit of a crisscross :-)

The early years: Acoustic Research AR 8 LS

While most people in the communist block had only a Sokol radio at home, I had the luxury of listening to a HiFi system imported from the West. Components were carefully chosen based on recommendations from the friends of my father. The speakers were made by Acoustic Research, a pair of AR 8 LS.

I did not know much about speakers at that time: there was no Internet yet, and no magazines about hifi yet (at least not in the remote part of Hungary, where I lived). The only thing I knew that I could not hear this level of sound quality anywhere else. I loved loud music, and even if these were bookshelf speakers, they could easily fill a 5m x 8m room. But when my parents were away and I had the time, I built a small triangle and listened to them just from a meter away.

Many years later I learned that the AR 8 LS was the smallest of a series of speakers. It was built for music enthusiasts, but this particular type was mostly used by professionals in studios as near field monitors. What a coincidence :-)

The university years: Altec Lansing 2.1 system

The AR speakers sounded fantastic, but as I started to listen to music elsewhere I suddenly realized that they did not have much bass. Or rather at that time I did not know yet, that others had too much bass. So, when I had a chance to buy something for myself, I ended up with an Altec Lansing self-powered 2.1 speaker system. Obviously, I did not have much budget, and these I could source at a relatively good price (even if this price was still 5x more than anyone around me would spend on speakers…). I do not remember the exact type any more, but it had a huge sub-woofer and the satellite speakers were two way.

Listening to Pink Floyd was fantastic on these speakers and the explosions in movies sounded terrifying. When we had a 5m x 5m room full with guests dancing, everyone wanted to buy similar speakers for home. However classical music or music with acoustic instruments did not sound nearly as good as on the AR 8 LS.

By that time I had a friend at university who brought me to various hifi events and I quickly became aware of the limitations. I fell in love with Linn and Heed Audio at that time, but as a university student they were out of reach for me.

My first larger salary: JVC EX-A5 wood cone system

When my Altec Lansing 2.1 system died with a bit of smoke I had to look for something new. I remembered reading about JVC wood cone systems earlier, so I visited a JVC show room to listen to one. I liked it, but it was expensive. A few months later, when I got my first relatively good salary for teaching SUSE Linux at a bank, finally I bought an EX-A5 mini system. It is a complete mini system: an amplifier built together with a radio and a CD/DVD player bundled together with a pair of two way wood cone speakers.

It did not have the extreme bass of the Altec Lansing 2.1 systems I had earlier, but for the rest it had a fantastic, well balanced natural sound. Suddenly I had to listen to my whole music collection again: all music had a lot more more detail. The speakers can fill a smaller room if necessary, but best listened to just as the AR speakers: as near field monitors. And many recording studios use them as such.

My dream speakers: Heed Enigma 5

Do you remember Heed from a few paragraphs earlier? For the last couple of years I am lucky enough to listen to a pair of Heed Enigma 5 speakers. I first listened to them during my university years at a factory visit. I did not know why, but no matter where I was in the room, I felt that instruments are all around me. It was a love at first sight, or rather at first listening. These are non-directional or omnidirectional speakers. The speakers are not directed at the listener, but slightly upwards. What it means that you do not have to sit in a traditional triangle setting to enjoy a perfect sense of spatial sounds.

With the Enigma 5 there are no compromises. Bass sounds perfectly just as everything else. Almost everything sounds much better than anywhere else. Even with speakers costing more than an average car I often had the problem that music came directly from the speaker, there was no sense of having a band in front of you. With ominidirectional speakers this problem is gone. However there are some recordings which do not sound that well on them: some persecution recordings sound strange, and the problems of some low quality recordings are over emphasized by this setup.

What is next?

Most likely nothing :-) Sometimes I think about connecting the wood cone speakers as an alternative to the current system. They sound a lot better with the current amplifier than with the bundled one. However, a switch between the speakers would most likely alter the sound of the system, and I would not want that. Luckily there are really just a very few recordings which do not play well with the Enigma 5. I can listen to them using headphones, and that hides away most of the recording problems as well.