This year the syslog-ng project will participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentor organization again. If you are a university student or otherwise eligible to participate in the GSoC program, you can choose to develop a new feature for syslog-ng.

Read my blog to learn why to choose syslog-ng and how to get started: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-in-gsoc-2022

Running a x86_64 image in qemu machine can be as easy as:

qemu-system-x86_64 openSUSE-Leap-15.3-JeOS.x86_64-kvm-and-xen.qcow2

# A more extended example
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1G -cpu host -enable-kvm -smp cores=2,threads=1,sockets=1 -drive file=openSUSE-Leap-15.3-JeOS.x86_64-kvm-and-xen.qcow2,if=virtio

Doing the same for aarch64 is a bit more tricky. In this tutorial we’re gonna learn how to run a aarch64 vm using qemu. This approach works on native aarch64 hardware and as emulated VM on any other architectures as well.

The openSUSE community has published results from the annual community survey.

This year’s results increased from last year’s results by more than 100 participants, with 1,320 respondents this time around. While participation increased, results indicated a larger amount of people located in Europe took the survey. Since other regions were less represented, people should be aware of this fact while reading the results.

Information was gathered about the project, its distributions, the demographics and how the community is contributing to the project. A number of questions in this year’s survey provided participants with a wider opportunity to express their opinions and satisfaction with the above topics. A document lists all the comments from the survey.

Some modifications were made from the previous year’s survey, but the highest percentage group of users were ages of 35 to 44. An overwhelming survey participants were from the Northern Hemisphere and almost 500 were in the +1 UTC time zone before the recent daily savings, which put most in the Central European Time. Almost 60 percent of surveyees had a university degree and more than 81 percent of those who answered the question had at least a graduate degree. The amount of surveyees with a job in IT is about split about 50/50.

A core take away from the survey was that openSUSE distros were well supported for IT professionals and developers. Technologies for professional content creators appears to be growing is usage, according to the results.

More than 40 percent have been using Unix-like operating systems for 10 years and less than 3 percent have been using one less than a year. A majority of openSUSE’s desktop users favored using Tumbleweed and those favoring server use opted for Leap. MicroOS use on servers increase more than 40 percent. Packagers were given much recognition in the survey. An overwhelming percentage of surveyees ranked official repositories as their favorite source for get software; the others that followed were rpm downloads along with Flatpak, AppImages and snap respectively.

The survey results showed that most would recommend openSUSE distributions to advanced users and least recommend the distributions for new users. The overall sense was that users were satisfied with the distributions and found them stable and reliable; the distributions and there ease of use were held in high regard, especially the core uses of the server with web hosting, databases, containers and virtualization.

A majority of people prefered openSUSE’s forums, reddit and Twitter for technical communication and knowledge sharing about openSUSE. The other platforms were used for more social interaction with the community.

For more details about the annual survey, please visit the results on the openSUSE Wiki.

https://www.wykop.pl/link/6612291/rzad-dotuje-organizacje-religijne-ktore-stosuja-jawna-segregacje-religijna/

W całej sprawie chodzi o przyznanie uczelni wyższej, która nie dopuszcza w swe szeregi nie-katolików, sporego grantu pieniężnego od rządu. Mogę przeboleć fundusz kościelny, bo niby krzywdy komunistyczne. Ale grant pieniężny na prowadzenie kierunku, do którego mogą się zapisać tylko katolicy? I to z funduszu ochrony środowiska? To tak samo, jakby fundować prywatne drogi dla księdza Rydyzka…

Next week it's going to be a year since Ingenuity made the first flight in an atmosphere of another planet. An atmosphere with about 1% of density of the one on Earth.

Something that sounded unlikely became a great success with 24 flights so far. To celebrate the occasion I revisited an older project of mine and used more appropriate footage shot by my friend VOPO at Fuertaventura, Canary Islands. I rendered some overlays of the Ingenuity model kindly provided by NASA.

The music was composed on the Dirtywave M8 Tracker, went straight from the device, no mastering. The time constraints of weeklybeats is brutal. I used a hint to the Close Encounters of the Third Kind main theme, but because the flight is unrealistically dynamic, it leans on a mangled classic Jungle Jungle break.

Thanks to the C-Base crew for taking good care of us and the GNOME Fundation to support the travel (mostly on the surface).

Next week it’s going to be a year since Ingenuity made the first flight in an atmosphere of another planet. An atmosphere with about 1% of density of the one on Earth.

Something that sounded unlikely became a great success with 24 flights so far. To celebrate the occasion I revisited an older project of mine and used more appropriate footage shot by my friend VOPO at Fuertaventura, Canary Islands. I rendered some overlays of the Ingenuity model kindly provided by NASA.

The music was composed on the Dirtywave M8 Tracker, went straight from the device, no mastering. The time constraints of weeklybeats is brutal. I used a hint to the Close Encounters of the Third Kind main theme, but because the flight is unrealistically dynamic, it leans on a mangled classic Jungle Jungle break.

Thanks to the C-Base crew for taking good care of us and the GNOME Fundation to support the travel (mostly on the surface).

Mentioning my ever lasting adoration of the realtime engine in Blender on twitter kind of exploded (for my standards), so I figured I'd write a blog post.

Georges wrote a great little app to configure Elgato Stream Deck buttons on non-proprietary platforms. I've been following Georges' ventures into streaming. He's done amazing job promoting GNOME development and has been helping with OBS a lot too.

To make Boatswain work great by default, rather than just presenting people with a monstrous shit work mountain to even get going, Georges needed some graphical assets to have the configurator ship with ready made presets.

Sadly I've already invested in an appliance that covers my video streaming and recording needs, so I wasn't going to buy the gear to test how things look. Instead I made the device virtual, and rendered an approximation of it in Blender.

For GNOME wallpapers there are cases where I have to resort to waiting on Cycles, but if you compare this 2 minute render (left) to the 0.5s render (right) it's really not worth it in many cases.

Personally switching to AMD GPUs a couple of years back has removed much pain updating the OS and the reason I was allowed to do that is Eevee.

There was some interest in how the shader is set up, so I'm happily making the file available for dissection.

To do it properly, I'd probably want to improve the actual display shader to rasterize the bitmaps in a more sophisticated manner than just displaying a bitmap with no filtering. But I'd say even this basic setup has served the purpose of checking the viability of a symbol rendered on a lousy display.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Another week has gone by, and despite me claiming we won’t be using openQA anymore (hey, it was April 1st; you should know not to trust anything you read on that day), we are of course very much relying on it. Tumbleweed couldn’t possibly be as stable as it is without the help of openQA and the fabulous team developing and maintaining it. So since last Friday we have thrown a full set of 7 snapshots at openQA and received a ‘go’ back for all of them. so we pushed out 7 snapshots (0331, 0401, 0402, 0403, 0404, 0405, and 0406)

The major changes included in those snapshots were:

• Linux kernel 5.17.1
• KDE Plasma 5.24.4
• SQLite 3.38.2
• Mesa 22.0.1
• Pipewire 0.3.49
• openldap 2.5.9 (upgraded from 2.4.59)
• dracut 056
• gcc12: it is providing the base libraries like libgcc_s1, libstdc++6, but it is not yet the default compiler. That will comea bit later
• procps 4.0.0: note: a few issues have been found that could be attribute to this, like salt not being able to parse the resulting output when distributing sysctl values
• autoconf 2.71: a bunch of packages fail to build now. A common thing I’d seen is gettext translation catalogs wrongly being installed to /usr/locale (instead of /usr/share/locale). Most package seem to be old and rather under-maintained (most, nost all!)
• Full RelRO (-z now) has been enabled by default for all builds. Partial RelRo was enbable around the timeframe of SUSE Linux 10.1, about time to move one level up

Currently, we’re testing these changes in the staging areas:

• LLVM 14
• Podman 4.0.3
• Rust 1.60
• Pytest 7
• GCC 12 as default compiler

A new default GNU Compiler Collection for openSUSE Tumbleweed is set to follow one of the snapshots that rolled out this week.

Snapshot 20220405 prepares the default compiler switch to GCC 12. GCC 12 is now providing the libgcc standard libraries. It is not yet the default compiler, but that will follow at a later date.

The most recent snapshot that came out after the switch was 20220406. This snapshot updated five packages. One of those updated packages was autoconf 2.71. Configuration scripts from the latest autoconf improved compatibility with C-variant front end compiler clang and compatibility was restored with automake’s rules for regenerating a configuration. The Linux SCSI target framework tgt package updated to version 1.0.82 and added support for listening on a random port. Other packages to update in the snapshot were xf86-video-dummy 0.4.0 and yast2-slp-server 4.5.0.

The 20220405 snapshot prepares GCC 12 to become the default compiler at a later date for the rolling release and it had multiple packages updated in the snapshot. New packages were inherited from GCC 11 with the GCC 12.0.1 update, and the compiler provides the conflicts to glibc crosses since only one GCC version for the target can be installed at the same time; the same thing was done for libgccjit as well. Translations were updated in the gedit 42.0 update. An update in the new dracut version does not use network-wicked as default the network handler. The update of text shaping engine harfbuzz 4.2.0 fixed the handling of contextual lookups. The word selection error in Arabic text was fixed in libreoffice 7.3.2.2 and four crashes with various circumstances and inputs were fixed. Other notable updates in the snapshot were libvirt 8.2.0, aws-cli 1.22.87 and file synchronizer unison 2.52.0.

The 20220404 snapshot gave Xfce users a file manager update to thunar; the 4.16.11 thunar version fixed a few reloading views, prevented a crash on malformed bookmarks and updated translations. Smoother rendering of a clock’s hands were made in the xclock 1.1.0 update. The printing package cups-filters 1.28.12 had some resolution and image size fixes. Other packages to update in the snapshot were xwayland 22.1.1, ceph 16.2.7, yast2-installation 4.4.51 and more.

Added support for the Zstandard compression algorithm was made in the 20220403 snapshot with the kdump 1.0.2 update; kdump also removed a few patches for the crash dumps feature of the Linux Kernel. New features were added in the update from gnome-logs 3.36.0 to 42.0. Some of those features include opening journal files directly and several keyboard shortcuts to help with overlay. There were also window sizing improvements in the gnome-logs upgrade. An update of libsoup 3.0.6 had miscellaneous HTTP/2 fixes, meson build improvements and fixed build issues with Visual Studio. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

The second snapshot of the month, 20220402, had several package updates. The minor update of ImageMagick 7.1.0.28 fixed a couple buffer overflows and 3D Graphics Library Mesa 22.0.1 fixed some maintainer scripts and panfrost drivers. Some documentation was added in the firewalld 1.1.1 update about container host integration and a build fix was made for the use of dbus inside a container. A Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure was addressed in the openvpn 2.5.6 update; the vulnerability could allow for a possible authentication bypass in external authentication plug-in. Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile streaming was improved and reduced stuttering was made on some devices with the PipeWire 0.3.49 update. Several other packages updated in the snapshot.

Konqi fans had an update to Plasma 5.24.4 in the 20220402; the update provided fixes mostly for KWin and Plasma Workspace. Window flickering was fixed with the update for KWin when a clip intersected with the blur region and Plasma Workspace fixed some weird behavior with the lockscreen. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ncurses 6.3.20220319, expat 2.4.8, sqlite3 3.38.2 and more.

For many years, you could use the match() filter of syslog-ng to parse log messages with regular expressions. However, the primary function of match() is filtering. Recent syslog-ng versions now have a dedicated regular expression parser, the regexp-parser(). So, you should use match() only if your primary use case is filtering. Otherwise, use the regexp-parser for parsing, as it is a lot more flexible.

You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/using-the-regexp-parser-of-syslog-ng