Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Once again we were able to demonstrate the power of OBS and openQA by allowing the GNOME maintainers to bring the shiny new GNOME 42 into a snapshot ‘the day it is published upstream’. GNOME 42 was released on March 23, 2022, and snapshot 20220323 already contains it. But of course, this is not all that happened during the last week. After all, we had a total of 6 snapshots published (0318…0323).

The main changes in those snapshots include:

• NetworkManager 1.36.2 & 1.36.4
• Linux kernel 5.16.15
• librsvg 2.52.8
• GNOME 42.0
• VLC 3.0.17.3
• Kubernetes 1.23.4 & 1.22.7

There is a change in the build system that might be of general interest: The default builrdoot when building against openSUSE:Factory no longer contains the packages hostname and iputils2. Those have just been carried around for internal requirements of OBS, which are no longer valid. There are a few packages around that blindly relied on those packages being present that might be filing now.

Things that are currently being forged to become ready for consumption are:

• Move ot use Java 17 openjdk instead of Java 11 openjdk by default
• timezone 2022a: causes a failure in a python module; https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo/issues/114 any help is welcome
• systemd 250.5
• podman 4.0
• Linux kernel 5.17: another python module failing: https://build.opensuse.org/package/live_build_log/openSUSE:Factory:Staging:O/python-psutil/standard/x86_64
• transactional-update 4.0.0 (rc2 is will be shipped)
• GCC 12 work keeps on progressing

openSUSE’s rolling release quickly gave Tumbleweed users the freshly released GNOME 42.

This highly anticipated release from GNOME contributors landed in the 20220323 snapshot.

GNOME 42 has a new global dark User Interface style preference and comes with a redesigned screenshot feature. The core GNOME 42 apps have been ported to GTK4 and provide next generation capabilities. GNOME 42 includes a valuable set of performance improvements like videos now use modern OpenGL widgets with hardware accelerated decoding; the input handling has been significantly enhanced, which results in lower input latency and improved responsiveness. Improvements in how fullscreen apps are rendered result in reduced energy consumption for video playback and increased frame rates for games. VLC 3.0.17.3 was updated in the snapshot and fixed a regression that could cause a lack of audio for adaptive streaming playback. Several other packages updated in the snapshot including NetworkManager 1.36.4, GTK4 4.6.2, webkit2gtk3 2.36.0, yast2-installation 4.4.50 and more.

The previous day’s snapshot, 20220322 provided three package updates. The Ethernet and IP address pairings package arpwatch 3.2 added a configure option to specify the path to sendmail. The aws-cli 1.22.65 updated the spec file and had some Application Programming Interfaces changes like adding an operation for custom plugin deletion DeleteCustomPlugin and adding Hybridcast as an available profile option for Dash Origin Endpoints. The python-pip 22.0.4 package updated; the package is not compatible with Python 3.6 and is not suitable for openSUSE Leap 15. However, the package fixed an issue where pip did not consider dependencies. There were a significant amount of updates from the previous 20.2.4 version that was in the rolling release.

Another three packages were updated in snapshot 20220321. This snapshot provided a minor update for GNU Compiler Collection 11, which had a patch to fix the miscompiling of an embedded premake of game 0 A.D. on i586 processors. The C/C++ code analysis tool cppcheck updated to version 2.7.1. The tool made various checker improvements and added support for container views; the view attribute has been added to the container library tag to specify the class is a view. The lifetime analysis has been updated to use this new attribute to find dangling lifetime containers. The other package to update was rpm-config-SUSE, which changed his version structure and updated from 0.g96 to 20220317.

The snapshots continued to be released over the weekend as snapshot 20220320 updated fifteen packages. This snapshot updated gnome-software to version 41.5 to add several appstream-related fixes; the update also disabled the scroll-by-mouse-wheel on the featured carousel. The update of container-selinux from 2.171.0 to version 2.180.0 provided several added options and allow container domains to be used by user roles. An updated of libstorage-ng 4.4.94 no longer blocks blkdiscard on extended partitions and whois client 5.5.12 updated the .pro top-level domain server. Other notable packages to update were librsvg 2.52.8, python-kiwi 9.24.29, yast2-installation 4.4.49 and more.

The NetworkManager 1.36.2 update in snapshot 20220319 now loads all the known plugins found in the plugin directory. NetworkManager also converted iproute2 and iputils from requires to recommends. Flatpak 1.12.7 updated in the snapshot and has a change that will allow apps built with Flatpak 1.13.x to export AppStream metadata in share/metainfo, which might be discussed in the upcoming Linux App Summit. The 5.16.15 Linux Kernel appears to have provided a few arm fixes and listed a fix for CVE-2022-0886, which is a duplicate of CVE-2022-27666.

The snapshot that started the week last Friday was 20220318. The snapshot reverted rubygem-formatador from 1.1.0 to 0.3.0. There was a cargo.lock update int he gstreamer-plugins-rs 0.8.2 release and several hundred translation were made in the sixth month desktop-translations 84.87.20220316 update 9301f89b. Other updates in the snapshot included fwupd-efi 1.2, p11-kit 0.24.1 and yast2-packager 4.4.26.

Quite a few people asked me recently how I deal with anxiety. I seem to be less anxious than people around me. First of all: I also have anxiety, just like anybody else. The recent company acquisition & reorganization, the COVID-19 pandemic, the upcoming general elections, or the Russian attack all make sure that once a problem is over, there is a new problem already to worry about. However, sport, music and spending less time reading the news all help to keep my anxiety at bay.

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical expert. I just share my own experiences. I can only guess why these work for me, but I enjoy the results. Your mileage may vary.

Music

Let’s start with a less obvious one: music. It seems to help both when music is just put in the background and also when listening to music without doing anything else.

When I play music in the background, it helps focusing on what I’m working on in multiple ways. It keeps noises out, so there are less distractions. It also keeps part of the mind busy, so my mind has less capacity to think about the problems, and thus anxiety is reduced.

I also like listening to music not as background noise, but as a focused activity. In the first few minutes, I still might think about problems, current events, but then music takes over. When focusing on music, I can always hear new details even in songs I listened to hundreds of times already. Listening to music also clears my mind. And it seems to have a long-lasting effect, as I feel refreshed even hours after listening to music.

Sport

Doing some kind of sport regularly also seems to reduce anxiety levels. Of course, I can rarely do some kind of sport each and every day, but I still try to exercise. Half an hour for five days a week seems to be an achievable goal. And you do not have to think about anything special or needing lots of preparation, just something like walking or biking for half an hour in the neighborhood. When it’s too cold or raining, just jump on the exercise bike. My favorite activity is hiking. It needs a bit more preparation: driving there and driving back. But this is also the most rewarding one, thanks to the fresh air far away from the city.

Doing sports regularly helps to improve anxiety-related problems, like blood pressure and heart rate. Better physical condition also seems to reduce anxiety. As an added bonus, all these activities help to control weight as well :-)

And a few more obvious tips

I am a news maniac. I was reading the news whenever I had a little time. Not anymore. I can follow the reactions of my body when reading the news from Ukraine and it is brutal. My blood pressure and heart rate improved drastically when I skipped reading the news completely for days. Just reading the headlines and even those just 2-3 times a day allowed my situation to improve. Going back to the old me and reading everything for two days canceled the effects of two weeks of slow improvements. Reading the news is not worth your health. Donating to a charity organization helping Ukrainian refugees instead can help your anxiety a bit, and also the people in need.

Leaving social media behind as much as possible can help as well. Up until a few weeks ago, we were surrounded by COVID experts. The unfortunate events in the Ukraine changed this. One of the most unpleasant experiences is when a friend whom you admire for his technical knowledge suddenly starts pushing Russian war propaganda. Luckily, the last US elections taught me to spend less time reading Facebook and Twitter. Instead of reading the feeds, I started to just sample them. I try to post hiking and flower photos to break the constant feed of terrible news, and I got plenty of feedback that it helps those people who still read most of the posts.

I hope that my tips and tricks helped you a bit. However, remember to see a doctor if you cannot handle your anxiety!

Most of syslog-ng works perfectly well on MacOS; however, there is no native driver to collect local log messages. Due to this, in the past, the system() source did not work on MacOS, thus the default syslog-ng configuration failed to start. Version 3.36 of syslog-ng includes a workaround: it follows /var/log/system.log.

You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-system-source-of-syslog-ng-now-also-works-on-macos

The March syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line:

• syslog-ng future: the path to syslog-ng 4
• MQTT source
• Another use for the syslog-ng elasticsearch-http destination: Zinc
• Sending logs to Elastic Cloud using syslog-ng
• syslog-ng 3.36 is now available

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2022-03-syslog-ng-4-mqtt-source-zinc-elastic-cloud-3-36

In the YaST Team we have changed a bit the way we organize the work and we are not longer numbering the development sprints. But that will not stop us from reporting as often as possible what’s new in the YaST world. So, let’s go with our second regular development report of 2022.

New YaST Features

We are still in the beta phase of the development of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4 and openSUSE Leap 15.4, which means a significant part of our time is invested in debugging and fixing issues found by our testers. But we also keep introducing other changes and new features. Let’s go over some of them.

In the previous blog post we mentioned the new support for switching themes in the installer. As a cherry on top, we recently improved and partially automated the process to generate the corresponding SLE themes.

In the network area, we extended YaST support to configure Network Manager in S/390 mainframes and improved the way YaST handles automatic network configuration (DHCP) in interfaces associated to devices configured via iBFT (iSCSI Boot Firmware Table).

Regarding usability, we improved the behavior of the installer when the Release Notes contain external links.

We also tried to improve the visibility of a feature that has been available in AutoYaST for quite some time (initially announced at this blog post from 2020) but that we fear may have been overlooked by some of its potential users - the possibility to use ERB (Embedded Ruby) within the AutoYaST profiles. In that regard, we contributed quite some documentation and examples to the official AutoYaST documentation maintained by the awesome Documentation Team at SUSE.

On a more technical note, we introduced an automated check to detect if the YaST code contains method invocations that may be problematic in any of the different versions of Ruby supported by YaST. It may serve as inspiration for other Ruby developers needing to support different runtime environments.

D-Installer Keeps Evolving

As our main obligations permit, we continue progressing in our D-Installer side project that is already able to install an openSUSE system, configuring some basic aspects like the language or the partitioning layout.

We are actively working to publish a couple of interesting bits in the upcoming weeks. On the one hand, a blog post detailing the current status, the involved technologies and the opportunities D-Installer may bring for the future. On the other hand, a live openSUSE image containing the new tool so everyone can give it a try by installing openSUSE Tumbleweed in any virtual or real machine.

Stay tuned

This blog is a nice communication channel to keep you all informed about recent news and future plans, but we don’t want it to be the only way. We hope to see as many of you as possible in the upcoming openSUSE Conference 2022 in June. We plan to present quite some content in several talks (and maybe even some workshop) and we would like to encourage everyone to do the same. Beware the call for papers close in three weeks and time flies!

While waiting for the event to happen, we promise to keep blogging regularly as long as you promise to keep trying to have a lot of fun!

When I moved from being a “city mouse” to now being a “country mouse” I had to rethink how I was going to do my network connectivity. Since I am not in an area that offers cable or fiber type of Internet, I had to go for a cellular based Internet and it made the […]

My vintage gaming fun came to a quick pause when the stick part of my Joystick decided to detach itself from the base of this “human-machine interface device.” At first very upset but then I thought, “I’m sure I can fix this.” Sure enough, I was able to and although I didn’t do it because […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Another week filled with 7 snapshots, and this despite of one snapshot being discarded. We have published 0310, 0311, 0312, 0313, 0314, 0316, and 0317 (0315 was skipped due to some elevated risk of braking systems with a dracut update; maintainers are looking into this)

The 7 published snapshots contained these changes:

• dbus 1.14.0
• KDE Plasma 5.24.3
• KDE Frameworks 5.92.0
• Mozilla Firefox 98.0 & Thunderbird 91.7.0
• cURL 7.82.0
• Linux kernel 5.16.14
• Pipewire 0.3.48
• util-linux 2.37.4
• Mesa 22.0
• Node.JS 17.7.1
• SQLite 3.38.1
• openSSL 1.1.1n

As you can see, a lot of things are happening – and changes keep on coming. Currently, we have these items in Staging projects being tested:

• systemd 250.4: staging is finishing the QA, should happen rather soon
• Linux kernel 5.16.15
• Kubernetes 1.23.4 & 1.22.7
• NetworkManager 1.36.2
• Podman 4.0.2

Let’s see what else is being thrown at staging over the next few days – some things can pass rather quickly

I’m sure the last thing you are interested in is another type of USB Cable but hold on just a moment and work with me here. This is the USB Cable to end them all! Okay, that’s not true either. This is a solution to prolong the life of your connector ports on your phones […]