Did you join the beta program, but somehow wish you could disable a specific beta feature? This is now possible with the new Manage Beta Features page. What Changed Exactly? Before, you joined the beta program and all beta features were enabled. If you somehow didn’t want a certain beta feature, you couldn’t disable it. You had to leave the beta program to disable all beta features. Now, you can manage which beta feature is...

I’m happy to announce that I became an IBM Power Champion for the year 2022. This blog is long overdue, however with the conflict raging in our neighbor country, Ukraine, I just did not feel the strength to write about anything. In this blog I try to introduce myself and share my plans for this year. But before doing so, let me share my new badge with you:

My background

My title at work is “Open Source Evangelist” and Power does not appear anywhere in my job description. I do not have a Power system under my desk right now. How could I still become an IBM Power Champion?

The story goes back almost 30 years. That is when I first started using Power, some RS/6000 boxes at Dartmouth College. At that time, I did not know that I was using systems based on POWER processors. I did not even know that open source software exists, but I was most likely already using some. All I was aware, that those were the fastest systems I used up to that point.

A few years later I was introduced to open source software and became a Linux admin as a student job. When I got a trainee position at an IT company, my task was to install open source software on IBM Power servers running AIX. At that time it meant compiling software from source, as pre-built binaries were not yet available. I did so also on the fastest server of Hungary at that time: an IBM Power server larger than an average fridge.

Soon I started to work at Genesi, supporting Linux on Pegasos, a PowerPC workstation. I also ported openSUSE and Ubuntu to various PowerPC development systems by Freescale. This was also the time when I became more interested in open source user communities. I became a powerdeveloper.org community contributor and moderator and later I had the same roles on power.org by IBM. In my last year at Genesi I started to give talks about Linux on Power at various events in Hungary and in Europe.

You can read more about my Power experiences at https://opensource.com/article/20/10/power-architecture

I spent the past twelve years as open source evangelist for open source IT security software: syslog-ng and sudo. Officially I do not have anything to do with Power, but in practice I work with Power regularly. I build syslog-ng packages for the platform. I also use Power to test and tune syslog-ng. For many years Power 9 was the fastest platform I had access to to run syslog-ng. I do not have access to Power 10, but I suspect that after a quick break the crown is back to Power. Obviously, the IBM Power E1080 would be an overkill to run syslog-ng :-)

You can read more about being an open source evangelist at https://opensource.com/article/21/1/open-source-evangelist

Being an open source evangelist taught me to share my thoughts loud and clear. I have hundreds of blogs and articles on-line and I have many thousands of posts on social media. Even if my primary focus is syslog-ng and sudo, many people know me as a vocal Power advocate. It’s not surprising: if I am interested in something, I use my experiences as open source evangelist to share my thoughts on it. I’m definitely very interested in Power. Within Power my focus is open source, mainly Linux.

My plans

Just like most developers, I prefer to work on a machine under my desk, not on some remote hosts. (See my blog on the topic: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/saving-power/) I planned to buy a Power 9, either a reduced cost AC922 or a Blackbird from Raptor Computing. However, the unfortunate events in Ukraine made this plan impossible, as our currency lost much of its value.

As someone with an environmental engineer degree I’d be even more happy to have a Power 10 box under my desk to work with. More performance and it is also a lot more power efficient. Of course, with a Power system under my desk I could do a lot more practical work: testing various Linux distributions, providing fixes and/or feedback to developers. But a Power 10 desktop is probably just a dream for now. Nevertheless, advocating Power is still something very important for me. Although not as good as having a system at home, I can access remotely access Power 9 systems at one of the universities providing public access to open source developers, as well as at a friends' place. I plan to write a series of articles covering Power and open source. If all goes well, I’ll publish a new article each month here.

Answering the question, "How well does the Raspberry Pi 400 openSUSE."

I am hoping that these just might be a real thing! There have been other Indigogo campaigns that haven’t come to see the production light of day and some of which, I had really hoped to see be a real thing. When I saw this campaign for the Commodore 64 keycaps, I was already skeptical […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Over here, the weather is getting better by the day, spring is around the corner. But the Tumbleweed developers seem not to care that much, as we managed to release a full 7 snapshots in the last week (0303…0309).

The main changes in those snapshots included:

• libva 2.14.0
• KDE Gear 21.12.3
• binutils 2.38
• Libreoffice 7.3.1.3
• Poppler 22.03.0
• Node.JS 17.6.0
• VLC 3.0.17
• openSSH 8.9p1
• Rust 1.59
• go 1.16.15 & 1.17.8
• Ruby Rails 7.0

The stagings are not overcrowded at the moment, there is space for all your submissions. But there are still things in the makings, such as:

• systemd 250.3: breaks python-pyudev
• Linux kernel 5.16.14
• util-linux 2.37.4
• Mozilla Firefox 98.0 & Thunderbird 91.7.0
• cURL 7.82.0: breaks libzypp and pycurl
• KDE Plasma 5.24.3
• dbus 1.14.0

As explained in my previous post, we do have some features already in mind for syslog-ng 4, even though the work on creating a long term set of objectives for the syslog-ng project is not finished yet. One of the themes that I have working code for already, is typing.

syslog-ng traditionally assumes that log data, even if it comes in a structured form (like RFC5424 structured data or JSON) is primarily textual in nature. For this reason, name-value pairs in syslog-ng are text values just as the log message as a whole. The need for typing however came up previously, most notably in cases where we sent data to a consumer that supported typing, such as:

• Elastic like other similar consumers use JSON, and attributes can have non-text types
• SQL columns have types
• Riemann metrics can have types

Read the rest of the blog at https://syslog-ng-future.blog/syslog-ng-4-theme-typing/

It has been possible to use wildcards in the sudoers file for many years. This can make configuration easier and more flexible, but it also introduces problems of its own. Regular expressions, introduced in in sudo 1.9.10, allow you to create more fine grained rules. From this blog you will learn about some of the problems when you use wildcards in your sudoers file, and how using regular expressions can resolve those problems.

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.sudo.ws/posts/2022/03/sudo-1.9.10-using-regular-expressions-in-the-sudoers-file/

Version 3.36 of syslog-ng brings us many interesting new features. There is now basic support for system() source on MacOS, TLS 1.3 ciphers can now be restricted, TLS keylog support was added, symlink creation to the latest file, and there are many new possibilities in syslog parsing.

From this blog, you can learn about some of the new 3.36 features, and we will test symlink creation, which is a community-contributed feature.

Development of syslog-ng 4.0 is already under way, and syslog-ng 3.36 already contains some under-the-hood changes for 4.0. You can learn more about this topic from Balázs Scheidler’s latest blog. Balázs is the original author and still an active developer of syslog-ng: https://syslog-ng-future.blog/syslog-ng-future-the-path-to-syslog-ng-4/

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-3-36-news-better-tls-1-3-basic-macos-support-and-many-more

Last couple of weeks I have been working on the 16k columns support in Calc. There's been a lot of work on this already by Noel and others, but so far this has been hidden behind the experimental option, and normally documents open only with the "normal" 1024 columns support. The goal of this work is to finish the 16k support stable enough for it to be the default, so that people who need this many columns can finally get them without any complications.

As of now all Calc tests pass with the default switched to 16k, and I've also dealt with all the known problems from tdf#133764 (minus few rare corner cases that I can deal with later). But I'm pretty sure there are more hidden problems lurking, either crashes because of incorrect bounds checking, or performance problems when some code suddenly deals with 16x more columns. So the next step is to enable this by default in master and collect compl... feedback from  guin... testers :).

I have the change already in Gerrit and expect to push it later today. If you'll be lucky unlucky noticing any problems, please report them in bugzilla and set your bugreport to block tdf#133764, and I'll sort it out. One of the things that remains to be decided is how to handle this from the users point of view. So far it seems to it'll be fine to just load everything in 16k without saying anything, but a part of collecting feedback is checking whether and how much backwards compatibility handling would be needed. If all goes well, and so far I don't see why it shouldn't, 7.4 will ship with 16k columns being the default.

Just to be clear, this is only about columns, not rows. The experimental option also changes rows from 1048576 to 16777216, but that's not focus of the work, so the default will stay at 1048576. First of all, Excel also only supports 1m rows, so there's not(?) such a demand for it, and it'll also require more work (16m rows is a lot of pixels, and it doesn't fit into 32bits).

This work is funded/sponsored by DEVxDAO as part of its mission to support open source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks.

Fun meaningless fact: Column 16384 is called XFD.

The Commodore 64 is “famous” for being the most prolific computer of the past. For many people it in the 80s, it was their first computer and as it does hold that position for me. It has been and remains today the computer I get incredible joy out of using. When My Retro Computer made […]