If something is not broken, do not fix it. Following that principle, the YaST Team spent almost no time on the latest sprint working on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 or openSUSE Leap 15.3. But that doesn’t mean we remained idle. Quite the opposite, we invested our time reorganizing some of the YaST internals. An effort that hopefully will pay off in the mid term and that affects topics like:

• Management of local users, specially during installation.
• Unification of the code for configuring the network.
• Error handling and reporting.
• Reorganization of our UI toolkit.

So let’s take a closer look to all that.

In our previous blog post we already announced we were considering to refactor the YaST Users modules to improve the management of local users and to reduce the risk associated to the current complexity of the module. We can now say we are making good progress in that front. We are working on a separate branch of the development repository that is not submitted to Tumbleweed or any other available distribution, which means we still have nothing concrete our users can test. But we hope to have the creation of users during installation completely rewritten by the end of next sprint, while still remaining compatible with all other YaST components that rely on user management.

Another milestone we reached on the latest sprint regarding YaST internal organization was the removal of the legacy network component known as LanItems. Everything started with the report of bug#1180085 that was produced because the installer, which uses the new Y2Network (a.k.a. network-ng) infrastructure for most tasks, was still relying on that legacy component for proposing the installation of the wpa_supplicant package. So we took the opportunity to seek and destroy all usage of the old component all along YaST, replacing the calls to it with the equivalent ones in the new infrastructure. Less code to maintain in parallel, less room for bugs.

That was not the only occasion during this sprint in which we turned a bug into an opportunity to improve YaST internals. It was also reported that using an invalid value for the bootmode or startmode fields of a network configuration file could produce a crash in YaST. In addition to fixing that problem, we took the opportunity to introduce a whole new general mechanism to handle errors in YaST and report them to the user in a structured and centralized way. Apart from the YaST Network module, that new internal infrastructure will be adopted by several parts of YaST during subsequent sprints. In fact, it’s already being used in the rewritten management of local users mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Last but not least, we would like to mention that we keep working to improve the new unified repository of LibYUI. Apart from revamping the README file that serves as landing page, we created new scripts for a more pleasant and flexible building process, we are improving the compatibility with the Gtk backend and with libyui-mga (the extra components developed and maintained by Mageia) and we published the API documentation in a central location that is now automatically updated on every change of the repository.

Of course, during the process of implementing all the mentioned improvements, we fixed several other bugs for SLE-15-SP3 and openSUSE Leap 15.3 and also for older releases and Tumbleweed. But, who wants to write about boring bug fixes? We prefer to go back to work and prepare more exciting news for our next report in two weeks from now. See you then!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week seemed rather calm except for a minor glitch with the Linux kernel 5.11.16, which, due to a build failure, was out of sync between the various kernel sub-packages for one snapshot. The pace of the snapshots was averaged at 5 snapshots (0423, 0425, 0426, 0427, and 0428).

The changes included things like:

• Linux kernel 5.11.16 & 5.12.0
• KDE Gear 21.04.0 (formerly KDE Applications)
• Mozilla Firefox 88.0
• NetworkManager 1.30.4
• Virtualbox 6.1.20: some services were renamed; e.g. vboxautostart.service” is replaced by “vboxautostart-service.service

The plan for the upcoming snapshots currently includes:

• TeXLive 2021
• Move openmpi default from openmpi2 to openmpi4
• GNOME 40.1
• icu 69.1: for the ring packages, nodejs15 seems to be the last blocker
• Switch from go 1.15 to go 1.16: most packages fixed, the last failure in Staging:M is cilium
• GCC 11 as default compiler: Move from special-purpose Staging:Gcc7 to Staging:O (incl. openQA test coverage). There are a few more build failures to be addressed.
• UsrMerge: The current state is that we checked in all changes and are planning on actually doing the switch somewhen in the not too far future, likely together with the planned distro-rebuild for GCC 11

Six openSUSE Tumbleweed were released this week.

The snapshots delivered updated versions of curl, KDE Gear, LLVM, GNOME 40, Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird and much more.

The 20210428 snapshot updated the Linux Kernel to version 5.12 and text editor vim to version 8.2.2800. The virtualbox update to 6.1.20 took care of a hang for guest operating systems under circumstances where Hyper-V is used and the VM packaged added support for kernel versions 5.11 and 5.12. Domaine name cacher dnsmasq 2.85 added --dynamic-host options and debugger strace 5.12.0 made improvements and implemented an option to display SELinux contexts.

Daniel Stenberg detailed the patch release of curl 7.76.1 in a video on April 14, which made it into snapshot 20210427. No new features were made with the curl release, but Stenberg acknowledged contributions in the video and highlighted the selection of HTTP/2 over HTTPS. Open-source file pager less updated to version 581, which fixed some crashes and added several new options in the release. Utility probing package os-prober updated to version 1.78 and firmware package shim-leap updated to version 15.4.

Snapshot 20210426 updated about 15 packages, which included the 5.11.16 Linux Kernel and an updated 11.0.11.0 version of java-11-openjdk, which had a very large update and addressed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. A fix for container runtime binary labels were made in the update of container-selinux 2.160.1. A major version of ncompress 5.0 cleaned up some code and fixed the recursive mode. General purpose cryptographic library libgcrypt provided some accelerated implementations for x86_64 in the 1.9.3 update. Other packages to update in the snapshot are pipewire 0.3.26, rubygem-nokogiri 1.11.3, python-pydot 1.4.2 and more.

KDE Gear 21.04.0, which is the new name for KDE apps, arrived in snapshot 20210425. A new menu option was added in the file archiver Ark to show the about dialog for kpart. File manager Dolphin removed some input methods and fixed the alignment of the location bar during the first startup. KDE’s text editor Kate fixed a memory leak and some compiler warnings. Video editor Kdenlive fixed a few crashes and the keyframe limit on imports from the clipboard. GNOME 40 had multiple updates. Translations were made with gedit 40.1, Document viewer evince 40.1 added three patches to remove more SyncTeX, and gnome-tweaks 40.0 made a fix bumping up from the beta version, which failed to recognize when GNOME Shell was running in the release candidate version. Both gtk3 and gtk4 were updated to 3.24.28 and 4.2.0 respectively. GTK4 brought some event matching fixes for missed layouts for Wayland. Other packages updated in the snapshot were NetworkManager 1.30.4, glib2 2.68.1, pango 1.48.4, rsyslog 8.2104.0 and wireshark 3.4.5, which fixed the printing of GeoIP information.

Snapshot 20210423 updated Mozilla’s Firefox to version 88.0 and Thunderbird to version 78.10.0. The browser has a new feature with PDF forms now supporting JavaScript embedded in PDF files. The open-source browser also made a change to the microphone and camera prompts reducing the number of times a prompt asks to grant device access on a website. Nine CVEs were fixed with the Thunderbird email client; one of which could have executed an arbitrary FTP command on FTP servers using an encoded URL. Regressions were fixed with redis 6.2.2 and a Xen update restored a change that was silently removed almost two years ago. YaST had multiple packages updated and many of those entailed some spec file cleanups.

The week’s opening snapshot, 20210422, gave audio users an update with Audacity 3.0.2; the audio software added some new preferences for output and improved diagnostics reporting. The major version of llvm12 12.0.0 arrived and the compiler brought in a ton of changes. There were changes for architecture targets, the WebAssembly target, go bindings, C Application Programming Interfaces and much more. AppStream made some parsing improvements and improved a text wrap for when words could be excessively long. Text shaping package harfbuzz, developed by everyone’s favorite font expert Behdad Esfahbod, improved some shape joining scripts and provided documentation improvements. Other packages updated in the snapshot were hwinfo 21.73, sqlite 3.35.5, sudo 1.9.6 and more.

Announcement

The Kubic Project is proud to announce that Snapshot 20210426 has been released containing Kubernetes 1.21.0.

Release Notes are avaialble HERE.

Upgrade Steps

All newly deployed Kubic clusters will automatically be Kubernetes 1.21.0 from this point.

For existing clusters, please follow our new documentation our wiki HERE

Thanks and have a lot of fun!

The Kubic Team

The openSUSE Project and its community, contributors and release engineers have entered the Release Candidate phase for the upcoming openSUSE Leap 15.3 version today after a snapshot was released, which transitions the release to a new phase.

The RC signals the package freeze for software that will make it into the distribution, which is used on server, workstation, desktop and for virtualization and container use.

openSUSE Leap offers a clear advantage for servers by providing at least 18 months of updates for each release. There is a projection as of April 2021 that Leap 15 will extend to Leap 15.5. Leap Major Release (15.x) extends maintenance and support until a successor. At present, a successor has not been declared; Leap 15’s lifecycle fully aligns with SUSE Linux Enterprise and uses the source code and Leap is built with the exact same binary packages..

Desktop environments for the release include KDE’s Long-Term-Support version of Plasma 5.18, GNOME 3.34 and Xfce 4.16. Packages for artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are available for data scientists who use the release. A list of some of the packages in openSUSE Leap 15.3 can be found on the Wiki.

Leap release manager Lubos Kocman recommends Beta and RC testers use the “zypper dup” command in the terminal when upgrading to the General Availability (GA) once it’s released.

During the development stage of Leap versions, contributors, packagers and the release team use a rolling development method that are categorized into phases rather than a single milestone release; snapshots are released with minor version software updates once passing automated testing until the final release of the Gold Master (GM). At that point, the GM becomes available to the public (GA expected on June 2) and the distribution shifts from a rolling development method into a supported release where it receives updates until its End of Life (EOL).

Kocman listed the following important dates related to the release:

• May 14 - Translation deadline
• May 21 - Gold Master
• June 2 - Public Availability of the Release (5 to 10 days after GM)
• June 2 - Start of Release retrospective survey
• June 16 - Collect feedback from the retrospective

Users upgrading to openSUSE Leap 15.3 need to be aware that upgrading directly from versions before openSUSE Leap 15.2 is not recommended. Due to the upgrade path, it is highly recommended to upgrade to Leap 15.2 before upgrading to Leap 15.3.

The community is supportive and engages with people who use older versions of Leap through community channels like the mailing lists, Matrix, Discord, Telegram, and Facebook.

Here is the 28th Chiclet sized podcast episode Return of BDLL Digital Sign Solution with Screenly on the Raspberry Pi Ventoy | Multi-ISO Bootable USB Drive Made Easy TiddlyWiki | Personal, non-linear, Note Taking Application on Linux openSUSE Corner openSUSE Smiles I purchased a new printer and had some issues with the proprietary plugin. The […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Tumbleweed is in full swing – with a staggering 6 snapshots published since the last weekly review. And this, despite me having to discard 2 snapshots (one for being totally broken, and one was discarded because it took too long to test). The six snapshots published were 0415, 0416, 0417, 0418, 0420, and 0422.

The major changes included:

• Mozilla Thunderbird 78.9.1
• Poppler 21.04.0
• Postfix 3.5.10
• Mesa 21.0.2
• Linux kernel 5.11.15
• Pipewire 0.3.25
• Ffmpeg 4.4
• LXQt 0.17.0
• GCC 10.3.0
• RPM 4.16.1.3
• Lua 5.4.3
• SQLite 3.35.5
• LLVM 12
• Python 3.9 modules: besides python36-FOO and python38-FOO, we are testing to also shop python39-FOO modules; we already have the interpreter after all. Python 3.8 will remain the default for now. Building in snapshot 0415

This was quite a list of things happening, and the python 3.9 module introduction definitively took a while to enusre we don’t just trip over our own feet.

Things keep on moving, and we are currently testing integration of the following bits and pieces for Tumbleweed:

• Linux kernel 5.11.16+
• KDE Applications 21.04.0
• Mozilla Firefox 88.0
• GCC 11 as default compiler
• TeXLive 2021
• UsrMerge is progressing well, thanks to Ludwig for his continued work here. The current state is that we checked in all changes and are planning on actually doing the switch somewhen in the not too far future

Integrated development environemnts (IDE) are using their own folders within your code repositories to store their settings. This can become annoying when working on a git repository and they keep popping up as untracked files:

Gamers using openSUSE Tumbleweed have at least two package updates in the rolling release that enhanced performance on their system and offer new features.

Both the 3D Graphics Library Mesa and computer opponent package Pentobi each landed in a separate snapshot. There have been four Tumbleweed snapshots released so far this week.

Snapshot 20210420 brought in nearly a dozen package updates, which included an update of GNU Compiler Collection 10.3.0. The updated GCC disabled the Parallel Thread Execution, nvptx, offloading for AArch64 and ffmpeg-4 4.4 improved AV1 support and it monochrome encoding. A couple YaST packages were updated. More specifically, the update of yast2-installation to 4.4.4 removed some system directory conflicts and made some changes to the spec-cleaner. Other packages to update in the snapshot were CPU balancer irqbalance 1.8.0, kdenetwork-filesharing 20.12.3 and rpm 4.16.1.3.

The 21.0.2 version of Mesa and Mesa-drivers arrived in snapshot 20210418. There were several optimizations and additions on the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver front where sparse memory support is in place. The update also moved osmesa build to Mesa-drivers since swrast driver has been removed from Mesa. Fast streaming XML parser expat 2.3.0 had a bug fix that no longer triggers an undefined behavior. The 1.10.6 graphene package, which is a thin layer of graphic data types enabled Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 on x86_64. Serval translations were made with the update of iso-codes 4.6.0. Google’s regular expression library re2 had two months worth of updates and one of those makes it easier to swap in a scalable reader-writer lock. The Linux Kernel updated from 5.11.12 to 5.11.15 and there were several KVM for x86_64. Other packages to update in the snapshot were libxcrypt 4.4.19, librsvg 2.50.4 and pipewire 0.3.25.

Board game players received a major version update of Pentobi in snapshot 20210417. The new pentobi 19.0 version displays the manual with an external browser, which removes the dependency on the Qt WebView library. The Qt SVG library is no longer needed and loading game files in encodings other than UTF-8 is no longer supported. The only other package in the snapshot was rubygem-tmuxinator 2.0.3, which had a minor update to add support for terminal multiplexer tmux 3.2.

The snapshot starting off the week, 20210415, updated Mozilla Thunderbird 78.9.1, which addressed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures that created an inability to send encrypted OpenPGP emails after importing a crafted OpenPGP key. PDF renderer poppler 21.04.0 fixed word ordering and a crash in files with malformed signatures. Web development package perl-Mojolicious 9.17 deprecated some format parameters and mail server package postfix 3.5.10 made a security fix that was introduced in a previous version, which had some internal Input and Output errors during the smtp(8) to tlsproxy(8) handshake.

Matomo is an open source PHP/MySQL  based web analytics application to track online visits to websites and displays reports on these visits. It does what Google Analytics does, but it is open source. Matomo has commercial cloud based offering for those who do not want to host their own instance but the code is there on GitHub (https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo) for anyone who is interested.

I decided to first test drive the cloud based solution and then install my own instance.