This week was filled with good news surrounding openSUSE.

On top of openSUSE Leap 15.4 reaching its beta build phase, rolling release Tumbleweed had six snapshots that updated a few networking packages and Leap 15.3 is putting out its second quarterly respin iso.

The latest snapshot is 20220302. NetworkManager 1.36.0 reworked the handling of Layer 3 configurations that results in more robust behavior when addressing information from multiple sources (DHCP, manually configured, VPN) when applied simultaneously. Performance and memory should also slightly improve with the update. PipeWire 0.3.47 had a fix that removed infinite loops and the buffer size handling was fixed that made some applications stutter. Other packages to update in the snapshot were nftables 1.0.2, ruby3.1 3.1.1, xscreensaver 6.03 and a couple of Python Package Index version updates.

Caching proxy squid 5.4.1 was updated in the 20220301 snapshot; the package had some code cleanup and made some visible developer changes. Window manager screen 4.9.0 eliminated a Common Vulnerability and Exposure that made a denial of service attack possible via a crafted UTF-8 character sequence; this was fixed by replacing the dropped combchar.diff. Other packags to update were autoyast2 4.4.32, yast2-trans and more.

A handful of RubyGem RSpec packages were updated in the 20220228 snapshot and the branding-openSUSE package was updated, which drop systemd icons for the distribution logos. The fwupd package updated to version 1.7.6. The firmware updating package added several new features like the addition of a flag for UEFI devices that never want a capsule header auto-added. It also fixed loading flashrom devices in coreboot mode. The 4.4.45 yast2-installation update fixed an issue with a VNC server during installation.

The 20220227 snapshot updated firewalld to version 1.1.0. The new version added http3 and added a couple service definitions for Web Services Dynamic Discovery. The data storage package hdf5 1.10.8 added new build tools and fixed a few vulnerabilities like CVE-2018-17432, which would have allowed an attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted hdf5 file. A switch to f-strings was made in the update of urlscan 0.9.9 and the package also updated setup.py.

Optimizing the performance of the thumbnail resizing algorithm was done in the ImageMagick 7.1.0.26 update, which arrived in snapshot 20220226. Some unrecognized coloring was also fixed in image editor. The 3D graphics package Mesa fixed some regressions in the 21.3.7 update. The Embedded Linux library (ell) 0.49 version fixed an issue affecting DHCP server. A dependency of npm 8.4.1 was added to the update of nodejs17 17.5.0 and experimental support to the fetch Application Programming Interfaces was added; this adds a --experimental-fetch flag that installs the fetch, Request, Response and Headers globals. Several Berkeley Packet Filter adjustments were made in the 5.16.11 Linux Kernel updated. The Kernel also made some fixes affecting Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Other packages to update in the snapshot were freerdp 2.6.0, libzypp 17.29.5, zypper 1.14.52 and several translations for for yast2-trans.

The snapshot from last Friday, 20220225, updated ModemManager from version 1.14.8 to 1.18.6. The DBus-activated daemon that controls mobile broadband devices and connections can run now in a ‘quick suspend/resume’ mode; no explicit data disconnection is triggered on suspend, and no explicit device re-probing is done from scratch. Instead, the daemon tries to refresh the state of all interfaces upon suspend. Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn added support for the T99W175 5G wireless module, which includes a built-in FCC unlock procedure, and Foxconn also added a new Intel MBIM Qualcomm Device Update firmware method. Fetchmail 6.4.27 updated Romanian translations and bumped up wolfSSL to version 5.1.1 in order to pull in security fixes. The 2.2.0 rubygem-faraday package was the only other package to update in the snapshot.

Leap Quarterly Respin

The quarterly respin of openSUSE Leap 15.3 iso image is expected to arrive soon. The first quarterly respin of the iso was published in October. Respins refresh the iso images based on General Availability (GA) release and contain all the updates for the past quarter. 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. More information about the release of the quarterly builds can be found on the Leap Roadmap.

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

In an effort to improve the organization of my home computer “core” I have made the search for a solution to mount my Raspberry Pi and potentially future Pis on my 2-post server rack. The solutions I found were outside of my budget for a small change so I found a solution on Thingaverse.com by […]

I have loved the openSUSE project for quite some time and I love how it keeps my old systems relevant and working beautifully. I like to test whether or not this continues to hold true on older machines, especially those that have meant a lot to me over the years. Mothballed my D630 when I […]

The next openSUSE Leap minor release, 15.4, has entered its beta release phase today and users can begin testing the minor version to find bugs before the general release schedule for June 8.

Unlike previous 15 series versions, Leap 15.4 will offer a refresh of more modern packages for the distribution.

A variety of software packages will differ from those in openSUSE Leap 15.3, but some, like the Xfce 4.16 version, will remain the same as in the previous release. Versions of Qt 5, Plasma, GNOME, Enlightenment and many other packages will also have newer versions.

The Leap 15.4 beta phase is expected to introduce a running version of Leap Micro 5.2, which is a new offering of a MicroOS for Leap. MicroOS is a variant of Tumbleweed. Leap Micro is a modern lightweight operating system that is immutable and ideal for host-container and virtualized workloads; it provides automated administration and patching. Leap Micro is well suited for decentralized computing environments and is a microservice distribution for developers, distributed computing projects and professionals. Beta testers are likely to see the first beta version of Leap Micro within a couple weeks, and will see a general release in the spring; this will happen before Leap 15.4 reaches its public release.

Progress continues behind the scenes to ensure that H.264 and gstreamer plugins can be installed through a series of clicks as needed by the end user. These should become available during a later portion of the Beta phase or when Leap 15.4 puts out its Release Candidate.

Testers are encouraged to try out Leap 15.4 on multiple laptops, workstations and other hardware devices. People testing the beta are encouraged to record their Leap Beta testing efforts on this spreadsheet. Contributors would also like feedback for those who are testing High Performance Computing on the spreadsheet.

Leap beta testers have an option to receive a gift of gratitude, so make sure to fill in all the proper information and bug reports to get one. Then send an email to ddemaio (at) opensuse.org with your address. Please make the subject title “Leap beta testings”.

Bugs should be reported on openSUSE’s bugzilla. Bugs for packages inherited from SUSE Linux Enterprise should be reported against PUBLIC SUSE Linux Enterprise SP4, server and High Availability. The policy for setting priorities on these public products listed above have been updated. A list of the Most Annoying Bugs for the Leap 15.4 beta will be posted on the wiki.

The road map shows openSUSE Leap 15.4 will reach its Release Candidate phase in late April and the Gold Master is expected on May 27, which will be followed by a public release on June 8. The documentation and translations deadline is May 14.

Architectures available for testing include x86_64, aarch64, PowerPC and s390x. Those interested in beta testing images for openSUSE Leap 15.4 Windows Subsystem for Linux can contact the Leap release manager Luboš Kocman or the factory mailing list.

Last week, the ivykis library, the most important core dependency of syslog-ng landed in EPEL 9 successfully. There are still plenty of dependencies missing, but this way, I could submit a slightly cut down version of syslog-ng to EPEL 9. Hopefully the rest of the dependencies will arrive in EPEL 9 as well. I plan to update the syslog-ng package as soon as the dependencies arrive. Luckily, these are only needed to enable some less frequently used syslog-ng destination drivers, no core functionality is affected.

Syslog-ng is right now in the epel-testing repository. You can speed up moving the package to the stable repository by doing some testing.

You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/a-minimalist-syslog-ng-package-is-heading-to-epel-9

The release manager for openSUSE Leap Luboš Kocman is expected to announce the Beta release phase of Leap 15.4 this week, according to the roadmap. That means the openSUSE Community can download, install and test the release.

Leap’s Beta phase has rolling updates until it’s official release, which will then transition the release to a maintenance phase.

To celebrate this Beta phase, why not have a Pizza Party and test the openSUSE Leap 15.4 Beta.

If there’s no party near you, organize your own; just add it to the wiki page and invite others from your local community to join you in testing openSUSE Leap. Get some pizza delivered to your home or office and bring friends and colleagues together. A new openSUSE user may show up! If you are unsure of how to do it, read this.

Download the Beta…

The Leap 15.4 Beta is available on get.opensuse.org. Pick an image fitting your purposes. Install it on a VM, virtualbox or on your hardware.

Testing and helping out!

Report or help fix any problems you encounter. The focus of a Beta Pizza Party is about building a local openSUSE community and testing Leap 15.4 Betas. This means installing it and submitting bug reports.

During the beta, testers are encouraged to record their testing on the Beta testing worksheet. Find out how to report bugs on the openSUSE wiki.

Discussions about openSUSE development takes place on the openSUSE Factory mailing list. If you want to help out, please see the wiki page on contributing to Factory. Contributing is easy and welcomed!

Architectures available for testing include x86_64, aarch64, PowerPC and s390. People interested in armv7 and other architectures should read the announcement about openSUSE Step.

Those interested in beta testing images for openSUSE Leap 15.4 Windows Subsystem for Linux can contact the Leap release manager Kocman or email the factory mailing list.

Leap beta testers have an option to receive a gift of gratitude, so make sure to fill in all the proper information and bug reports to get one. Then send an email to ddemaio (at) opensuse.org with your address. Please make the subject title “Leap beta testings”.

Have a lot of fun!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we managed to do the impossible: despite missing one snapshot 0220), we STILL published 7 snapshots (0217, 0218, 0219, 0221, 0222, 0223, and 0224). Of course, this just happens by coincidence, as 0217 could only be released late evening and 0224 happens to come out already before writing the weekly review.

And what did those snapshots bring us? See for yourself:

• KDE Plasma 5.24.1 (0217) & 5.24.2 (0224)
• KDE Frameworks 5.91.0
• Linux kernel 5.16.10 (simpledrm disabled again)
• systemd 249.10
• systemd packaging changes: systemd-sysvinit will be renamed to systemd-sysvcompat: most users won’t need it (sysv support is minimized anyway, and Tumbleweed no longer ships any sysv init script)
• Mozilla Firefox 97.0.1
• expat 2.4.6
• tigervnc 1.12.0: the ‘vncserver’ script no longer exists, see https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/blob/master/unix/vncserver/HOWTO.md

That’s pretty cool and everything reported last week as coming (except the gcc12 and python long-lasting efforts) have thus been delivered. As usual, we don’t stop there, and staging projects are already prepared with these updates:

• Linux kernel 5.16.11 (also addressing build fails with gcc12)
• Mesa 21.3.7
• Python 3.6 interpreter will be removed (We have roughly 45 python36-FOO packages left)
• Python 3.10 as the distro default interpreter (a bit down the line, after py36 is done)
• GCC 12 introduction has started to be as ready as possible for when the upstream release happens.

Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed continue to be released at a steady pace. There have been seven snapshots released since our last review.

The latest snapshot is 20220223 and it dropped an updated version of systemd 249.10. The version changed the settings to increase the external core size for processing coredumps to infinity. Flatpak 1.12.6 updated translations and fixed a bug that sometimes caused repo corruption when downloads were interrupted or canceled. A handful of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures were fixed in the mariadb 10.7.3 update. CVE-2021-46665, CVE-2021-46664, CVE-2021-46661, CVE-2021-46668 and CVE-2021-46663, which caused the application to crash, were all fixed in the updated version. Many CVEs were also fixed with the the XML parser expat 2.4.6; one of those was fixing an integer overflow in the copyString function. Several other packages updated in the snapshot including autoyast2 4.4.31, yast2-security 4.4.12 and yast2-installation 4.4.44.

Text editor nano 6.2 came in snapshot 20220222. In this version, the file browser clears the prompt bar when using --minibar, and better analyzing of code with a newer source file parser pyflakes is now an option available for nano. Virtualization package Xen added multiple x86_64 patches in the 4.16.0_06 version and an update of both vulkan-tools and vulkan-loader 1.3.204.0 brought new features like a profile tooling solution for application developers that enables developers to generate their own app-specific feature profiles. There was a kernel-firmware update in the snapshot, and yast2-firstboot 4.4.8 added an option to have a registration step enabled for SUSE Linux Enterprise even when running in Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Web browser Firefox had an update to 97.0.1 in snapshot 20220221. The Mozilla project fixes centered on some functionality with TikTok and Hulu. The update of php7 7.4.28 was a security release meant to fix CVE-2021-21708, which could have allowed an attacker to inject a malicious file, leading to a crash or a Segmentation fault. Italian, Germany, Chinese and Chinese (Taiwan) languages were updated in the libstorage-ng 4.4.88 update. The general-purpose e-mail package mailutils 3.14 had Transport Layer Security support rewritten from scratch and fixed a timezone calculation bug. Other packages to update in the snapshot were yast2-installation 4.4.42, python-lxml 4.8.0, libinput 1.20.0 and more.

Just two packages were update in snapshot 20220219. The Linux Kernel update to 5.16.10 was part of the snapshot. The kernel had several updates for the Network File System protocol, and there were a few Small Computer System Interface fixes. There were also a few updates in the kernel for arm64 that added detection for Trace Buffer Extensions. The update of systemd-rpm-macros 16 fixed some dependencies and renamed systemd-sysvinit to systemd-sysvcompat.

The native viewer for tigervnc now supports full screen over a subset of monitors thanks to the 1.12.0 update in snapshot 20220218. Passwords and usernames can now be specified via the environment for the native viewer with packages that interact with graphical applications on remote machines. Rendering engine webkit2gtk3 2.34.6 fixed several crashes. The package also fixed the rendering of scrollbars when overlay scrollbars are disabled, and webkit2gtk3 also fixed builds in a number of situations where the main OpenGL library was not called.

Both GNOME and KDE Plasma users received updates in snapshot 20220217. Plasma 5.24.1 was updated and the new Long-Term Support version that will be available in Leap 15.4 made some modification to the Dolphin file manager. The KScreen manager adjusted a workaround for an unknown Qt issue that caused reverted dialogs to be invisible. Window manager KWin had multiple fixes to include one for Wayland that had the decoration tooltips mispositioned. The cursor color was fixed in the xwayland 22.1.0 update. An update of gnome-shell-extensions 41.2 fixed the window tracking to avoid missing icons.The directory listing program tree 2.0.2 changed some settings and fixed a HTML URL output issue. There were a few more package updated in the snapshot.

Snapshot 20220216 was released last week shortly after last week’s Tumbleweed review was published.

Recently I got some complaints that it is difficult to figure out how to contact the syslog-ng team to get help or report problems. Most of this information is available both on the syslog-ng website and at the syslog-ng repository on GitHub, but collecting here all information might be still useful for some people.

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/contacting-the-syslog-ng-team-reporting-problems-asking-questions

We realized that, apart from the blog post presenting our D-Installer project, we have not reported any YaST activity during 2022 here in our blog. Since we are in the Beta phase of the development of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4 (which will also be the base for openSUSE Leap 15.4) we are quite focused on helping to diagnose and fix the problems found by the intensive and extensive tests done by SUSE QA department, partners and customers. We know that’s not the part of our job our audience wants to read about… and to be honest is not the part we enjoy writing about either.

Fortunately, two months after our latest regular report, we have some interesting more bits to share.

New YaST Features

While debugging and fixing issues we also found time to implement quite some interesting changes and new features in YaST. Let’s quickly go through a summary.

• Improvements in the way YaST handles the activation of encrypted devices.
• Better integration of NFS management in the Partitioner.
• Usability and speed enhancements for DASD formatting on S/390 systems.
• Support for GRUB2 password protection in AutoYaST (check the recently extended documentation for more information).
• Better handling of the errors found analyzing storage devices.
• Adapted the keyboard layouts used by YaST.
• Support for selecting during installation the desired Linux Security Module (note the screenshots on that pull request are not fully up-to-date and do not exactly reflect the current user interface).
• Improvements in how the _netdev mount option is handled for remote file-systems. Including changes in the general handling and the new warning in the Partitioner.
• Adapted YaST to be compliant with the inclusive naming initiative. This implies changes in different parts of YaST, like this, this, this or this.
• Definition of specific per-product schemas to validate the AutoYaST profiles.
• Integration of the package yast2-firstboot-wsl into yast2-firstboot.
• Adjusted creation of snapshots in YaST for transactional systems like MicroOS.
• New capability for roles and products to specify a default timeout for the boot-loader configuration.
• Support for switching themes.
• Adapted handling of network configuration if iBFT (iSCSI Boot Firmware Table) is used during installation.

We also found time to implement some internal changes that, even though they don’t have a direct impact on final users, may be interesting for the more technical audience like people who usually debug or develop YaST:

• Better ways to manually test yast2-storage and debug storage-related issues.
• Usage of RSpec verifying doubles and better YaST module mocking. See this announcement in the yast-devel mailing list.

Progress on D-Installer

As you all know from our previous blog post mentioned above, we are also working on a side project codenamed D-Installer, as our main YaST duties permit. We want to turn our initial proof of concept into something that you can actually try, so the team is working on a few topics at the same time.

On the one hand, we are redefining our D-Bus API thinking about how it should look like in the future. As a side effect, Martin is improving the ruby-dbus library to support a few features that we need, like better support for D-Bus properties.

On the other hand, we are redesigning the user interface. Although we have not implemented the new design, you can see the approach we would like to follow in our mock-ups. :-)

More to Come

As you can see, we have been quite busy lately and we plan to remain so. The bright side is that both YaST and D-Installer will keep evolving at a good pace. The not-so-bright one is that we are not sure when we will be able to blog again. But we promise we will try to recover the biweekly cadence. Meanwhile do as we do and have a lot of fun!