Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This was quite a strange week. Almost every single day has shown a new problem, be it with new Tumbleweed snapshots directly, or, more often, the infrastructure used to build/test it. Luckily, we do have a testing framework that saves us from publishing all those problems, and most infra issues also did not cause real problems, that would not be solved by simply waiting longer. With all this, we ended up publishing just two snapshots this week (1114 and 1117).

The main changes in those two snapshots were:

• Mesa 20.2.2
• Mozilla Thunderbird 78.4.3
• KDE Plasma 5.20.3
• Linux kernel 5.9.8
• PostgreSQL 13.1

The Staging area is currently filled with these changes:

• firewalld: switch from iptables backend to nftables
• The YaST changes as promised in https://yast.opensuse.org/blog/2020-11-10/sprint-112
• brp-check-suse: a bug fix in how it detected dangling symlinks (it detected the, but did not fail as it was supposed to) is causing some package build failures now (Staging:A at this moment)
• permissions package: prepares for easier listing, while supporting a full /usr merge
• RPM 4.16: still a few packages build failures
• Ruby 3.0: mainly YaST not ready for that switch
• First experiments with rpmlint 2.0 started in Staging:M
• openssl 3.0: currently alpha 9 in Staging:O

The attentive reader might have seen that GNOME 3.38.1 is neither listed in the updates that were shipped, not in the staging areas. It is in the current snapshot in QA, so no longer staged, but also not yet shipped. No promise yet, not all tests are conclusive, but there is a chance that it will finally be part of Tumbleweed in the next days.

Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released so far this week.

Snapshot 20201117 provides the latest update of packages for the rolling release. Among the packages to update was Mozilla Thunderbird to version 78.4.3; the email client updated a Rust patch and brought in a new feature from a previous minor version that prompts for an address to be used when starting an email from an address book entry with multiple addresses. KDE’s Plasma 5.20.3 stopped the loading of multiple versions of the same plugin in the task manager KSysGuard and there were many other bug fixes for Plasma users. Four months of shell scripts were updated in the hxtools 20201116 version; one of the changes to gpsh changed the tmp location to /var/tmp, which was to avoid saving potentially large files to tmpfs. The Linux Kernel made a jump from 5.9.1 to 5.9.8, which had a change for Btrfs as well as several USB changes. Database package postgresql 13 had its first point release to 13.1, which took care of three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures and fixed a time test case so it works when the USA is not observing daylight-savings time. The graphical tool for administering virtual machines, virt-manager slimmed down the filesystem device editor User Interface. Text editor vim had a fix for when a crash happens when using a popup window with “latin1” encoding and python 3.8.6 took care of CVE-2019-20916.

An update of the 3D Graphics and drivers package Mesa 20.2.2 was updated in snapshot 20201114. This new version of mesa was primarily a bug fix release and implemented the Vulkan 1.2 Application Programming Interfaces and OpenGL 4.6 API, but some drivers don’t support either. The only major version to arrive in Tumbleweed this week was Python module python-xdg 5.0.0; the new major version provides no upstream changelog. The patterns-desktop package update renamed the laptop pattern to mobile in it’s update from 20170319 to 20201106. The 3.5.8 package of postfix brought a memory leak fix and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) Protocol, srt 1.4.2, package improved the logging functionality by means of defining new and more fine-grained Functional Areas (FA) to which log messages are assigned; this was done to prevent too many debug log messages from the library influencing performance with the debug logging turned on. Some CVE updates in the 20201110 ucode-intel package addressed security vulnerabilities in some Intel processors; these included updates of INTEL-SA-00381 and INTEL-SA-00389. The xen 4.14.0_12 package added several patches and improved performance of live migrations. YaST had some packages update, which included adding methods in the yast2 4.3.41 package to decide if hibernation should be proposed, and the yast2-storage-ng 4.3.20 package disabled the “Device” menu items for Network File System (NFS) shares.

Progress is being made on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, but there is not date when it might be functioning again.

Some of you may be wondering what I have been up to lately since I took a break from my work in the KDE community. Well, it was time for a change, a change towards family, friends and a more local life. The result is a more balanced, a more grown up me. These changes in my life lead to me having a small family and a group of new friends, both of which I spend a lot of time with. They brought more light into my life, one could say.

That is not all I want to talk about, however. I the past 1.5 years I worked on a new project of mine that combines my love for software with the physical world. I created a product and brought it to the market last month. Now, we’re ready for the international launch of Organic Lighting. The product is a design smart lamp for the living room. It combines unique and dynamic visual effects with natural, sustainable materials.
Meet our Aurora lamp:

It’s a connected device that can be eighter controlled using its physical knob on the front, or via its web ui (or REST interface). Effects can be changed, tweaked and its firmware can be updated (nobody should want an IoT device that can’t get security of feature updates). The concept here, technically is to do “light in software”. The lamp is run by a microcontroller embedded in its foot. Its roughly 600 leds produce ca. 4000 Lumen and render effects at more than 200 frames per seconds.
The lamp is built with easy repairs in mind, and it’s designed for a long-lasting experience, it respects your privacy, and it creates a unique atmosphere in your living space.

With our products, we’re offering an alternative to planned deprecation, throw-away materials and hidden costs of cheap electronics that make you the product by consuming your data for breakfast.

In the future, we will build on these concepts and technology and offer more devices and components that match our principles and that enhance one-another. Stay tuned!

At this time of the year the Regular Board Election of openSUSE knocks at the door. Yesterday, Ariez Vaccha, from the openSUSE Election Committee, announced on the election on the project's mailing list.

The election wiki page has been updated with all relevant information.

The poster is a courtesy of our friends from the openSUSE Indonesia community.

The openSUSE Regular Board Election has been announced for the 15th of December 2020. Results will be published on the new year’s eve, i.e 31st December. Call for nominations and applications for the openSUSE Board candidacy is now open.

It’s election time (again)!

Yes, but this time, it is the regular board election that is happening. The previous elections that were conducted during the past year were due to ad-hoc and unforeseen circumstances. However, as per the regular election cycle, we have three seats that are going to be vacant on the openSUSE Board in December. They are the seats of Axel Braun, Marina Latini and Stasiek Michalski. Note that Stasiek was elected this year to replace Christian Boltz whose term ends in 2020. However, Stasiek is opting out from this election due to personal commitments.

My friend from the Election Committee, Ariez Vachha, made the election announcement on the project mailing list yesterday. The election wiki page has been updated accordingly, which includes the usual election schedule poster. That’s courtesy of our friends from the openSUSE Indonesia community.

At the time of writing this blog post, that is less than 24 hours since the annoucement of the election, we received emails from three members who wish to stand as candidate in this election. It’s a very good start.

The call for nominations and applications will continue until Sunday 29th of November. If you would like to nominate a member from the openSUSE community, please send us an email, election-officials@opensuse.org. We will be glad to inform the member about his/her nomination.

This article first appeared at https://sysadmin-journal.com/opensuse-board-election-2020-announced/.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Overall, week 46 was good. A steady flow of new snapshots, staging projects that keep on moving – and we delivered 6 snapshots during this week (1105, 1106, 1107, 1108, 1110, and 1111).

The most noteworthy changes include:

• AppArmor 3.0
• libvirt 6.9.0
• binutils 2.35
• Mozilla Firefox 82.0.3
• GStreamer 1.18.1
• KDE Applications 20.08.3

The staging projects are currently all filed, with more or less impacting changes. The bigger things there are:

• firewalld: switch from iptables backend to nftables
• The YaST changes as promised in https://yast.opensuse.org/blog/2020-11-10/sprint-112
• KDE Plasma 5.20.3
• Linux kernel 5.9.8
• glibc: CET enablement (Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology)
• brp-check-suse: a bug fix in how it detected dangling symlinks (it detected the, but did not fail as it was supposed to) is causing some package build failures now (Staging:A at this moment)
• permissions package: prepares for easier listing, while supporting a full /usr merge
• GNOME 3.38.1: some openQA tests need adjustments, but getting closer
• RPM 4.16: still a few packages build failures
• Ruby 3.0: mainly YaST not ready for that switch
• First experiments with rpmlint 2.0 started in Staging:M
• openssl 3.0: currently alpha 9 in Staging:O

This week there were six openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released.

Some minor email changes have affected the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, so reviewer ratings won’t be listed.

The latest snapshot, 20201111, updated a half dozen RubyGems. The 4.11.0 rubygem-mini_magick package fixed the fetching of metadata when there are GhostScript warnings and fixed some method redefined warnings. The rubygem-web-console 4.1.0 package update added support for Rails 6.1.

KDE Applications 20.08.3 arrived in snapshot 20201110. In the 20.08.3 apps update, a fix for Okular addressed a wrong memory access that could cause a crash and a fix for the fast scrolling with Shift+Scroll. Video editor kdenlive provided a fix for the monitor displayed frames per second with high fps values and fixed the playlist clips that had a no audio regression. There were several other app fixes and konsole provided an important fix for closing the split view with ‘Alt+C’. Mozilla Firefox 82.0.3 fixed regressions introduced in the previous minor version and took care of a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, which in certain circumstances, the MCallGetProperty opcode would emit with unmet assumptions that could result in an exploitable use-after-free condition. GStreamer 1.18.1 provided some important security and memory leak fixes while providing various stability and reliability improvements. Hardware identification and configuration data package hwdata 0.341 updated the Peripheral Component Interconnect, USB and vendor identifications. The multi-purpose desktop calculator qalculate 3.14.0 improved the plot speed for functions that are defined using expressions. Other packages updated in the snapshot were libbluray 1.2.1, a month and a half of updates for libiscsi and udisks2 2.9.1.

An update of the Xfce file manager package thunar to version 1.8.16 was the lone update in snapshot 20201108. The newer version updated translations, fixed an error for custom date formats and added a missing parameter to the ThunarBrowserPokeDeviceFunc function.

Three packages were updated in snapshot 20201107. Some fixes for the debugging format DWARF-5 was made with the package update to binutils 2.35 and a linker was added to produce a dependency file listing the inputs processed. Function tests were made more robust with perl-IO-Tty 1.15 and the rpm-config-SUSE package was updated to version 0.g64.

Snapshot 20201106 brought important updates for the 11.0.9.0 version of java-11-openjdk; several CVEs were addressed in the new version and improvements to jpeg processing and decoding were also made with the update. GNOME’s personal photo manager shotwell, which was the subject of a legal dispute between GNOME and patent troll Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPIL), updated to version 0.30.11; the image organizer enabled sandboxing for WebKitGTK.

The only major version update arrived in snapshot 20201105. The snapshot provided the new release of Apparmor 3, which adds support for new Linux Kernel features like upstream v8 network socket rules, xattr attachment conditionals and capabilities PERFMON and BPF; it also has a new aa-features-abi for extracting feature abis from the kernel. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ImageMagick 7.0.10.35, firebird 3.0.7, fwupd 1.5.1, libvirt 6.9.0 and vim 8.2.1955.

There was a mailing list migration this past week for openSUSE infrastructure and the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer is temporarily down. The reviewer is likely broken due to a Python script that was affected by the email migration. Help is certainly welcomed. The reviewer code can be found at https://github.com/boombatower/tumbleweed-review.

Our previous sprint report was full of promises. We stated we were working to improve the Cockpit support for (open)SUSE and finishing some other interesting stuff. We also mentioned we had delivered a YaST presentation in the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference. Time has come to pay our debts. The current report offers more news about all that.

Make Cockpit Great… for (open)SUSE

In the Cockpit area, we found out the official module for network configuration is completely coupled to Network Manager. Its (lack of) internal architecture makes very hard to adapt it to work with wicked, the framework used by (open)SUSE to configure the network, specially on servers. So we are writing a new Cockpit module to configure the system network through wicked. It’s pretty functional already, including:

• Configuration of both IPv4 and IPv6
• Basic support for wireless configuration
• Management of VLANs
• Definition of routes
• Virtual interfaces like bonds and bridges

We don’t have a clear release date for this new module yet, since we have to coordinate with the team that will take care of packaging Cockpit for (open)SUSE and we still want to improve validation and error handling. That includes deciding how to inform the user if something goes wrong, since there is no unified way to do that across the different Cockpit modules. And we also want to improve the DNS settings and to extend the support for wireless technologies. Meanwhile, if you are hungry for screenshots you can check the links to the pull requests in the list of features above.

We have also being working in a Cockpit module to manage transactional updates. But that one is still in research phase and we have very little to show at this point.

Storage improvements

Of course, YaST keeps being our main target and lately we have concentrated a rather significant amount of development firepower into the area of storage management. First of all, we have finally submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed the long anticipated overhaul of the Partitioner user interface. Check the description of this pull request for a visual summary of everything that have changed.

On top of that new interface, we have started make Btrfs subvolumes more prominent, adding more possibilities to handle them. Check the corresponding pull request for more details and screenshots.

And last but not least (regarding storage management), we have improved the installer proposal for creating a /boot/efi partition when needed. That change was also submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed and will be available as well in the upcoming Leap 15.3 and SLE-15-SP3.

Informing more and better

We also put some effort during this sprint in improving YaST’s user friendliness. On one hand by explaining better the bootloader configuration in some corner cases and allowing to easily tweak that configuration. On the other hand, offering a much more informative message when there is an error parsing some configuration file.

Look Ma! That’s me on TV!

We also found out the recording of our talk presenting the “Top 25 New Features in (Auto)YaST” at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference is finally available at the openSUSE TV channel.

Enjoy and spread the word!

That’s all folks

Since we had very diverse things to share with you, this post has turned out to be a bit longer than expected. But don’t worry, we plan to come back to more concise reports in the upcoming blog entry. That will be in two weeks from now. Meanwhile, watch the video, check the links and have a lot of fun!

The openSUSE release team has established a survey to gain greater insights into the use cases of people using or developing for ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8.

The introduction to the survey explains that ARMv7 architecture is currently being challenged by the new Jump development model of openSUSE Leap.

The Jump process looks to use pre-built binaries from the corresponding SUSE Linux Enterprise release.

“Previously openSUSE Leap was sharing the distribution package sources with SUSE Linux Enterprise, but built them separately,” according to the introduction of the survey. “As SLE stopped supporting 32-bit distributions many years ago, we have the option of continuing to rebuild the packages for openSUSE Leap on those architectures from sources, or to stop supporting those.

“We would like to understand our openSUSE ARM contributors and openSUSE ARM user base before taking any further steps. We really value your time, we don’t expect you to spend more than 10 minutes on this survey.”

The outcome of the survey will be:

• either continue supporting openSUSE Leap on ARMv7 in future releases (15.3 and beyond)
• or that ARMv7 remains an openSUSE Tumbleweed only option.

The 64-bit flavor (aarch64) is not part of this issue.

The survey has seven questions and is anonymous, but gives the option to list an email if a person is interested in being contacted by the developers. The survey ends on Nov 20th November 23:59. So, please go to survey.opensuse.org to fill it!

Thank you!

The openSUSE release team

Four years of nightmare is over.