Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We have seen a lengthy rebuild phase of one snapshot due to Perl being upgraded to 5.32, which required all Perl modules to be rebuilt for them to install to the right location. Despite this delay, we still managed to publish three snapshots (1029, 1030, and 1104).

The most relevant changes as part of these snapshots includes:

• poppler 20.10.0 (new version format, last was 0.99.0)
• polkit 0.118, using spidermonkey 78
• KDE Plasma 5.20.2
• LibreOffice 7.0.3.1
• LXQt 0.16.0
• LLVM 11
• Perl 5.32.0

As usual, the staging projects are in full swing and the next snapshots are already being built. Planned changes include:

• AppArmor 3.0
• Linux kernel 5.9.6
• Binutils 2.35
• GLibc will be configured with CET enabled (Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology)
• RPM 4.16 (Staging:A – some help to fix issues is welcome)
• Ruby 3.0: mainly YaST not ready for that switch
• GNOME 3.38.1: awaiting sec review for malcontent (parental control feature)
• openssl 3.0 (long-term; no progress in the last few weeks)

Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since our last blog more than a week ago.

These four snapshots had a variety of package updates that included updates for LLVM, Wireshark, Node.js, Plasma and Xfce.

A few hours ago, the first snapshot of the month of November was released with snapshot 20201104, which started trending at a rating of 90 on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. The snapshot brought the new major version of LLVM 11. More than half the changelog covers the additions and changes for this compiler. Generic improvements to Clang as a whole were made and new compiler flags like -fstack-clash-protection will provide protection against the stack clash attack for x86, s390x and ppc64 architectures. The edict package, which is a Japanese-English Dictionary in machine readable form received more than a year’s worth of updates in it’s 20201102 release. Node.js 14.15.0 had no major changes, but the Long-Term-Support version had a International Components for Unicode version bump. LibreOffice’s update to version 7.0.3.1 in Tumbleweed provided some bug fixes and translation updates. The update of Perl 5.32.0 brought in support of unicode 13.0 and Wireshark 3.2.8 took care of a build failure caused from the bison parser. The Xfce desktop fixed a memory leak when reconnecting to a DisplayPort monitor with the update of the xfdesktop 4.14.3 package.

KDE’s Plasma 5.20.2 updated in the 20201030 snapshot; the release had bug fixes for the window manager KWin like fixing the drag-and-drop cursors with HiDPI for Wayland. There were also a few other HiDPI fixes. Some behavior fixes were made to improve consistency with KScreen and the 5.20.2 plasma-desktop package had a fix for high CPU usage. Firmware update package fwupd 1.5.0 added async versions of the library for GUI tools and had some plugins to update the Broadcom BCM5719 network adapter.. Application Programming Interfaces library ncurses had a minor fix for a potential indexing error and changed a null-pointer check. Classification framework, nftables 0.9.7 updated support for implicit chains and for the reset command with the data-interchange format json. One package that hasn’t been listed in a Tumbleweed review before is sratom 0.6.6. Sratom is a library for serialising LV2 atoms, which is a generic data container for holding any type of plain old data, to and from the Resource Description Framework; the update had little listed in the changelog, but did fix some minor warnings and other code quality issues. The snapshot recorded a 75 rating on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20201029 updated btrfsprogs from version 5.7 to version 5.9, which removed obsolete mount options and switched the default to single profile for a multi-device filesystem. Text editor vim fixed a memory leak and crash when throwing empty strings in version 8.2.1900. Several Python implementations and libraries were updated in the snapshot like python-gevent 20.9.0, which provides a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv and python-ecdsa 0.16.0, which is implementation of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptography. Poppler now follows the upstream versioning of 20.10.0 and added UTF16LE support even though the standard says it should be UTF16BE. The snapshot recorded a 76 rating.

Snapshot 20201028 recorded a 78 rating and had updates of GStreamer 1.18.0, git 2.29.1, firebird 3.0.6.33328, iproute2 5.9.0 and libressl 3.2.2.

Members of the openSUSE community are separated by great distances, but that didn’t keep them from coming together virtually on Nov. 4 to kickoff the development of the next release;openSUSE Leap 15.3! Several people attended the kickoff, which lasted a couple hours, and the kickoff started with a video from Release Manager Lubos Kocman. The kickoff video shared some news about the development and shared the Roadmap.

Leap 15.3 follows the same setup established in the Open Build Service for the openSUSE prototype Jump, which is a new way for building the community distribution using SUSE Linux Enterprise sources and binaries to make the distributions virtually alike.

Members of the release team attended and many aspects of the new development model were clarified for those who attended.

Questions from package maintainers and people with use cases were addressed.

The group of developers discussed topics like parallel versions of package, marketing of the release, bug tracking, tools and a new soft launch of the Open Source software code hosting system Pagure tool used by Fedora, which was recently integrated into openSUSE infra.

For this tutorial we are going to install a full desktop suite of openSUSE leap 15.2 on a machine.

Download

The first thing we shall do is to go to https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/leap and download the .iso file of the DVD Image

Making a live USB

A live USB is used as a medium to boot into and install an oS, it is used as an alternative to DVD installation. There are several software that can be used to easily create a live USB.

linux        -   Unetbootin [https://unetbootin.github.io/linux_download.html]

Windows  -  Rufus  [https://rufus.ie/]

The steps are easy, plug in a USB, format it and select the downloaded openSUSE iso and start the flashing process. This may take a while...

Installation

Once you got your live USB, plug it in and restart your machine. It will automatically boot into the installation medium.

Once you've selected openSUSE, it will launch the installation GUI

Once the kernel has been loaded, select your preferred language and keyboard Layout

Choose your favorite User Interface

openSUSE makes the partitioning setup easy. If you're inexperience and don't want to mess up your system you can go along with the suggested partitioning if you are dual booting and want to keep your other partition you can use the Guided Setup. If you're a pro and know what you want you might choose the Expert Partitioner

Select your Region and Time Zone, Mauritius in my case. You can click directly on the map for your location.

User Account creation

Here you can create your local user account and register a password

Once the configurations have been done, you'll get a summary of your configuration, to proceed with the installation click on Next

Awesome! Now you have a running openSUSE OS

Um es deutlicher zu machen, wie mit dem neuen PDF Konverter, der in Kraft Version 0.95 eingeführt wurde, Dokumente gestaltet werden können habe ich ein neues Beispiel-Template in das Kraft Repository gestellt.

Mit diesem Template werden die Posten auf dem PDF in zwei Zeilen ausgegeben: In der ersten Zeile steht der Text, und darunter werden in einer separaten Zeile die Menge, der Einzelpreis und der Gesamtpreis des Posten gedruckt:

Außerdem hat das Dokument ein Bild als Firmen-Logo auf der ersten Seite.

Das Template besteht wie die meisten aus zwei Dateien: Das eigentliche Template File (kraft_kfg.gtmpl) und das dazugehörige stylesheet file (kraft_kfg.css).

Um sie zu verwenden, müssen beide Files heruntergeladen werden und im Kraft Einstellungsdialog bei den Dokument Typen das gtmpl File ausgewählt werden. Zu beachten ist, dass der Link zum css File in dem gtmpl File angepasst wird.

Grob gesagt: In dem template file kraft_kfg.gtmpl wird die Dokument-Struktur in html gesetzt, das heisst die Abfolge von Dokumentkopf mit Adressen, dem Einführungstext etc und dann den Posten und so weiter, festgelegt.

Das Stylesheet-File kraft_kfg.css definiert das Aussehen der einzelnen Elemente.

Eine Überschrift

Als grundsätzliches Beispiel sei hier die folgende Zeile herausgegriffen:

<h1>{{ doc.docType }} {{ doc.ident }}</h1>

Die in den geschweiften Klammern stehenden Texte bezeichnen Template-Variablen, die ersetzt werden: doc.docType ist (genau wie doc.ident) ein Wert des Dokumentes, nämlich dessen Dokument-Typ wie Angebot oder Rechnung. doc.ident ist bezeichnet die Dokumentnummer. Es gibt eine feste Anzahl von solchen Variablen, die durch den Kraft-Code festgelegt sind. Es ist hoffentlich durch ihre Verwendung im Template selbsterklärend, was sie bedeuten.

Die beiden Werte werden innerhalb des html tags h1 gedruckt. Das bezeichnet eine Überschrift ersten Grades (die „oberste“ Überschrift), die üblicherweise etwas größer und fett geschrieben wird.

Wie genau die Überschrift in diesem Fall aussehen soll, wird im Stylesheet festgelegt. Dort ist zu finden:

html h1 {
    color: #2f590a;
    font-family: Roboto;
    font-size: 14pt;
    margin: 0;
}

Das bedeutet, dass die Farbe #2f580a verwendet werden soll, und der Text ohne Rand im Font Roboto in der Größe 14 Punkt geschrieben werden soll.

CSS bietet eine große Menge von Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten. Dazu sei auf die zahlreiche Dokuementation im Internet verwiesen.

Meistens wird CSS zur Gestaltung von Webseiten verwendet. Hier wird jedoch ein Druckbild gestaltet. Das ist durch die Zeile, mit dem die Stylesheet Datei geladen wird, festgelegt. Das Attribut media legt den Stylesheet für print Medium fest.

Wie ist das Logo verwirklicht?

Im Template File ist es nur ein HTML Image Tag, das ein Bild von einer URL lädt. Da kann aber auch eine lokale Datei angegeben werden. Dem img Tag die ID „logo“ zugewiesen wird, das es für das CSS identifizierbar macht.

Das Aussehen ist wieder im CSS File festgelegt:

img#logo {
  position: absolute;
  right: 0px;
  top: -150px;
  width: 178px;
  height: 191px;
  z-index: -1;
}

Etwas besonderes ist hier, das das Bild mit einer absoluten Position gesetzt wird. Die Positionsangaben werden in Pixel angegeben. Das Bild wird direkt an den rechten Rand und 150 px von oben (ein positiver Wert würde vom unteren Papierrand aus zählen) auf die Ausgabe gesetzt.

Ich hoffe, dieses Beispiel erleichtert das Anpassen des Templates an die eigenen Bedürfnisse ein wenig. Am besten geht man dabei schrittweise vor und verändert immer nur ein Detail nach dem anderen.

Last November, Microsoft announced that its Edge browser is coming to Linux in the near future. That day has arrived.

On 20 October 2020, Microsoft released Edge preview builds for Linux and with that Microsoft Edge is now available for all major desktop and mobile platforms.

DEB and RPM packages are available on the Microsoft Edge Insider website. These packages are updated every week.

Hence, to install Microsoft Edge on openSUSE, simply download the .rpm file and use zypper for the installation.

sudo zypper in ~/Downloads/microsoft-edge-dev-88.0.680.1-1.x86_64.rpm

That's it! You should now be able to run Edge on openSUSE. In fact, the above screenshots are from the Edge build version 88.0.680.1 running on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The short answer is, yes!

Microsoft Edge is a web browser developed by Microsoft. It is based on the open source project Chromium and it aims to be fully cross-platform. It was released in 2015 for Windows 10 and it became available for Android and iOS in 2017. A preview for Linux became available in October 2020.

If you visit the Microsoft Edge website using a browser on a Linux machine at the moment it will display that it is not supported for Linux. In order to download the the preview for Linux, you need to visit the Microsoft Edge Insider page. The preview is available from the Edge Dev Channel which releases weekly updates.

You can select to download a .deb or .rpm file according to the Linux distribution you are using. In our case, for our openSUSE desktop machine, be it Leap or Tumbleweed, we are going to download the .rpm file.

The file is approximately 87 MB.

Once the download is complete we can use zypper to install.

sudo zypper in ~/Downloads/microsoft-edge-dev-88.0.680.1-1.x86_64.rpm

The application shortcuts will be created.

At first run, Microsoft Edge goes through a traditional setup of EULA acceptance, privacy notice and configuring the browser appearance.

Edge is now ready to be used on the openSUSE Tumbleweed desktop!