Time flies and another two weeks of YaST development have passed. As in the previous report, we have to mention we invested quite some time learning and experimenting with technologies that will shape the role of YaST in particular and Linux installers in general in the future. But we also had time to fix quite some bugs and to make progress in several features, like:

• Simplified support for hibernation
• Make network forwarding configurable in the installer
• Improved tabs in graphical mode
• Progress in the rewrite of yast2-users, including AutoYaST

Hibernate All Systems!

Funnily enough, the first aspect we want to report about is not a feature we developed, but one we reverted. Back in November we reported a new feature in the installer to propose hibernation only on real hardware (ie. not on virtual machines) and only if the product’s configuration specifies hibernation is desired. Time has proved that the usage of hibernation in real world scenarios goes further than expected back then. For example, hibernation is used on virtual servers deployed on top of some cloud-based infrastructures, as part of a technique to save power and money. The existence of that kind of creative scenarios makes it very hard to predict when hibernation is wanted and when not. So YaST will go back to its previous behavior of proposing hibernation always if the technical conditions are met, no matter which product is being installed or in which environment. The change will be available as an installer self-update for SLE-15-SP3.

Better Default Network Configuration

Despite the hibernation affair, we don’t give up in our attempts to make smart selections in the installer. As you may know, YaST allows to tweak the network configuration during installation. Among many other things, it allows to configure the status of IP forwarding. But we want YaST to propose a correct default value for those settings without requiring user intervention. In the cases of openSUSE MicroOS and SLE Micro that means enabling forwarding by default, since is needed for such systems to work properly. So we made that configurable per product and adjusted the corresponding configuration for those container-based solutions.

Prettier Tabs

Beyond the installer, we also invested some time in something we really wanted to put our hands on - improving the look&feel of the YaST tabs in graphical mode. The description of this pull request includes a good description of the problems (with a link to the original issue in which they were discussed), a technical explanation of the solution and, of course, many screenshots!

New Users Management to Arrive Soon

Last but not least, we continue our small project to rewrite big parts of the users management in YaST. We implemented support for some aspects that were still based on ancient Perl code and we are getting rid of all the legacy parts involved in (auto)installation. If everything goes as expected, next sprint will see the new user management land in the installation process of openSUSE Tumbleweed.

See you soon

We hope you are already enjoying openSUSE Leap 15.3 and ready for the openSUSE Virtual Conference 2021. Meanwhile, we keep working to make YaST a little bit better every day thanks to your feedback. See you around and have a lot of fun!

Recently, I nearly create ProgressUI – tool to setup triggers (condition/action pair) related to task of programs. Currently It’s very simple, because it supports only one kind of action – running external program. User must also type program name and parameters. In future, we would read .desktop files and allow to select from dropdown list (for example). Also, I will add possibility to invoke DBus method and allow to define method name/path/etc. in special files, so user could also select method. Also, I must enhance my set of tools in other ways – for example allowing to send watch fd to daemon, so It could report exit code of application.

In terms related to libgreattao, I added functions, possibility to invoke it and signals. Functions not working properly yet, so doing special thinks like allowing to create multi-level menu is not possible. Signals are templates, but treated in different way – they could been processed multiple times without need to give unique path. It also do not work as expected since it created many not needed entities, but needed for templates. Simplicity is boring.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm04e2N5AcU&t=9s

And yet, I created patron (in patreon.com) page. See: https://www.patreon.com/easylinux?fan_landing=true

Our survey about the release of openSUSE Leap 15.3 has ended and the results will be discussed in a release retrospective at the openSUSE Conference in the coming days.

“I’d like to give big thanks to all of those who participated…,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman in an email. “We’ve received 605 responses, which is almost 200 more than in 15.2. I’m grateful for the increased participation as it shows us that it makes sense to have this type of feedback loop.”

Kocman will give a talk at the openSUSE Conference on June 19 at 09:00 UTC and discuss the results.

Project members and participants of the conference and survey are encouraged to join.

“We’ll schedule some more public rounds on meet.o.o as well, as you can’t review all of (the) feedback (plus) create action items in a single session,” he wrote.

For those interested in the raw data from the survey, it is available on the wiki page.

I just checked my email and I got email from ddemaio <ddemaio@suse.de> that said welcome to this year’s openSUSE Conference. S/he give me token access and said that I can claim free t-shirt. Nice!

Its interesting to watch Youtube reviews for openSUSE Leap 15.3. One of the main critics is that it doesn’t offer the latest KDE and GNOME desktop versions. “The software is quite old.” Yes, that is not very interesting for a reviewer. Because as a reviewer, you like to point out what is new. And what is exiting. And the goal of openSUSE Leap 15.3 is to not be exciting. The goal is to be stable.

openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise have moved closer together over the last few years. I remember all the effort that has been put into making sure that the codebase for the base packages of openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise were similar. In may 2015 (yes, that is a while ago) Richard Brown announced that the latest SUSE Enterprise Sources where now available in the Open Build Service and he presented the vision for a new stable release version, which would be named openSUSE Leap. But after that, there was still a lot of work. It took a couple of releases (42.1, 42.2, 42.3 and then 15) before the base packages of Leap and SLE were completely aligned. From openSUSE Leap 15 and onwards, SUSE officially supported organizations who wanted to migrate from Leap 15 to SLE 15. And this new release takes that integration even further. From openSUSE Leap 15.3 and onwards, the binary packages of the base of Leap 15.3 and SLE 15 Service Pack 3 will be identical. The packages on top of that base will be ‘community backports’. And these packages will work on both Leap 15.3 and on SLE 15 Service Pack 3.

So you will get a rock solid distribution, because it needs to be enterprise grade. Enterprises don’t have the time, nor the willingness to mess with software. They want to get work done. The software should just work. And that is exactly what you should expect from openSUSE Leap 15.3. This might be a bit boring for a reviewer or for a Linux enthusiast. Because a typical Linux enthusiast wants to try out the latest and greatest software. They want to play around with the new KDE Plasma 5.22 (released on the 8th June 2021). Or they want to play with the new GNOME 40 desktop (released on the 24th March 2021). They can, if they install the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed.

openSUSE Leap 15.3 is based on the Linux 5.3.18 kernel, which was released on the 18th of December 2019. The GNOME desktop is version 3.34 (the same as Leap 15.2), which was released on the 12th of September 2019. And the KDE Plasma version is 5.18 LTS (the same as Leap 15.2), which was released on the 11th of February 2020. Only the XFCE desktop has seen an upgrade to version 4.16, which released on the 22nd of December 2020. You get the idea, the software is at least 6 months to well over 1 year old. Tried and tested software, so to speak. But what is new?

What is new in openSUSE Leap 15.3?

• In green, I highlighted the packages that are significantly changed in comparison to Leap 15.2.
• In blue, I highlighted the packages that are changed compared to Leap 15.2 at time of its release, but which are now also available in updated Leap 15.2 installations.

From the table, it becomes clear that some of the bigger productivity applications are kept up-to-date both in Leap 15.2 and Leap 15.3, such as: Darktable, Digikam, Inkscape, Krita, LibreOffice, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird and VLC. openSUSE can still do a better job if they kept GIMP up to date as well, but even GIMP is not too far behind. The point that I like to make is that if you just want to use your computer, openSUSE Leap 15.3 should suffice for that. Not everyone needs the transparent panel functionality that is offered in the KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop. And not everybody needs the new horizontal layout of GNOME 40, when the vertical layout has been refined a lot over the last 10 GNOME iterations. Sure those features are nice to have. But they won’t break the user experience when they are not included. Remember: only a year ago, everybody thought these experiences where the best thing since slided bread.

The upgrade experience

This time, I have decided to upgrade both my laptop (the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd) and my desktop (the HP Pavilion Power 580-146nd). The openSUSE installer did ask me to make some manual choices about package conflicts. That might be the result of me having ~10 additional repositories enabled. So my system is not really a stock installation. Without some technical knowledge, I think the questions on file conflicts are not easy to resolve for a new Linux user. This is also a problem during regular updates, so this is a broader openSUSE issue. The YaST installer just offers too much technical choices. Most of the time, there is only 1 valid option. Yes, please make the required changes; downgrade the package or change the repository. Of course I don’t want to keep a package with broken dependencies. And of course I don’t want to delete the application, which I want to keep using. If YaST just removed those choices, in most cases the user doesn’t have to make any manual changes. End of rant.

On the laptop, I had to make more manual choices and this seemed a more complex installation. After the installation, I had to re-install some packages (gnucash, hedgewars and wesnoth) that were not transferred correctly. And I have also removed all (openSUSE Leap 15.2) packages that were left without a repository. Most of these (library) packages had a more modern version in Leap 15.3, but because the version number is included in the package name (instead of in the version number) they were not removed.

On the desktop, I tried to directly upgrade the system with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, which didn’t work out. I did have a successful installation, but I could only use the command line. After running YaST from the command line and re-installing the Nvidia packages (nvidia-computeG05) and rebooting, my system showed the login screen and my problem was resolved. A lesson for the future: when upgrading, do not enable the Nvidia repository. Install these proprietary drivers after the upgrade. After the installation, I had to re-install the same packages (gnucash, hedgewars and wesnoth) that were not transferred correctly. But now that is all said and done, I am very happy that both my systems are running on the latest and greatest openSUSE Leap 15.3.

Published on: 13 June 2021

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Today, the weekly review reaches you a little bit late: I was out early yesterday to enjoy the weather. Here, the sun is finally coming out for more than just a few minutes. But, back to the important things that are the openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots. Namely, we have released 6 snapshots (0603, 0604, 0605, 0606, 0609, and 0610) in the last week.

The major changes included:

• Linux kernel 5.12.9
• Mesa 21.1.2
• KDE Plasma 5.22.0
• libxml 2.9.12
• Apache 2.4.48
• PHP 7.4.20
• Chrony 4.1
• cURL 7.77.0
• Mozilla Thunderbird 78.11.0
• OpenSSH: move of the distro default config to /usr/etc. Admin config is supposed to be in /etc. Make sure to check the .rpmsave files after the update. Best to put config snippets in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*.conf files to inherit distro config changes

The changes planned for the future snapshots include:

• python3x packages will no longer provide a python symbol. This caused some confusion in the past when people expected ‘python’ to be the legacy python2, but python3x provided it as well.
• Linux kernel 5.12.10
• GNOME 40.2
• systemd 248
• KDE Gear 21.04.2
• Cinnamon 5.0

Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released this week with the possibility of another snapshot being released over the weekend if it passes openQA testing.

The latest snapshot, 20210609, brought an update for KDE users; Plasma 5.22.0 was released just days ago and improves stability and usability across the board, according to the release announcement. Developers put in a lot of work on the aesthetics of the release. The big new feature in the release is called Adaptive Transparency, which provides a pleasant translucent panel and panel widgets that become entirely opaque if there are any maximized windows; this is done to avoid any visual distractions when users need to focus. The new version also opens up on a speed dial page in System Settings that gives users direct access to the most commonly used settings, as well as to the ones accessed the most. Mozilla Thunderbird renewed an expired keyring in the 78.11.0 version and fixed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Wireshark 3.4.6 fixed a display filter crash and macro filters’ handling of escaped characters. A major version update for the basic directory structure was made with the jump of the filesystem package from version 15.5 to 84.87. GNOME 40 also received some updates in the snapshot with an update of gnome-software to version 40.2; some crash fixes were made and an improvement in reporting errors low disk space for Flatpak were made. Other packages to update in the snapshot were git 2.32.0, powertop 2.14, xfce4-settings and nftables 0.9.9.

The 20210605 snapshot provided an update of curl 7.77.0, which fixed three CVEs; CVE-2021-22901 could be tricked into using already freed memory when a new TLS session is negotiated or a client certificate is requested on an existing connection using the curl library. Printing protocol cups-filters updated to version 1.28.8 and fixed several memory leaks and provided some fixes for grayscale mode. A major version update of chrony 4.1 arrived in the snapshot. The newer implementation for Network Time Protocol added support for Network Time Security (NTS) authentication and added support for Advanced Encryption Standard keys with the low-level cryptographic library Nettle. Multiple patches were added for the the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture package and the asla-plugins package in the update to versions 1.2.5. The command line utility package for container images and image repositories, Skopeo, updated to version 1.2.3 and added a fix for login and logout registry arguments. An update of yast2 version 4.4.9 disabled hibernation based on products and virtual machines. Other packages to update in the snapshot were libvirt 7.4.0, kmod 29, vim 8.2.2918 and more.

The 3D Mesa package and Mesa-drivers package updated to versions 21.1.2 in snapshot 20210604. Some flickering when rendering was fixed on Intel’s Tiger Lake chips with the Mesa update. Most of the updates included changes for AMD and Intel, but there was a decent amount of arm fixes. Multiple fixes were made in the update of apache2 2.4.48, which added SSL related inquiry functions to the server Application Programming Interface. The update of the Thunderbolt 3 device manager bolt updated to version 0.9.1, which fixes journal and now has a host identification for embedded thunderbolt controllers. Redis 6.2.4 fixed a few crashes and a CVE that exploited an integer overflow bug. The zypper package added hints to trust GPG key prompt in the version update to 1.14.45; the package also received a translation in Kabyle , which is a language spoken in north Africa. Other packages to update in the snapshot were remmina 1.4.18, xapps 2.2.0, hwdata 0.348 and more.

In Element, you can create nice widgets on top of a channel that contain a Jitsi Meet video conference. However, these Widgets normally point to a Jitsi server from Element and to a random meeting ID. So, here is my step by step guide on how to create a widget with a custom Jitsi room.

1. Open the room you want to have the widget in.
2. Click on the room name and select the “Advanced” tab
3. Click on “Open Devtools”
4. Select “Send Custom Event”
5. Click on the red “Event” button. You should see something like this:
6. In the “Event Type” text field, write this: im.vector.modular.widgets
7. In the “State Key” text field, write this: dimension-jitsi-1622722886114
8. Fill the large text box with the following:

   {
    "type": "jitsi",
    "url": "https://dimension.opensuse.org/widgets/jitsi?conferenceId=$conferenceId&domain=$domain&isAudioOnly=$isAudioOnly&displayName=$matrix_display_name&avatarUrl=$matrix_avatar_url&userId=$matrix_user_id",
    "name": "Jitsi Video Conference",
    "data": {
        "conferenceUrl": "<jitsi instance>/<jitsi room>",
        "domain": "<jitsi instance>",
        "conferenceId": "<jitsi room>",
        "isAudioOnly": false,
        "url": "https://dimension.opensuse.org/widgets/jitsi?conferenceId=$conferenceId&domain=$domain&isAudioOnly=$isAudioOnly&displayName=$matrix_display_name&avatarUrl=$matrix_avatar_url&userId=$matrix_user_id",
        "dimension:app:metadata": {
            "wrapperUrlBase": "",
            "wrapperId": "",
            "scalarWrapperId": null,
            "integration": {
                "category": "widget",
                "type": "jitsi"
            }
        }
    },
    "id": "dimension-jitsi-1622722886114"
   }
   

   Replace <jitsi instance> with the URL of the Jitsi Server, e.g. https://meet.opensuse.org and replace <jitsi room> with the name of the Jitsi room, e.g. bar A working example looks like this (it links to the openSUSE Bar):

   {
    "type": "jitsi",
    "url": "https://dimension.opensuse.org/widgets/jitsi?conferenceId=$conferenceId&domain=$domain&isAudioOnly=$isAudioOnly&displayName=$matrix_display_name&avatarUrl=$matrix_avatar_url&userId=$matrix_user_id",
    "name": "Jitsi Video Conference",
    "data": {
        "conferenceUrl": "https://meet.opensuse.org/bar",
        "domain": "meet.opensuse.org",
        "conferenceId": "bar",
        "isAudioOnly": false,
        "url": "https://dimension.opensuse.org/widgets/jitsi?conferenceId=$conferenceId&domain=$domain&isAudioOnly=$isAudioOnly&displayName=$matrix_display_name&avatarUrl=$matrix_avatar_url&userId=$matrix_user_id",
        "dimension:app:metadata": {
            "wrapperUrlBase": "",
            "wrapperId": "",
            "scalarWrapperId": null,
            "integration": {
                "category": "widget",
                "type": "jitsi"
            }
        }
    },
    "id": "dimension-jitsi-1622722886114"
   }
   

9. Click on the green “Send” button
10. Have a lot of fun…

The release party in the openSUSE bar continues on more than a week after the release of openSUSE Leap 15.3, yet that’s not the only thing soaring for the project.

The adaptation of the new release continues to show a steady increase on metrics.opensuse.org as a pattern trends up and to the right with 40,000 installations a week after the release. Major increases in adaption traditionally happen within a few months after a release as users are expected to upgrade to the latest minor release within six months of its availability.

An area where the project can use help is with the promotion of openSUSE Leap 15.3. Users can find new Leap flyers in the github artwork repository along with updated banners and a new Leap image.

Community marketing has been emphasizing the use of Leap on servers, workstations, desktops and for virtualization and container use. Migration projects and user acceptance testing also benefit from the newest Leap. Large development teams can run and test workloads that can be lifted and shifted to SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 15 Service Pack 3 for long-term maintenance if needed. The newest minor version is rock-solid and simple to upgrade from Leap 15.2. openSUSE Leap 15.3 is built with the exact same binary packages as SLE.

The community is supportive and engages with people who use Leap through community channels like the mailing lists, Matrix, Discord, Telegram and Facebook. Help to promote the release by giving a review on DistroWatch or do a review of the release through a video or blog.

The release team also wants users’ feedback and can take a survey about the release until June 16.