Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we have published a few snapshots less than normal. To ‘compensate’, the next one will be huge to download though. On August 25, I merged the change for libexecdir == /usr/libexec and since then I’m fighting to QA after effects to get you a snapshot out that won’t break in all corners. There will likely be some rough patches here and there though.

Anyway, let’s see what DID happen in week 35: three snapshots have been published (0821, 0823 and 0824) containing these changes:

• cURL 7.72.0
• NetworkManager 1.26.2
• fdupes 2.1.2 (upgraded from 1.61)
• systemd 245.7: NOTE: an issue with a dangling symlink in /etc/systemd/system/tmp.mount was identified. A fix for this is in the TW-Update channel

As mentioned earlier, the next snapshot to come out (currently testing 0826, but this could still be discarded too) will be ‘large’ with respect to download size, as literally all 15000 packages in Tumbleweed have been rebuilt. There were multiple reasons to trigger a full rebuild (and I intentionally collected them to have this done in one go)

• RPM: %{_libexecdir} changed to /usr/libexec. As this affects a lot of packages, and can change build results based on dependent packages file locations, a full rebuild was needed to be consistent in the end
• RPM: The compression payload of our packages has been changed to zstd compression. This generally should result in faster decompression (read: installation) of RPMs. Downside: These packages can only be read with Leap 15.2 (and future versions) and Tumbleweed (newer than 20190713).
• build: the build package was changed to also copy pkgconfig .pc files into the -devel-32bit package, if this is defined to be built in baselibs.conf.
• brp-check-suse: The symlinks pointing to /etc/alternatives are no longer converted to be relative symlinks, as update-alternatives did not really like that and kept on complaining to the users.

And besides all what has happened, the Stagings are still filled up with:

• Linux kernel 5.8.4
• Mozilla Firefox 80
• Chromium 85
• Boost 1.74.0
• Kubernetes 1.19
• systemd package drops the dependency on sysvinit-tools
• glibc 2.32
• binutils 2.35
• gettext 0.21
• bison 3.7.1

The authors are happy to announce the new release 0.95 of Kraft. Kraft is free desktop software for managing office documents like quotes and invoices in the small enterprise for the Linux desktop.

Kraft Version 0.95

With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF documents.

While this has served us well, it has always been cumbersome to adopt the template for users needs. ReportLab uses a XML format as the template which has a bit of a steep learning curve and is not really easy with syntax.

This changes now: From version 0.95, Kraft supports the cool project WeasyPrint. The principle remains the same: The document is built of a text based template which defines the look of the output document. That gets filled with the document data and gets converted to a PDF document. But unlike ReportLab, Weasyprint is HTML based. Many people know a bit of HTML and thus will have an way easier time to adopt the template to personal needs.

Apart from the ease of use, it is much more simple to do modern report design with Weasyprint, as it supports the wide range of CSS styling.

That is a great improvement, as adopting Krafts output to personal needs is much more intuitive now. For now, Kraft supports both rendering engines, but ReportLab based reports are deprecated now and support will end in future releases of Kraft.

Along with integration of Weasyprint the text templating library Grantlee was added, as it is the standard in the KDE/Qt world, well maintained and widely available. The ctemplate library which was used for that so far will also be deprecated.

The other great improvement in this release is that Kraft now has a user manual embedded which will give new users a guiding help. It will open in the browser once the user clicks on the menu entry in the help menu, also without internet connection. It was started by a community member and it will grow and improve over time.

As usual this new version also ships an amount of bug fixes and small improvements which can be found in the Changelog.

We wish all users big fun with this remarkable new version of Kraft.

The prototype project openSUSE Jump is now available for Alpha phase testing. Jump is an interim name given to the experimental distribution in the Open Build Service as developers have been trying to synchronize SUSE Linux Enterprise binaries for openSUSE Leap. The efforts are trying to bring the codes of Leap and SLE closer together, which was previously mentioned in an article titled New Prototype Builds Bringing Leap, SLE Closer Will be Available Soon.

The past week produced three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots.

The snapshots brought some interesting packages including one used by NASA and one package fixed a ancient bug. A full rebuild of Tumbleweed was done with Build20200825, but the build doesn’t appear good enough to be released in a snapshot.

Snapshot 20200824 provided an update of the intel-vaapi-driver 2.4.1 package, which fixed some compiler errors with GNU Compiler Collection 10. A few RubyGem packages were updated, but didn’t provide much info in the changelog. However, the rubygem-bootsnap 1.4.8 changelog points to a force-pushed fix in the package that was contributed for Shopify. The snapshot is trending moderately stable at a rating of 72, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

An update to the 245.7 version of systemd arrived in snapshot 20200823. The snapshot also had an update of NetworkManager 1.26.2, which provided a fix for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 4 and added an update for the export and handling of the DHCPv6 FQDN option. A major version update made it into the snapshot with fdupes updated from version 1.61 to the newest 2.1.2 version; FDUPES is a program for identifying or deleting duplicate files residing within specified directories and the updated version increases speed by reducing the number of call to stats. Pipewire 0.3.9, which is a server and user space API to deal with multimedia pipelines, fixed bad audio in Chromium and added support for the video crop in the GStreamer elements. The python-kiwi 9.21.7 package had multiple fixes including one for Google Compute Engine integration test builds. Other packages update in the snapshot were the pixel encoding and color space conversion engine babl 0.1.80, bash-completion 2.11 and giflib 5.2.1. The snapshot is trending moderately stable at a rating of 69, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The command line tool for transferring data curl 7.72.0 arrived in snapshot 20200821. The bugfix release also added zstd decoding support. The open-source lexer generator for C, C++ and Go, re2c has a new Go code generation backend that can be used with a –lang go re2c option, or as a standalone re2go binary in the new major 2.0.2 version; the version also offers backward incompatible changes. Generic spell checking library enchant 2.2.8 added a provider back-end for Nuspell, which is a new spell-checker whose development has been supported by the Mozilla foundation. It is backwards-compatible with Hunspell and Myspell dictionaries and supports a wider range of language peculiarities, improved suggestions, and easier maintainability of the code-base. GNOME’s note editor bijiben 3.36.3 updated translations and fixed an issue in the main view that prevented showing more than 48 notes. Other packages updated in the snapshot were the C and Fortran library used by NASA cfitsio 3.490. The machine checks daemon mcelog 170 was updated and popt 1.18 fixed “an ugly and ancient” security issue that failed to drop privileges on alias exec from a Set User ID/Set Group ID program. The snapshot recorded a moderately stable rating of 73.

If you lurk around many Linux support forums, you are bound to see the regular post that looks something like this:

Hi, I’m new to Linux. I tried to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, now I can’t use my computer at all because it has errors. Help!!!

Troubleshooting Grub errors is difficult enough. Troubleshooting Grub errors when you know very little about how any of it works or when getting help from strangers on the internet is even more difficult to nearly impossible.

I offer 3 suggestions for newbs who want to learn Linux other than dual booting.

1. Use a virtual machine. Download Virtualbox on any platform, and install Linux there. It is a little slower than a real computer, but it is safe. If something breaks, nothing is lost. Just start again.
2. Use bootable live installations. OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and others allow you to use their Linux distribution from a USB key without ever installing it. This is faster that a VM and when rebooted, it’s like it was never there.
3. Get a dedicated Linux machine. I’m not talking about spending a ton of money on something new. A raspberry pi will do nicely. So would an old machine from Craigslist. Something that would be used only for Linux and that’s all.

All of these are safe alternatives. I suggest the first option though because it costs nothing except time and your data will be safe.

In case you follow the mailing lists or openSUSE groups in social media you might have come to know that the openSUSE community holds ad-hoc board elections to refill an open spot in the openSUSE board.

If you did not know or even if you knew, you might not know that I was honored by being suggested as a candidate for that elections by Gerald and that I accepted the nomindation.

So, ultimately, I am running for the openSUSE board!

Ballot is open

Since 17th August 2020 the ballots are op...

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Another week has passed and there was probably something of interesting to everybody. So, we have released 6 snapshots since my last review (0814, 0815, 0816, 0817, 0818 and 0819).

The most relevant updates were:

• gdb 9.2
• qemu 5.1.0
• GNOME 3.36.5
• KDE Applications 20.08.0
• sqlite3 3.33.0
• LibreOffice 7.0.1 RC1

The list of major upgrades being brewed did no get much shorter, those are still:

• Linux kernel 5.8.2
• glibc 2.32
• binutils 2.35
• gettext 0.21
• bison 3.7.1
• RPM changes: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. Basically all build failures are addressed by now, openQA is starting to look good.
• openSSL 3.0

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openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots had a strong week of releases and brought not just Apache, Wireshark, nano and remmina, but new KDE, GNOME and Mate software.

Five of the past seven snapshots since 20200812 will be covered in this week’s review.

The latest snapshot, 20200818, brought KDE Applications 20.08.0. The latest applications release offers a plethora of awesomeness. Dolphin adds thumbnails for 3D Manufacturing Format (3MF) files to the list and previews of files and folders on encrypted file systems such as Plasma Vaults can be seen. This is done securely by storing the cached thumbnails on the file system itself, or falling back to generating them but not storing cached versions anywhere if necessary. Konsole also comes with a new feature that displays a subtle highlight for new lines coming into view when the terminal output is rapidly scrolling by and shows a thumbnail preview for image files when hovering the cursor over by default. The announcement about the new features is worth reading. Command line utility dar 2.6.10 updated the configure script to handle some undocumented enables and fixed less thana handful of bugs. Users of the Mate Desktop Environment had a fix with the engrampa 1.24.1 package to avoid a memory leak in Java utilities and the mate-calc 1.24.1 fixed incorrect parenthesis handling; both packages update translations. Those who use the TV and webcam recorder xawtv will noticed the update to version 3.107 after ta build issue was resolved with GNU Compiler Collection 10.1. Other packages to update in the snapshot were the new major version of perl-Image-ExifTool 12.04, rubygem-i18n 1.8.5 and rubygem-rubocop-ast 0.1.0. The snapshot is trending moderately stable at a rating of 73, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20200817 updated bash to version 5.0.18. The console-based network monitoring program iptraf-ng updated to version 1.2.1 and make a change to not reuse sockets for multiple receive functions.The libcap 2.42 version, which provides a utility for reading the capabilities of a process, support Go module abstraction and now has better support for cross-compilation. Email client mutt 1.14.6 made a fix to properly reset mailbox entries. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 70.

The smallest amount of packages in a snapshot this week arrived with snapshot 20200816. Just three packages were updated in this snapshot, which is trending at a rating of 62. The packages that were updated were apache2, new major version of emacs and publicsuffix 20200810. The apache2 version updated from 2.4.43 to 2.4.46, which brought in several fixes including a regression that caused connections to close when mod_reqtimeout was configured with a handshake timeout. The new version also made an enhancement for load-balancing responsiveness. The new major version of emacs 27.1 is now compliant with the latest version 13.0 of the Unicode Standard.

The GNOME desktop, shell and shell extensions was updated in the 20200815 snapshot. The gnome-shell 3.36.5 package fixed the top bar navigation when NumLock is active and fixed a delay when showing calendar events. The google-roboto-fonts version 2.138 provides better Emoji compatibility. Smart fonts package graphite2 1.3.14 make the move to Python 3. Several packages were in this snapshot like gtk3 3.24.22, text editor nano 5.1, which fixed a crash on first keystroke in an empty buffer, the meta package postgresql 12.0.1 and postgresql12 12.4. The 3.2.6 update of Wireshark fixed two bugs that involved the Kafka protocol; one was a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure that caused a Kafka dissector crash. Remote desktop client, remmina 1.4.8 added timeout option for Remote Desktop Protocol connections and added SSH support to the protocol handler. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 74.

Also trending at a rating of 74, snapshot 20200814 brought tons of updated for YaST packages, but most involved a spec file change to install an AutoYaST package. The yast2-storage-ng 4.3.14 package proposes to fix the detection of shadowed subvolumes for roles using separate LVM volume groups for each filesystem. The 4.3.3 yast2-security package fixed randomly failing unit tests. Machine emulator and virtualizer qemu 5.1.0 provided multiple additions for s390, PowerPC and arm; it also had RISC-V improvements and highlights the need to see the feature depreciation tracker. ImageMagick 7.0.10.27 added animated webp blend method support and fixed the paths that were corrupted when converting Photoshop EPS file into another format. Other packages updated in the snapshot were ethtool 5.8, which added some parent/child configuration support, and firewalld 0.7.5, which fixed some conflicts with systemd’s nftables.service.

Talks submitted for the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference have been reviewed and accepted by the conference organizers.

The approved talks have been updated in the Open Source Event Manager instance on events.opensuse.org.

The organizers thank everyone who took the time and effort to submit a talk for the conference.

Speakers have until Sept. 6 to confirm their talk/s for the conference on events.opensuse.org. Speakers will need to login, click on My Proposals and will have an option to confirm the accepted proposal. There is also a withdraw proposal option.

People who have issues logging on to confirm their talk may have not realized the openSUSE went through a migration and users might need to migrate their account following the steps on https://idp-portal-info.suse.com.

The events.opensuse.org website is used to manage talk submissions, scheduling of talks and registrations, but there will be an online live conferencing platform where the conference will take place online from Oct. 15. - 17.

More information will follow in the coming weeks about the tool and how to navigate it.

Attendees will be able to customize their schedule by adding sessions they would like to participate in once the platform is ready.

The conference will have technical talks about LibreOffice, openSUSE, open source, cloud, containers and more. Extra time for Questions and Answers after each talk is possible and the talks will be recorded. The conference will schedule frequent breaks for networking and socializing.

Organizers have online, live conference sponsorship packages available. Interested parties should contact ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more information.

In August the YaST Team is focusing on bugfixing, which is a nice way to use the time while many colleagues are on summer vacation. The downside is that blog posts consisting on a list of solved bugs look pretty boring. Fortunatelly, we also found time to implement three nice new features.

• New menu bar widget in libYUI. Check the screenshots below.
• Configuration of the firewall in AutoYaST moved to the first stage if possible. Check the documentation update for details.
• Preliminary support to mark the packages affected by BootHole and show a warning message if such old packages are going to be installed (text of the message is still under development).

Everybody loves screenshots, so let’s see how the new libYUI menu bar looks. First in graphical mode.

And then in text-based interfaces.

We have plans to use the new widget to improve the usability of the YaST Partitioner. Stay tuned for more news. If nothing goes wrong, we will have plenty of them to share with you here in two weeks.