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.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The last two weeks have seen a steady stream of new snapshots with small gaps for some days. In total, we have published 11 snapshots since the last review: 0731, 0801..0807, 0810, 0812, and 0813.

The most relevant changes in those snapshots were:

• Linux kernel 5.7.11 & 5.8.0
• git 2.28.0
• A new UEFI signing key and grub2 fixes to address for the boothole security issue CVE-2020-10713
• GCC 10.2.1
• Mozilla Thunderbird 68.11.0
• /tmp is now tmpfs, no longer disk backed
• KDE Frameworks 5.73.0
• LibreOffice 7.0.0 stable release

And in the next days/weeks, you can expect these changes to happen:

• GNOME 3.36.5
• KDE Applications 20.08.0
• glibc 2.32
• binutils 2.35
• gettext 0.21
• bison 3.7.1
• RPM changes: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build. Additionally, the payload compression is being changed to zstd
• openSSL 3.0

The month-long, virtual-festival event that celebrates open source contributions, Hacktoberfest, is coming soon and members of the openSUSE community can make a difference.

The event that is in its seventh year and run by Digital Ocean and DEV encourages people to make their first contributions to open source projects.

The event is for developers, designers who contribute artwork, people who can contribute to documentation,and more.

As the event brings more awareness to open-source projects and encourages contributions that benefit communities, having developers and community members available to help people who want to contribute can be beneficial to the project.

Community members can help by guiding new contributors, creating educational content for the project, providing a list of the resources available and creating meetups.

Natnael Getahun plans on coordinating some of the efforts for openSUSE’s presence during Hacktoberfest and has asked for help from community members who are willing to help contributors and expand the events efforts around openSUSE related projects.

A list of ideas for projects during Hacktoberfest are being developed on the openSUSE Etherpad.

Hacktoberfest is open to everyone and there are rules that apply to receive Hacktoberfest Swag and Hacktoberfest Quality Standards that need to be met.

Another prime number… and no the title doesn’t make sense. It’s just a nonsensical way to string everything together. 19th Noodling on a mid-August night 19 Episodes… 19 is another prime number! Fun facts about chocolate milk can be found here BIOS Update Dell Latitude E6440 on Linux My BIOS was 4 years out of date. … Continue reading Noodlings 19 | BIOS Games Serving the NDI™ Plugin →