Intro

We made an important change for our Container Host OS openSUSE MicroOS, which our Kubernetes platform openSUSE Kubic will inherit since it is based on openSUSE MicroOS: we use now tmpfs for /tmp.

tmpfs is a temporary filesystem that resides in memory. Mounting directories as tmpfs can be an effective way of speeding up accesses to their files and to ensure that their contents are automatically cleared upon reboot.

A fresh installation will use tmpfs for /tmp by default. Old installations needs to be converted to this manually, but it is still possible to switch back to use disk space for /tmp. This is especially useful and important, if big files are stored in /tmp.

If temporary files or directories are needed below /tmp, this can be created at boot by using tmpfiles.d. But never store important files in /tmp, they will not survive the next reboot.

Converting old installations to use tmpfs

As tmpfs will be mounted on top of /tmp, existing files will be no longer accessible. The following steps will cleanup /tmp and enable /tmpfs:

1. Backup all important files currently stored in /tmp!
2. Remove the line for /tmp from /etc/fstab
3. Remove all files in /tmp
4. Reboot

After reboot, tmpfs should be used for /tmp.

Using disk space for /tmp

After creating a new btrfs subvolume for /tmp and adding this to /etc/fstab, tmpfs will no longer be used for /tmp.

The easierst way to archive this is to use mksubvolume from snapper 0.8.12 or newer:

# transactional-update shell
transactional update # mksubvolume /tmp
transactional update # exit
# systemctl reboot

Afterwards, all files are stored again on the disk and will survive a reboot.

Future plans

In the future we plan to harden the system by default even more, e.g. by marking /tmp and other write-able parts of the filesystem with noexec.

I am thinking about making a formal proposal for one of two new
unmoderated groups. The group would either be comp.internet.history or
soc.history.internet. I think you can see where these two names could
possibly overlap.

The general idea of the new group is to discuss retro internet
technologies such as IRC, ftp sites, BBSs (telnet and otherwise), MUDS,
MOOs, and of course Usenet and others. We could also discuss the culture
that surrounded many of these technologies especially IRC and Usenet as
they were maturing. Many of use don’t consider these technologies to be
“retro” because we use them everyday and yet interest in them is waning
and in order for them to continue, fresh interest must be continually be
added.

I don’t know if anyone could possibly be interested, but the only way to
find out is to ask. If I get enough positive feedback, I’ll write up an
official CFD and submit it to the board. I won’t do anything if no one is
interested.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Due to a packaging change in a low-level package (krb5), I decided to trigger a full rebuild of openSUSE:Factory. Quite a lot of packages reference krb5-config to find the correct locations, but I could not get a conclusive list. The risk of not doing a full rebuild and having all packages follow the changes of krb5 could lead to devastating results, which I did not want to risk. This in turn meant OBS was busy for a bit longer and we only released two snapshots (0717 and 0720). The next one to be published (0721) will be the one with the full rebuild.

The two published snapshots brought you these changes:

• VirtualBox 6.1.12
• gtk2: Resolve GIMP segfault from accessing memory past end of pixbuf
• Linux kernel 5.7.9
• Kubernetes 1.18.6 and 1.17.9

Changes currently being prepared/tested in our staging areas:

• Mesa 20.1.4
• GCC 10.2 (the RC did not expose any issues, but was not checked in to Factory)
• LibreOffice 7.0rc2
• openSSL 3.0
• Python3 package will be renamed to python38. The goal will be to allow multiple python versions to more easily coexist.
• 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

Organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference are extending the Call for Papers to August 4.

Participants can submit talks for the live conference past the original deadline of July 21 for the next two weeks.

The conference is scheduled to take place online from Oct. 15. - 17.

The length of the talks that can be submitted are either a 15-minute short talk, a 30-minute normal talk and/or a 60-minute work group session. Organizers believe shortening the talks will keep attendees engaged for the duration of the online conference.

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.

The conference will be using a live conferencing platform and will allow presenters with limited bandwidth to play a talk they recorded should they wish not to present a live talk. The presenter will have the possibility to control the video as well as pause, rewind and fast-forward it.

Attendees can customize their own schedule by adding sessions they would like to participate in once the platform is ready. More information about the platform will be available in future news articles.

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

As the YaST team keeps implementing new features and bug fixes we also keep delivering our small activity reports. As you may remember, we ran a small survey to collect our readers’ opinion about the recent changes introduced in these reports. We will today take a look to the results of the survey. But first things first, let’s go over the most relevant pull requests in the YaSTphere from the latest two weeks.

Summary of the (Auto)YaST Changes

• Research about the differences in the look&feel of the installer and YaST Firstboot, including several fixes and a whole new document summarizing the current inconsistencies and how we plan to address them.
• Several fixes related to the usage of the firstboot_hostname client, including a fixed crash and improved hostname validation.
• More accurate detection of the installation medium type when SMT (SUSE Subscription Management Tool) is used to mirror the repositories from SCC (SUSE Customer Center) during installation.
• Better support in the Partitioner for the different types of LVM logical volumes (RAID, cache, snapshots, etc.). That includes better visualization and informative warnings, as well as automatic removal of dependant snapshots.
• AutoYaST now exports the SUSE registration settings.
• Improved support for the so-called Repository Variables (like ${releasever}) in the URL of the repositories during system upgrade.
• Extend the support of Repository Variables to also cover the name of the repositories, in addition to the already mentioned support in URLs.
• Adapted YaST to handle the new location of the krb5 files, both in yast2-auth-server and yast2-users.
• Many internal improvements regarding AutoYaST.

Our readers have spoken

But the previous list of improvements is not the only news we have for you. We got 31 answers to our survey about how our readers use the YaST blog post and we want to share the results with you.

The detailed report with all the numbers can be read in this mail, but the most important conclusions we have taken are:

• Most participants are loyal readers (71% of them read the blog regularly).
• Most readers define themselves as just (open)SUSE users (74%).
• Both formats we have tried for the posts (long stories vs digests of links) are valued by our readers in a similar way.

Since the current digest format is way easier to put together, we will keep it for the time being. Thanks a lot for all the input, it was really helpfull!

See you in the next sprint report!

Back in February 2020 Christian Boltz resigned from the openSUSE Board explaining the reasons behind his decision on the project mailing list. His resignation came about two weeks after Sarah Julia Kriesch's resignation from the Board.

The openSUSE Board was left with two vacant seats to be filled. Sarah had been a board member for just a few weeks after the 2019-2020 board elections. After her resignation, the openSUSE Board decided to appoint Vinzenz Vietzke as board member based on the results of the 2019-2020 board elections. Following that, only one seat remained vacant on the board. However, before the Election Committee could start discussions for an election to fill that vacant seat, about two weeks after Vinzenz's appointment, openSUSE member Pierre Böckmann called for a No-Confidence vote against the current board. It was unprecedented in the community and that put things on halt for a while.

The board election rules state that:

If 20 per cent or more of the openSUSE members require a new board, an election will be held for the complete elected Board seats.

The Election Committee was tasked to find out whether 20% of the community is indeed calling for a re-election. At this point I should disclose that I am an election official in the openSUSE Election Committee and the task given to us was not easy. After much consultation, we finally came up with a way to "measure" this 20% requirement of the election rule. We set up an electronic petition using the voting platform that is used for openSUSE Board elections.

A few days ago the petition ended and the result showed that only 11.6% of the community was in favour of a re-election. That does not satisfy the requirement for a forced re-election and thus an ad-hoc election will be carried to fill the one vacant seat only.

Ariez Vachha announced the ad-hoc board election schedule on the project mailing list and details are also available on the openSUSE wiki.

Starting now and until the 2nd of August openSUSE members wishing to run for this election or nominate someone from the community can do so by sending an email to election-officials@opensuse.org. I wish to remind that only openSUSE members can run for board candidacy and vote in this election.

The Election Committee is composed of Ariez Vachha, Edwin Zakaria and myself.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The week started a bit bumpy for Tumbleweed, as openQA was having some technical difficulties over the weekend. But nothing that our skilled epxerts could not solve within a few hours. Once every thing was back in shape, Tumbleweed started rolling full steam ahead and we managed to release 5 new snapshots (0710, 0713, 0714, 0715 and 0716)

The changes included in those snapshots were:

• KDE Plasma 5.19.3
• KDE Frameworks 5.72.0
• KDE Applications 20.04.3
• Poppler 0.90.0
• GNOME 3.36.4
• Subversion 1.14.0
• Mozilla Firefox 78.0.2

The staging projects are filled up with:

• Kubernetes 1.18.6 and 1.17.9
• LibreOffice 7.0rc1
• Linux kernel 5.7.9
• GCC 10.2 rc1
• openSSL 3.0
• Python3 package will be renamed to python38. The goal will be to allow multiple python versions to more easily coexist.
• 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