About two years ago, I started using Kdenlive to do video editing. The dark theme I had been using, a modified version of the “openSUSE dark alternate” theme, was not getting along with Kdenlive and I had to use the “Breeze Dark” theme to be able to properly distinguish the widgets and such on the … Continue reading openSUSE Breeze Dark Plasma Color Scheme Published →

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week might not have seen the highest count of snapshots being published (only 3, 0212, 0215, and 0217), but for sure we reached the highest count of packages to replace on your system and megabytes to transfer this year (so far). We have few reasons to trigger rebuilds of all packages, and most of the time I do that on a glibc update and when we switch the default compiler (in both cases to make use of new technologies). This week, glibc was the ‘guilty’ one.

The three snapshots contained the following changes (and more):

• glibc 2.33
• Mozilla Thunderbird 78.7.1
• Mozilla Firefox 85.0.1
• Linux kernel 5.10.14 & 5.10.16
• LibreOffice 7.1.0.3
• KDE Plasma 5.21.0
• KDE Frameworks 5.79.0
• postfix 3.5.9: note: the default format for its databases changed from bdb to lmdb; bdb support is in postfix-bdb

That is almost everything I promised you last week. Almost! But don’t worry: while we all enjoy a stable, rolling release, the developers keep on submitting new changes. Currently, we are testing the integration of these parts:

• Linux kernel 5.11.x
• Binutils 2.36
• GNOME 3.38.4 (GNOME 40.beta is being tested in GNOME:Next)
• openssl 1.1.1i, based on centralized crypto-policies package
• Use GCC 11 as default compiler (Staging:Gcc7)

Since there is a part of me still stuck in 1998, I do enjoy using my Texas Instruments TI-86 calculator for math things. When I have a complex equation that my middle-aged brain just can’t seem to work out, I reach for my trusty old TI-86. It has been a faithful companion that has been … Continue reading Linking a TI-86 Calculator with openSUSE →

Today we reached a new milestone: all openSUSE services around the world now support IPv6 natively. The last set of machines in Provo are equipped with IPv6 addresses since today. IPv6 was missing for those machines since the renumbering (which was needed because of the carve out of SUSE from Microfocus). Thanks to one of our providers, who now reserved and routed a whole /48-IPv6 network for us.

With this, we can also run all our DNS servers with IPv6 (and they do not only have a IPv6 address, but all our external DNS entries for the opensuse.org domain should now contain IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as well. Don't worry, you did not miss much. The Dual-Stack (IPv4 and IPv6) is the case for all services in Germany since a long, long time already - and we even had it for the machines in US for a long time, before SUSE switched the provider. But this finally brings us to the same level on all locations!

I was going down a retro computing rabbit hole and I stumbled upon this fantastic little device that allows you to plug in more modern game pads into the Commodore 64. Specifically, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis, the 64JPX. This is a small interface that plugs into the DB9 ports of the Commodore, Atari and … Continue reading 64JPX | JoyPad eXpander for the Commodore 64 →

Updates of both KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed as part of three snapshots released this week.

The rolling Tumbleweed distribution began the week with Linux Kernel 5.10.12 and has ended it with version 5.10.16, which was the latest stable Kernel when the 20210215 snapshot was released.

The newest Frameworks 5.79.0 version arrived in snapshot 20210217. As part of the release, Kholidays package updated holidays for Mauritius and Taiwan. The Kirigami user interface framework had fixes to the controls and enhanced some vertical alignments. Removal of the usage of non-UTF-8 string literals were made with Framework’s kcodecs package update. GNOME had some updates with gnome-builder updating to version 3.38.2, which provided support for an --add-policy for Flatpak, and gnome-software updating to version 3.38.1, which updated translations and ignores harmless warnings when using unusual fwupd versions. Three areas of focus were emphasized for the update of dhcp 4.4.2 with changes for dynamic DNS additions, dhclient improvements and support for dynamic shared libraries; the package is now licensed under the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0. Multiple PyPI packages were updated including python-greenlet 1.0.0, which requires setuptools to build from source, and python-numpy 1.20.1, which fixed a random.shuffle regression. A major update of perl-Mojolicious 9.01 added an experimental color attribute and an experimental color log environment variable. Other packages to update in the snapshot were Long-Term Support package subversion 1.14.1, filesystem mounter fuse3 3.10.2, pipewire 0.3.21 and git 2.30.1.

Plasma 5.21 is all about upgrading the looks and usability of Plasma. Snapshot 20210215 brought this Plasma update, which refreshed the color scheme and sports a brand new unified headerbar style with a clean and cool new look. The new Plasma System Monitor app for monitoring system resources is now an integral part of Plasma; the application shows all the running applications along with detailed statistics and graphs. Plasma 5.21 makes massive progress toward first-class support for Wayland. The virtual keyboard in Wayland has been improved and supports GTK applications using the text-input-v3 protocol. The update of Mozilla Firefox 85.0.1 fixed a few bugs like a crash in the browser in case of an unexpected Cache Application Programming Interface state. The trim that was not working in ImageMagick was fixed in version 7.0.10.62 and the GPS info for TIFF images now works with the imaging applications. Terminal emulator xterm 366 corrected the upper-limit for a selection buffer, which fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure. PDF library poppler 21.02.0 fixed a memory leak if saving a file fails. Some other packages in the snapshot were LibreSSL 3.2.4, text rendering package pango 1.48.2 and Linux Kernel 5.10.16.

The Linux Kernel updated from 5.10.12 to 5.10.14 in the 20210212 snapshot, which brought in some KVM fixes. New packages were inherited from GNU Compiler Collection 10 into the GCC 11.0.0+git183291 update. CardDAV address books now support OAuth2 and Google Contacts in the email client update of Mozilla Thunderbird 78.7.1. The glibc 2.33 version optimized dynamic linker loads and the implementations of shared objects from subdirectories under the glibc-hwcaps directory on the library search path; that’s if the system’s capabilities meet the requirements for this subdirectory. The 7.1.0.3 LibreOffice updated bundled dependencies and php7 7.4.15 fixed a Curl bug and core fix that provided a bogus parser error on more than 4GB of source code. The regular expression library re2 had an update from a November release to version 20210202, which addressed -Wnull-dereference warnings from GCC 10.x.

Things are hectic and busy here on Earth. We may have disrupted the seeemingly eternal atmospheric streams by warming up the planet. We seem to be really terrible at dealing with a viral threat we've known about for a long time. We're doing a lot of bad things as species.

But today I won't be bitching about our government failing to distribute vaccines handed to them on a silver platter. I'll be admiring the work of another government agency that did amazingly organizing resources and talent and will be landing the Perseverance rover on Mars at 19:15 UTC.

Join me and watch it here

Today we reached a new milestone: all openSUSE services around the world now support IPv6 natively. The last set of machines in Provo are equipped with IPv6 addresses since today. IPv6 was missing for those machines since the renumbering, which was needed because of the carve out of SUSE from Micro Focus. A big thank you goes out to one of our providers, who now reserved and routed a whole /50-IPv6 network for us.

With this, we can also run all our DNS servers with IPv6 (and they do not only have an IPv6 address, but all our external DNS entries for the opensuse.org domain should now contain IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as well. Don’t worry, you did not miss much. The Dual-Stack (IPv4 and IPv6) is the case for all services in Germany since a long, long time already - and we even had it for the machines in the US for a long time, before SUSE switched the provider. But this finally brings us to the same level on all locations!

It’s finally time for a small update on the Karatek Network, so I summorized the most important things that changed in the past month.

Nemesis is now OpenGM - Well, kind of

In order to make our Telegram bot more accesible for other users and easier to self host, I decieded to build RPM packages for an easy and convinient installation process. Problem was, the name “Nemesis” was already taken inside openSUSE Open Build Service, so I was required to change the name. After thinking about it a lot, I decieded that “OpenGM” would be a nice name that represents what we are: “Open” in multiple ways - First of all, our code is open. We do not rely on any proprietary non-free code for the bot, and that’s how it’s gonna stay. Plus, we are an open commuinty. Everyone who wants to can use the Bot, and we try our best to help new users getting their things done. “GM” stands for “Group Manager” - So I think OpenGM is a perfect representation of the project. However, the instance hosted by me (@karatekbot) is keeping its name (for now).

OpenGM is now avaliable for openSUSE

As mentioned before, you can now install OpenGM as a regular package on openSUSE - just follow these instructions. Specfiles and building status is avaliable at Open Build Service.

Our hosted instance changed servers!

In an effort to make Nemesis faster, we moved our hosted instance from a Raspberry Pi 3 to a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB. This should increase performance by a lot. As these servers cost money, I would really appriciate if you donated a small amount - so if you’re interessted, please contact me. Thanks a lot!

Dear Tumbleweed users,

At the moment, Tumbleweed snapshot 20210212 is being synced out to the
mirrors; the public announcement of the snapshot being available will
(estimated) be at around 12pm CET (Feb 16)

I want to inform you upfront of a few specialties:

  * The snapshot is going to be large, in the number of packages to
‘update’ (mostly rebuild counters) and thus also megabytes.
  * The snapshot is the first to be based on glibc 2.33
https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2021-February/122207.html

While testing this snapshot, a few things were broken (which delayed
publishing a bit). There are, however, still two issues known which you
should be aware of:

  * NIS integrated system administrators might want to check out
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1182247 – the nss_compat
module does not load additional modules, which means you might have to
adjust the nsswitch.conf to make ‘nis’ an explicit setting.
  * Especially on 32bit systems we had seen a bunch of sandboxing
features not behaving as expected. This currently (still) affects
libqt5-qtwebengine. An additional fix is currently being published in
parallel into the update channel
(http://download.opensuse.org/update/tumbleweed/). In case you see
rendering issues (kmail for example) make sure to have this update
included.

The other fixes (OpenSSH, chromium) which we had seen in prior testings
are already included in snapshot 20210212 and should not be of concern.

As usual, if you see new bugs appearing, please verify if somebody else
already filed them in bugzilla.opensuse.org and, if not already
present, file the bugs yourself.