Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week I have been fighting a bit with the size of the DVD. Due to some mistake in the pattern definition, it was for a good chunk ignored. Serves me right for fixing the error and then getting an ISO file that would not ever fit on a DVD, eh? Well, long story short: I needed to save some space, so looked at what the ‘fix’ newly brought on the DVD and aligned to what the DVD looked like before. As a result, week 28 only had two snapshots released (0707 and 0708), containing these changes:

• Mozilla Firefox 78.0.1
• file 5.39
• Linux kernel 5.7.7
• python3 packaging change (so far no difference for the user)

These changes are planned and work in progress:

• GNOME 3.36.4
• 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

Flatpak comes pre-installed in openSUSE Leap 15.2. However, executing the flatpak command for the first time had a minor quirk in a freshly installed Leap 15.2 machine.

error: While opening repository /var/lib/flatpak/repo: opendir(objects): No such file or directory

I see other users commenting about this on Reddit. The error is "most probably" due to missing repositories. Therefore, we will add the Flathub repository as described in its documentation.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Voilà! Now, you may search apps and install them with the flatpak command. For example, if you would search for Visual Studio Code, you would do:

flatpak search code

Find its Application Id from the result obtained with the above command and install it as follows:

flatpak install flathub com.visualstudio.code

The installation command arguments format is:

flatpak install repo_name application_id

In order to remove an application that you previously installed through Flatpak, just replace install by remove followed by the Application Id and it's done.

Before introducing the recent changes in the YaST land, the team would like to congratulate the openSUSE community for the release of Leap 15.2. It looks like a pretty solid release, and we are proud of being part of this project.

Having said that, let’s focus on what the team has achieved during the past sprint.

Summary of the (Auto)YaST Changes

• Fix an embarrassing installer crash (boo#1172898). We suspect that it might be a Ruby problem, but we implemented a solution in the installer.
• Add a mechanism to ask AutoYaST to export a reduced profile. At this point in time, only the yast2-users module supports such a mechanism.
• Publish our conclusions about the usage of wizards in the Expert Partitioner.
• Study the impact of adding support for new types of LVM logical volumes in our storage layer. We will use the outcome of such research to plan future work in this area. If you are curious, you can start by having a look at LVM features and YaST document.
• Use the REMOVE libstorage-ng view when deleting devices. You can check libstorage-ng#740 if you are interested in the mentioned view.
• Remove the obsolete repository initialization, which made installation using an unsigned/self-signed repository impossible.
• Do not solve dependencies while checking the connection to libzypp.
• Add support to collect memory usage data during installation. If you are interested, check the follow-up document, which contains some nice ideas for the near future.
• Backport to SLE 12 SP4 some fixes related to Ruby gems loading in order to solve a problem some appliances were having after a Ruby security update.
• Do not remove /etc/hosts entries during autoinstallation.

The YaST Blog Poll Is Still Running

A few weeks ago, we announced that we were changing our sprint reports’ format to reduce the amount of work that it takes us to write them. Thus, instead of using a consistent and self-contained nice story, we decided to go for a digest-like approach.

After having published two reports using the new approach, we decided to open a poll to know your opinion of such a change. We have already received quite some feedback, but the poll is still open and we would love to hear from you.

The release of openSUSE Leap 15.2 continues to expand its use and is now available for Windows Subsystem for Linux in the Microsoft Store.

Leap can be executed on top of WSL to deliver the power of openSUSE to the Windows world.

WSL is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows systems. WSL is available for 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.

System Administrators who like using tools such as rsync, tar, grep, sed, awk, and more might be limited to corporate environments where the use of Windows is mandatory. With openSUSE Leap 15.2 for WSL, sysadmins are empowered with the freedom, ability and tools to manage systems and networks.

WSL allows users to run Bash shell scripts and GNU/Linux command-line tools like vim and emacs; languages like NodeJS, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go and more; and services like MySQL, Apache, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Additional software is available using openSUSE’s package manager zypper.

Leap 15.2 on WSL isn’t just for sysadmins; developers that want to leverage Linux and users who would like to learn it without setting up a dual-boot system or virtual machine have an opportunity to try openSUSE and a few other distributions on WSL.

Before installing any Linux distributions on Windows, users must enable the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” optional feature. Documentation about using WSL is available on the openSUSE wiki and on Microsoft’s quickstart guide.

I have been working at what has been my dream job at Whirlpool Corporation for six years. Every day I was either working on something new or making something better. The way I saw it, every day I was given a great gift of being payed to play with toys. Sure, they were appliances or … Continue reading New Adventures | Unexpected Change in Employment Status →

Estu Fardani is a helpful & jovial fellow whom I met at the openSUSE Asia Summit last year in Bali, Indonesia. Recently, for the openSUSE Virtual Summit, Estu did a short presentation on Podman. His presentation video is available on YouTube and slides deck available on Google Slides.

While I am not a fan of alias docker=podman I believe Estu added that part in his slide below to make the Podman transition a bit smoother for users already familiar with Docker commands.

Note that the latest release of openSUSE Leap, i.e version 15.2, comes with support for Podman through the libcontainers-common package.

Previously, if one needed to experiment with Podman and/or deploy in production then openSUSE Tumbleweed, Kubic or MicroOS were the supported choices. Now, one may deploy Podman containers on their existing Leap infrastructure (after upgrading to the latest version 15.2).

All sessions videos from the openSUSE Virtual Summit 2020 are available on the openSUSE YouTube channel.

Almost finished this on time… 16th Noodling of things There are certain numbers, due to my nerdiness, that have importance to me. 16 is one of them. Some people get excited about reaching 10 or 20 or 100, I get excited about base 2 numbers. 8, 16, 32, 64 will be huge! I’ll have to … Continue reading Noodlings 16 | Amiga 1200, openSUSE Leap 15.2 and Documentation →

२ जुलाई २०२० को openSUSE Leap 15.2 संस्करण उपलब्ध हुआ।

openSUSE Leap एक निशुल्क और लिनक्स-आधारित ऑपरेटिंग सिस्टम है जो आप अपने पीसी, लैपटॉप या सर्वर पर इस्तेमाल कर सकते है। Leap 15.2 और SUSE Linux Enterprise एक समान कोडबेस उपयोग करते है जिस से openSUSE Leap 15.2 की स्थिरता और ज्यादा मज़बूत होती है।

यह विशेष संस्करण कृत्रिम बुद्धिमत्ता, यानी आर्टिफिशियल इंटेलिजेंस, को अधिक आसानी से सुलभ बनाता है। निम्नलिखित पैकेज ऑफिशल रिपॉजिटरीज से प्राप्त किए जा सकते हैं।

• टेनसरफ्लो
• पाइटोर्च
• ग्राफाना
• प्रोमेथेउस

इस संस्करण में अधिक कंटेनर टूलस् शामिल है, जैसे कि कुबनेटिस् (जो पहली बार के लिए Leap संस्करण में उपलब्ध हुआ है) हेल्म और सिल्यम।

Even if the 99,9% of times all the applications released through the official repositories are reliable and perfectly working, sometime a buggy package might get installed on our systems after an update. With a few steps we can rollback to the previous version taking advantage of the feature made available by package managers and repositories.

I’m going to begin this rant by saying that there are some things that that the Stack Exchange network is really good with: mainly, programming help.

However, it really sucks when it comes to providing help with a specific application where there is already a community. For the past year, I have been the #1 person to answer questions on tor.stackexchange.com. I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back; just to say that I have actually been doing this for a little while. However, I feel that many, if not most, of the questions should never have been there. Here’s what I mean:

1. Nobody googles anything for themselves anymore. A huge number of questions have been answered time and time again and can be found by just searching.
2. Nobody reads documentation or man pages.
3. There are better places to ask the questions.

While #1 and #2 are annoying, it’s #3 that I want to focus on. For example, we get a lot of questions about running Tor relays. Many times, I will copy and paste from the documentation and answer their question. However that question should never have been there at all. It should have been posted to the tor-relays mailing list. That way more people who actually run relays can answer and give better insight. Also other newbies to the list can learn also and the person asking the question can actually be a part of the community.

When it comes to subreddits that are based on a specific application like Tor, take my 3 examples and multiple it by 1000x because it is a continual cycle of the same crap week after week. I had to leave before I flamed someone for asking the same stupid question for the 9th time in a row. I miss good netiquette.