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DimStaropenSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/27
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Week 27 has mostly been in the light of the release of openSUSE Leap 15.2. With the developers mostly focusing on getting the best Leap release yet out of the door, it’s just natural that Tumbleweed has seen a bit less of churn. But honestly: has it? We have released 6 snapshots during this week so that does not talk for the ‘less active development’ of Tumbleweed during this period. The snapshots released were 0625, 0626, 0627, 0628, 0630, and 0701.
The most relevant changes in these snapshots were:
- Linux kernel 5.7.5
- KDE Plasma 5.19.2
- systemd 245.6
- Mesa 20.1.2
- Valgrind 3.16.0
- hplip 3.20.6
So, not much of a slow-down to be seen. And the staging projects are also still busy with various things, like:
- Python3 packaging rework: switch away from multiple spec files to OBS multi build flavors.
- openSSL 3.0
- RPM change: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build
Review of the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd
I have recently bought a 14″ laptop, the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd. This is a mid-range laptop. It is an upgrade from my previous laptop, the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T. However, this machine is not without it flaws.
Design and hardware
The HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd looks and feels like a quality laptop. The body around the keyboard is made of anodized metal and feels quite premium. Somewhat less premium is the plastic cover at the bottom and the plastic screen cover. A nice design touch are the hexagonal shapes in the laptop speaker grille that stretches all the way from left to right. It houses the B&O PLAY speakers. There is a very large trackpad at the bottom of the laptop. The touchpad has invisible integrated buttons (by clicking the whole touchpad on the left bottom or right bottom).
On the left side, this laptop features 2 USB 3.2 type A ports. It also features a headphone jack, an opening for a kensington lock and a SD card reader. On the right side, this laptop features a port for the power plug, an ethernet adapter, a HDMI port, a USB 3.2 type C port and a fingerprint sensor.
The display has an interesting hinge mechanism, that raises the laptop a couple of millimeters when you open it. This means that the keyboard has a slight slope. Which is more comfortable for typing. The disadvantage of this mechanism is that it blocks the hot-air vents on the backside.
The display itself is bright enough, but not extremely bright. The colors look good enough for me, but they are not stunning by any means. The viewing angles of the display are good.
The keyboard feels very good for typing. I could see myself writing entire essays on this laptop. I find it annoying that by default the multimedia keys are enabled instead of the function keys. When I try to access Krunner, I decrease the brightness of the screen instead. This is easily changed in the BIOS. HP calls them ‘action keys’ and you can disable them. I am less enthusiastic about the track-pad, which is by default way to sensitive for my taste. I made some adjustments in the KDE System Settings and now it works fine. It does have a good size. A disadvantage of that size is that the distance between the left bottom click and the right bottom click is too far apart.
The B&O PLAY speakers sound good, relative to other laptop speakers. Voices in songs are very clear. Pop music and Jazz music sound great. The speakers are not very loud. Like many other laptop speakers they fail to produce very crisp high tones (e.g. violins in classical music) and the bass doesn’t feel ‘heavy’ enough (in R&B music). But that is to be expected from laptop speakers.
The weight is just 1,59 kilogram, so its a light laptop. Which is good for portability. The laptop feels quite sturdy because of the metal housing. However, it has a plastic bottom plate which could break, if you access the internals too many times.
Specifications and benchmarks
The specifications:
- Intel Core i5-8250U
- Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU
- Nvidia GeForce MX150 (2GB GDDR5)
- 8GB DDR4 SDRAM
- 256 GB M.2 SSD
- 1 TB 5400rpm HDD
- 14.0″ FullHD Edge-lit IPS display (1920×1080 pixels)
- 1 x LAN port
- 1 x HDMI port
- 1 x Type C USB 3.2 port
- 2 x Type A USB 3.2 port
- 1 x SD card reader
- 1 x Microphone-in/Headphone-out jack
- Realtek RTL8821CE 8.02.11/b/g/n/ac WiFi and Bluetooth card
- HP Wide Vision HD-camera
- B&O PLAY speakers
- 3 cell 41-WHr lithium-ion battery
For benchmarks, I always look at the benchmark scores on the websites: cpubenchmark, videocardbenchmark and harddrivebenchmark. In the table below I compare the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd with my previous laptops: the ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T and the Acer Aspire One 725. The HP Pavilion laptop has 3x more CPU/GPU power than the Asus Vivobook. And it has 10x more CPU power than the Acer Aspire One and 17x more GPU power. All-in-all a nice boost in available horsepower.
| Comparison | HP Pavilion 14 ce0830nd | ASUS VivoBook X402NA | Acer Aspire One 725 |
| Benchmark Score CPU | 6139 |
2022 |
564 |
| Benchmark Score dedicated GPU | 2382 |
– |
– |
| Benchmark Score integrated GPU | 889 |
616 |
138 |
| Benchmark Score SSD | 9961 |
2712 |
– |
| Benchmark Score HDD | 895 |
– |
481 |
| Combined storage size | 1256 GB |
128 GB |
320 GB |
| Screen size | 14″ |
14″ |
11,6″ |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
1920 x 1080 |
1366 x 768 |
Installing openSUSE Leap 15.2 Beta
I installed openSUSE Leap 15.2 Beta in March 2020, 3 months before the official release. The install went without issues. I have settled on the following disk layout:
- SSD 256 GB
- 500 MB – EFI (boot partition)
- 80 GB – BtrFS (root partition)
- 9 GB – Swap (swap partition)
- 16 GB – NTFS (Windows backup partition)
- 149 GB – NTFS (Windows partition)
- HDD 1 TB
- 1 TB – XFS (home partition)
I did encounter issues with hardware detection and drivers of the WiFi chipset and the videocard. I did succeed to resolve the WiFi issue. Unfortunately, I was not able to resolve the videocard issue.
WiFi issue
I knew from past experience that you can still encounter WiFi issues with cards that don’t have proper Linux support. The Realtek RTL8821CE is such a card. After installation, I discovered that I had no access to WiFi. Which makes the laptop a very expensive brick. Fortunately, this laptop has an Ethernet adapter, so I could plug it in on my local wired network.
I first tried installing a driver for the RTL8821CE, which was packaged for openSUSE. However, this failed to work. The second thing I tried, was to follow this guide on manually installing the driver from Github. But that also didn’t work. After multiple hours trying to problem-solve this issue, I was ready to spend my money on an easier solution. In the end, I bought 3 WiFi cards:
- Intel 3168NGW (PCI-Express)
- TP-Link Archer T3U (USB type A)
- TP-Link TL-WN823N (USB type A)
Replacing the internal Realtek card was fairly straightforward. After unscrewing a couple of screws, the bottom plate of the laptop can be removed. And the internal of the laptop are easy to reach. After replacing the Realtek card, the new Intel card produced a working WiFi signal. Which is great! However, the signal strength is low. And my WiFi reception is not great when I am indoors. So I wanted a better solution.
I initially purchased the TP-Link Archer T3U with the WiFi protocol ‘802.11 ac’. Which was a mistake. It uses the Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 card internally. Which (surprise surprise) is not supported on Linux. I tried to install the driver the easy way (packaged for openSUSE) and the hard way. Both ways didn’t succeed. Which meant that I had to purchase another USB WiFi dongle.
This time, I looked for a WiFi card that had Linux support out of the box. I purchased the TP-Link TL-WN823N card with the WiFi protocol ‘802.11 n’. And it works without any problems on openSUSE. So my suggestion for other Linux users with WiFi problems: purchase this (13 euro) USB WiFi dongle and save yourself hours of fiddling around with DKMS drivers that may or may not be working.
Nvidia videocard issue
The HP Pavilion 14 laptop is an optimus laptop, which means it features both integrated (Intel) graphics and dedicated (Nvidia) graphics cards. openSUSE Leap 15.2 doesn’t install the xf86-video-intel package by default. This is easily remedied by searching and installing this package via YaST and rebooting.
The Nvidia videocard wasn’t showing at all. When the proprietary Nvidia gfx-G04 / gfx-G05 drivers became available, I wanted to try to resolve this issue. I installed SUSE-prime to be able to switch between Intel and Nvidia graphics. SUSE-prime has a very easy to understand Wiki page. After installing the proprietary G05 drivers and SUSE-prime, the Nvidia card was still not showing. I tried the G04 drivers instead and replaced SUSE-prime with SUSE-prime-bbswitch. But I still wasn’t able to switch between the Nvidia and Intel GPUs. The G04 driver did appear to work better than the G05 drivers, because I was able to open the NVIDIA X Server application. Which presented me with an error dialog, informing me to run nvidia-xconfig as root.
When I followed the recommendation, an empty xorg.conf file was created. Which caused Xorg not to work at all after reboot. I had to remove this xorg.conf file to get my KDE desktop back up and running.
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
In the blog of another openSUSE user (Cubiclenate) I found that I was not alone in trying to resolve this issue. He linked me to the openSUSE Bumblebee Wiki page. These instructions looked very daunting, so I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. I can play the same games on Windows (via Steam) where the Nvidia drivers are working.
Dual booting Windows
My reason for installing Windows 10 has nothing to do with the mentioned Nvidia issues. The reason to install Windows is to be able to transfer files between my computer and my Samsung Galaxy S phone and my Fitbit Versa watch.
I encountered problems in the past, trying to transfer pictures and music via Dolphin or via KDE Connect. I did manage to transfer a couple of files without a problem. But a mass download of all pictures from my Samsung phone to my computer was to much for Dolphin/KDE Connect to handle. And uploading a large collection of music from my computer to my Samsung phone was just as much of a problem.
This laptop originally shipped with Windows. I formatted both hard drives when installing openSUSE. I left some space on the SSD for a fresh Windows install. Windows 10 installed without any problems. When I restarted the computer, GRUB only showed the openSUSE entries, so I couldn’t boot into Windows 10. This issue was easy to resolve, I found the solution online.
In Dolphin I opened the Windows partition. Then I opened a terminal and entered:
sudo os-prober
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
GRUB directly found my Windows partition and added it as an option in the GRUB menu. After his, I was able to boot into Windows 10.
As many people have experienced before, Windows 10 is very hostile to your privacy. I already gained an advantage by doing a clean install. This way I didn’t have to deal with the unwanted crapware that HP installed by default on my system. Next, I disabled all spying options in the settings. Windows 10 was also automatically installing games like Bubble Witch 3 Saga and Candy Crush Friends. This apparently cannot be disabled. Microsoft, please stick to Mahjong, Minesweeper, Solitaire and Sudoku.
So what did I install? Mostly open source applications: Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC media player, Elisa music player, ImageGlass, Notepad ++, openRA and SuperTuxKart. I also installed Steam (not open source) to play some games. And I installed the Fitbit app (also proprietary software) to communicate with my watch.
Gaming
I have installed OpenArena, Xonotic, SuperTuxKart and OpenRA on both openSUSE and Windows. I will use these open source games to compare gaming performance between openSUSE and Windows. The GeForce Experience app (which controls the Nvidia GPU) didn’t recognize these as games and thus everything runs on the Intel GPU. So this is a fair comparison.
| Average FPS | openSUSE Leap 15.2 | Windows 10 |
| OpenArena (max settings) | 45 FPS |
90 FPS |
| Xonotic (ultra settings) | 55 FPS |
100 FPS |
| SuperTuxKart (max settings) | 9 FPS |
17 FPS |
| OpenRA – Red Alert (default settings) | 60 FPS |
60 FPS |
I wasn’t expecting this difference in gaming performance. The average frame-rates are almost twice as good on the Windows side. Apparently the Intel GPU drivers on the Windows side are better optimized.
The GeForce Experience app did recognize the games that I installed via Steam on Windows: Tomb Raider, DiRT Rally and GRID autosport. These 3 proprietary games are used to see how well the Nvidia GPU is handling them.
| Average FPS | Ultra settings | Low settings |
| Tomb Raider | 40 FPS |
60 FPS |
| DiRT Rally | 30 FPS |
54 FPS |
| GRID autosport | 16 FPS |
60 FPS |
Not surprisingly, the frame rates on Ultra settings are not great. However, these games are very playable on full HD resolution on medium/low settings.
Multitasking
The HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd handles multitasking like a boss. It has no problem handling multiple tasks at the same time. For fun, I tried opening Firefox, Dolphin, Gwenview, Darktable and LibreOffice Writer, while playing music in Elisa music player at the same time. The image below shows the result. The applications started almost instantly. None of the CPU cores reached 100% and most of them stayed below 50%. The 8GB of memory was plenty to handle all of these tasks.
Conclusion
Would I recommend the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd? To be honest, its a mixed bag on openSUSE. Installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2 was very easy. And installation of a dual boot system with Windows 10 was easy as well. The laptop has an attractive look and feel. The display, speakers, keyboard and external ports are all good. The touchpad is too sensitive, but this can be adjusted in the KDE settings. The machine has enough RAM, enough storage and the hard drives are performant. The Intel CPU/GPU is great. Which means that this is a great machine for multitasking. The gaming performance on the Intel GPU on openSUSE Leap 15.2 is good enough to play various open source games on medium/high settings.
There are 2 big issues why I wouldn’t recommend this machine:
- the Realtek WiFi card is not supported under Linux
- the Nvidia GPU is not working in openSUSE Leap 15.2
I feel that if you are looking for a good Linux laptop, it should come with an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth chip. And that it is better to avoid laptops with Nvidia optimus videocards.
So is this laptop a disappointment? Not at all. After a bit of tinkering, I am quite happy with it. I replaced the internal WiFi card and use a 13 euro USB WiFi dongle if I need an even better signal. I don’t mind that the Nvidia GPU is not working on the openSUSE side. This machine offers a big performance upgrade in comparison to my previous laptop. I enjoy the better display, speakers and the great keyboard. I have a Logitech wireless mouse plugged in, so I don’t have to use the track-pad exclusively. The battery is also better than my previous laptop. For me, these are enough reasons to happily keep running openSUSE Leap on this laptop.
Published on: 2 July 2020
openSUSE Leap 15.2 Release Brings Exciting New Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Container Packages
ISO 639-1 Languages - CA - CS - DE - FR - ID - IT - ES - JA - ZH-TW - PT
NUREMBERG, Germany (02/07/2020) – The openSUSE release team is proud to announce the availability of community-developed openSUSE Leap 15.2. Professional users, from desktops and data-center servers to container hosts and Virtual Machines (VM), will be able to use Leap 15.2 as a high-quality, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade Linux operating system.
Download openSUSE Leap 15.2
This release provides security updates, bug fixes, network enhancements, and many new features for openSUSE users who depend on a stable and scalable distribution. openSUSE’s rich and mature Linux platform supports workloads on x86-64, ARM64 and POWER systems. The dependability of core packages found in previous Leap 15 versions and newer open source technologies in Leap 15.2 are ready for multiple use cases and workloads.
“Leap 15.2 represents a huge step forward in the Artificial Intelligence space,” said Marco Varlese, a developer and member of the project. “I am super excited that openSUSE end-users can now finally consume Machine Learning / Deep Learning frameworks and applications via our repositories to enjoy a stable and up-to-date ecosystem.”
What’s New
Several exciting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning packages are added in Leap 15.2.
Tensorflow: A framework for deep learning that can be used by data scientists, provide numerical computations and data-flow graphs. Its flexible architecture enables users to deploy computations to one or more CPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device without rewriting code.
PyTorch: Made for both server and compute resources, this machine learning library accelerates power users’ ability to prototype a project and move it to a production deployment.
ONNX: An open format built to represent machine learning models, provides interoperability in the AI tool space. It enables AI developers to use models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes, and compilers.
Grafana and Prometheus are two new maintained packages that open up new possibilities for analytical experts. Grafana provides end users the ability to create interactive visual analytics. Feature-rich data-modeling packages: Graphite, Elastic and Prometheus give openSUSE users greater latitude to construct, compute and decipher data more intelligibly.
In general, software packages in the distribution grew by the hundreds. Data fusion, Machine Learning and AI aren’t all that is new in openSUSE Leap 15.2; a Real-Time Kernel for managing the timing of microprocessors to ensure time-critical events are processed as efficiently as possible is available in this release.
“The addition of a real time kernel to openSUSE Leap unlocks new possibilities,” said Gerald Pfeifer, chair of the project’s board. “Think edge computing, embedded devices, data capturing, all of which are seeing immense growth. Historically many of these have been the domain of proprietary approaches; openSUSE now opens the floodgates for developers, researchers and companies that are interested in testing real time capabilities or maybe even in contributing. Another domain open source helps open up!”
Container Technologies
openSUSE users will have more power to develop, ship and deploy containerized applications using the newer container technologies that are being maintained in the distribution.
For the first time, Kubernetes is an official package in the release. This gives a huge boost to container orchestration capabilities, allowing users to automate deployments, scale, and manage containerized applications.
Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes, is also added. Helm helps developers and system administrators manage complexity by defining, installing, and upgrading the most complex of Kubernetes applications.
Container Runtime Interface (CRI) using Open Container Initiative (OCI) conformant runtimes (CRI-O) is also new to this release. CRI-O is a lightweight alternative to using Docker as the runtime, which allows Kubernetes to use any OCI-compliant runtime as the container runtime for running pods or processes running on a cluster.
Even with Docker, the use of microservices will be secure thanks to more container packages arriving in this release.
Cilium helps in transparently securing network connectivity and load-balancing between application containers and services deployed using Linux container frameworks like Docker and Kubernetes. Cilium provides an efficient way to define and enforce both the network-layer and the application-layer security policies, which are based on a container/pod identity.
Leap 15.2 offers both Server and Transactional Server system roles. The Server system role uses a small set of packages that are suitable for servers with a text mode interface while the Transactional Server system role is similar to the Server role, but uses a read-only root filesystem to provide atomic, automatic updates of the system without interfering with the running system.
Installation process
The openSUSE installer remains as powerful and as versatile as ever, allowing to easily tweak every single aspect of the system including the mitigation for CPU based attacks like Spectre or Meltdown. The installation process presents several improvements like a more user-friendly dialog for selecting the system role, improved information about the installation progress, better compatibility with right-to-left languages like Arabic and many other small enhancements.
In Leap 15.2, it offers a more accurate detection of MS Windows partitions encrypted with BitLocker and a better management of storage devices for Raspberry Pi.The installer also makes it easy to tweak the mitigation for CPU based attacks like Spectre or Meltdown.
Unattended installations with AutoYaST is greatly improved. Many aspects are polished at all levels. More configuration options are added and the possible errors in the user’s profile and the installation process are now handled and reported in a more sensible and informative way.
Improvements to YaST - The most complete configuration tool for Linux
The YaST Partitioner remains the most powerful tool to configure all kinds of storage technologies in Linux, both during installation of the system or at any later point. This release incorporates the possibility of creating and managing a Btrfs file-system that expands over several devices, and the release allows for the use of more advanced encryption technologies.
Leap 15.2 is the first openSUSE release to introduce a gradual change that splits system’s configuration between /usr/etc and /etc directories. YaST supports this new structure in all the affected modules, offering to system administrators a central point to inspect the configuration that will help them during the transition and beyond.
Leap can be executed on top of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), delivering the power of openSUSE to the Windows world. The YaST version in Leap 15.2 improves the compatibility with that platform, specially when executing YaST Firstboot in order to perform all the needed initial adjustments.
Desktop Environment
While the desktop environments in this release will be new, the focus remains on more conservative fixed release. The Long-Term-Support version of KDE’s Plasma 5.18 is available in Leap 15.2. The newer LTS has a significant amount of polish and new features. Notifications are clearer, settings are streamlined and the overall look is more attractive. GNOME 3.34 updates from the previous 3.26 version that was available in Leap 15.1. The new GNOME provides a considerable amount of visual refreshes for a number of applications. More data sources in Sysprof makes performance profiling of an application even easier and there are multiple improvements to Builder including an integrated D-Bus inspector. Xfce has a minor update to version 4.14 after four plus years of development; the new version produced a slew of updates and features, including enhancements for the window manager, file manager, application finder and power management.
Cloud Images, Hardware and Architectures
Linode cloud images of Leap are available today and ready for all infrastructure needs. Cloud hosting services will offer images of Leap 15.2 in the coming weeks like Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Compute Engine and OpenStack. Leap 15 is continually optimized for cloud usage scenarios as a host and virtualization guest.
TUXEDO Computers and Linux notebooks can be purchase with Leap 15.2 preinstalled. Leap 15.2 can also be ordered preinstalled with Slimbooks.
Leap deployment scenarios include physical, virtual, host and guest, and cloud. Ports to other architectures like ARM64 and POWER are expected in the coming weeks.
Core Components
Compilers, scripting languages, system configuration tools and graphical user interfaces have all been improved.
GNU Compiler Collection 7 through 9 are available in this newer Leap minor version along with an updated version of the 3D Graphics package Mesa to support the use of the professional grade operating system. Leap 15.2 has the same 234 version of systemd used in Leap 15.0 and 15.1.
New graphics hardware support has been backported for the release of Leap 15.2 and Linux Kernel 5.3 will be used for the release. Kernel features automatically become available in Leap since the distribution shares the same kernel as SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE).
openSUSE Leap 15.2 is a distribution with community packages built on top of core sources of SLE 15 Service Package 2. The shared common core and alignment with SLE makes migrations to SUSE’s enterprise product easy for professional who want to extend the life cycle of their maintenance and security past the life cycle of Leap. Migrating from the community version of Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise is an available option for those who desire to migrate. The migration from openSUSE Leap server installations to SUSE Linux Enterprise is easy for system integrators developing on Leap code who may decide to move to an enterprise version for SLAs, certification, mass deployment, or extended Long Term Support.
Health Packages
This Leap release increases the capabilities of health services. The award-winning health- and hospital management system GNU Health comes in version 3.6.4. It has an updated GUI and is prepared for COVID-19 pandemic tracking, including updated ICD-10 codes and improved laboratory functions. GNU Health can directly interface with Orthanc, the free PACS Server, which is newly shipped in this release. Developers of the health and medical fields have several open-source tools with openSUSE Leap that can be be used for creating powerful User Interfaces (UI) and User Experiences (UX) for medical devices. Healthcare device developers can be confident in the use and performance of Leap and rely on the system supporting newer and older hardware.
Configuration Management
System administrators will have the most up-to-date tools for configuration management. Salt 3000 has arrived in Leap; the new Salt version removes the date versioning and provides new functions to chroot: apply, sls, and highstate. It also updates slot syntax to support parsing dictionary responses and to append text. Ansible is also availble for sysadmins. Ansible works over SSH and does not require any software or daemons to be installed on remote nodes.
Groupware and File Hosting
File sharing and cloud services include software such as NextCloud and even the groupware application suite Kopano (formerly known as Zarafa) is part of the official Leap 15.2 repositories.
Like prior versions, System Administrators and small businesses can use Leap for hosting web and mail servers or for network management with DHCP, DNS, NTP, Samba, NFS, LDAP, and hundreds of other services.
Life Cycle of Leap
Minor versions of the Leap 15 series have about an 18-month life cycle; minor releases come roughly once a year. Users of openSUSE Leap 15.1, which was released in May of 2019, should upgrade to Leap 15.2 within the next 6 months. The first release of Leap 15 was released two years ago. Download Leap 15.2
The openSUSE Project is a worldwide community that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. It creates two of the world’s best Linux distributions, the Tumbleweed rolling-release, and Leap, the hybrid enterprise-community distribution. openSUSE is continuously working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds. Learn more about it on opensuse.org.
Ubuntu Cinnamon | Review from an openSUSE User
CubicleNate now on LBRY | Blathering
Software War (Keith Curtis)
Hello there! Do you know who Keith Curtis? If yes then good! If no and you are someone who using opensource software then you should get to know who are this guy.
I never meet him personally but I my love with linux start with Debian and I like to read his blog about debian, opensource vs proprietary software, questioning about Ubuntu existant etc (which is how this thing lead me to his weblog 10 years ago).. I just silent reader, I read this articles including everyone comments which I believe everyone have they own implicit objective and mutual objective for everything about IT.
Ok, sorry for the crap introduction taking too long. Today, I visited his weblog and found out he releasing “Software Wars, the Movie”.
You can download the torrent file HERE or watch it on the Peertube that he already setup.
P/s: If you wonder which articles lead me to his weblog 10 years ago..then let me tell you. That articles was “Should Ubuntu Have Been Created?”. From the title itself you can already smell how controversial yet so brave. Even Mark Shuttleworth come and leave a comment there.
openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/26
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Week 26, aka half of the year, is over. But as we all know, Tumbleweed does not care much about the weather, the temperatures, or the season at all. It only cares for its contributors to have fun – at any given moment. So, week 26 has seen 3 snapshots (0618, 0621, and 0622).
The snapshots contained these changes:
- VLC 3.0.11
- KDE Plasma 5.19.1
- Linux kernel 5.7.2
- LibreOffice 7.0 beta2 (please report bugs if you see regressions)
The staging projects are filled with these relevant changes:
- Linux kernel 5.7.5
- KDE Plasma 5.19.2
- systemd 245.6: the maintainer started adding the minor release number to the package version to make it clearer, what the openSUSE package is based on
- LibreOffice 7.0 will enable skia
- openSSL 3.0
- RPM change: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build
Creative Common license (CC)
Have you heard keyword such as intellectual property, copyright, pattern, watermark, plagiarize etc? Well of coz you heard it everywhere. It all about licenses and permission.
If someone creating opensource software, we normally heard it under “Free and open-source software software licenses” such as GNU GPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, Mozilla public, Common public and many more.
How about books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites? Okey,it is also eligible to file for a license. Creative Common license (CC) is one of several public copyright licenses we can use.
The CC licenses are appropriate for all types of content you want to share publicly, except software and hardware. The CC licenses all grant the “baseline rights”, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide, for non-commercial purposes and without modification.
The details of each of these licenses depend on the version, and comprises a selection out of four conditions:
| Icon | Right | Description |
|---|---|---|
 |
Attribution (BY) | Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these. Since version 2.0, all Creative Commons licences require attribution to the creator and include the BY element. |
 |
Share-alike (SA) | Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical (“not more restrictive”) to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC.) |
 |
Non-commercial (NC) | Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes. |
 |
No Derivative Works (ND) | Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it. Since version 4.0, derivative works are allowed but must not be shared. |
Reference : wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license
This weblog work is under “CC BY-NC-ND 4.0”
As per title said, this weblog work is under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
This license is the most restrictive of CC six main licenses, only allowing others to download my works and share them with others as long as they credit back, but you can’t change them in any way or use them commercially purpose.
I choose to CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 in order to be able to protect my own contents from getting stolen. Although things that I write might be full of crap and bulls**t, broken grammar, not interesting but at least it is a way to practice on using the intellectual property rights.