This week there were six openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released.

Some minor email changes have affected the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, so reviewer ratings won’t be listed.

The latest snapshot, 20201111, updated a half dozen RubyGems. The 4.11.0 rubygem-mini_magick package fixed the fetching of metadata when there are GhostScript warnings and fixed some method redefined warnings. The rubygem-web-console 4.1.0 package update added support for Rails 6.1.

KDE Applications 20.08.3 arrived in snapshot 20201110. In the 20.08.3 apps update, a fix for Okular addressed a wrong memory access that could cause a crash and a fix for the fast scrolling with Shift+Scroll. Video editor kdenlive provided a fix for the monitor displayed frames per second with high fps values and fixed the playlist clips that had a no audio regression. There were several other app fixes and konsole provided an important fix for closing the split view with ‘Alt+C’. Mozilla Firefox 82.0.3 fixed regressions introduced in the previous minor version and took care of a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, which in certain circumstances, the MCallGetProperty opcode would emit with unmet assumptions that could result in an exploitable use-after-free condition. GStreamer 1.18.1 provided some important security and memory leak fixes while providing various stability and reliability improvements. Hardware identification and configuration data package hwdata 0.341 updated the Peripheral Component Interconnect, USB and vendor identifications. The multi-purpose desktop calculator qalculate 3.14.0 improved the plot speed for functions that are defined using expressions. Other packages updated in the snapshot were libbluray 1.2.1, a month and a half of updates for libiscsi and udisks2 2.9.1.

An update of the Xfce file manager package thunar to version 1.8.16 was the lone update in snapshot 20201108. The newer version updated translations, fixed an error for custom date formats and added a missing parameter to the ThunarBrowserPokeDeviceFunc function.

Three packages were updated in snapshot 20201107. Some fixes for the debugging format DWARF-5 was made with the package update to binutils 2.35 and a linker was added to produce a dependency file listing the inputs processed. Function tests were made more robust with perl-IO-Tty 1.15 and the rpm-config-SUSE package was updated to version 0.g64.

Snapshot 20201106 brought important updates for the 11.0.9.0 version of java-11-openjdk; several CVEs were addressed in the new version and improvements to jpeg processing and decoding were also made with the update. GNOME’s personal photo manager shotwell, which was the subject of a legal dispute between GNOME and patent troll Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPIL), updated to version 0.30.11; the image organizer enabled sandboxing for WebKitGTK.

The only major version update arrived in snapshot 20201105. The snapshot provided the new release of Apparmor 3, which adds support for new Linux Kernel features like upstream v8 network socket rules, xattr attachment conditionals and capabilities PERFMON and BPF; it also has a new aa-features-abi for extracting feature abis from the kernel. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ImageMagick 7.0.10.35, firebird 3.0.7, fwupd 1.5.1, libvirt 6.9.0 and vim 8.2.1955.

There was a mailing list migration this past week for openSUSE infrastructure and the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer is temporarily down. The reviewer is likely broken due to a Python script that was affected by the email migration. Help is certainly welcomed. The reviewer code can be found at https://github.com/boombatower/tumbleweed-review.

Our previous sprint report was full of promises. We stated we were working to improve the Cockpit support for (open)SUSE and finishing some other interesting stuff. We also mentioned we had delivered a YaST presentation in the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference. Time has come to pay our debts. The current report offers more news about all that.

Make Cockpit Great… for (open)SUSE

In the Cockpit area, we found out the official module for network configuration is completely coupled to Network Manager. Its (lack of) internal architecture makes very hard to adapt it to work with wicked, the framework used by (open)SUSE to configure the network, specially on servers. So we are writing a new Cockpit module to configure the system network through wicked. It’s pretty functional already, including:

• Configuration of both IPv4 and IPv6
• Basic support for wireless configuration
• Management of VLANs
• Definition of routes
• Virtual interfaces like bonds and bridges

We don’t have a clear release date for this new module yet, since we have to coordinate with the team that will take care of packaging Cockpit for (open)SUSE and we still want to improve validation and error handling. That includes deciding how to inform the user if something goes wrong, since there is no unified way to do that across the different Cockpit modules. And we also want to improve the DNS settings and to extend the support for wireless technologies. Meanwhile, if you are hungry for screenshots you can check the links to the pull requests in the list of features above.

We have also being working in a Cockpit module to manage transactional updates. But that one is still in research phase and we have very little to show at this point.

Storage improvements

Of course, YaST keeps being our main target and lately we have concentrated a rather significant amount of development firepower into the area of storage management. First of all, we have finally submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed the long anticipated overhaul of the Partitioner user interface. Check the description of this pull request for a visual summary of everything that have changed.

On top of that new interface, we have started make Btrfs subvolumes more prominent, adding more possibilities to handle them. Check the corresponding pull request for more details and screenshots.

And last but not least (regarding storage management), we have improved the installer proposal for creating a /boot/efi partition when needed. That change was also submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed and will be available as well in the upcoming Leap 15.3 and SLE-15-SP3.

Informing more and better

We also put some effort during this sprint in improving YaST’s user friendliness. On one hand by explaining better the bootloader configuration in some corner cases and allowing to easily tweak that configuration. On the other hand, offering a much more informative message when there is an error parsing some configuration file.

Look Ma! That’s me on TV!

We also found out the recording of our talk presenting the “Top 25 New Features in (Auto)YaST” at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference is finally available at the openSUSE TV channel.

Enjoy and spread the word!

That’s all folks

Since we had very diverse things to share with you, this post has turned out to be a bit longer than expected. But don’t worry, we plan to come back to more concise reports in the upcoming blog entry. That will be in two weeks from now. Meanwhile, watch the video, check the links and have a lot of fun!

The openSUSE release team has established a survey to gain greater insights into the use cases of people using or developing for ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8.

The introduction to the survey explains that ARMv7 architecture is currently being challenged by the new Jump development model of openSUSE Leap.

The Jump process looks to use pre-built binaries from the corresponding SUSE Linux Enterprise release.

“Previously openSUSE Leap was sharing the distribution package sources with SUSE Linux Enterprise, but built them separately,” according to the introduction of the survey. “As SLE stopped supporting 32-bit distributions many years ago, we have the option of continuing to rebuild the packages for openSUSE Leap on those architectures from sources, or to stop supporting those.

“We would like to understand our openSUSE ARM contributors and openSUSE ARM user base before taking any further steps. We really value your time, we don’t expect you to spend more than 10 minutes on this survey.”

The outcome of the survey will be:

• either continue supporting openSUSE Leap on ARMv7 in future releases (15.3 and beyond)
• or that ARMv7 remains an openSUSE Tumbleweed only option.

The 64-bit flavor (aarch64) is not part of this issue.

The survey has seven questions and is anonymous, but gives the option to list an email if a person is interested in being contacted by the developers. The survey ends on Nov 20th November 23:59. So, please go to survey.opensuse.org to fill it!

Thank you!

The openSUSE release team

Four years of nightmare is over.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We have seen a lengthy rebuild phase of one snapshot due to Perl being upgraded to 5.32, which required all Perl modules to be rebuilt for them to install to the right location. Despite this delay, we still managed to publish three snapshots (1029, 1030, and 1104).

The most relevant changes as part of these snapshots includes:

• poppler 20.10.0 (new version format, last was 0.99.0)
• polkit 0.118, using spidermonkey 78
• KDE Plasma 5.20.2
• LibreOffice 7.0.3.1
• LXQt 0.16.0
• LLVM 11
• Perl 5.32.0

As usual, the staging projects are in full swing and the next snapshots are already being built. Planned changes include:

• AppArmor 3.0
• Linux kernel 5.9.6
• Binutils 2.35
• GLibc will be configured with CET enabled (Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology)
• RPM 4.16 (Staging:A – some help to fix issues is welcome)
• Ruby 3.0: mainly YaST not ready for that switch
• GNOME 3.38.1: awaiting sec review for malcontent (parental control feature)
• openssl 3.0 (long-term; no progress in the last few weeks)

Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since our last blog more than a week ago.

These four snapshots had a variety of package updates that included updates for LLVM, Wireshark, Node.js, Plasma and Xfce.

A few hours ago, the first snapshot of the month of November was released with snapshot 20201104, which started trending at a rating of 90 on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. The snapshot brought the new major version of LLVM 11. More than half the changelog covers the additions and changes for this compiler. Generic improvements to Clang as a whole were made and new compiler flags like -fstack-clash-protection will provide protection against the stack clash attack for x86, s390x and ppc64 architectures. The edict package, which is a Japanese-English Dictionary in machine readable form received more than a year’s worth of updates in it’s 20201102 release. Node.js 14.15.0 had no major changes, but the Long-Term-Support version had a International Components for Unicode version bump. LibreOffice’s update to version 7.0.3.1 in Tumbleweed provided some bug fixes and translation updates. The update of Perl 5.32.0 brought in support of unicode 13.0 and Wireshark 3.2.8 took care of a build failure caused from the bison parser. The Xfce desktop fixed a memory leak when reconnecting to a DisplayPort monitor with the update of the xfdesktop 4.14.3 package.

KDE’s Plasma 5.20.2 updated in the 20201030 snapshot; the release had bug fixes for the window manager KWin like fixing the drag-and-drop cursors with HiDPI for Wayland. There were also a few other HiDPI fixes. Some behavior fixes were made to improve consistency with KScreen and the 5.20.2 plasma-desktop package had a fix for high CPU usage. Firmware update package fwupd 1.5.0 added async versions of the library for GUI tools and had some plugins to update the Broadcom BCM5719 network adapter.. Application Programming Interfaces library ncurses had a minor fix for a potential indexing error and changed a null-pointer check. Classification framework, nftables 0.9.7 updated support for implicit chains and for the reset command with the data-interchange format json. One package that hasn’t been listed in a Tumbleweed review before is sratom 0.6.6. Sratom is a library for serialising LV2 atoms, which is a generic data container for holding any type of plain old data, to and from the Resource Description Framework; the update had little listed in the changelog, but did fix some minor warnings and other code quality issues. The snapshot recorded a 75 rating on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20201029 updated btrfsprogs from version 5.7 to version 5.9, which removed obsolete mount options and switched the default to single profile for a multi-device filesystem. Text editor vim fixed a memory leak and crash when throwing empty strings in version 8.2.1900. Several Python implementations and libraries were updated in the snapshot like python-gevent 20.9.0, which provides a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv and python-ecdsa 0.16.0, which is implementation of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptography. Poppler now follows the upstream versioning of 20.10.0 and added UTF16LE support even though the standard says it should be UTF16BE. The snapshot recorded a 76 rating.

Snapshot 20201028 recorded a 78 rating and had updates of GStreamer 1.18.0, git 2.29.1, firebird 3.0.6.33328, iproute2 5.9.0 and libressl 3.2.2.

Members of the openSUSE community are separated by great distances, but that didn’t keep them from coming together virtually on Nov. 4 to kickoff the development of the next release;openSUSE Leap 15.3! Several people attended the kickoff, which lasted a couple hours, and the kickoff started with a video from Release Manager Lubos Kocman. The kickoff video shared some news about the development and shared the Roadmap.

Leap 15.3 follows the same setup established in the Open Build Service for the openSUSE prototype Jump, which is a new way for building the community distribution using SUSE Linux Enterprise sources and binaries to make the distributions virtually alike.

Members of the release team attended and many aspects of the new development model were clarified for those who attended.

Questions from package maintainers and people with use cases were addressed.

The group of developers discussed topics like parallel versions of package, marketing of the release, bug tracking, tools and a new soft launch of the Open Source software code hosting system Pagure tool used by Fedora, which was recently integrated into openSUSE infra.

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For this tutorial we are going to install a full desktop suite of openSUSE leap 15.2 on a machine.

Download

The first thing we shall do is to go to https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/leap and download the .iso file of the DVD Image

Making a live USB

A live USB is used as a medium to boot into and install an oS, it is used as an alternative to DVD installation. There are several software that can be used to easily create a live USB.

linux        -   Unetbootin [https://unetbootin.github.io/linux_download.html]

Windows  -  Rufus  [https://rufus.ie/]

The steps are easy, plug in a USB, format it and select the downloaded openSUSE iso and start the flashing process. This may take a while...

Installation

Once you got your live USB, plug it in and restart your machine. It will automatically boot into the installation medium.

Once you've selected openSUSE, it will launch the installation GUI

Once the kernel has been loaded, select your preferred language and keyboard Layout

Choose your favorite User Interface

openSUSE makes the partitioning setup easy. If you're inexperience and don't want to mess up your system you can go along with the suggested partitioning if you are dual booting and want to keep your other partition you can use the Guided Setup. If you're a pro and know what you want you might choose the Expert Partitioner

Select your Region and Time Zone, Mauritius in my case. You can click directly on the map for your location.

User Account creation

Here you can create your local user account and register a password

Once the configurations have been done, you'll get a summary of your configuration, to proceed with the installation click on Next

Awesome! Now you have a running openSUSE OS

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