Intro

As some may have already noticed, openSUSE MicroOS introduced a /usr/etc directory and some configuration files are already moved to this directory.

What’s behind this move? For a better understanding, let’s first look how configuration files are handled by RPM today:

RPM and Configuration Files

RPM has limited support for updating configuration files. In the end this consist of two simple choices:

• modified configuration files are moved away during upgrade and the admin has to redo the changes (.rpmsave files).
• modfied configuration files are kept and changes done by the distribution are ignored (.rpmnew files). In the end the service may not work or could even be insecure!

Both options are not really user friendly and will most likely lead to a broken or insecure service after an upgrade, which requires manual work by the admin. On desktop systems or a simple server this may be tolerable, but for big clusters this can lead to a huge amount of work.

There are several alternative solutions for this like Three-Way-Diff or doing the update interactively, but the first one does not solve the problem if conflicting changes are done, and the second one is no solution for fully automated updates.

Atomic Updates

For atomic systems another layer of complexity is added, because different states may contain different versions of a configuration file. So how can this happen? An atomic update is a kind of update that:

• Is atomic
  • The update is either fully applied or not applied at all
  • The update does not influence your running system
• Can be rolled back
  • If the update fails or if the update is not compatible, you can quickly restore the situation as it was before the update

The update will be activated by rebooting into the new state, so after an update, before the reboot, the changes done by the update are not visible. If an admin or configuration management software changes the configuration files in the runnung system during this time, this will create conflicts, and needs manual interaction again.

Goal

The goal is to provide a concept working for most packages and their configuration files, which makes automatic updates much easier and robust. For that a new way to store and manage configuration files is needed.

Requirements for a Solution

The new solution should make sure that:

• It’s visible to the admin that something got updated
• It’s visible which changes the admin made
• Package and admin changes should be merged automatically
• There should be only one directory to search for default configuration files

Solutions

As a longterm solution no package should install anything into /etc any more, this directory should only contain host specific configuration files created during installation and changes made by the system administrator. Packages are supposed to install their default configuration files to another directory instead.

For SUSE/openSUSE the decision was made to use /usr/etc as the directory for the distribution provided configuration files.

For merging the package and admin configuration files there will have to be different strategies depending on the file type; the files can be categorized as follows:

1. Configuration files for applications
2. Configuration files for the system (network, hardware, …)
3. “Databases” like files (/etc/rpc, /etc/services, /etc/protocols)
4. System and user accounts (/etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/shadow)

Application Configuration Files

For application configuration files there is already a good solution used by systemd, which could be adopted for most applications:

• /usr/etc/app.conf is the distribution provided configuration file.
• If it exists, /etc/app.conf replaces /usr/etc/app.conf.
• /etc/app.conf.d/*.conf contains snippets overiding single entries from /usr/etc/app.conf or /etc/app.conf.

The workflow for the application to load the configuration file would be:

• Application looks for /etc/app.conf.
• If this file does not exist, load /usr/etc/app.conf.
• Look for overides in /etc/app.conf.d and merge them.

See https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html#Examples, “Overriding vendor settings” for more details and examples. A C library which provides a simple interface and implements above loading mechanism transparently for the application is libeconf.

Depending on the configuration file format above patterns may not work for all applications. For those applications a solution following the above guidelines as closely as possible should be found.

System Configuration Files (network, hardware, …)

As these configuration files are system specific and only created during or after installation and not provided by the distribution, these files will stay in /etc.

System Databases (rpc, services, protocols)

There are files in /etc which, strictly speaking, are no configuration files, such as /etc/rpc, /etc/services and /etc/protocols. They are changed very rarely, but sometimes new system applications or third party software need to make additions. These files will be moved to /usr/etc; /etc/nsswitch.conf has to be changed to search in /etc first and in /usr/etc second. A glibc NSS plugin usrfiles will be used for this. /etc will contain only the changes done by the admin and third party software.

/etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow

There is no solution yet for these configuration files which would really solve the problems. Ideas are welcome!

Further Documentation

• The original, full proposal with many more ideas and background information on the reasoning behind the decisions: Atomic Updates and /etc
• The openSUSE wiki page tracking all changes: Packaging /usr/etc

Election time is here!

Two seats are open for election on the openSUSE Board. Gertjan Lettink completed his second term. Simon Lees completed his first term and thus he is eligible to run as a Board candidate again should he wish to do so.

The election schedule is as follows:

== Phase 0 ==

5 December 2019

* Announcement of the openSUSE Board election 2019-2020

* Call for Nominations and Applications for Board candidacy

* Membership drive. Become an openSUSE Member. Take the opportunity to apply for an openSUSE Membership during this phase (in order to vote or to run as a candidate).

25 December 2019

* Nominations and Applications for Board candidacy close

== Phase 1 ==

26 December 2019

* Announcement of the final list of candidates

* Campaign begins

* Membership drive continues, opportunity to apply for openSUSE Membership, but members will only be eligible to vote and not run as a candidate.

== Phase 2 ==

16 January 2020

* Ballots open: Please cast your vote during this time

* Campaign continues

31 January 2020

* Ballots close

1 February 2020

* Announcement of the results

The Election Committee is composed of Edwin Zakaria and Ish Sookun.

Only openSUSE members are eligible to run for openSUSE Board openings. Election Committee officials, however, are not eligible to run in order to avoid conflicts of interest. To stand for a position in the openSUSE Board please send an email to:

* opensuse-project@opensuse.org and * election-officials@opensuse.org

If a member would like to nominate somebody else, please inform the Election Committee and the officials will contact the nominee to ask whether s/he would like to run as a Board candidate.

The Election Committee is hereby calling for Nominations and Applications for the openSUSE Board.

Our infrastructure status page at https://status.opensue.org/ is using Cachet under the hood. While the latest update brought a couple of bugfixes it also deprecated the RSS and Atom feeds, that could be used to integrate the information easily in other applications.

While we are somehow sad to see such a feature go, we also have to admit that the decision of the developers is not really bad - as the generation of those feeds had some problems (bugs) in the old Cachet versions. Instead of fixing them, the developers decided to move on and focus on other areas. So it's understandable that they cut off something, which is not in their focus, to save resources.

As alternative, you might want to subscribe to status changes and incident updates via Email or use the API that is included in the software for your own notification system. And who knows: maybe someone provides us with a RSS feed generator that utilizes the API?

Sometimes it's a good idea to follow best practices. This is what we did by following the recommendations for "general-purpose servers with a variety of clients, recommended for almost all systems" from https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/.

With this, our services accept only TLS 1.2 connections and the latest elliptic curve ciphers. If your client or browser does not support these settings, it's definitely time for you to consider an update.

While we are looking for TLS 1.3 support, the openssl version on our systems (running currently Leap 15.1) does not support it - yet. Once there is an update, we'll let you know.

Please don't be surprised, if you visit our Etherpad instance at https://etherpad.opensuse.org/ today: the new version also comes with a new theme. All the old pads are still there and should be available under their old URL.

There were 20 openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released in the month of November and the snapshots brought in a large amount of updated packages to include KDE Applications 19.08.3, Frameworks 5.64.0 Plasma 5.17.2 and 5.17.3, Linux kernel 5.3.9 and 5.3.11, Mozilla Firefox 70, libvirt 5.9.0 and more. During the month, even Java 12 OpenJDK was dropped from the distribution.

One of the more amazing aspects of Tumbleweed in November, 2020, is that the last 10 snapshots of the month all produced a constant level of stable rating and the last seven had rating of 99 out of 100, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Closing out the month, there were two snapshots with version upgrades and one snapshot (20191127) that produced some minor changes to a couple Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) packages.

The first Tumbleweed snapshot for December arrived with the 20191202 snapshot. Updated were also made to ALSA with the update of the 1.2.1.1 versions of alsa-plugins, alsa-utils and asla, which dropped 25 patches and fixed regressions for the UCM parser. GNOME had several package updates for gedit, evolution and more. The 3.34.2 version of gnome-software fixed a potential threading crash when using flatpak and had an upstream fix for fwupd. An updated version of ModemManager 1.12.0, which is a DBus-activated daemon that controls mobile broadband devices and connections, had a large amount of improvements and changes to include adding support for Mobile Station Based Assisted-GPS in addition to Mobile Station Assisted Assisted-GPS. Revision control tool mercurial 5.2 made some backwards compatibility changes and added some new feature extensions with its quarterly release. The update of perl 5.30.1 triggered an issue recorded on the snapshot reviewer because the newer version and patch that came in it is problematic for embedded Perl usage. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot to include qemu 4.1.93, re2 20191101, xen and xorg-x11-server. The one major version change in the snapshot was an update to terminal multiplexer tmux 3.0a; the major release that allows its users to easily switch between several programs in one terminal offers new features like added support for the SD (scroll down) escape sequence and for underscore colors.

There were several RubyGems packages updated in snapshot 20191128, but the digital paint application Krita had the most fixes. Krita 4.2.8.2 removed the CSV export filter that had not worked in a long time and fixed the crop tool that loses a constant ratio when the handles touched the canvas edge. The 2.22.0 tuned package, which is a daemon for monitoring and adaptive tuning of system devices, fixed a bug that makes use of the self defined profile_dir argument instead of libexecdir. November’’s update of the wireguard package, which is a free and open-source software application and communication protocol for point-to-point connections, added a syncconf command and changed the wg-quick tool to only touch net.ipv4 for v4 addresses.

The 3D Graphics Library Mesa 19.2.6 arrived in snapshot 20191126 and fixed builds on PowerPC and added some stability patches. The digital audio editor and recording application audacity 2.3.3 added several improvements like splitting the equalization effect into two Filter Curve and Graphic EQ effects; the package update also fixed some crashes and the software’s refusal to export some large (4GB) files. The bind 9.14.8, package, which provides a DNS server and client utilities, set a limit on the number of concurrently served pipelined TCP queries and added support for the GeoIP2 Application Programming Interface (API) from MaxMind. The Antivirus Toolkit clamav updated to version 0.102.1 and introduced a new configure option to statically link libjson-c with libclamav and added support for HTTPS. The exo 0.12.10 for the Xfce desktop fix typeahead search regression and firewalld 0.7.2 added 15 new service definitions and provided a new option FlushAllOnReload in firewalld.conf. Improved experimental support was made for building Node.js with Python3 in the nodejs 12.13.1 long-term-support package. Python-networkx 2.4 added support for Python 3.8 and home media solution rygel 0.38.3 were also updated in the snapshot.

In an email this week, Tumbleweed Release manager Dominique Leuenberger indicated that a build fail notification for the python-numba package in openSUSE Factory has not been addressed for the past four weeks and unless somebody steps up and submits fixes, the python-numba will be removed.

In a previous article I introduced Kdialog and the whole set of output dialogs provided. In this second part, we will see how to show and handle some input dialogs from the command line.

This year I haven’t done any drone-related travelling. The sponsorship deal fell through and Rotorama didn’t participate in DCL. I admit I haven’t been practicing as much as I would need to to do any better in the local races either.

So at least I got the world of FOSS to get out of the couch.

Berlin

Tobias organized yet another icon-related hackfest in Berlin earlier this year. This time we had some talented young developers help us out with the tooling. This effort to focus on the tools as well as the assets is continuing and we’ll have some more exciting news to share soon.

Hackfest Berlin 2019 from jimmac on Vimeo.

Thessaloniki

GUADEC continues bringing awesome southern locations, which a vitamin D deprived monkey from a rainy climate can’t appreciate enough. I have fallen back to my comfort zone and only given a short workflow/demo on icon design this year, mainly because Tobias has been giving great talks on focusing on design.

I still have a video to finish editing, but it ended up more of a personal one so I’m not sure I’ll publicize it that much.

the Hague

And we’re closing the year with another design hackfest. Big shout out to Hans de Goede and Carlos Garnacho for organizing a shell hackfest in the Netherlands, and mainly allow some designers crash the party to revive our efforts in attacking some of the downsides of the current overview design. The facilities of Revspace allowed us to meet face to face, mind map on the whiteboard, iterate on some prototypes and move forward considerably compared to the usual cycle spanning months.

So, the branch implementing VCL drawing based on the  Skia graphics library has been merged in.
All(?) the necessary info about how to enable it etc. are in this mail, but there are things that better fit a blog post than a mail, and in this case that's going to be a table and a picture showing how well it may perform. Note that these results are from running visualbackendtest, which is not really a benchmark, so these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. It's just a test that draws a gradient, several big polygons (each circle is actually 720 lines) and short text.
And LibreOffice of course does many more things than just paint on the screen. And it's not just about performance of drawing (some of these e.g. do not double-buffer, which makes things like alpha blending complicated and slow). And for some of these we could discuss the complicated reasons for why the numbers are what they are. But still, some of the numbers are interesting:

Render method	FPS
Linux gen (X11)	86
Linux gtk3	70-90
Linux OpenGL	45
Linux Skia Vulkan (GPU)	65-90
Linux Skia raster (CPU)	5
Windows GDI	64
Windows OpenGL	40-60
Windows Skia Vulkan (GPU)	175-185
Windows Skia raster (CPU)	75-85

I purchased a medium of the road Bluedio headset that I have been using in both Bluetooth and wired modes. It’s pretty decent and they fit my head well. Unfortunately, my Magilla Guerrilla handling of it I snapped the headband. I didn’t think I was being rough with it but I do have a track … Continue reading Broken Headband on Bluetooth Headphones | Repair Instead of Replace →