Hi openSUSE Community,

We have been using Redmine as a ticketing system for a very long time. The previous server had Redmine 2.4.5 from 2014 installed on an old SLE 11 SP4 server.

And finally we have successfully migrated to a newer Redmine version. Currently running Redmine 3.4.12 on a brand new server with Leap 15.1.

This is a long awaited step in a long, long journey. Much time was spent fixing broken plugins, configuration and the database to match the new Redmine version. And we have a new theme to make it look fresh.

Thank you to all people who helped this migration run smoothly.

Estu

Since last Thursday, a total of five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released.

Each snapshot had about between five to 10 packages updated.

The most recent snapshot, 202000414 has a few libraries updated like libgit2 0.28.5, libva 2.7.0 and libva-gl 2.7.0. Several patches and five Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures security fixes were made to the high performance, multi-platform VNC client and serve tigervnc 1.10.1. Midnight Commander (mc) 4.8.24, which is a text-mode full-screen file manager and visual shell, provided new skins and added yabasic (Yet Another BASIC) syntax highlighting. A minor update to plymouth’s 0.9.5 version removed unused kernel-headers and module-init-tools build dependencies and the xfce4-settings 4.14.3 updated translations and modified the display to allow for the use of a proper fallback configuration on “apply” and “toggle off”. The xfwm4 4.14.1 package, which is the window manager for the Xfce environment, fixed hostnames that were not showing initially when running apps remotely and the update fixed a crash with the Graphics Library that involved high CPU usage without a monitor. The snapshot is currently trending stable at a rating of 93, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

A new major version of the Mozilla Firefox browser was released in snapshot 20200413. The new 75.0 version improves the behavior performance on Linux when clicking on the Address Bar and the Search Bar, which now matches other desktop platforms; a single click selects all without primary selection; a double click selects a word; and a triple click selects all with primary selection. Additionally, Firefox is now available in Flatpak and a CVE memory safety bug for Firefox 75 and Firefox ESR 68.7 were fixed. The btrfsprogs package jumped from version 5.4.1 to version 5.6 and supports new hash algorithms in the 5.5 Linux Kernel; the new version also supports LOGICAL_INO_V2 features in logical-resolve. The new option ‘-o’ helps advanced dedupe tools. The libostree 2020.3 library was update in Tumbleweed from it’s previous 2019.6 verion; nine months of updates bring several newer features and fixes like support for making the /sysroot mount pointread-only upon start, and the error-handling around GPG verification was overhauled. Text editor nano 4.9.2 fixed a crash after undoing an at the end of a leading whitespace. The snapshot is currently trending at a moderate 83 rating on the [Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer](https://review.tumbleweed.boombatower.com/).

Snapshot 20200411 is also trending at an 83 rating and provided less than a half dozen updated packages. GNOME’s gnome-weather 3.34.2 package fixed an unknown temperature and cloud conditions bug when using autolocation. The yast2 4.2.81 version retranslated the wizard help button in the ncurses User Interface. Updates were also made to yast2-packager 4.2.61 and yast2-tune 4.2.3.

The ncurses package was update in the 20200410 snapshot; the new version added a configure option and a check for the GNU Compiler Collection -fvisibility=hidden feature. The snapshot also had an update to gcc9 9.3.1. Peripheral Component Interconnect, USB and vendor identifications were updated in the hwdata 0.334 package. Many incremental improvements and bug fixes were made with the update to libvirt 6.2.0. The new libvirt implements a QEMU 5.0 feature allowing for NVDIMM memory support for pSeries guests, which is done by adding a ‘uuid’ element in the memory XML that can either be provided in the XML or, if omitted, generated automatically. Salt 3000 has arrived in Tumbleweed; the new Salt version removes the date versioning, provides new functions to chroot: apply, sls, and highstate. It also updates slot syntax to support parsing dictionary responses and to append text. The snapshot will likely record a moderate 82 rating on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20200409 recorded an 82 rating and provided an update to flatpak 1.6.3, which fixed a regression in the progress calculation for applications using extra-data. User space utility strace 5.6 provided several improvements like the ability to silence specific messages using -e quiet/–quiet qualifier (an alias for the -q option), including those that couldn’t be silenced previously (path resolution messages and “superseded by execve”). Another noteworthy package updated in the snapshot was the update to the LLVM Compiler; llvm10 10.0.0 brings new tools like llvm-ifs, llvm-install-name-tool and llvm-reduce.

In the times of Covid-19 and the people staying at home it is an adventure to get the tools to work from home without missing the benefits of face-to-face meetings.

There are a lot of solutions out in the wild. But one promising solution is Jitsi. Until now we used the instances provided by other people.

But now we are able to introduce:

Our own Jitsi instance

It is based on openSUSE Leap 15.1 and uses docker containers to deploy Jitsi. The current security warnings were also considered, furthermore the setup uses secure LDAP and HTTPS.

You need an openSUSE(community) account to login.

A few remarks about meet.opensuse.org:

• It is a 8 CPU VM with 16 GB of RAM
• This is still a “Beta” system
• We don’t know how Jitsi scales
• We will try to keep the downtimes as low as possible

The plan for the future is to package jitsi for openSUSE and to deploy an instance with packages.

If you find bugs or experience any problems please report to admin@opensuse.org or find me on Freenode with the nick lethliel.

I hope you enjoy it and have fun :-)

Marco

Usually your AppArmor profile would look something like this:

#include <tunables/global>

/usr/lib/colord {
  ...
}

Now if we check if our profile is actually used:

$ ps axZ | grep '^/usr/lib/colord'
/usr/lib/colord (enforce)  4466  ?  Ssl  0:00 /usr/lib/colord

The Z parameter makes ps print the AppArmor profile name, or in the case of selinux the context of the program. /usr/lib/colord (enforce) tells us what AppArmor profile is used and in which mode it is. Another option you can see there is complain. With long binary paths this can become ugly very quickly.

SUSE has sent a proposal to the openSUSE community about bringing the code streams of both SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap closer together. The proposal includes SLE binaries for the community version.

Bringing the code streams closer together to provide full compatibility provides several advantages to the community going forward such as the use of higher-quality code due to the clean-up of spec-files, an improved relationship between the two distributions, easier bug reporting, less code streams to maintain, extensively tested packages and the inclusion of SLE supported architectures like s390x.

“With this change, we can make better use of our resources as one code base converge, so one build target less to consider,” expressed openSUSE board member Axel Braun in an email sent out to the community about the proposal. “Everyone who packages for Leap and for Package Hub will immediately benefit from this.”

The proposal provided a staged approach to implementing the vision. The email listed the following options: • Merge the code bases for the intersection of openSUSE Leap 15.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 as much as possible without loss of stability or functionality. (SUSE has actually started merging from Leap into SUSE Linux Enterprise.) • Create an intermediate openSUSE Leap flavor where SLE binaries are used inside (October 2020 time frame) in parallel to classic Leap 15.2. • Build openSUSE Leap 15.3 with SLE binaries included by default (assuming community agreement).

The Leap distribution already shares a significant amount of core source code with SLE. Leap 15.2 will be based on the sources from SLE 15 SP 2, but not the binaries.

The community is likely to discuss the proposal on how to bring the SLE binaries into a to new build setup for Leap and would help to identify any issues that might change processes or workflows. The intermediate project build in OBS is likely to come in May. The build should give openSUSE contributors and developers an opportunity to better understand SUSE’s proposal.

“We have an idea about the setup in build.opensuse.org,” responded Adrian Schröter from the OBS team. “I anticipate to have a first prototype of the build setup in next three weeks. We must keep in mind that this is really an entire new way to develop a distribution.”

The release team has evaluated all the packages and technical implications for integrating the additional SLE packages, so they could provides some clarity to the community on how a technical implementations might work best.

There are about a couple dozen packages that are technically difficult to implement for full compatibility with the enterprise and community distributions.

“It took quite some effort to create a plan acceptable by all involved teams,” explained Leap release manager Lubos Kocman. “Splitting the work across the upcoming two releases seemed to be accepted well at least by involved parties so far. The idea of re-using should generally lower the effort on the Leap side. However, it comes with the price of increased complexity to bring all (the) pieces together.”

Feedback and technical discussions are an important part of any open-source project. The new intermediate project build will introduce the community to the sources and help with the handling of various code parts that are needed to implement schedulers, publishing and other elements of releases should the proposal be accepted by the community.

The release engineering team is interested in feedback from contributors and users once the intermediate project build becomes available.

Feedback is an important part of this process as the project looks to gain more SLE source code, Kocman emphasized.

A road map for the prototype build an proposed release would become available at https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap.

Frequently Asked Questions about this topic are available at https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Leap/FAQ/ClosingTheLeapGap.

Over the weekend I was forced to unload all my photos from my phone due to limited storage space. As I went through a nice capture of Builder nighly caught my attention and I couldn't help but post it on twitter.

Obviously posting on twitter meant it was misunderstood immediately and quipped with entitled adjectives. And rather than responding on the wrong platform, I finally have an excuse to post on my blog again. So let's take a look at the horrible situation we ended up with.

Thanks to Flatpak you now have a way to install a stable and development versions of an app, concurrenly. You can easily tell them apart without resorting to Name suffices in the shell, where the actual name gets horribly truncated due to ellipsization, while still clearly being the same app on a first glimpse.

There's plenty of apps already making use of this. So how does an app developer get one? We actually have the tooling for that. If you have an app icon, you can easily generate a nightly variant with zero effort in most cases.

So what was the situation twitter was praising? Let's count on how many GNOME applications shipped a custom nighly icon. Umm, how about zero?

A pretty picture an artist spends hours on, modelling, texturing, lighting, adjusting for low resolution screens is not a visual framework nor a reasonable thing to ask app developers to do.

Another four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released this week.

A notable package updated this week is a new major version of gucharmap. Plus several python package updates, nano, mesa, git and Xfce packages also had new minor updates.

The most recent snapshot, 202000331 is trending well with a stable rating of 99 on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. The GNOME Character Map, gucharmap, updated to version 13.0.0, but no changelog was provided. An update for glib2 2.62.6 is expected to be the final release of the stable 2.62.x series; maintenance efforts will be shifted to the newer 2.64.x series. The updated glib2 package fixed SOCKS5 username/password authentication. The 2.34 binutils package added and removed a few patches. GTK3 3.24.16 fixed problems with clipboard handling and fixed a crash in the Wayland input method. The package for creating business diagrams, kdiagram 2.6.2 fixed printing issue. The Linux Kernel updated to 5.5.13. A handful of Advanced Linux Sound Architecture changes were made in the kernel update. The 5.6.x kernel is expected to be released in a Tumbleweed snapshot soon. The libstorage-ng 4.2.71 package simplified combining disks with different block sizes into RAID. The programming language vala 0.46.7 made verious improvements and bug fixes and properly set CodeNode.error when reporting an error. Several xfce4 packages were updated and xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin 0.4.3 fixed various memory leaks and warnings and xterm 353 was updated. The yast2-firewall 4.2.4 packaged was updated and forces a reset of the firewalld API instance after modifying the service state and yast2-storage-ng 4.2.104 extended and improved the Application Programming Interface to get udev names for a block device

The package to improve audio and video under Linux pipewire 0.3.1 switched the license to MIT and added fdupes BuildRequires and pass fdupes macro while removing duplicate files, which came in snapshot 20200326. The 1.1.9 spec-cleaner package drop travis and tox and now uses github actions. Several python arrived in this snapshot. Python-packaging 20.3 fixed a bug that caused a 32-bit OS that runs on a 64-bit ARM CPU (e.g. ARM-v8, aarch64), to report the wrong bitness and python-SQLAlchemy 1.3.15 fixed regression in 1.3.14. The Xfce file manager package, thunar 1.8.14 updated translations and reverted a bug that introduced a regression. The snapshot recorded a stable rating of 99.

A stable rating of 97 was recorded for snapshot 20200325. The snapshot updated ImageMagick to version 7.0.10.2 and fixed another sizing issue with the label coder when pointsize is set. Mesa 20.0.2 provided several fixes for the code base. Bluetooth issues were fixed with the class UUID matches before connecting the profile in the bluez 5.54 package. Git 2.26.0 improved the handling of sparse checkouts. Text editor nano 4.9 made the new paragraph and the succeeding one get the appropriate first-line indent when justifying a selection. The latest stable version of the in-memory database redis 5.0.8 uses the tmpfiles macros instead of calling systemd-tempfiles direct and build wrong macro paths and the sssd 2.2.3 package brought new features like a “soft_ocsp” and “soft_crl” options that were added to make the checks for revoked certificates more flexible if the system is offline.

The 20200324 snapshot recorded a stable 93 rating. The snapshot also had an update for ImageMagick and an updated version of Mozilla Thunderbird 68.6.0. The email client adds a new popup display window when starting up on a new profile. A fix for the linker version script was made in FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) 3.9.1, which provides a simple interface for userspace programs to export a virtual filesystem to the Linux kernel. The lensfun package jumped from version 0.3.2 to 0.3.95 and provides support for several next cameras and lenses. Other packages updated in the snapshot were mercurial 5.3.1, php7 7.4.4 and zypper 1.14.35.

Systemd 245 is expected to arrive in a snapshot in the coming days.

Announcement

The Kubic Project is proud to announce that Snapshot 20200331 has been released containing Kubernetes 1.18.0.

Release Notes are avaialble HERE.

Upgrade Steps

All newly deployed Kubic clusters will automatically be Kubernetes 1.18.0 from this point.

For existing clusters, please follow our new documentation our wiki HERE

Thanks and have a lot of fun!

The Kubic Team

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The week started with problems inside the openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution (caught by QA, so no worries) and ended even worse: we have some trouble on openQA since Thursday and many tests are failing. The failures seem more to be related to openQA’s infrastructure though, and not to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Nevertheless, we will not publish new snapshots until QA is stable again. During this week we have thus only released two snapshots: 0326 and 0331 (promised, no joke).

The snapshots contained these updates:

• Kubernetes 1.18.0
• Linux kernel 5.5.13
• Rust 1.41.1
• XFCE 4.14.2

The things being worked on are

• KDE Plasma 5.18.4.1
• Linux kernel 5.6.0
• Systemd 245: homed will not be enabled/offered just yet
• Poppler 0.86.1
• GNOME 3.34.5: last stable version from the 3.34 branch; this supposedly still gets into Leap 15.2 (via SLE). After this, the team can start focusing on GNOME 3.36.x; a maintained mozjs68 package is the main blocker on this path though
• GNU Make 4.3: missing only a fix for daps
• Guile 3.0.2: breaks gnutls’ test suite on i586
• LLVM 10
• Qt 5.15.0 (currently beta2 being tested)
• Ruby 2.7 – possibly paired with the removal of Ruby 2.6
• GCC 10 as the default compiler
• Removal of Python 2: quite some progress done, but not fully there yet