openSUSE.Asia Summit will come back to Tokyo, Japan

The openSUSE Project is exciting to announce that openSUSE.Asia Summit 2024 is going to be held in Tokyo, Japan. The openSUSE.Asia Summit is an annual conference for users and contributors of openSUSE and FLOSS enthusiasts. During this summit, they will gather in person to share knowledge and experiences about openSUSE including applications running on it.

The venue of the summit will be located in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, blending tradition and cutting-edge technology. Its infrastructure and global connectivity make it a primal location for promoting collaboration among openSUSE users and developers. Moreover, Tokyo is a center of information technology; Many technology companies have their offices in Tokyo, with numerous engineers residing in the surrounding areas.

Tokyo is also a popular place for sightseeing with its unique culture, food, etc. Especially, characters from video games, anime, and comics, which are now common in the world, attract tourists to Japan. In Tokyo, you can easily find character shops and get items related to works you love.

The number of tourists from abroad has recovered last year to the same level as before COVID-19. Due to the currency exchange rate, it will be a great chance to enjoy your trip to Japan while saving your money. Even though you may have attended the last summit in Tokyo, you will discover new facets, developed before the TOKYO 2020 Summer Olympics.

Please see also:

• GO TOKYO
• Travel Japan
• Japan Guide

The expected summit date is Nov. 2 and 3 soon after Open Source Summit Japan. Our call for speakers is going to end around the end of July. For more details including the venue, please stay tuned until the next announcement in a couple of weeks.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is the Best Distro No One Knows About

I've been at SUSE for 4 months now. Of course the company keeps my primary focus on our Enterprise customers, but I have learned a lot more how openSUSE is built and used in the four months, and I have to say, I am impressed. I think Tumbleweed is the best developer distro that nobody knows about.

On my main laptop I opted to install the "stable" verion of openSUSE called "Leap." (you can read about that here). I followed suit on my $65 laptop, but ran into some issues based on the cheapness and newness of the laptop's components. For example, the wifi module was not recognized, and the built in speakers just didn't work. The wifi issue was obvious; the wifi module was too new for Leap 15.5, and I was too lazy to compile and install an up to date kernel driver for it.

As I learned more about openSUSE, I finally understood the difference between Tumbleweed and Leap, and I realized that Tumbleweed would probably work well on my oddball $65 laptop.

How is openSUSE built anyway?

openSUSE is unique, because it is both upstream of Suse Linux Enterprise, and downstream from it. Basically, what happens is:

1. The openSUSE community is constantly packaging upstream software with the Open Build Server.
2. Those packages are constantly being built into openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is, therefore, a rolling release. There is a quality assurance process that keeps Tumbleweed stable in the sense of "not crashy."
3. Periodically, those packages from the Open Build Server, which become highly used and vetted by the community using Tumbleweed, then get moved into SUSE's Internal Build Server. From there, SUSE builds Certified and L3 Supported packages, that go into SUSE Linux Enterprie releases. This is a paid Enterprise product.
4. Out of those packages, openSUSE Leap is built. Leap, therefore, is essentially the same as SUSE Linux Enterprise, but without the certifications and support.

I assume I got some details wronng above, but I think that's the gist of it.

Choice happens. You can choose a high quality rolling release, a fully supported Enterprise release with a long lifecycle, or a free (as in speach and beer) release with the same lifecycle and bits as the Enterprise version.

For simplicity, I left out that there are even more options. For example, do you want an immutable OS with transactional updates? The openSUSE community has you covered with Microos.

So How did it Go?

Installing Tumbleweed was actually pretty boring. The main difference from installing Leap was that the wifi driver was recogized by the kernel (as I expected). I was pleasantly surprised to see that I also a built in LTE modem.

Up to Date

Looks like after install, every single package is up to date with the repositories. I uppose the installer installed all up to date packages from the repositories, which is sweet.

WIFI woes

However, while the built in wifi seemsto work, I noticed that when I am downloading files, they sometimes get "stuck." Either the server times out, or the data trickles in so slowly the files will never download. More on this bellow.

Next Steps

So now I seem to be a happy Tumbleweed user. I have installed my work software (Slack, etc...) so I am planning to take this device as my only laptop on an upcoming work trip to Europe in May. I should be in meetings most of the time, so it's a pretty low risk situation.

Follow up on Issues

So, this wifi issue ... this seems like a good opportunity for me to help out with the community however modestly. I will learn how to log an issue in the right place, and then see if I can help who ever turns out to be the right mainter address the bug.

Connect with the Community

I am motivated to started looking at this issue as openSUSE Conference is coming up at the end of June, and I am looking forward to connecting with community members and generally learning how the openSUSE community works, and seeing how I can collaborate and help.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Last week, I was attending the SUSE Labs Conference last week and had to skip writing the weekly review. As many SUSE devs were there too, the expectation was to get fewer changes anyway during week 17. Consequently, I am spanning two weeks again today and will be covering the nine snapshots (0419, 0421, 0423, 0425…0430) released during this period.

The most relevant changes delivered were:

• Linux kernel 6.8.7 & 6.8.8
• SETools 4.5.0
• libxml 2.12.6
• LLVM 18.1.4
• Python 3.11.9 & 3.12.3
• Mesa 24.0.5
• Mozilla Firefox 125.0.2
• SQLite 3.45.3

Having some engineers together at the Labs Conference also allowed them to directly exchange ideas and work on some of the things in staging. Simon and I have worked on dbus-broker and made some good progress, but we have not yet reached the end goal. Similarly for other things in the staging areas. The most interesting changes being prepared are:

• Mozilla Firefox 125.0.3
• LibreOffice 24.2.3.2
• QEmu 8.2.3
• GNOME 46.1
• Ninja 1.12.0
• util-linux 2.40
• Ruby 3.3.1
• dbus-broker: some networking issue after upgrades left to work out
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler – lots of help needed: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory:Staging:Gcc7

Thanks to a colleague who introduced me to Nim during last week’s SUSE Labs conference, I became a man with a dream, and after fiddling with compiler flags and obviously not reading documentation, I finally made it.

This is something that shouldn’t exist; from the list of ideas that should never have happened.

But it does. It’s a Perl interpreter embedded in Rust. Get over it.

Once cloned, you can run the following commands to see it in action:

• cargo run --verbose -- hello.pm showtime
• cargo run --verbose -- hello.pm get_quick_headers

How it works

There is a lot of autogenerated code, mainly for two things:

• bindings.rs and wrapper.h; I made a lot of assumptions and perlxsi.c may or may not be necessary in the future (see main::xs_init_rust), depends on how bad or terrible my C knowledge is by the time you’re reading this.
• xs_init_rust function is the one that does the magic, as far as my understanding goes, by hooking up boot_DynaLoader to DynaLoader in Perl via ffi.

With those two bits in place, and thanks to the magic of the bindgen crate, and after some initialization, I decided to use Perl_call_argv, do note that Perl_ in this case comes from bindgen, I might change later the convention to ruperl or something to avoid confusion between that a and perl_parse or perl_alloc which (if I understand correctly) are exposed directly by the ffi interface.

What I ended up doing, is passing the same list of arguments (for now, or at least for this PoC), directly to Perl_call_argv, which will in turn, take the third argument and pass it verbatim as the call_argv

        Perl_call_argv(myperl, perl_sub, flags_ptr, perl_parse_args.as_mut_ptr());

Right now hello.pm defines two sub routines, one to open a file, write something and print the time to stdout, and a second one that will query my blog, and show the headers. This is only example code, but enough to demostrate that the DynaLoader works, and that the embedding also works :)

I got most of this working by following the perlembed guide.

Why?

Why not?.

I want to see if I can embed also python in the same binary, so I can call native perl, from native python and see how I can fiddle all that into os-autoinst

Where to find the code?

On github: https://github.com/foursixnine/ruperl or under https://crates.io/crates/ruperl

Welcome to the monthly update for openSUSE Tumbleweed for April 2024. This month began after addressing last month’s supply chain attack against xz compression library for the rolling release. An explanation of that XZ Backdoor, how it was address and what was learned can be found on news.opensuse.org.

A flurry of updates, enhancements, and crucial security fixes arrived in openSUSE’s rolling release this month as the busy season for conferences begins. Should readers desire a more frequent amount of information about snapshot updates, readers are encouraged to subscribe to the openSUSE Factory mailing list.

New Features and Enhancements

• Linux Kernel: The month of April had a few kernel updates. Notable changes with the 6.8.5 version included mitigation for Branch History Injection (BHI) vulnerabilities, improvements to Spectre mitigation, updates for Intel graphics drivers, fixes for SMB client vulnerabilities and fixes for RISC-V architecture. Version 6.8.7 included updates and fixes for AMD display drivers, Intel i915 driver, x86 speculative execution vulnerabilities, arm 64 device tree files, DRM drivers, filesystem handling, and more.
• KDE Frameworks 6.1.0: The numpy package introduces enhanced support for structured arrays and flexible indexing, while pandas incorporates improved handling of missing data and new methods for data manipulation. Additionally, the matplotlib package offers enhanced customization options for plot aesthetics. New algorithms for machine learning tasks in scikit-learn were included in the update.
• KDE Gear 24.02.2: The KDE Gear 24.02.2 update encompasses a wide range of fixes and enhancements, including resolving issues with tag addition functionality in Akonadi, addressing translated shortcut and icon appearance problems in Akregator, various improvements and fixes in ark such as disabling RAR4 compression method, multiple fixes in Elisa including volume slider and track playback issues and numerous enhancements in Konsole. There were fixes for calendar selection and the todo view updates in Korganizer.
• PHP8 8.3.6: There were significant bug fixes, security patches and improvements across different components including in the update. Besides fixes with Core, DOM, GD, Opcache and Session other fixes include:
  • FPM: Fixes have been applied to address issues with the configuration test running twice in daemonized mode and incorrect checks in fpm_shm_free().
  • Gettext: Fixes have been made to address issues with dcgettext and dcngettext calls with specific configurations.
  • MySQLnd: Various fixes have been applied, including correcting handshake response and charset length checks.
  • Random: Compatibility improvements have been introduced for PHP versions prior to 8.2, and issues with global Mt19937 reset have been resolved.
  • Standard: Validation has been added for specific characters in the mail() function, and various bug fixes have been implemented, including addressing command injection and cookie bypass vulnerabilities. (Noted in CVE-2024-1874, CVE-2024-2756 and fixing issues with mb_encode_mimeheader and password_verify with CVE-2024-3096 and CVE-2024-2757.
• Mozilla Firefox 125.0.2. The browser brought new features such as:
  • Support for AV1 codec in Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for improved video playback quality.
  • Enhanced PDF viewer capabilities with text highlighting.
  • Introduction of the URL Paste Suggestion feature, improving usability by allowing quick navigation to URLs copied to the clipboard.
  • Multiple critical security fixes addressing vulnerabilities like out-of-bounds reads and use-after-free errors that enhance browser security.
• dracut: There were improvements such as the addition of tpm2.target and systemd-tpm2-generator and several memory leak fixes.
• ffmpeg: Versions 4 and 6 took care of some video handling issues and made fixes for memory leaks with improved EOF handling. The updates addresses:
  • CVE-2023-51793 and CVE-2023-49502.
  • CVE-2023-50008 and CVE-2023-50007
• sqlite3: An update from version 3.45.2 to 3.45.3 addresses a long-standing bug affecting the accuracy of trigger responses in certain UPSERT operations to ensure for more reliable database operations.
• Flatpak: The 1.15.8 update had some security fixes to prevent sandbox escape and various other usability improvements.
• Python3.11: The 3.11.9 version had various security patches and bug fixes, such as addressing CVE-2023-52425, updating bundled libexpat to version 2.6.0, fixing possible crashes in collections.deque.index() and improves SSLContext behavior.
• Cppcheck: New checks in version 2.14.0 include:
  • eraseIteratorOutOfBounds: Warns about calling erase() on an iterator that is out of bounds, enhancing the robustness of code.
  • returnByReference: Warns when a large class member is returned by value from a getter function, which can impact performance and memory usage.

Other Package Updates

• SDL2: Version 2.30.2 introduces support for various new controllers, including the 6-button SEGA Mega Drive Control Pad and the Hori Fighting Stick EX2.
• Cryptsetup: Version 2.7.2 addressed several issues, including fixes for OPAL device formatting and activation.
• SpamAssassin: A package with a great name, version 4.0.1 enhances URL shortener link redirection handling and improved TxRep locking management, which bolsters email security for users.

Bug Fixes

• Xwayland: CVE-2024-31083 This critical security vulnerability mitigates an Xorg servers vulnerable due to use-after-free flaw in ProcRenderAddGlyphs(), allowing authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code.
• [PHP8]((https://www.php.net/):CVE-2023-51793, CVE-2023-49502, CVE-2023-50008 and CVE-2023-50007
• glibc: CVE-2024-2961 allows buffer overflow when converting to ISO-2022-CN-EXT, causing crashes or variable overwrites. libxml2: CVE-2024-25062 was a vulnerablity to use-after-free via crafted XML documents.
• Python3.11: CVE-2023-52425, CVE-2023-6597
• QEMU: Backports and bugfixes were made for a flaw that allows a malicious guest to crash QEMU and cause a denial of service condition with CVE-2024-3567. CVE-2024-3446 could affect arbitrary code execution and CVE-2024-3447 was also backported.
• Freerdp2: Version 2.11.5 provided fixes for CVE-2023-40574, which experienced an Out-Of-Bounds Write in the writePixelBGRX function that was likely due to incorrect variable calculations, and CVE-2023-40575, which results in crashes.

Conclusion

The month of April 2024 had a blend of feature enhancements and crucial security fixes. From improved gaming support with SDL2 to strengthened encryption practices with Cryptsetup, users benefited from a host of updates aimed at enhancing functionality, stability and security. Other packages to update in Tumbleweed during the month were Mesa, GTK4, transactional-update and more .

For those Tumbleweed users that want to contribute, subscribe to the openSUSE Factory mailing list. The openSUSE team encourages users to continue participating through bug reports, feature suggestions and discussions.

Contributing to openSUSE Tumbleweed

Your contributions and feedback make openSUSE Tumbleweed better with every update. Whether reporting bugs, suggesting features, or participating in community discussions, your involvement is highly valued.

openSUSE Leap 15.6 exited Beta and entered its Release Candidate phase with build 669.1 last week. You can get Leap 15.6 RC install images from get.opensuse.org.

This means the release is considered featurefull and contributors should focus on bug fixes and eliminating any remaining build failures.

Users who are eager to install Leap 15.6 on their machines should check the release’s known issues to see if there is any issue that prevents the use of the RC.

The release team was able to deliver a long time awaited Cockpit for both Leap and SUSE Package Hub users. Users might be familiar with Cockpit’s web-based admin interface from Leap Micro tutorials.

Users are advised not to publicly expose Port 9090 used with the admin interface; just like people shouldn’t expose their router’s web interface to the public.

`$ sudo zypper in cockpit`

`$ sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket`

`$ firefox https://localhost:9090 # root login is disabled by default check note bellow`

Previous attempts to include Cockpit in Leap 15.5 were made, but there were several blockers. Inclusion was possible thanks to a refresh of the python311 stack, which was part of massive update effort for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 6 along with unification branding. The team was able to build Cockpit once and provide it for both SLES and Leap users with this RC.

Root login into cockpit is disabled by default Similarly to password-based root login via ssh, root login into cockpit is disabled by default in openSUSE Leap. This isn’t the case for Leap Micro where we expect single user boxes.

If you prefer root login, over privileged user account access, then simply edit and remove root from disallowed-users and a restart of service.

$ sudo vim /etc/cockpit/disallowed-users

$ sudo systemctl restart cockpit.socket

There is no existing SELinux policy on Leap 15.X so the SELinux part of Cockpit is not expected to be working. The release team expects to have an SELinux policy in Leap 16, so this will be working for future releases.

Happy Hacking!

Your favorite Linux distribution is X. You test everything there. However, your colleagues use distro Y, and another team distro Z. Nightmares start here: the same commands install a different set of syslog-ng features, configuration defaults and use different object names in the default configuration. I ran into these problems while working with Gábor Samu on his HPC logging blog.

From this blog you can learn about some of the main differences in packaging and configuration of syslog-ng in various Linux distributions and FreeBSD, and how to recognize these when configuring syslog-ng on a different platform.

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/using-syslog-ng-on-multiple-platforms