The openSUSE Community is pleased to announce a logo competition for a new openSUSE logo as well as four openSUSE distributions; Tumbleweed, Leap, Slowroll and Kalpa.

You read that correctly; the openSUSE Community is considering a new, distinct openSUSE logo to represent the project; essentially, a new chameleon-inspired design. This new logo should complement the brand identity of the openSUSE Project with its distributions. The color green (#73ba25) is reserved as the primary logo color for the project, but color suggestions for distribution logos are welcome.

There have been discussions of a new openSUSE logo over the years, but the timing to transition to a new logo wasn’t ideal, until now. As openSUSE’s logo is similar to SUSE’s old logo and the project is experiencing a transitional period, now seems like a logical time to have the competition along with the four distribution logos. This should provide an opportunity to strengthen the visual identity of the openSUSE brand and make it discernible and cohesive with its other logos.

The current Tumbleweed logo’s wide shape and thin lines have caused visibility and recognition issues, which we aim to avoid with a new Tumbleweed logo. The Leap logo doesn’t have the same issues, but members of the community felt the option should be available to submit a new logo for Leap.

The intent of the competition is to have the logo designs visualize a unified brand. Newly added openSUSE Distribution logos are designed with simple shapes and lines for uniqueness and interest, typically as empty outlines, although the possibility of using fill is not excluded. The logos use a 16u square canvas with a 1u stroke width, maintaining a relatively square aspect ratio.

openSUSE is a community-driven Linux project that develops, builds and maintains many software packages, tools and infrastructure for its distributions.

Tumbleweed is a pure rolling-release Linux distribution with tested versions of the newest stable software.

Leap is a reliable open-source Linux distribution with a focus on stability for desktops and servers.

Slowroll is an experimental distribution based on Tumbleweed, but has a slower release pace. Big updates come every one or two months, and continous bug fixes and security fixes gradually come in moving toward the big updates. The Slowroll logo should not directly mimic the Tumbleweed logo to maintain differentiation among the distributions from the same source.

Kalpa is the KDE Plasma MicroOS Desktop distribution that is gradually advancing from its Alpha state, and receives updates as a subset of Tumbleweed. While Kalpa has a close relationship with Aeon, their logos should be distinct. Gears and the letter K motifs are acceptable for Kalpa, but it cannot directly use KDE trademarks.

An element of the competition, as stated above, is the desire for submitted logo designs to be similar and integrate well with the newer project logos like Aeon (a GNOME MicroOS Desktop distribution), MicroOS and Leap Micro. There is a desire for all the logos together to show a cohesive brand identity for openSUSE and its distributions.

The logos will be selected for the marketing material at events, on its websites as well as on clothing. All the logos submitted will be voted on using survey.opensuse.org.

To establish the official logo for the Project and distribution going forward, current logos of openSUSE, Tumbleweed, and Leap, must be submitted just like the others. The rules of the contest can be found at https://en.opensuse.org/Logocontest.

The competition starts on Nov. 1.

The winners will receive a “Geeko Mystery Box” as a reward for their creative designs.

The deadline is Nov. 22.

The Rules of the Contest are as follows:

• The logo should be licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and allow everyone to use the logo without attribution (BY) if your work is used as a logo for the openSUSE Project. Note that the attribution is going to be shown on the project’s websites.
• Design must be original and should not include any third party materials.
• Both monochromes and color formats are essential for submission.
• Submissions must be in SVG format.
• Design should reflect the openSUSE communities.

• The logo should avoid the following things:

  • Brand names or trademarks of any kind.

  • Illustrations that may consider inappropriate, offensive, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libelous.

  • Sexually explicit or provocative images.

  • Violence or weapons.

  • Alcohol, tobacco, or drug use imagery.

  • Discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.

  • Bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against groups or individuals.

  • Religious, political, or nationalist imagery.

• The branding guidelines will be helpful to design your logo (optional) https://opensuse.github.io/branding-guidelines/

Please submit your design by doing the following:

• Email: ddemaio@opensuse.org
• Subject: openSUSE/Tumbleweed/Leap/Kalpa/Slowroll – [your name]
• Your name and mail address to contact
• Vector file of the design with SVG format ONLY.
• Post a PNG of the design under the openSUSE, Tumbleweed, Leap Slowroll, or Kalpa headings on https://en.opensuse.org/Logocontest
• File size less than 512 KB.
• Text about philosophy of the design

The designs that are submitted will be added to a survey where the community can vote on the submitted logo designs. The final decision will be made at an openSUSE Community meeting and it may not be the highest scored design.

We recommend the artist to use Inkscape, a powerful, free and open source vector graphics tool for all kinds of design.

Join others on openSUSE’s Marketing Telegram Channel if you want to chat with people about the designs.

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Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 42 has been a busy one for Tumbleweed. A total of 6 snapshots have been released (1012, 1013, 1015, 1016, 1017, and 1018). Quite a few interesting discussions are also happening on the factory mailing list (e.g. Agama as the future installer, how to interact with patterns, and such).

But let’s look first at the updates you received during the last week:

• KDE Gear 23.08.2
• cURL 8.4.0
• Zypper 1.14.66
• Freetpe 2.13.2
• Pipewire 0.3.81
• Qt 6.6.0
• Samba 4.19.1
• Node.JS 20.8.1

Looking into the future, we know of these things being worked on at the moment (mainly due to pending submit requests that we have in staging right now):

• KDE Frameworks 5.111.0
• Samba 4.19.2
• Linux kernel 6.5.8
• Binutils 2.41
• moving to dbus-broker
• Removal of /run/utmp and /var/log/wtmp (See mailing list thread)

All Things Open (ATO) is one of my favorite conferences. This week I had the privilege to be in Raleigh, NC for the third time, and give a talk at the conference for the fourth time. I participated not just ATO, but the Community Leadership Summit. Both events were fantastic. I learned a lot, and also realized that many others have the very same problems as I have. I also had a slight overdose of AI :-)

Why I like ATO?

Normally I prefer small events, like Pass the Salt. Small events are more comfortable, have more discussions, more interactions between participants. Large events are noisy, and if you are an introvert (like me), then it’s hard to engage in meaningful interactions with others.

Why do I like to attend ATO then? Obviously, there is noise, lots of it. But no matter how shy I am, I have tons of good discussions both with sudo/syslog-ng users and with completely random participants.

How is it possible? I guess it can be attributed to many things. First and foremost, Todd Lewis, who founded this event 11 years ago, and has kept running it ever since. He keeps saying “Thank you” to everyone, and he means it. Last time we met was four years ago. When we ran into each other on the corridors, he remembered my name, where I am coming from, which events I participate and about my talk too. And he thanked me for being here at ATO.

The name of the conference includes the word “open”. It does not only refer to open source, but also to being open minded. I talked to dozens of people during ATO, and everyone was fully open minded. I cannot find the website boasting it anymore, but once I read that the Research Triangle is the highest average IQ area of the whole US. I do not know how much of it is true, but I met a lot of bright people here. Everyone I talked to was open to new ideas, and no discussions were side tracked by endless ranting about software licenses, closed source software, or other creations of the devil…

Community Leadership Summit

On the first day I participated a co-located event, the Community Leadership Summit. After the opening thoughts of Jono Bacon, the conference had a rather unconventional format, discussion groups. These sessions are lead by volunteers, who introduce their topic, and also make sure that the discussion is kept on track.

To me the main message was that around the world many community leaders have the very same problems as I experience. And I learned about problems I definitely want to avoid. Just to name a few:

• If you invest time and energy into an open source community, it will usally have positive effects after 3-5 years.
• Building up trust, and the community based on this trust, is a lenghty process. Destroying this trust is a rapid process…
• If you abandon investing in your community, it still might go on for a few years, even grow for a while, but you lose trust and users over time, and it will be difficult to win them back.
• There are no metrics to demonstrate, how your open-source software improves the sales of your commercial offering. Even if there are direct connections, sales often tries to hide the evidence.
• There are software to measure the health of open source communities by measuring developer activity, support forum activity, etc., but they answer only part of the questions, and any measurement can easily lead to false results (daily user activity jumping 100x could easily mean a technical problem in a new release).

AI, OpenTelemetry and other topics

One of the returning topics at the conference was AI and LLM. It is a huge and contradictory topic, and it was also reflected in the talks. There were many opposing opinions:

• AI is not evil, but of course it can be misused.
• AI is evil, doomed to fail, but open source AI might be good.
• AI is good for math and coding, but not for generic questions.
• AI might be good for generic questions, but proven to fail with basic math on the eight largest AI services.

My personal view is a mixture of these: AI might be useful in some cases, but gives useless answers in many cases. It is far from perfect, but getting better. There is a strong need for open source: not just AI software, but also training data. So, all pieces are out in the open to experiment with.

The talk by Frank Karlitschek of NextCloud provided probably the most balanced view: https://2023.allthingsopen.org/sessions/what-does-the-ai-revolution-mean-for-open-source-open-tech-and-open-societies/ The recording of this talk should be available soon.

Another topic, which came up both in a dedicated talk, and as part of other topics: OpenTelemetry. When it comes to Kubernetes, but even without it (FreeBSD users were asking for OpenTelemetry support), OpenTelemetry is an emerging new standard embraced by many large and smaller organizations for collecting logs, metrics and traces. Support for OpenTelmetry was added to syslog-ng by Axoflow. It has some rough edges, like difficulty to compile, OS support is really limited, however it is definitely a step into the right direction.

The conference had several social events to help networking. I had many good discussions. Of course my favorite was about syslog-ng. Recently I have seen a lot of activity around syslog-ng in the OpenNMS. I put it on my To-do list to take a closer look. As it turned out, my discussion partner worked on OpenNMS for over eight years!

Unfortunately some of the best talks were not recorded: communication skills for developers and developer advocates, monetizing open source, and talking about open source with your managers. As I have lived and breathed open source for almost 30 years now, much of these were nothing new for me. However, these were very well written talks, and would be fantastic if they could reach a lot larger audience.

My talk

This year I talked about sudo at ATO: https://2023.allthingsopen.org/sessions/sudo-giving-access-while-staying-in-control/ It went pretty well, even with jet lag. I received many good questions about sudo functionality during and after my talk. English is not my native language, so I was especially happy that the audience was laughing when I improvised a few jokes on stage :-)

My talk was not recorded, however not everything is lost. All topics I talked about at the conference are covered in the sudo blogs at https://www.sudo.ws/posts/

Thank you!

Finally, I want to say “Thank you!” to many people. To Todd Lewis for organizing this event, to the volunteers and sponsors, who made it happen. And of course to all people who came to my talk. I hope you did not just learn something new about sudo, but that you will also implement these in your own environment.

I hope to see you again next year! :-)

This is a short message from the openSUSE Board that we are posting on our communication channels and is a reminder that we ask each and every one of you to be kind, considerate and welcoming to people on all our communication channels.

Let’s foster a positive atmosphere for people on all of our communication channels.

Our channels are a wonderful place for collaboration, but also remember that open-source is not about telling others what or how to build.

How we communicate can benefit and/or hinder our community. Please do your part to always be welcoming, kind, mindful and respectful to one another, so that we can all help each other build a healthy community. The way we communicate can help us create a friendly environment for all.

Also, we’d like to refer to our Code of Conduct.

Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed this week ranged from small- to medium-sized updates.

Snapshots are rolling out consistently this week and updates for GNOME, KDE Gear, PipeWire and more have all been making it into the hands of rolling release users.

While a few GNOME packages, arrived this week, snapshot 20231017 updates just one. The Japanese logo game gnome-sudoku updates to version 45.1 and it fixes a right-click to correctly open the earmark popover while also updating translations. An update of the ncurses 6.4.20231007 improves the loop limit for get_position(), enhancements a manual description and fixes for formatting issues with manpages. The package also enhances ` setupterm use and improves error messages in tic`. Another package to update was nodejs20 20.8.1 that addresses severalCommon Vulnerabilities and Exposures. CVE-2023-44487, CVE-2023-45143 and CVE-2023-39333, which was susceptible to a WebAssembly module that could inject JavaScript code, were among the six CVE that were addressed. The terminal emulator xterm 387 update includes the addition of some control sequences and corrects indexing expressions. The package also made memory usage configurable for buffering Device Control Strings and Operating System Command strings. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

More GNOME packages were updated in snapshot 20231016. Those packages include mutter 45.0+45, which has fixes related to blob size and stack overflow, gnome-photos 44.0+23, which includes the addition of mnemonics in photos-embed, and gnome-user-share 43.0+11, which fixes the bug-database value to point to GNOME GitLab Issues and ensure more accurate bug tracking. Another package to update in the snapshot was zchunk 1.3.2. The compressed file format package improves the handling overflow errors in malformed zchunk files to prevent potential crashes or unexpected behavior. The update of python-qt5 5.15.10 includes the addition of missing QEvent to improve compatibility with Qt versions 5.2 and later. The package also now requires python-qt5-sip v12.13, which was also made available in the update. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Just two packages were updated in snapshot 20231015. The package for manipulating block devices, libblockdev updates to version 3.0.4. Improvements like the use of g_autofree for memory management, corrected descriptions and reworked memory allocation became available to users who did a zypper dup during or after this snapshot. A package also made some adjustments to spec files and logging settings for better functionality and maintainability. The python-cffi 1.16.0 version cleans up its spec file. This Python for calling C code includes support for Python 3.12 and notes that projects using C Foreign Function Interface features dependent on distutils should add a dependency on setuptools for Python 3.12 and above. The package drops support for older Python versions like 2.7, 3.6 and 3.7. The package update reflects a focus on Python 3.8 and newer versions.

The snapshot from last Friday, snapshot 20231013, updates the font rendering package freetype2 to version 2.13.2. The package includes better support for Compact Font Format 2 variation fonts and removes the TrueType interpreter version 38. The package also brings improved support for OpenVMS. An update of pipewire 0.3.81 addresses sound-related issues and ensures that pro-audio functions produce sound correctly. The package now requires Vulkan 1.3 and enables jackdbus support by default. There is improved Advanced Linux Sound Architecture scheduling and support for old and new versions of webrtc-audio-processing. Along with the pipewire update, the 0.4.15 version of wireplumber arrives in the snapshot. This policy manager includes the addition of a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) policy module, which automatically loads a filter-chain for specific hardware devices, ensures audio passes through software DSP, particularly to support Apple M1/M2 devices. Wireplumber now supports loading module arguments directly and improves the device profile selection policies. An update of samba took care of a handful of CVEs and microos-tools receives a 2.21+git5 update that includes setting mount propagations properly and adds a spec file. Along with widget abstraction library libyui 4.6.1, several other Libyui packages updated in the snapshot. With it and the others, the Qt Package Manager now provides the option to display a patterns order column and shows invisible patterns when corresponding environment variables are set. A few qt6 subpackages were also updated in the snapshot.

One of the snapshots that didn’t make it into last week’s Tumbleweed review was 20231012. This snapshot had two yast2 packages, yast2-country and yast2-x11, upgrade from a 4.6 version to the 5.0.1 version. Another openSUSE package to update in the snapshot was zypper. This 1.14.66 package manager version has updates to include returning exit code 104 when information suggests near matches, rephrases upgrade messages for openSUSE Tumbleweed and fixes some typos and spelling errors. KDE Gear 23.08.2 also updates in this snapshot. Video editor Kdenlive resolves some erratic behavior when adding transitions to clips that ensures clips with audio don’t block sound on video tracks. The package also optimizes RAM usage for better performance. With Kitinerary there are enhancements for handling newer UK railway PDF tickets to extracting multi-leg PDF tickets. The package also gains the ability to merge international Renfe results and streamline ticket handling and management. Compression and decompression utility Ark drops an unused dependency and adds a missing KWindowSystem dependency.

Big projects usually shift the conversation to external bug tracking platforms and therefore don’t want to end up having lots of comments on their OBS project. For this reason we are introducing comment locks. On top of this we enhanced the reporting feature by a set of categories to ease the submission. Content Moderation is part of the beta program. Our journey into content moderation began back in October 2023, initially addressing comment locks and...

Logging is not just syslog anymore. Still, many syslog-ng users stick to using one of the syslog protocols for log transport and flat files for log storage. While most SIEMs and log analytics tools can receive syslog messages or read them using their own agents, in most cases, you can use the http() destination of syslog-ng as well to send logs to them. You gain extreme performance and an architecture that is easier to maintain.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/why-use-a-http–based-destination-in-syslog-ng