Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Welcome to the year 2024! I hope you had a great start and did not get too anxious about the few snapshots you received during the last two weeks. I’m sure many of you had better things to do than running zypper dup on their machines. Since I was having some days off myself, I missed the weekly review of week 2023/52 – so I will include this here as well. I will cover the six snapshots 1222, 1225, 1226, 1228, 0103, and 0104, which have all been released since my last reviews. 0104 is hot off the press!

The main changes in those snapshots were:

• Mozilla Firefox 121.0
• Postfix 3.8.4
• Linux kernel 6.6.7 & 6.6.9
• BlueZ 5.71
• Poppler 23.12.0
• Sudo 1.9.15p5
• Qt 5.15.12
• PHP 8.2.14

This week is still quiet, as many developers stretch the holiday period over the first week of the new year. So, it’s not a big surprise that many things on the to-do list are identical to the previous weeks. Things currently being tested in staging include:

• meson 1.3.1
• GStreamer 1.22.8
• RPM 4.19.x: llvm17 fails to build (?)
• Ruby 3.3: yast failures are being debugged
• libxml 2.12.x: slow progress
• openSSL 3.2.0
• c-ares 1.21.0: breaks nodejs
• dbus-broker: no progress: openQA fails to launch the network stack in the installer

If you’re using copilot and by luck also use pass to manage your passwords, you will find that the default configuration, or rather the configuration where you want copilot enabled everywhere, basically creates a risk for your precious passwords… As Copilot will be enabled by default, on text files.

So here’s the snippet I use:

-- initialize copilot
local copilot = {
	"zbirenbaum/copilot.lua",
	"ofseed/copilot-status.nvim",
	cmd = "Copilot",
	build = ":Copilot auth",
	event = "InsertEnter",
	opts = {
		filetypes = {
			sh = function()
				if string.match(vim.fs.basename(vim.api.nvim_buf_get_name(0)), "^%.env.*") then
					-- disable for .env files
					return false
				end
				return true
			end,
			text = function()
				if
					vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES") or vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "PASS_VERSION")
				then
					-- disable for .env files
					return false
				end
				return true
			end,
		},
	},
}

I should eventually add this too to my dotfiles… Once I have the time to do so.

If you’re using copilot and by luck also use pass to manage your passwords, you will find that the default configuration, or rather the configuration where you want copilot enabled everywhere, basically creates a risk for your precious passwords… As Copilot will be enabled by default, on text files.

So here’s the snippet I use:

-- initialize copilot
local copilot = {
  "zbirenbaum/copilot.lua",
  "ofseed/copilot-status.nvim",
  cmd = "Copilot",
  build = ":Copilot auth",
  event = "InsertEnter",
  opts = {
    filetypes = {
      sh = function()
        if string.match(vim.fs.basename(vim.api.nvim_buf_get_name(0)), "^%.env.*") then
          -- disable for .env files
          return false
        end
        return true
      end,
      text = function()
        if
          vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES") or vim.has_key(vim.environ(), "PASS_VERSION")
        then
          -- disable for .env files
          return false
        end
        return true
      end,
    },
  },
}

I should eventually add this too to my dotfiles… Once I have the time to do so.

Congratulations on finishing yet another ride around the Sol with me. Here's some noteworthy events from it from the perspective of a dust spec.

Music

While of course I'm stuck in my young taste like everybody else, I do try to pick up some new music. This year I've discovered Venjent doing a silly skit (he's fully aware of that being how people discover his music and really leans into it). In surreal turn of events I went to see him in a club, looking like a misplaced pensioner at 1am, when he finally spun his set. But I seriously enjoy how he can transform the absolute silliness into a total banger I play on repeat.

I've published some music of my own as well. After Desync assembled from material from weeklybeats 22 came Solar Coffee and Take Frequent Breaks right at the end of the year. I doubt I'll release anything this year, because Weekly Beats 24 will probably suck all my energy for music production. Hopefully I'll enjoy it as much as the first half of 22 :)

FPV

From about 3 videos a week in 2018 I'm down to about 3 a year. One might say I've thrown the towel in, but I still enjoy a decent tree surf from time to time.

I've completely dropped the ball when it comes to racing though. Didn't even qualify in Klatovy this year, because absolutely everyone has been training like crazy. It's been lovely to hang around with the weirdos in the three competitions I attended.

Congratulations on finishing yet another ride around the Sol with me. Here’s some noteworthy events from it from the perspective of a dust spec.

Music

While of course I’m stuck in my young taste like everybody else, I do try to pick up some new music. This year I’ve discovered Venjent doing a silly skit (he’s fully aware of that being how people discover his music and really leans into it). In surreal turn of events I went to see him in a club, looking like a misplaced pensioner at 1am, when he finally spun his set. But I seriously enjoy how he can transform the absolute silliness into a total banger I play on repeat.

I’ve published some music of my own as well. After Desync assembled from material from weeklybeats 22 came Solar Coffee and Take Frequent Breaks right at the end of the year. I doubt I’ll release anything this year, because Weekly Beats 24 will probably suck all my energy for music production. Hopefully I’ll enjoy it as much as the first half of 22 :)

FPV

From about 3 videos a week in 2018 I’m down to about 3 a year. One might say I’ve thrown the towel in, but I still enjoy a decent tree surf from time to time.

I’ve completely dropped the ball when it comes to racing though. Didn’t even qualify in Klatovy this year, because absolutely everyone has been training like crazy. It’s been lovely to hang around with the weirdos in the three competitions I attended.

This is my last blog for 2023, Budapest time. However, it might already be the first blog of the year from me, if you live in Japan or New Zealand :-) This time it’s a single song: “Happy new year” from ABBA (and from me :-) ).

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/575781/track/575787

setting up my system for my new job

equipment

I am starting my new job at Suse on Tuesday. As if to build the excitement over the holidays, they send me a boxes with equipment to get started. This gave me a good opportunity to clear off my desk and set up for a clean start.

They sent me a Thinkpad, a docking station, keyboard and mouse, and headphones. So, I set up all the equipment and made sure everything was comfortable to work with.

software set up

installing opensuse

It was recommended to me to install Leap, with I was happy with because I have been using it over my break on some other computers that I have. So I have already installed and set it up twice, and I had a USB key for it laying around.

I turned off Secure Boot on my laptop. I forgot all about the Secure Boot mess, and my BeeLink computers didn’t require my to make any configuration changes to install OpenSuse. Anyway, it was pretty easy to get the installer kicked off.

While the installer was running, I went about my day, and came back later delighted to see it on the Leap login page.

I logged in and was up and running.

I opened settings to see what wasn’t working, but everything so far was configured perfectly. Even the 4k display was set up properly, and I could tweak the settings if I wanted.

opensuse choice of install options

Three applications that I use everyday are Chrome, Visual Studio Code, and Slack. I also wanted to install Zoom. I don’t think that Suse the company uses Zoom, but other folks do, so I wanted to have it ready.

This is an area where I think Suse really shines. Suse is not trying to force me down a path of installing and using software specifically from their repositories in their specific packaging format. My order of preference for running apps is to:

1. Set up a repository and install from there.
2. Download an archive and install it locally.
3. Download a built binary and run it locally.

I am not interested in FlatPak or Snappy packages. For people who do like those formats, they seem to work fine on OpenSuse, but it turns out that I could follow my personal preferences when I was getting set up.

installing chrome

For better or worse, I am pretty embedded into the Google ecosystem. As such, the first thing I do with any computer is install Chrome and log into my Google account. Of course, I have to use Firefox once to find and install Chrome.

The way I did it was to download the rpm, and click on it.

This opened YaST2 for me, and it was a simple matter of clicking buttons to get Chrome installed.

Then I logged in and made sure I could get to my email and omg.lol account, and all was good.

installing vscode

Code is nice because they let me follow my #1 preference. They had clear instructions for Suse on their downloads page. Just add the repo, and use zypper to install the package.

Worked like a dream:

install slack

For Slack, I downloaded the rpm from the slack download page, double clicked on it, and YaST2 installed it with no issues:

Also “just worked”:

install and run zoom

For some reason, I assumed that installing Zoom was going to be a mess, but … on the contrary, I visited their (linux download page)[https://zoom.us/download?os=linux] and could easily select an archive for my system:

I double clicked on the archive, went through YaST2 again, and it worked as smooth as silk:

webcam and headset

Suse included Plantronics headset with my equipment. It took me a lot of fiddling to get it working on Beelink, but it worked out of the box on Thinkpad. My Webcam also “just worked.”

I watched some videos to make sure all was well, and I had a great 4k experience with good sound.