The openSUSE Conference did not slow down openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots from frequently being released this week.

Three snapshots have been released since last Friday when the conference began and a new major version of QEMU arrived just days after the conference.

This emulator and virtualizer arrived in snapshot 20230530. The update of qemu 8.0 fixed dependencies and improved the spec file; the package added support for Xen guests under KVM with Linux Kernel version above 5.12. Two newly emulated CPU types were arm’s Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52. RISC-V also had some support extensions added with the emulator, and s390x improved device handling and fixed some emulation instructions with the major version package update. Python Package Index had an update. The 23.1.2 version of python-pip upgraded setuptools to 67.7.2 and added a --keyring-provider flag. An old Common Vulnerability and Exposure was fixed with the python310 3.10.11 update. CVE-2007-4559 that could allow for user-assisted remote attackers to overwrite arbitrary files was fixed and the language package also fixed a bug that caused a crash when deallocating deeply nested filter objects. Another package to update in the snapshot was Btrfs 6.3. The file system added a patch, removed some old files and provided some integration with GitHub actions. A few GNOME packages were updated in the snapshot. Several fixes were made with gnome-software 44.2 like fixing a bug with listing Flatpak addons when multiple Flathub remotes are enabled. Extensible screen reader Orca updated to version 44.1 and improves performance by checking for duplicate object events. The 44.2 version of the gnome-control-center had fixes in GTK template usage that caused crashes on some systems.

The snapshot that arrived the day before was 20230529. This updated the Linux Kernel; with the kernel-source 6.3.4, fixes were made in different areas like networking, scsi, netfilter, bonding, and more. An update of grep 3.11 fixed a pattern matching issue with the -P option. Patterns like [\d] now work again, which was broken in the previous version. Multiple CVEs associated with Chromium were fixed in libqt5-qtwebengine 5.15.14; these included a stack buffer overflow, heap buffer overflow, an out-of-bounds memory access, and other vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited by attackers to compromise the system.

An update of gstreamer 1.22.3 fixed a video decoder deadlock with ffmpeg 6 as well as some regression handling of input streams. The pixel encoder babl 0.1.106 has a faster startup by caching balanced RGB to XYZ matrices. Several other packages updated in the snapshot including window manager icewm 3.3.5, diffutils 3.10, xfce4-panel 4.18.4 and crypto-policies.

The 20230526 snapshot had eight packages update. ImageMagick 7.1.1.10 was among the packages to update and it fixed security vulnerability CVE-2023-2157. Mozilla Firefox 113.0.2 fixed a bug causing it to freeze on certain pages with the Developer Tools Web Console open. There was also a bug fixed related to the vertical resizing of the bookmark and history sidebars. Programming language guile updated to version 3.0.9 and introduced a new interface, functionality and refreshed some patches. An update of libreoffice 7.5.3.2 also refreshed some patches and fixed a Microsoft PPTX format issue. Translations for Georgian using Weblate were made in the libstorage-ng 4.5.110 update. Two CVEs were fixed in the snapshot as well; mariadb 10.11.3 took care of CVE-2022-47015, which had a Denial of Service vulnerability for MariaDB Servers in versions 10.3.34 thru 10.9.3, and an updated 4.17.1 version of xen took care of CVE-2022-42336, which had a security vulnerability on AMD hardware specific to the AMD Family 17h and Hygon Family 18h processors.

Members of the Geekos community are inviting technology enthusiasts, students, potential candidates, and anyone interested in open source, openSUSE and Linux to an Open House event in SUSE’s Prague office on June 7 from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The purpose of the event is to provide attendees with an exclusive opportunity to gain insight into open-source companies like SUSE and projects like openSUSE; organizers aim to share the unique culture of the two, and exhibit the exceptional work being done by the organizations. Participants will have the chance to interact with SUSE employees and openSUSE members as well as explore the office space, and learn more about the innovative projects being developed.

“The SUSE Open House is an excellent platform for us to showcase our company, culture, and the amazing work happening here in Prague,” said Kristyna Streitova, one of the main organizers of the event. “We are excited to welcome everyone, whether they are students, potential candidates, family and friends, or former colleagues. This event is for everyone who has an interest in SUSE, openSUSE, or Linux.”

The event schedule and additional details can be found on the official website at https://more.suse.com/openhousecz. Participants are encouraged to join the conversation on the official Telegram channel at https://t.me/SUSEOpenHouseCZChat.

To ensure the success of the Open House, organizers are seeking the support of the community. Attendees are encouraged to help promote the event by sharing posts about it on social media and inviting friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested.

One of the highlights of the Open House will be team presentations, allowing attendees to gain insights into various departments and projects. The Open House will feature a tour allowing visitors to explore the infrastructure that powers the organizations’ cutting-edge solutions.

“We encourage everyone to come to the office on Wednesday and be a part of this exciting event,” Streitova said. “We want to create a vibrant atmosphere and show our passion for open source technology.”

The Open House promises to be an engaging and informative event that provides attendees with a unique opportunity to connect with a vibrant community and learn about the latest innovations and career opportunities.

After a while keeping working on the request page redesign, we are glad to come back to you with two new request types: maintenance incident requests and maintenance release requests. The request redesign is part of the beta program. We started the redesign of the request workflow in August 2022. Then, in September 2022, we focused on the support of multi-action submit requests. We continued in October 2022 with improvements regarding the Build Results tab...

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 Logo Competition

Today is the launch of our logo competition for the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023. A logo is an integral part of the openSUSE.Asia Summit experience. As you have seen, the previous openSUSE.Asia Summits have their unique logos that reflect the communities where the Summit took place. In line with tradition, we have a logo contest to have a great logo for this year’s summit. The openSUSE.Asia Summit will be held this year in Chongqing, China, details are available here.

The competition is now open. It will close on 16 July 2023. The organizers will send a “Geeko Mystery Box” as a reward for the best designed logo.

Deadline: 16 July 2023

Announcement Winner: Week of July 24

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 the logo of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023. Note that the attribution is going to be shown on the summit website.
• Design must be original and should not include any third party materials conflicting with CC-BY-SA 4.0 with the attribution exception.
• Both monochromes and color formats are essential for submission.
• Submissions must be in SVG format.
• Design should reflect the openSUSE community in Asia.
• 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 logo should follow “openSUSE Project Trademark Guidelines” published at HERE
• The branding guidelines will be helpful to design your logo (optional)

Please submit your design to opensuseasia-summit@googlegroups.com with the following entries:

• Subject: openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 Logo Design - [your name]
• Your name and mail address to contact
• A document about philosophy of the design (txt or pdf)
• Vector file of the design with SVG format ONLY.
• Bitmap of design in attachment — image size: 256*256 px at least, PNG format.
• File size less than 512 KB.

The openSUSE.Asia Summit Committee will decide on the logos, subject to the condition, that the logo meets all the requirements. The final decision will be made by openSUSE.Asia Summit Committee 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.

New Names!

As seen in Richard Brown’s presentation at openSUSE Conference 2023 Why you should be running the MicroOS Desktop, we are pleased to announce a name change for both MicroOS Desktop GNOME and MicroOS Desktop Plasma.

MicroOS Desktop GNOME is now: openSUSE Aeon

MicroOS Desktop Plasma is now: openSUSE Kalpa

Why the name changes?

Simply put? The microOS product namespace is getting crowded. And this is leading to a certain amount of confusion, and causing some support issues.

At present, amongst the microOS “family” offered are:

Server Products openSUSE MicroOS openSUSE Leap Micro SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro Desktop Products openSUSE MicroOS Desktop GNOME openSUSE MicroOS Desktop Plasma

And I think we can all agree, when somebody joins a support forum of some sort, be it Matrix/Telegram/forums/IRC/etc, and says “I’m running microOS and I have a problem” then the inevitable question of “Which MicroOS?” has to be asked.

And by their very nature, the Desktop offerings are quite different beasts, than the server offerings, and have quite different support needs.

And typing out “openSUSE MicroOS Desktop GNOME” is just too darn long, every time you want to tell somebody what’s running on your machine.

Why Aeon and Kalpa?

You might be asking yourself, Why these names?

Aeon - an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time (philosophy) a power existing from eternity

Kalpa -

As stated in the Design Goals of Aeon and Kalpa, we intend the product to be something that lasts, that due to the atomic nature of the updates, and the immutable nature of the core system, we aim to have a system where you install it once, and then not have to worry about it, as well as provide the features and tools that developers need, without so much of the tedious tweaking and customization that can so often consume so much time after installation.

So the names fit. Aeon was chosen for the GNOME offering through a few polls and discussion, by Richard, as it is the product that is closest to release, and has the most active development, and the larger userbase.

Kalpa was chosen for the Plasma offering, as it is roughly the same concept, and as a nod to KDE, it conveniently starts with a ‘K’ as so much software from the KDE project does.

What does this mean for the users?

Well, for now? Nothing. Your desktops are going to continue to operate just as they have. At present, neither Richard or I believe there will be any requirement to be doing any re-installs or make any special changes to your current installations. The download media will remain the same for now, and you will still receive your updates as expected, the branding changes should be automatically delivered during the course of regular updates, as we get things done.

What does this mean for MicroOS Desktop as a product?

One of the challenges that I personally have been wrestling with, is the current disparity in development resources between folks using and working on mOSD GNOME and mOSD Plasma, and by “splitting” the product, this means that while Aeon and Kalpa will continue to operate from the same base, and the same package selections, we are no longer tied in lockstep to each other. The slower development pace of Kalpa is decoupled with the much closer to release ready Aeon. This takes pressure off of our limited development resources on the Plasma side of things, and allows the GNOME product to proceed from RC to Release.

Additionally, this also will mean less noise, ultimately, for the MicroOS Server developers, dealing with Desktop support, and conversely means the same for Aeon and Kalpa developers, not having to deal with the confusion of server product support. Conclusion

In Summary, very little is currently changing, in either product, and for now, the transition from “MicroOS Desktop” to “Aeon/Kalpa” should be seamless for our users. I highly suggest giving Richard’s presentation (linked at the top of post) a watch, to see some of the things He has planned for Aeon, and keep watching this blog for announcements.

NUREMBERG, Germany (May 30, 2023) - Open-source projects and contributions have brought remarkable advancements in technology by enabling communication and collaboration among people worldwide.

One such example of this is the openQA testing tool, which has collectively benefited the Linux ecosystem.

Started by the openSUSE community in 2011 and still very actively developed, openQA has gained strong usage by projects such as Fedora, Debian, Kali Linux, Qubes OS, GNOME, and KDE. Recently, AlmaLinux joined this group as a reliable and stable RHEL clone, and the community has made contributions to openQA that demonstrate how complementary open-source projects can work together.

“To assure our users that we take testing very seriously and are committed to delivering the best possible experience, we’ve implemented the openQA tool to automatically test AlmaLinux OS for all supported architectures,” according to a community post.

“I want to thank AlmaLinux for these contributions!” said Sarah Julia Kriesch, openSUSE zSystems Maintainer & (Co-)Chair of the Linux Distributions Working Group at The Open Mainframe Project. ”openQA is already used by Fedora and Debian besides openSUSE/SUSE. Working together and improving our tests is part of the collaborative maintenance of Linux for s390x.”

“With tests enabled for Red Hat KVM now, we can additionally test all other Linux distributions on Fedora and RHEL,” she said. “That is also a test extension, where we all can benefit. openQA is an open-source project and can be used for automated tests for every operating system.

In brief, openQA uses virtual machines to reproduce predefined processes and check the output against what it expects to be the output. The architectures available are for Intel/AMD (x86-64), ARM64 (aarch64), IBM PowerPC (ppc64le) and IBM Z (s390x).

A pull request to add Enterprise Linux support to the QEMU backend started the AlmaLinux contributions to openQA and more are expected from the community. Updating QEMU-KVM options like Kriesch mentioned to make them compatible with RHEL’s QEMU-KVM build as well as several updates to make QEMU backend work with s390x are making a difference for developers.

“Expanding architecture support for quality testing software like openQA is really great to see, and it’s even better to see this support already being put into use by the AlmaLinux project.” said Elizabeth K. Joseph, Open Source Software Program Office for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE & (Co-)Chair of the Linux Distributions Working Group at The Open Mainframe Project.

During the development, the AlmaLinux contributors went through the processes of adapting openQA for working on the RHEL virtualization stack and bringing back KVM support in ppc64le architecture for AlmaLinux 9. It was removed from RHEL9 and therefore can’t be part of AlmaLinux 9 (as it promises to be a 1:1 binary clone of RHEL), but modified kernel and qemu-kvm packages are part of AlmaLinux’s openQA repo now.

The AlmaLinux community also implemented virtualization support for s390x architecture in openQA. More details of the development process and challenges that the AlmaLinux Team overcame are coming soon from Elkhan Mammadli, the AlmaLinux OS Engineer responsible for the openQA improvements they’ve contributed.

Elkhan gave a shout out to openQA developers for such a cool project, to the Fedora Project for tests and inspiration, and to Sam Thursfield who gave a presentation at FOSDEM about using openQA for testing GNOME OS Nightly builds, which played a big role for Elkhan for using and contributing to the testing tool.

The team prepared an openQA User guide with more details and has invited contributions by helping AlmaLinux define test suites tailored for developer needs.

The expansion of openQA’s use started in 2014 after Richard Brown wrote a test suite for Fedora. His talk at the openSUSE Conference in 2015 and other events gradually helped to expand its usage across the open-source ecosystem.

This year’s openSUSE Conference starts in about 72 hours and open-source enthusiasts, contributors and supporters are making their way to Nuremberg, Germany, for a collaborative community event.

Talks begin on May 26 at 9:30 a.m. Central European Time and the event will be streamed by c3voc; the stream link will be posted on events.opensuse.org before the event begins. The schedule lists plenty of talks ranging from an introduction to the Geeko Foundation to an introduction of the service-based Linux installer Agama.

Talks will take place in two presentation rooms at the event and are labeled on the schedule as Saal and Galerie. Stream viewers can ask questions to the presenters during the event via two Telegram channels that correspond with the room where the presentation is being held. Questions for talks in Saal should be asked in the https://t.me/oscsaal Telegram channel and questions for talks in Galerie should be asked in the https://t.me/oscgalerie Telegram channel. Questions may be presented to the speakers as time allows.

There are other online event interactions as well. From a Fedora Hatch event to a Kubernetes workshop, attendees are being reminded to incorporate events with people attending the conference virtually. Like the Telegram channels for talks, those giving workshops are encouraged to incorporate a Jitsi room corresponding to where their workshop is taking place. Workshops on the schedule listed in Seminar Raum 1 will have a dedicated virtual room https://meet.opensuse.org/Seminarraum1 and Seminar Raum 2 will have a dedicated virtual room https://meet.opensuse.org/Seminarraum2.

Members of the community are also looking for help during and after the conference. The video team needs help during the conference. The team at the physical location really needs help as the video recording, editing, and streaming can be demanding if not enough people are willing to help. The video team will be meeting at 9:00 a.m. in Saal on May 26, so please join and help the team with our online viewership and recorded videos.

There are also several other areas the openSUSE community can use help with. A list of those items can be found at https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/help. Consider helping out as the project can use some help in quite a few areas.

The openSUSE Project’s annual openSUSE community event brings people from around the world together to meet, collaborate and learn. With organized talks, workshops and meetup sessions, openSUSE Conference 2023 provides a framework for communities to enhance and improve open-source technologies and shared projects.

The project thanks our sponsors for the great support. This year’s sponsors are SUSE, arm, The Geeko Foundation, Fedora, Linux Pro Magazine and FOSSLife.

Chongqing, China, Selected for openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023

Chongqing has been accepted to host the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 and the openSUSE.Asia Summit will return to China for the second time, Chongqing is one of the four directly-administered municipalities of the PRC, located in southwest China, bordered by Sichuan, Yunnan and other areas, is one of the second batch of national historical and cultural city announced by the State Council of China.The world map hanging in the halls of the United Nations, marked only the names of four cities in China, one of which is Chongqing.PRC

The openSUSE.Asia Summit is a highly anticipated event for supporters of openSUSE in China and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in general. This activity will bring together experts, contributors, end-users and technology enthusiasts.will gather to share experiences about the development of openSUSE and other things related to FLOSS and have a lot of fun.The venue for the openSUSE.Asia Summit was chosen by vote of openSUSE.Asia committee . Finally, the Asian committee decided Chongqing as the host of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 from October 21, 2023 to October 23, 2023, at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

Some of the goals to be achieved at the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 in Chongqing will be to

• Promotion of openSUSE in China.
• Attraction of new openSUSE contributors from China and other Asian countries.
• To provide an alternative for the wider community to see that FLOSS can be a powerful tool for them to use in their day-to-day work.
• Provide a platform for the exchange of experiences between users and developers, where such discussions would normally only take place online.

Finally, we are proud to present Chongqing as one of the best locations for openSUSE.Asia.

Pre-announcement

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 will open a call for papers for potential speakers. and the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2023 logo competition will also be opened. The logo competition would be an opportunity for designers in Asia to compete with each other to showcase their skills and be a part of this activity. More details about the above information will be announced in the near future via news.opensuse.org.

See you in Chongqing!

Tao-dialog is part of tao-utils commands group. It assembles only tao-manager (simple file manager) and tao-dialog currently. Tao-dialog aims to work as zephyr/kdialog replacement, but it is currently not done. Maybe in future, I will add xmessage compatibility mode. Dialog compact mode rather never been supported, due dialog have options rather hard to implement using libgreattao.

Libgreattao have GUI and shell mode. Network mode must be re-implemented. Many feature, working in V2 version must be rewriten to V3 (3.0 version). But V2 is rather complicated and error-prone. LibgreattaoV3 uses libexslt internally.

Zephyr and KDialog modes of tao-dialog are partially implemented. You can do basic stuff like displaying yes/no dialog, info dialog and file dialogs. File dialogs are currently error-prone in libgreattaoV3 (sometimes causes crash, when dialog is destroyed), but I will work on this.

One good point of Libgreattao is GUI mode could use one of three backends: GTK4, Qt5 and console. So it could revolution inside system-communication manner. Programmer could write script, which uses tao-dialog in zenity/kdialog mode and, depending on current DE, it could show GTK+, QT or console dialogs. Yes… it even could work without Graphical Environment, so it made many programming problems less problematic. You can write installer in bash, using tao-dialog and it spawns Qt dialogs, Gtk4 dialogs. If user open it terminal, it also uses console backend and works. Maybe I will add ncurses backend in future. Console backend is very simple, but works.

Libgreattao allows to make Linux software easier. Imagine xdg-su do not load backends by its own. It only create normal windows (authorization prompts) and libgreattao takes care for rest. There could be also other pieces of Linux desktop, which could take advantage thanks to libgreattao, like prompt for allow to start application (set x bit and ran app, if user allow), dialog asking to select application for file open task, etc. DE could only selects GUI backend or design files.

Recently, I was looking for some new hybrid / crossover music, and someone recommended me to check out Hidden Orchestra. Listening to their album, “Creaks” was an instant love. As I learned later, it’s the music of a game. I’m not a gamer, but once seeing that it’s on sale on Humble Bundle I bought it immediately.

You can listen to the whole album here:

You can also find it on Bandcamp.

So, what is hybrid or crossover music? A real musician would probably have two distinct definitions with lots of fine details. To me, both mean combining classical and modern styles and instruments in a song. This can easily lead to disaster, but when done right, that’s my favorite style of music. There are some fantastic bands and composers here in Hungary who work in this genre, like After Crying, Fugato, Hidden Kingdom, or Julius Dobos (strictly in alphabetical order, as all of them are good).

I was curious to find more hybrid / crossover music, so I asked around. From the handful of suggestions, Hidden Orchestra was to the closest to what I was looking for. Luckily, much of their music is available on TIDAL, so I could listen to them in CD quality. And while I liked most of their albums, “Creaks” became my absolute favorite.

“Creaks” is now installed on my machine. I must admit, I did not play much with it. The music and graphics are beautiful, however I’m not a gamer. The only other game I bought recently is Civilization, as I played that a lot during my university years, so I bought it mostly out of nostalgia :-)

As a music fanatic, I find it fascinating that the music I love to listen to is also available as the soundtrack of a game. Previously, I had similar experiences with films. I watched many movies because I listened to their soundtrack first, and I became curious. But that’s another story, and I already wrote a blog about that almost two years ago: Watching movies belonging to soundtracks.

Finally a question and request to you:

• Did you ever buy a game because of its music?
• If you know any good hybrid / crossover music, let me know!

Reach out to me on Twitter or Mastodon! Links to my accounts are available at the top of the page.