You have probably read about the release of the OpenAPI Documentation. That doesn’t mean the documentation is finished and static. On the contrary, we have recently introduced a few more endpoints and are looking forward to your contributions. Please check them out! Statistics Status Project Status Reports - Required Checks Status Reports Build Worker Status After kicking off the API documentation remake in January 2021, we’ve continued with the Build and Workers endpoints in April...

openSUSE Leap 15.5 was released earlier this week and release team would like to hear from you about your experience with openSUSE Leap 15.5.

Did anything go particularly well, or perhaps did we miss something? Did you have trouble downloading, installing, or contributing to Leap 15.5? Did you like the overall communication?

Simply head to survey.opensuse.org and tell us.

About the survey

The survey is anonymous and has only two questions “What went well? and “What didn’t go too well?”.

Leap 15.5 release retrospective survey will remain open for two weeks from the release, until 21st June.

We’re using our own instance of LimeSurvey as the platform.

How will the data be used?

Past that, we’ll announce a few rounds of public review meetings, where we’ll review and categorize feedback (see feedback from previous releases) and will try to come up with action items to address issues.

Opportunity to recognize teams or individuals

If you’d like to recognize some of the contributors please do so! We’ll use it as input for release recognition e-thank-you emails. Both teams or individuals will be happy to see that you appreciate their efforts!

Everybody is welcome to help us with the recognition effort feel free to participate on Github.

Feedback from previous releases

Leap 15.2 retrospective results
Leap 15.3 retrospective results
Leap 15.4 retrospective results

EN / CA / CS / DE / ES / FR / JA / NL / ZH-TW

NUREMBERG, Germany – The release of openSUSE’s latest 15-series version marks years of maintenance and security that began more than five years ago.

The maturity of Leap 15.5 comes into play as new technological changes of the last five years have been introduced, such as container technologies, immutable systems, virtualization, embedded development, and other high-tech advances.

Entrepreneurs, hobbyists, professionals and developers use Leap as a go-to Linux distribution as seen by the increase in usage from each minor release. Traversing from legacy software to more modern systems is imminent.

Leap 15.5, which is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5, will receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2024. This will provide users with plenty of time to transition to the release’s successor; a successor has yet to be confirmed. Users interested in commercial support can use a new tool to transition to commercial support. Leap can be downloaded at get.opensuse.org.

This release brings newer packages like Mesa and others, but Leap 15.5 is a non-feature release. Some of these newer packages to highlight include KDE Plasma 5.27, which is a Plasma Long Term Support version until the next one rolls out in 2024. Konqi lovers will enjoy a new welcome wizard, dynamic customization of desktop workspaces and more functionality with KRunner that includes a full desktop search, unit and currency exchange rate conversions, dictionary definitions, calculator features, and it shows graphical representations of mathematical functions. The Color Picker had a few improvements and added the possibility of displaying another preview color circle. KDE Gear 22.12.3 will be a new package in the release and complement the use of Plasma 5.27. The update fixes bugs with the Desktop Environment applications and highlights the enhancement of compression/decompression utility ark, improvements to text editor Kate and fixes some crashing of the video editor Kdenlive. Qt 5.15 LTS is available with the KDE Qt 5 patch collection.

Text editor Vim will upgrade to a new major version. Vim 9 has a new script language that drastically improves performance. Increases in execution speed of 10 to 100 times is expected for the text editor. Users are recommended to read the project’s Vim 9.0 release information to know how the upgrade affects legacy scripts, backwards compatibility and other new features added in the release.

For professionals configuring networking of Linux containers, the netavark 1.5.0 package is in the release. Users who have already transitioned to Flatpaks will have an updated 1.14.4 version that addresses a Common Vulnerability and Exposure with CVE-2023-28101. The newer version fixes the hiding of permissions for an attacker publishing a Flatpak app with malicious intent to elevate permissions.

Leap 15.5 is set to have the OpenH264 repository enabled by default for all new installations thanks to contributions from Open Source at Cisco.

Leap 15.5 comes with Linux Kernel 5.14.21 that including backports for this SUSE specific LTS kernel. Leap 15.5 shares the kernel with SLE 15 SP5 that receives the same fixes and backports along, which includes a few thousand other shared packages. The device firmware updater package fwupd will change to version 1.8.6. The newer version fixes compiling errors when building for s390x and ppc64le

Good news for Python developers. Leap 15.5 users will have a fully usable Python 3.11 stack in parallel to the system Python (python36). This provides a more modern release for users and developers. Packagers are advised to switch to Python 3.11.

Other packages users may notice a change to are updates of Ugrep 3.11.0 and NetworkManager 1.38.6. Both webkit2gtk3 and webkit2gtk4 will update to version 2.38.5. Mozilla’s internet browser Firefox will get a new Extended Support Release version - 102.9.0. Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird gains various visual and user experience improvements with version 102.8.0.

End of Life

openSUSE Leap 15.4 will have its End of Life (EOL) six months from today’s release. Users should update to openSUSE Leap 15.5 within six months of today to continue to receive security and maintenance updates.

Important for users upgrading from previous versions

A new 4096-bit RSA signing key was introduced as part of openSUSE Leap 15.5 as well as 15.4 via a maintenance update. Leap 15.4 users are expected to update their system prior to upgrade of 15.5. For more information, visit https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade#0._New_4096_bit_RSA_signing_key

Download Leap 15.5

To download the ISO image, visit https://get.opensuse.org/leap/

Questions

If you have a question about the release or found a bug, we’d love to hear from you at:

https://t.me/openSUSE

https://chat.opensuse.org

https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-support/

https://discordapp.com/invite/openSUSE

https://www.facebook.com/groups/opensuseproject

Get involved

The openSUSE Project is a worldwide community that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. It creates two of the world’s best Linux distributions, the Tumbleweed rolling-release, and Leap, the hybrid enterprise-community distribution. openSUSE is continuously working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds. Learn more about it on opensuse.org.

We’d like to announce that the openSUSE Release team plans to work on openSUSE Leap 15.6.

openSUSE Leap 15.6 is expected to be released in early June 2024 and would reach its end of life by the end of the year 2025.

This decision was based on recent discussions at SUSE Labs and openSUSE Conference, and it reflects recent changes, progress on individual projects, and our new distribution architect.

This will also enable us to provide SUSE customers with an updated Package HUB module, as both SLES 15 SP5 and Leap 15.6 would be considered a feature release based on our tick-tock release model.

With a Leap 15.6, more time is given for efforts related to an ALP-based Leap 15.X successor.

A more detailed explanation of the situation at lkocman’s oSC2023 “Leap 16.0?” talk. Recording should be available within a few days at the openSUSE youtube channel.

One of the returning syslog-ng questions I receive is how many log messages can a given hardware handle. My typical answer is that it depends on the configuration. I have now an answer, or rather a tool to answer your question: sngbench.sh. It is a shell script that runs from localhost and uses loggen, the bundled benchmarking and testing tool of syslog-ng. It comes with two configurations: a performance-optimized and a realistic one. You are also free to extend sngbench with your own configurations.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/introducing-sngbench-a-shell-script-to-performance-test-your-syslog-ng

Starting today, the OpenAPI Specification presented through Swagger UI becomes the official API documentation for Open Build Service 🎉 Find it at https://api.opensuse.org/apidocs/ With OpenAPI we now provide an industry standard way to maintain the specification and with Swagger UI a tool that makes consuming the documentation easier for people who want to make use of the OBS API in their code. Now our journey to remake the API documentation has come to an end,...

Adding Python 3.11 to Leap 15.4 and newer

Leap has a default Python interpreter that’s “too old”. In Leap, python3 is Python 3.6 that reached upstream end of life at the end of 2021. The current version in Leap is based on SUSE SLES 15, so it’s supported by SUSE, but it’s not something easy to use with modern python modules.

Today it’s also possible to install a more modern Python interpreter in Leap, the python310 and python310-pip packages are in the repositories and you can install and use the virtualenv module to install from PyPI, and python311 will be available in Leap 15.5 when released.

But sometimes that’s not enough, some python modules requires non python libraries or tools to be installed and it’s not possible to use them directly from PyPI.

That’s the reason for this new Python interpreter and modules for Leap.

This Python 3.11 and modules is a solution proposed to provide a more recent Python interpreter and basic set of updated Python modules in stable SUSE solutions, SLES, and it will be supported, so it’ll be part of the Leap releases, as Leap inherits directly from there.

The first thing to keep in mind is that this solution doesn’t bring any break changes, the primary Python is the same (3.6) and existing Python modules are not updated. The current Python 3.6 interpreter and packages stay intact. The /usr/bin/python3 binary will remain Python 3.6 for software compatibility reasons, however an additional /usr/bin/python3.11 is provided as well. The new Python Stack is an addition, that doesn’t collide with existing packages, so it can be co-installed in a system without affecting any running application.

This modern Python will be available in Leap 15.4, and following releases will inherit it, so it’ll be available also in Leap 15.5. The interpreter can be found now, but the list of modules is still under development and will arrive soon.

Python Version

The python version selected is the Python 3.11. This is the best choice because:

• Is the latest official Python version, supported by the Python Foundation.
• There are some noticeable performance improvements, compared to the previous versions.
• It’s compatible with previous versions, there are no big changes that breaks not too old Python code, so code that works in Python 3.10 or Python 3.9 will work correctly in Python 3.11 or will require small changes.

With the interpreter there is a list of Python modules that will be provided with a recent version. These Python modules, that are part of the Modern Python, will be only available with the Python 3.11 interpreter, and will be the latest version released upstream, so this new stack provides a recent Python environment with a recent interpreter and Python modules from 2023.

The list of packages will be a reduced subset of modules in Leap, around 500 packages. But it’s an initial set that will allow to build a lot more modern packages and will make the life easier for people using the Python Backports.

Impact on existing systems

All python packages in the new stack will provide the “python311-” version, so for example to install Flask you will find the package python311-Flask, python3-Flask will continue being the python 3.6 version, the one that you can find in Leap 15.4 by default.

This new Python interpreter and modules will not affect the existing systems. But the new interpreter and modules will be available in Leap 15.4 and beyond, so it’s recommended to everyone to migrate from Python 3.6 to the new Python 3.11 and try to use this modern version of the interpreter and basic python modules.

Using the packages provided by the Modern Python will bring a lot of direct benefits:

• Considerably faster Python interpreter.
• Modern Python interpreter with the latest improvements in the syntax and standard library.
• Modern Python modules with improved functionality can be used, not just the provided by the distribution, but also from PyPI.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

First off, apologies for not having the weekly review since May 5th. There were some personal days off, some travels to conferences and things just lined up to fall through the cracks. But more importantly, than the weekly reviews, I’m sure you have all noticed that Tumbleweed has not been stopped. Au contraire: with people being all in the same time zones and proximity, we managed to resolve some of the long-standing issues in stagings and progress on. I’ll try to give an overview of what happened in the last 4 weeks.

Looking at all of May 2023, there have been a total of 29 snapshots published. The only ones skipped were 0516 and 0528. Snapshots 0501 through 0504 had been covered in week 2023/18’s review and I’ll skip them today. This brings us to this overview of what happened in the last weeks in Tumbleweed:

• iproute2 6.3
• LibreOffice 7.5.3.1 & 7.5.3.2
• Virtualbox 7.0.8
• php8 was attempted to be updated to 8.2.5, later reverted to 8.1.19 due to nextcloud incompatibilities
• Salt 3006.0
• systemd 253.4, plus the introduction of file triggers instead of relying upon packagers using all the systemd_ macros. There was an issue detected though, hinting at obs-pesign stripping the file triggers away.
• PAM 1.5.3
• Mozilla Firefox 113.0 & 113.0.1 & 113.0.2
• KDE Plasma 5.27.5
• KDE Gear 23.04.1
• KDE Frameworks 5.106.0
• OpenVPN 2.6.4
• Linux kernel 6.3.2 & 6.3.4
• SQLite 3.42.0
• LLVM 16.0.4
• GCC 13.1.1
• GStreamer 1.22.3
• QEmu 8.0.0
• The old 2k RSA signing key for openSUSE repos has been removed from default installations. The key is still valid, but not part of the default trusted keys anymore.

Things that are in the pipeline and are close to being ready – also thanks to the many in-person meetings at the SUSE Labs conference and the openSUSE Conference

• Python 3.11 as the new default Python interpreter (a few packages from the numeric stack pending confirmation)
• openSSL 3.1.1
• openSSH 9.3p1
• libxml2 2.11.4: breaks a few packages like perl-XML-LibXML, raptor, virtualbox
• fmt 10: breaks at least ceph and spdlog
• libplist 2.3.0: breaks libimobiledevice-glue
• protobuf 23.1: breaks libphonenumber, libzypp, protobuf-c, and vlc

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.