The open-source world is in the midst of an exciting transformation as the openSUSE community prepares to phase in a new project logo.

While the competition, which has more than 5,000 votes, has yet to conclude, below is a bit of information to help people understand the reasoning for rebranding the project’s logo and information about the next steps for the openSUSE brand once the logos contest is complete.

The beloved Chameleon passionately known as Geeko was first introduced in 2005 when the project began and was slightly changed in 2007 when the type was modified for the brand.

The openSUSE Project adopted the SUSE logo from 2003, but was characterized by a different text beneath it, marking an era of brand association for the community lead project. SUSE has refreshed its brand over the years and its newest logo revealed in 2020 differs completely from that of openSUSE’s. However, the brands of both SUSE and openSUSE can oftentimes confuse people who don’t understand the relationship between the open-source company SUSE and the open-source community project openSUSE.

To help reduce this cross-branding confusion, the community seeks to create a unique brand identity, but to help provide a distinction between the company and the community project; hence, the chameleon inspired logo design contest. Differing logos is a first step to help people identify the difference between the two brands and should alleviate issues that have or could arise in community projects from oozing into the company’s brand identity.

The new logo aims to create a distinct identity for openSUSE, enabling a clearer separation from SUSE. The new logo is expected to be distinguishable from SUSE’s branding and is expected to share a similar style with the logos of its distributions.

The next steps after the logo competition concludes is to discuss the winning selection during the openSUSE Community meeting on Dec. 12 at 14:30 UTC. People are welcome to attend and discuss the results and how the project should move forward with the designs.

After the new logo is announced, the old Geeko logo will be used alongside the new one in stickers and other marketing material to bridge this transition to the new logo. Introducing the new logo alongside the old one will help users adapt to the new identity gradually.

Community members will likely see the logo on table clothes, clothing and other apparel during the transition period, which should make these items unique collectibles. Community members can help get information out about the new logo by attending open-source events and organize a booth at one of the several events.

People within the community who will have feedback about the newly selected logo can email the project’s artwork mailing list or discuss in on the project’s marketing Telegram group.

The person doing the branding changes and maintenance for the distributions has a say in any changes. The ultimate brand decision will rest with members of the project doing the implementation, but the results from this logo competition will provide an expressed opinion of the brand identity project wide.

Vote now at survey.opensuse.org.

The ways communities connect and interact have also transformed over the year.

Amidst a time where people saw every square inch/cm of their homes, two openSUSE members founded an innovative way to foster camaraderie and engagement among its community; through a virtual bar.

What began as an idea to bridge distances and create a welcoming space for enthusiasts has now blossomed into a three-year tradition, marking its anniversary.

When the world was navigating the uncharted waters of remote interactions in 2020, the openSUSE community took a bold step to launch its virtual bar at meet.opensuse.org/bar.

Aimed to emulate the lively atmosphere of a physical bar where individuals gather, chat, share knowledge, stories and, most importantly, bond over their passion for openSUSE and Linux. It even has a Telegram group to let people know when the bar is open.

From its inception on December 19, 2020, this virtual watering hole serves as a hub for both seasoned veterans and newcomers. People on the platform share insights, troubleshoot technical issues, discuss the latest developments in the world of Linux, and build lasting connections over drinks of their choice that transcend geographical boundaries.

The success of the openSUSE virtual bar lies not just in its technical infrastructure but in its vibrant community.

The community gears up to celebrate its third anniversary on December 19, 2023, starting at noon UTC time.

The virtual bar has become more than just a place for technical discussions; it has evolved into a support network where members find encouragement, mentorship, and a sense of belonging. Newcomers, in particular, have found solace in the welcoming environment and are actively participating in the openSUSE Community.

Raise your virtual glasses and join the openSUSE community in commemorating three years of friendship, learning, and camaraderie at the virtual bar.

To begin the installation, visit MySQL Community Downloads page and download the RPM package for openSUSE Leap 15.

Install the RPM

sudo rpm -Uvh mysql80-community-release-sles12-8.noarch.rpm

Import the MySQL GnuPG Key

sudo rpm --import /etc/RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql

Install MySQL with Zypper

sudo zypper install mysql-community-server

A superuser account 'root'@'localhost' is created. A password for the superuser is set and stored in the error log file. To reveal it, use the following command:

sudo grep 'temporary password' /var/log/mysql/mysqld.log

Change the root password as soon as possible by logging in with the generated, temporary password and set a custom password for the superuser account:

mysql -u root -p

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'MyNewPassword';

In the first part of my music recommendation blog series I mentioned that many people turn to me for some less mainstream music. For quite a long time I thought that listening to cellos playing metal is already something niche. Then it turned out that many people around me love this kind of music. Recently I found something really niche: church organ and drums :-)

I love the sound of the church organ. I listened to this instrument as a kid a lot, and I could not get bored of it. I often hear the church organ with drums and several other instruments playing together in contemporary music, and I love it. However, it has never been just the organ and the drums. I have some mixed feelings here: listening to 3-4 songs with just a drums and a church organ is fun. But that’s my limit. So, here I show you three songs.

The first song I have ever listened to was Drumorg playing Popcorn. It is a fun arrangement, and probably the only in this blog, what most other people also find nice:

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/114460337/track/114460341

The next song is a lot more dividing. Many consider it blasphemy: playing the single best known church organ piece with drums. Other consider it fantastic, and listen to it often. The first time I heard it was when someone demonstrated a new pair of self-built speakers to me. At that time the speakers were far from being perfect, however I listened to the music at home, and I liked it:

I was curious, if there is anyone else combining these two instruments. I found one more, the Symphonic Rock Duo, but that was all:

TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/artist/18467717

I hope I did not scare you away with this music from my blog series! :-) See you next week!

Absence of Notifications on the 27th of November On November 27th, OBS users did not receive any notification from the system for more than three hours. Here is what caused the problem. Date: 27.11.2023 Impact: Users and groups did not receive any RSS, web or email notification from OBS for more than three hours. Root Causes: After the deployment of this line of code, the delayed job that creates notifications based on the latest events...

Rolling release users of openSUSE Tumbleweed who did a zypper dup on and after Monday will have a couple new major version updates.

El Presidente made an appearance in snapshot 20231127 when the red carpets was rolled out for PipeWire; Its 1.0 major version, also known as “El Presidente,” brings significant enhancements and numerous fixes like resolving memory management issues related to memfd and dma-buf leaks during buffer uploads. This audio and video package for Linux introduces improvements in time reporting for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture affecting Interrupt Request, which results in reduced timing deviations. Documentation was enhanced and improvements were made with Bluetooth codecs, which introduces the [LC3 codec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec); this is a the successor to the the SBC codec. Mozilla Firefox also had a major version update and took care of more than a handful of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Its 120.0 version addresses several security vulnerabilities. CVE-2023-6204, which made it possible for a leak of memory data, was fixed and CVE-2023-6213, which showed evidence of memory corruption that was presumed to exploit the running of arbitrary code, was also fixed. The tool to query connected USB devices, usbutils, had version 017 resolve issues like displaying entries for devices with no interfaces and improving power/wakeup display via lsusb.py. The changes also ensure better adherence to system libdir and includedir along with various other optimizations. The snapshot had icewm 3.4.4. The X window manager expands image format support for TIFF, WEBP, JXL, JP2, RAW, SVG, and TGA in icewmbg. The package has crash fixes, improves color interpretation for themes and provides a more stable and feature-rich user experience. The package for conversion between Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese Kanji (Shinjitai) opencc updates to 1.1.7 in the snapshot. It adds support for Python 3.12 and Node.js 20. A few other packages update in the snapshot along with transmission 4.0.4, which resolves issues such as metadata transmission to peers, memory allocation, file renaming collisions, and locale errors affecting number rounding in statistics display.

While snapshot 20231126 had no red carpet treatment for a new president, php8 8.2.13 arrived in the snapshot and demanded attention. The update resolves issues like double-free occurrences and incorrect behavior in various components like Opcache, OpenSSL, XMLReader and more. The update addresses error handling and potential crashes. An update of selinux-policy 20231124 fixes Bugzilla issue bsc#1216903 that involves an error message indicating a permission denied error when attempting to apply firewall rules. The update of libbpf 1.3.0 brings support for netfilter and introduces new section definitions, utility macros and extended functionalities for work with ring buffers. An update of libsolv 0.7.27 introduces zstd support for the installcheck tool, enhances compression capabilities, and implements the putinowndirpool cache. This new cache significantly accelerates file list handling within the repo_write function to enhance overall performance. A couple other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Just two packages were updated in snapshot 20231124. New versions of kernel-firmware-nvidia-gspx-G06 545.29.06 improves compatibility and functionality for a kernel module driver and another NVIDIA signing package was also updated in the snapshot.

In our latest iteration towards an even more user-friendly experience, we’re excited to share three key enhancements to our Request page. Get ready for a smoother and more informative ride! 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 and superseded conversations, and we presented build results with...

Recently, syslog-ng 4.5.0 was released with many new features. These include sending logs to OpenObserve using its JSON API, support for Google Pub/Sub, a new macro describing message transport mechanisms like RFC 3164 + TCP, an SSL option to ignore validity periods, and many more. You can find a full list of new features and bug fixes in the release notes at: https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/releases/tag/syslog-ng-4.5.0

In this blog, you can find some pointers on how to install the very latest syslog-ng version and learn how you can configure syslog-ng to use the OpenObserver JSON API: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/version-4-5-0-of-syslog-ng-is-now-available-with-openobserve-json-api-support

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This has been a week filled with Tumbleweed snapshots. Six of them, to be precise (1116, 1117, 1119, 1120, 1121, and 1122). The most relevant changes that could be delivered this week include:

• Linux kernel 6.6.2
• btrfsprogs 6.6.2
• fwupd 1.9.8 & 1.9.9
• GStreamer 1.22.7
• Node.JS 21.2.0
• Pipewire 0.3.85
• Poppler 23.11.0
• LibreOffice 7.6.3.1
• libxml 2.11.6
• LLVM 17.0.5

Staging projects are far from full: only five out of 15 have anything in them, and 4 of them are not even expected to move at the moment. So keep those things coming! The relevant changes (including the non-moving stagings) are:

• the package cnf-rs will be renamed to cnf (matching the command name)
• PHP 8.2.13
• libxml 2.12.0 in Staging:L – I can’t even start to list what is not building
• Sudo/polkit changes with the introduction of a sudo/wheel group to allow the user to choose if they want to use this over the way we configured sudo so far (targetpw). The sudo submission is interfering on some level with toolbox (toolbox -r id fails to return the expected info so far)
• c-ares 1.21.0: breaks nodejs
• wxWidgets 3.2.3: breaks wxPython bindings
• Testing of the two compiler flags -fcf-protection=full and -ftrivial-auto-var-init=pattern
• RPM 4.19: no further progress made (user handling conflict between sysuser-tools and RPMs new implementation)
• dbus-broker: no progress: openQA fails to even launch the network stack in the installer

This week has produced more than a few openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots with a moderate downloaded size of packages for those who did a zypper dup.

Snapshot 20231122 is the latest to arrive for openSUSE’s rolling release users. An update of the super-thin layer on the DBus interface, fwupd, arrived in the snapshot; the 1.9.9 version includes a new generic request feature that identifies the device power cable status to enhance devices’ power management capabilities. The package also incorporates support for specific hardware like the Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen 7 530E. The update of git 2.43.0 had a multitude of enhancements, which includes improvements in handling the --rfc option within git format-patch and the package enhances maintenance job schedules, updates handling of authentication data in libsecret keyrings and adds flexibility for aliases in command-line completion scripts. The update of transactional-update 4.5.0 improves handling of permissions when creating overlays in libtukit, introduces support for rollback via the library, implements snapshot delete and rollback methods in tukitd and adding checks for missing arguments in tukit commands like close and abort. There was also some code cleanup for the software package. A few more packages updated in the snapshot like xen 4.18.0_04 and package installer python-pip 23.3.1, which resolves issues related to error handling, metadata normalization, and handling of removed versions.

An update of openvpn 2.6.8 arrived in snapshot 20231121. The new version fixes issues such as a SIGSEGV crash caused by an unsuccessful TLS handshake that had memory issues leading to sending freed memory to the peer and fixes hard incompatibilities between client and server versions. The update removes certain obsolete features, adds warnings for specific configuration combinations and introduces improvements to the build systems for Windows platforms. A 17.0.5 update of llvm17 made adjustments for testing clang-tools-extra and liker LLD components while maintaining consistency in test adaptations. The Linux Kernel also updates in the snapshot as kernel-source updates to version 6.6.2 and resolves multiple issues within the Wi-Fi subsystem, including RCU usage warnings and other improvements across the kernel codebase. Several other packages updated in the snapshot including ImageMagick 7.1.1.21, yast2-trans and more.

While not having the most packages of the week, snapshot 20231120 was fairly sizable due to an update of libreoffice 7.6.3.1. The updated office suite version fixes crash occurrences, misalignments in document layout, errors in the PDF export and the incorrect display of tables and text frames in .DOCX files. For more in-depth information can be found in the LibreOffice changelog. The update of gnutls 3.8.2 resolves a timing side-channel vulnerability within the RSA-PSK key exchange that was known as CVE-2023-5981. The utility also introduces Application Programming Interfaces functions enabling Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman and Diffie–Hellman key protocol agreement. The update of image editor inkscape 1.3.1 addresses more than 30 crashes and freezes, which particularly impacts PDF import and Live Path Effects. The package provides two new features; the first is the ability to split text into individual letters while the other new feature allows for a disablement of snapping to grid lines. Gradient dithering is now also available. More than half a dozen other packages were updated in the snapshot.

Flatpak 1.15.6 and harfbuzz 8.3.0 both updated in snapshot 20231119. The 8.3.0 version of the text shaping engine enhances the memory barrier to prevent potential segfaults and various fixes related to subsetting and instancing. The option name hb-subset has been renamed to --variations for consistency among tools. Flatpak mandates a requirement for bubblewrap version 0.8.0 in distributions that compile Flatpak separately.The package enhances security by setting user namespace limits and improves the handling of environment variables for subsandboxes initiated by flatpak-portal. The gnome-bluetooth 42.7 resolves issues related to the Obex Push server’s automatic acceptance of files from paired devices. The bluez-gnome fork tackles bugs causing inconsistencies between the device’s connection switch appearance and the actual connection state. The update of webkit2gtk3 2.42.2 addresses a Content Security Policy regression that previously impacted Unity WebGL applications. The package also resolves CVE-2023-41983 and CVE-2023-42852, which allowed for the processing of web content that may have led to arbitrary code execution. A few other packages updated in the snapshot.

Snapshot 20231117 has several package update. Bash 5.2.21 includes multiple upstream patches to address various issues like resolving an off-by-one error causing command substitutions to fail within a here-document. The package fixes cases where the shell incorrectly attempted to set the terminal’s process group back to the shell’s and also fixes for problems related to returning tokens during syntax errors. An update of AppStream 0.16.4 introduces new features including the allowance of hyphens in the last segment of a component-ID and the implementation of the developer element for unique developer IDs. The update of bind 9.18.20 addresses issues such as incorrect resigning of unsigned inline-signed zones containing DNSSEC records and Service Location Protocol has been disabled by default for openSUSE Factory and ALP due to bsc#1214884. Other packages to update in the snapshot were gstreamer 1.22.7, libcrypt 1.10.3, libstorage-ng 4.5.157, nodejs21 21.2.0, pipewire 0.3.85, poppler 23.11.0 and several more.