Tumbleweed es una distribución “Rolling Release” de actualización contínua. Aquí puedes estar al tanto de las últimas novedades.

openSUSE Tumbleweed es la versión “rolling release” o de actualización continua de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE.

Hagamos un repaso a las novedades que han llegado hasta los repositorios estas semanas.

El anuncio original lo puedes leer en el blog de Dominique Leuenberger, publicado bajo licencia CC-by-sa, en este enlace:

• • http://dominique.leuenberger.net/blog/2021/02/opensuse-tumbleweed-review-of-the-weeks-2021-08/

Esta semana con un poco de ayuda se han podido publicar 6 nuevas snapshots (0218, 0219, 0220, 0221, 0222 y 0223) que han traido muchas actualizaciones a openSUSE Tumbleweed

Los cambios más notables son:

• Transactional-Updates 3.1.4
• GNOME 3.38.4
• binutils 2.36
• util-linux 2..36.2
• libguestfs 1.44.0
• PostgreSQL 13.2
• Mozilla Firefox 85.0.2
• Dracut 052

Y entre los cambios que se están preparando, se puede destacar:

• NetworkManager 1.30
• Mozilla Firefox 86.0
• KDE Plasma 5.21.1
• podman 3.0.1
• Dracut 053
• Linux kernel 5.11.2
• openssl 1.1.1i
• GCC 11 como compilador predeterminado

Si quieres estar a la última con software actualizado y probado utiliza openSUSE Tumbleweed la opción rolling release de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE.

Mantente actualizado y ya sabes: Have a lot of fun!!

Enlaces de interés

• • • ¿Por qué deberías utilizar openSUSE Tumbleweed?
    • zypper dup en Tumbleweed hace todo el trabajo al actualizar
    • ¿Cual es el mejor comando para actualizar Tumbleweed?
    • Comprueba la valoración de las “snapshots” de Tumbleweed
    • ¿Qué es el test openQA?
    • http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/
    • https://es.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

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Siguiendo la tendencia iniciada el 2020, evidentemente obligada por la pandemia mundial, os quiero invitar a asistir al Día de los datos abiertos 2021 que se celebrará en línea el próximo sábado 6 de marzo. Un evento que se me había pasado por alto pero que este año, por diversas razones aparece por primera vez en el blog… y espero que no sea la última.

Día de los datos abiertos 2021, sábado 6 de marzo

Para los que no lo sepan, entre los que me incluía yo en el 2020, el «Día de los Datos Abiertos» es una celebración anual de los datos abiertos alrededor del mundo.

Y es que los datos abiertos son mucho más importantes de lo que nos pueda parecer, según la Wikipedia, uno de lo estandartes de esta una filosofía y práctica que persigue que determinados tipos de datos estén disponibles de forma libre para todo el mundo, sin restricciones de derechos de autor, de patentes o de otros mecanismos de control.

Con esta se llega a la décima edición del evento, en la que grupos de todo el mundo crearán eventos locales que utilizarán datos abiertos en sus comunidades para crear aplicaciones, visualizaciones, liberar datos o publicar análisis.

Y es que la filosofía de este evento es promulgar la idea de que «todos los trabajos realizados son abiertos para usarse y re-usarse.», lo cual ayuda a compartir el conocimiento a todos los niveles.

En esta edición del Día de los Datos Abiertos 2021 se busca que la comunidad siga creciendo, y de esta forma se ha enfocado el evento en cuatro áreas clave, las cuales creemos que los datos abiertos pueden ayudar a resolver: Datos ambientales, Rastreo de flujos de dinero público, Mapeo abierto y Desarrollo equitativo.

Pero no penséis que este evento es pequeño, ya que este año se han organizado más de 150 eventos locales a lo largo y ancho del mundo, una muestra de la potencia de este evento.

Así que busca tu evento, o eventos, y participa. Yo lo he hecho y lo haré, pero eso lo explicaré en otra entrada.

Más información: Open Data Day

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week, we have released almost daily snapshots. It shows that I have received help in working on the Stagings. Richard has been very busy this week, working together with me on these areas. So, we managed to publish 6 snapshots (0218, 0219, 0220, 0221, 0222, and 0223).

The noteworthy changes therein were:

• Transactional-Updates 3.1.4
• GNOME 3.38.4
• binutils 2.36
• util-linux 2..36.2
• libguestfs 1.44.0
• PostgreSQL 13.2
• Mozilla Firefox 85.0.2
• Dracut 052

In the staging projects, we are preparing and testing these updates:

• NetworkManager 1.30
• Mozilla Firefox 86.0
• KDE Plasma 5.21.1
• podman 3.0.1
• Dracut 053
• Linux kernel 5.11.2
• openssl 1.1.1i, based on centralized crypto-policies package
• GCC 11 as default compiler

Suma y sigue. La lista de plasmoides para Plasma sigue aumentando con nuevas alternativas para personalizar y adaptar nuestro escritorio para nuestras necesidades. En esta ocasion os presento a Compact Shutdown un simple widget que nos permite añadir un menú para controlar la sesión personalizado en cualquier sitio de nuestro entorno de trabajo.

Compact Shutdown – Plasmoides de KDE (172)

Me encantan este tipo de plasmoides ya que confieren al sistema la flexibilidad necesaria para poder personalizar nuestro sistema hasta límites insospechados como hemos visto en vídeos como en el convertíamos nuestro Plasma en un Chrome OS, en un Windows o en un MacOS.

En concreto Compact Shutdown de X-Varlesh-X, un conocido creador de plasmoides de la Comunidad KDE que ha aparecido decenas de veces en el blog, que nos permite poner un pequeño lanzador con los comandos de salida,suspensión, hibernación, reinicio o apagado del sistema.

Y como siempre digo, si os gusta el plasmoide podéis “pagarlo” de muchas formas en la nueva página de KDE Store, que estoy seguro que el desarrollador lo agradecerá: puntúale positivamente, hazle un comentario en la página o realiza una donación. Ayudar al desarrollo del Software Libre también se hace simplemente dando las gracias, ayuda mucho más de lo que os podéis imaginar, recordad la campaña I love Free Software Day 2017 de la Free Software Foundation donde se nos recordaba esta forma tan sencilla de colaborar con el gran proyecto del Software Libre y que en el blog dedicamos un artículo.

Más información: KDE Store

¿Qué son los plasmoides?

Para los no iniciados en el blog, quizás la palabra plasmoide le suene un poco rara pero no es mas que el nombre que reciben los widgets para el escritorio Plasma de KDE.

En otras palabras, los plasmoides no son más que pequeñas aplicaciones que puestas sobre el escritorio o sobre una de las barras de tareas del mismo aumentan las funcionalidades del mismo o simplemente lo decoran.

Slonik fans are excited for this week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots as PostgreSQL has a major release in the rolling release distribution.

Snapshot 20210224 brought in the new postgresql 13 version. The new major version brings in highly requested features like parallelized vacuuming and incremental sorting. PostgreSQL brought some security enhancements with its extension system that allows developers to expand its functionality. There are also improvements to its indexing and lookup system, which benefit large databases. PostgreSQL wasn’t the only major version updated in the snapshot; the utility library ndctl jumped two versions to 70.1, which added firmware activation support. Other major version updates were made to liberation-fonts 2.1.1 and perl-Mail-DKIM 1.20200907. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture package updated to version 1.2.4, which provided some plugin updates and Link Time Optimization fixes. Among other packages to update in the snapshot were bind 9.16.7, libsolv 0.7.16 and debugging tool xfsprogs 5.9.0.

An update of translations was made in the gnome-desktop 3.38.4 update within snapshot 20210222. A fix of a deadlock during startup was made in the Mozilla Firefox 85.0.2 update. The reading of multichannel PSD files with 1 or 2 channels were made in ImageMagick 7.0.11.0. The update of gtk3 3.24.25 fixed the touchscreen event handling and had some Wayland fixes for crashes on tablets; the update also added Application Programming Interfaces to support clients with subsurfaces better. Several new features were added with the firmware package fwupd 1.5.6; the updated added support for the System76 keyboard. Detecting the AMD Transparent Secure Memory Encryption encryption state for HSI-4 and new plugins were made available in the update.

The 20210220 snapshot could be dubbed the RubyGems snapshot. Rubygem-autoprefixer-rails 10.2.4.0, rubygem-bootsnap 1.7.2, rubygem-jbuilder 2.11.2, rubygem-msgpack 1.4.2, rubygem-puma 5.2.1 and rubygem-thor 1.1.0 were all updated in the snapshot. The rubygem-thor release added support for Ruby 3.0, and the rubygem-msgpack update dropped support of old Ruby versions that included 1.8, 1.9, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3.

The smallest snapshot this week with one package update was 20210219. The 1.44.0 version of libguestfs, which is a C library and a set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual disk images, requires a minimum version of Python 3.6. The update also removed references between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise in the specfile.

Snapshot 20210218 started off the week and had several package updates for GNOME. Among the updates were personal information manager evolution 3.38.4, which fixed a memory leak when quoting headers for message replies, and gnome-maps 3.38.4, which fixed a drag hang and a bug that resulted in writing a broken last view position. A WebKitPluginProcess in webkit2gtk3 2.30.5 was returned to the package after mistakenly being removed. Other packages updated in the snapshot were freeipmi 1.6.7, glib2 2.66.7, udisks2 2.9.2, kplotting 5.79.0 and a new major version update of transactional-update 3.1.4, which fixed the syncing of SELinux attributes when using overlays.

openQA bites is a blog about tutorials, insights and love stories from a simple openQA developer. It aims to provide small and bite-sized posts about typical usage issues that every openQA dev encounters and atypical corner-cases that are worth to be written down. In the best case it can complement the official openQA documentation. by sharing some stories and make some typical and atypical use cases searchable in via your search engine of choice.

Como era de esperar, el gran evento comunitario de KDE no se va a celebrar físicamente tampoco este año. De esta forma, la Comunidad KDE acaba de anunciar que Akademy 2021 se celebrará en línea en junio, evitando así los actuales inconvenientes de la pandemia que está marcando nuestras vidas.

Akademy 2021 en línea se celebrará en junio

Como ya anticiparon muchos científicos y muchas comunidades libres este nuevo virus ha venido para quedarse mucho más que unos meses.

De esta forma, y viendo los problemas de movilidad, la Comunidad KDE ha decidido continuar con la modalidad en línea de evento de Akademy 2020 y empezar a organizar Akademy 2021 que también será en línea y cuyas fechas se han fijado para final de junio.

Como es habitual, las charlas se realizarán en línea el sábado 19 y el domingo 20, dejando el resto de días para el trabajo en pequeños grupos.

Como es habitual, en breve se lanzará el «Call for Papers» y pronto tendremos más detalles, sobre todo los técnicos.

Es cierto que se sigue perdiendo el factor humano pero se mantiene ese espíritu comunitario y seguro que se evoluciona en este tipo de eventos para que sean más emocionales.

Más información: KDE

¿Qué es Akademy?

Para los que no lo sepan, Akademy es el evento de la Comunidad KDE que aúna en una gran conferencia todo tipo de simpatizantes de KDE como desarrolladores, diseñadores, usuarios, traductores, promotores. Allí se reunirán a lo largo de una semana para compartir charlas, cenas, ponencias, talleres y, en definitiva, para trabajar juntos.
Es una gran semana que sirve para unir más fuerte los lazos que unen nuestra Comunidad, así como para crear nuevos.

Akademy lleva realizándose anualmente bajo este nombre desde 2004, en la página web oficial o en la wikipedia podéis encontrar los nombres y fechas anteriores eventos.

Para que os hagáis una ligera idea de la magnitud del evento, os dejo una imagen de grupo de Akademy 2018 de Viena.

openqa-mon is a little command-line utility to monitor one or multiple openQA jobs for their status. This tool is useful if you want to live monitor a handful of jobs closely e.g. for verification runs.

Almost five years ago librsvg introduced Rust into its source code. Around the same time, Linux distributions started shipping the first versions of Firefox that also required Rust. I unashamedly wanted to ride that wave: distros would have to integrate a new language in their build infrastructure, or they would be left without Firefox. I was hoping that having a working Rust toolchain would make it easier for the rustified librsvg to get into distros.

Two years after that, someone from Debian complained that this made it hard or impossible to build librsvg (and all the software that depends on it, which is A Lot) on all the architectures that Debian builds on — specifically, on things like HP PA-RISC or Alpha, which even Debian marks as "discontinued" now.

Recently there was a similar kerfuffle, this time from someone from Gentoo, specifically about how Python's cryptography package now requires Rust. So, it doesn't build for platforms that Rust/LLVM don't support, like hppa, alpha, and Itanium. It also doesn't build for platforms for which there are no Rust packages from Gentoo yet (mips, s390x, riscv among them).

Memories of discontinued architectures

Let me reminisce about a couple of discontinued architectures. If I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, the DEC Alpha ceased to be developed in 2001, and HP, who purchased Compaq, who purchased DEC, stopped selling Alpha systems in 2007. Notably, Compaq phased out the Alpha in favor of the Itanium, which stopped being developed in 2017.

I used an Alpha machine in 1997-1998, back at the University. Miguel kindly let me program and learn from him at the Institute where he worked, and the computer lab there got an Alpha box to let the scientists run mathematical models on a machine with really fast floating-point. This was a time when people actually regularly ssh'ed into machines to run X11 applications remotely — in their case, I think it was Matlab and Mathematica. Good times.

The Alpha had fast floating point, much faster than Intel x86 CPUs, and I was delighted to do graphics work on it. That was the first 64-bit machine I used, and it let me learn how to fix code that only assumed 32 bits. It had a really picky floating-point unit. Whereas x86 would happily throw you a NaN if you used uninitialized memory as floats, the Alpha would properly fault and crash the program. I fixed so many bugs thanks to that!

I also have fond memories of the 32-bit SPARC boxes at the University and their flat-screen fixed-frequency CRT displays, but you know, I haven't seen one of those machines since 1998. Because I was doing graphics work, I used the single SPARC machine in the computer lab at the Institute that had 24-bit graphics, with a humongous 21" CRT display. PCs at the time still had 8-bit video cards and shitty little monitors.

At about the same time that the Institute got its Alpha, it also got one of the first 64-bit UltraSPARCs from Sun — a very expensive machine definitely not targeted to hobbyists. I think it had two CPUs! Multicore did not exist!

I think I saw a single Itanium machine in my life, probably around 2002-2005. The Ximian/Novell office in Mexico City got one, for QA purposes — an incredibly loud and unstable machine. I don't think we ever did any actual development on that box; it was a "can you reproduce this bug there" kind of thing. I think Ximian/Novell had a contract with HP to test the distro there, I don't remember.

Unsupported architectures at the LLVM level

Platforms like the Alpha and Itanium that Rust/LLVM don't support — those platforms are dead in the water. The compiler cannot target them, as Rust generates machine code via LLVM, and LLVM doesn't support them.

I don't know why distributions maintained by volunteers give themselves the responsibility to keep their software running on platforms that have not been manufactured for years, and that were never even hobbyist machines.

I read the other day, and now I regret not keeping the link, something like this: don't assume that your hobby computing entitles you to free labor on the part of compiler writers, software maintainers, and distro volunteers. (If someone helps me find the source, I'll happily link to it and quote it properly.)

Non-tier-1 platforms and "$distro does not build Rust there yet"

I think people are discovering these once again:

• Writing and supporting a compiler for a certain architecture takes Real Work.

• Supporting a distro for a certain architecture takes Real Work.

• Fixing software to work on a certain architecture takes Real Work.

Rust divides its support for different platforms into tiers, going from tier 1, the most supported, to tier 3, the least supported. Or, I should say, taken care of, which is a combination of people who actually have the hardware in question, and whether the general CI and build tooling is prepared to deal with them as effectively as it does for tier 1 platforms.

In other words: there are more people capable of paying attention to, and testing things on, x86_64 PCs than there are for sparc-unknown-linux-gnu.

Some anecdotes from Suse

At Suse we actually support IBM's s390x big iron; those mainframes run Suse Linux Enterprise Server. You have to pay a lot of money to get a machine like that and support for it. It's a room-sized beast that requires professional babysitting.

When librsvg and Firefox started getting rustified, there was of course concern about getting Rust to work properly on the s390x. I worked sporadically with the people who made the distro work there, and who had to deal with building Rust and Firefox on it (librsvg was a non-issue after getting Rust and Firefox to work).

I think all the LLVM work for the s390x was done at IBM. There were probably a couple of miscompilations that affected Firefox; they got fixed.

One would expect bugs in software for IBM mainframes to be fixed by IBM or its contractors, not by volunteers maintaining a distro in their spare time.

Giving computing time on mainframes to volunteers in distros could seem like a good samaritan move, or a trap to extract free labor from unsuspecting people.

Endianness bugs

Firefox's problems on the s390x were more around big-endian bugs than anything. You see, all the common architectures these days (x86_64 and arm64) are little-endian. However, s390x is big-endian, which means that all multi-byte numbers in memory are stored backwards from what most software expects.

It is not a problem to write software that assumes little-endian or big-endian all the time, but it takes a little care to write software that works on either.

Most of the software that volunteers and paid people write assumes little-endian CPUs, because that is likely what they are targeting. It is a pain in the ass to encounter code that works incorrectly on big-endian — a pain because knowing where to look for evidence of bugs is tricky, and fixing existing code to work with either endianness can be either very simple, or a major adventure in refactoring and testing.

Two cases in point:

Firefox. When Suse started dealing with Rust and Firefox in the s390x, there were endianness bugs in the graphics code in Firefox that deals with pixel formats. Whether pixels get stored in memory as ARGB/ABGR/RGBA/etc. is a platform-specific thing, and is generally a combination of the graphics hardware for that platform, plus the actual CPU architecture. At that time, it looked like the C++ code in Firefox that deals with pixels had been rewritten/refactored, and had lost big-endian support along the way. I don't know the current status (not a single big-endian CPU in my vincinity), but I haven't seen related bugs come in the Suse bug tracker? Maybe it's fixed now?

Librsvg had two root causes of bugs for big-endian. One was in the old code for SVG filter effects that was written in C; it never supported big-endian. The initial port to Rust inherited the same bug (think of a line-by-line port, althought it wasn't exactly like that), but it got fixed when my Summer of Code intern Ivan Molodetskikh refactored the code to have a Pixel abstraction that works for little-endian and big-endian, and wraps Cairo's funky requirements.

The other endian-related bug in librsvg was when computing masks. Again, a little refactoring with that Pixel abstraction fixed it.

I knew that the original C code for SVG filter effects didn't work on big-endian. But even back then, at Suse we never got reports of it producing incorrect results on the s390x... maybe people don't use their mainframes to run rsvg-convert? I was hoping that the port to Rust of that code would automatically fix that bug, and it kind of happened that way through Ivan's careful work.

And the code for masks? There were two bugs reported with that same root cause: one from Debian as a failure in librsvg's test suite (yay, it caught that bug!), and one from someone running an Apple PowerBook G4 with a MATE desktop and seeing incorrectly-rendered SVG icons.

And you know what? I am delighted to see people trying to keep those lovely machines alive. A laptop that doesn't get warm enough to burn your thighs, what a concept. A perfectly serviceable 32-bit laptop with a maximum of about 1 GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive (it didn't have HDMI!)... But you know, it's the same kind of delight I feel when people talk about doing film photography on a Rollei 35. A lot of nostalgia for hardware of days past, and a lot of mixed feelings about not throwing out working things and creating more trash.

As a graphics programmer I feel the responsibility to write code that works on little-endian and big-endian, but you know, it's not exactly an everyday concern anymore. The last big-endian machine I used on an everyday basis was the SPARCs in the university, more than 20 years ago.

Who gets paid to fix this?

That's the question. Suse got paid to support Firefox on the s390x; I suppose IBM has an interest in fixing LLVM there; both actually have people and hardware and money to that effect.

Within Suse, I am by default responsible for keeping librsvg working for the s390x as well — it gets built as part of the distro, after all. I have never gotten an endianness bug report from the Suse side of things.

Which leads me to suspect that, probably similar to Debian and Gentoo, we build a lot of software because it's in the build chain, but we don't run it to its fullest extent. Do people run GNOME desktops on s390x virtual machines? Maybe? Did they not notice endianness bugs because they were not in the code path that most GNOME icons actually use? Who knows!

I'm thankful to Simon from the Debian bug for pointing out the failure in librsvg's test case for masks, and to Mingcong for actually showing a screenshot of a MATE desktop running on a PPC PowerBook. Those were useful things for them to do.

Also — they were kind about it. It was a pleasure to interact with them.