Three openSUSETumbleweed snapshots released this week brought about two dozen new versions of software.
The snapshots brought one new major version update for pulseaudio and an updated version of bash.
The major version update to pulseaudio 13.0 came in Snapshot 20190921. The sound server program improved the initial card profile selection for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) cards and improved the play 5.1 surround audio that now treats both “side” or “rear” channels identically when the user has a 5.1 speaker setup; the 7.1 setup still has a difference which channel pair gets used. The libreoffice 6.3.2.2 package had some stability tweaks and addressed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), which one had an unsafe URL assembly flaw. The cabextract program that un-archives files in the Microsoft cabinet file format modernized the spec file in its 1.9.1 version. Another package updated in the snapshot was osinfo-db, which is a package that provides a database of information about operating systems for virtualization provisioning tools. The snapshot is trending at a stable rating of 95, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
The 20190920 snapshot is also trending at a stable rating of 95. This snapshot updated bash from version 5.0 to 5.0.11. The minor update to bash change posix mode behavior. The Mesa 3D graphics library19.1.7. The update fixed a KWin compositor crashes on launch as well as a few other bugs. Command line tool and library curl 7.66.0 added experimental feature for HTTP/3 that is disabled by default but can be enabled and works, according to this tutorial from Daniel Stenberg. Two CVEs were also fixed with the curl update. The 26.3 version of the emacs text editors has a newly assigned codepoint U+32FF that was added to the Unicode Character Database compiled into Emacs, which now supports the new Japanese Era name. Software development tool swig 4.0.1 added Python 3.8 support and fixed some minor regressions that were introduced in the 4.0.0 major release. An updated version of plymouth added a time delay of 8 seconds to fit an AMD graphics card for graphical boot animation.
The snapshot that started off the week, 20190918, brought an update for Mozilla Thunderbird. The mail clients 68.1.0 squashed bugs like a car speeding on the autobahn on a muggy day; A total of six CVEs were addressed in the update including CVE-2019-11739, which allowed for a Covert Content Attack on S/MIME encryption using a crafted multipart/alternative message. File searching utility catfish 1.4.10 added some new features and improved the application menu to make better use of space, padding, and margins. The snapshot is recorded a moderately stable rating of 90, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Snapshot 20190917 delivered four packages. The Graphene package updated to 1.10.0 and now uses an ancillary library called (micro) µTest for its test suite, which makes possible to build and run the test suite without depending on GLib. Mozilla Firefox 69.0 provided Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) with stronger privacy protections and added support for receiving multiple video codecs to makes it easier for WebRTC conferencing services to mix video from different clients. The other two package updates in the snapshot were icecream 1.3, which takes compile jobs from a build and distributes it among remote machines allowing a parallel build, and the HTTP client/server library for GNOMElibsoup 2.66.3. The update of icecream 1.3 improved the speed of creating compiler tarballs. The snapshot is trending at a moderately stable rating of 87, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
The 20190916 snapshot finished the updates of KDE Applications 19.08.1, which were in the previous week’s snapshots. The 5.2.14 version of the Linux Kernel had some fixes for Ceph buffers and Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. The graphics editor written in Qt, Krita 4.2.6 had several fixes and added a new layer from visible to layer right-click context menu. Among the most key libraries updated in the snapshot were an update to glib2 2.60.7, which fixed more than a handful of bugs; libvirt 5.7.0, which added apparmor-abstractions as a required package for daemon; and gtk3 3.24.11, which added Wayland support for xdg-output v3 and has improved the monitoring of metadata with X11. The User Interface manager for GTK, amtk updated it’s first five series minor release to 5.0.1 that fixed a small new compilation warning. Rendering engine webkit2gtk3 2.26.0 added support for HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). The only major release to come in the snapshot was perl-HTML-Clean 1.2 from version 0.9. Other notable packages updated in the snapshot were flatpak-builder 1.0.8, texinfo 6.6 and virtualbox 6.0.12 that fixed a potential crash when using the medium Input/Output functionality of VBoxManage. The snapshot is trending at a moderately stable rating of 80, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
The snapshots brought an update of KDE Plasma and Applications along with an update for the input framework ibus, two PostgreSQL versions and the command line package manager zypper.
KDE Applications 19.08.1 improvements to Kontact, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Konsole, Step, and more arrived in snapshot 20190909. Several regressions in Konsole’s tab handling were fixed and olphin again starts correctly when in split-view mode. The updated of the anti-virus package clamav 0.101.4 address two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. The GNOME web browser package epiphany 3.32.5 fixed a memory corruption and broken web process extension connection when using WebKit trunk. An update of links 2.20.1 brought stability improvements and also addressed a bug when connected with tor would send real dns requests outside the tor network when the displayed page contains link elements with rel=dns-prefetch. The Plasma desktop received a minor update to 5.16.5 and fixed KWayland-integration builds with recent frameworks and Qt 5.13. Some notifications were changed in the new minor version and the some functionality was improved for current weather conditions. The qrencode 4.0.2 package improved support for cmake. The snapshot was trending at a rating of 84, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Multiple packages arrived in snapshot 20190907, which was also trending at a rating of 84. An update of ImageMagick 7.0.8.63 properly identifies the DNG and AI image format. About 15 CVE’s were addressed in the update of Mozilla Firefox to version 68.1.0, which included a fix for type confusion in Mozilla’s JavaScript engine Spidermonkey. An update for the Wayland input-method protocol was made in ibus 1.5.21 and improved Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) decoding of 24 bit files was made with the Free Lossless Audio Codec (flac) 1.3.3 package update. Improved performance of various Application Program Interface (API) such as JSON.parse and methods called on frozen arrays were made with the nodejs12 12.10.0 update and php7 7.3.9 provided a bug fixing release that fixed an Exchangeable image file format (Exif) crash (bus error) due to wrong alignment and invalid cast. Many other libraries were updated in the snapshot including a couple YaST packages.
The snapshots brought two new major versions and two Linux Kernel updates.
Snapshot 20190902 brought the second Linux Kernel update for the week with an update of kernel 5.2.11; the new kernel brought several fixes for ASoC audio drivers. The snapshot also provided an updated version of Ceph to address a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.The IRC Client irssi 1.2.2 version fixed a crash and libreoffice 6.3.1.1 removed some patches. The updated libsolv 0.7.6 fixed repository priority handling for multiversion packages and the network discovery and security auditing utility nmap 7.80 resolved a compatibility issue with OpenSSL library configured with security level 2. Qt4 support was removed with the polkit-qt5-1 version 0.113.0. MicroOS integration tests and an added required cryptomount coding for EFI boot were added with core appliance builder python-kiwi 9.18.12. The interface compiler connecting programs written in C and C++ with scripting languages, Swig, received the 4.0 update in the snapshot; the new major version improves support for parsing C++11 and C++14 code and removes php5 support. Several YaST packages updated the name type X-SuSE-YaST-AutoInstResource. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 88, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Snapshot 20190829 updated three packages. The three package updates were freeipmi 1.6.4, texlive-specs-m and texlive-specs-n. The snapshot recorded a moderate rating of 90, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Mesa 19.1.5 arrived in snapshot 20190828 and provided some bug fixes. Mozilla browser Firefox had a minor update to 68.0.2 and provided a fix that cut off some images that weren’t displaying on Google Maps as well as a fix for special characters there were being cut off from the end of the search terms. KDE music player amarok received an update to version 2.9.70 and re-added the gstreamer-plugins-ugly. The 3.7.3 version of ccache corrected the cache size on filesystems that use more or less disk blocks than conventional filesystems. A compiler warning was fixed in e2fsprogs 1.45.3. A major version release of gawk 5.0.1 was in the snapshot; the pattern searcher makes some stronger assumptions about a C99 environment and adds support for the POSIX standard %a and %A printf formats. There was an update for GNU Compiler Collection from 9.1.1 to 9.2.1 and a patch was added to make symbols for aggregated global constructor names stable when using Link Time Optimization (LTO). Improvements to User Interface, workflow and features were made with the update of git 2.23.0. This snapshot provided the first kernel update of the week with kernel 5.2.10. Several translations were made with the libstorage-ng 4.2.2 update and text editor nano 4.4 made a change on startup to allow the cursor to be put on the first or last occurrence of a string by preceding the filename with +/string or +?string. The welcome window for openSUSE received more translations for global users with an update of the opensuse-welcome 0.1.6 package and several YaST packages were updated for the handling multiple versions of Ruby versions by updating tags in the spec file. The snapshot recorded a moderate rating of 81, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Snapshot 20190824 delivered a fix that was made to the swirl option, which produced an unexpected result, with the update of ImageMagick’s 7.0.8.61 version. Improved adaptive streaming and a fix for stuttering for low framerate videos became available in VLC 3.0.8; 13 issues, including 5 buffer overflows we fixed and 11 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures were assigned and addressed in the media player version. More than a handful of CVEs were addressed with the apache2 2.4.41 update. One of the CVEs addressed was that of a malicious client that could perform a Denial of Services attack by flooding a connection with requests and basically never reading responses on the TCP connection. The new version also improves the balancer-manager protection against XSS/XSRF attacks from trusted users. The x86 emulation library fixed a compiler warning in the 2.4 version and the X11 RandR utility updated the geometry text file configure.ac for gitlab migration with the xrandr 1.5.1 version. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 86, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
The HP Linux Imaging and Printing package hplip 3.19.6 added support for several new color and enterprise printer, which was released in snapshot 20190823. The Linux Kernel was updated to version 5.2.9 and offered more than a handful of commits for the Direct Rendering Manager for AMD hardware and offered some memory leak bugs related to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. The utility library for rendering PDFs, poppler, also fixed some memory allocation in the PostScriptFunction with version 0.79.0; the version also fixed regressions on TextSelectionPainter. Minor updates were also made in the snapshot for xfce4-settings 4.14.1 and yast2-fonts 4.2.1, yast2-instserver 4.2.3 and yast2-support 4.2.2 all had changes related to a newer Ruby version. The snapshot is trending at a rating of 84, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
The first snapshot of the week, 20190822, updated five packages. MariaDB’s 10.3.17 package had the most changes in the snapshot and provided merge relevant storage engine changes from MySQL 5.7.27 as well as five CVE fixes. Small bug fixes and fuzzer fixes were made to libetonyek 0.1.9. GNOME’s photo manager shotwell 0.30.7 fix compatibility with programming language Vala 0.46. The other two package updates were libsrtp2 2.2.0 and rubygem-sassc 2.1.0. The snapshot recorded a rating of 78, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Ahoy! openSUSEXfce team is pleased to announce that the long awaited Xfce 4.14 has been releasedfor Tumbleweed.
After a long development cycle (4 years!), all of the core components and applications have been ported to GTK 3.
Among the main new features and improvements, the xfwm4 window manager has finally gained support for VSync, HiDPI, hardware GLX and various compositor improvements.
For openSUSE, we continued to polish the default experience by adding new packages that complete the desktop and make it more approachable to new users.
We:
– Switched to xfce4-screensaver, the new Xfce screenlocker, from xscreensaver
– Added xfce4-panel-profiles, a tool to back up and restore your panel layout configuration as well as layout presets
– Added mugshot, a tool to easily input personal information and a user avatar. It is integrated into the Whisker Menu
– Added lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings, a tool to easily configure LightDM
– Added gnome-disk-utility, a disk management tool that allows you to partition disks and mount ISO files
New GTK Theme
In the process of updating to Xfce 4.14, we decided that we wanted to have our very own GTK theme. Thus, Greybird Geeko was born.
Based on the popular Greybird Xfce theme, Greybird Geeko is an official spin with an openSUSE look & feel and other improvements, such as a dark variant of the theme.
A special shout out to Carson Black who carried out the work and maintains this theme! For a quick overview, please check out the screenshots.
A big “thank you” to everyone who got involved in this release!
After six years on the openSUSE Board and five as its Chairperson, I have decided to step down as Chair of the openSUSE Board effective today, August 19.
This has been a very difficult decision for me to make, with reasons that are diverse, interlinked, and personal.
Some of the key factors that led me to make this step include the time required to do the job properly, and the length of time I’ve served.
Five years is more than twice as long as any of my predecessors.
The time required to do the role properly has increased and I now find it impossible to balance the demands of the role with the requirements of my primary role as a developer in SUSE, and with what I wish to achieve outside of work and community.
As difficult as it is to step back from something I’ve enjoyed doing for so long, I am looking forward to achieving a better balance between work, community, and life in general.
Serving as member and chair of the openSUSE Board has been an absolute pleasure and highly rewarding. Meeting and communicating with members of the project as well as championing the cause of openSUSE has been a joyous part of my life that I know I will miss going forward.
openSUSE won’t get rid of me entirely. While I do intend to step back from any governance topics, I will still be working at SUSE in the Future Technology Team. Following SUSE’s Open Source policy, we do a lot in openSUSE. I am especially looking forward to being able to focus on Kubic & MicroOS much more than I have been lately.
As I’m sure it’s likely to be a question, I wish to make it crystal clear that my decision has nothing to do with the Board’s ongoing efforts to form an independent openSUSE Foundation.
The Board’s decision to form a Foundation had my complete backing as Chairperson, and will continue to have as a regular openSUSE contributor.
I have absolute confidence in the openSUSE Board; Indeed, I don’t think I would be able to make this decision at this time if I wasn’t certain that I was leaving openSUSE in good hands.
On that note, SUSE has appointed Gerald Pfeifer as my replacement as Chair. Gerald is SUSE’s EMEA-based CTO, with a long history as a Tumbleweed user, an active openSUSE Member, and upstream contributor/maintainer in projects like GCC and Wine.
Gerald has been a regular source of advice & support during my tenure as Chairperson. In particular, I will always remember my first visit to FOSDEM as openSUSE Chair.
Turning up more smartly dressed than usual, I was surprised to find Gerald, a senior Director at SUSE, diving in to help at the incredibly busy openSUSE booth, and doing so dressed in quite possibly the oldest and most well-loved openSUSE T-shirt I’ve ever seen.
When booth visitors came with questions about SUSE-specific stuff, I think he took some glee in being able to point them in my direction while teasingly saying “Richard is the corporate guy here, I’m just representing the community..”
Knowing full well he will continue being so community minded, while finally giving me the opportunity to tease him in return, it is with a similar glee I now hand over the reigns to Gerald.
As much as I’m going to miss things about being chairperson of this awesome community, I’m confident and excited to see how openSUSE evolves from here.
Keep having a lot of fun,
Richard
Note: This announcement has been cross-posted in several places, but please send any replies and discussion to the opensuse-project@opensuse.org Mailinglist. Thanks!
Kata Containers is an open source container runtime that is crafted to seamlessly plug into the containers ecosystem.
We are now excited to announce that the Kata Containers packages are finally available in the official openSUSE Tumbleweed repository.
It is worthwhile to spend few words explaining why this is a great news, considering the role of Kata Containers (a.k.a. Kata) in fulfilling the need for security in the containers ecosystem, and given its importance for openSUSE and Kubic.
What is Kata
As already mentioned, Kata is a container runtime focusing on security and on ease of integration with the existing containers ecosystem. If you are wondering what’s a container runtime, this blog post by Sascha will give you a clear introduction about the topic.
Kata should be used when running container images whose source is not fully trusted, or when allowing other users to run their own containers on your platform.
Traditionally, containers share the same physical and operating system (OS) resources with host processes, and specific kernel features such as namespaces are used to provide an isolation layer between host and container processes. By contrast, Kata containers run inside lightweight virtual machines, adding an extra isolation and security layer, that minimizes the host attack surface and mitigates the consequences of containers breakout. Despite this extra layer, Kata achieves impressive runtime performances thanks to KVM hardware virtualization, and when configured to use a minimalist virtual machine manager (VMM) like Firecracker, a high density of microVM can be packed on a single host.
If you want to know more about Kata features and performances:
Contributors of Uyuni Project have released a new version of Uyuni 4.0.2, which is an open-source infrastructure management solution tailored for software-defined infrastructure.
Uyuni, a fork of the Spacewalk project, modernizing Spacewalk with SaltStack, provides more operating systems support and better scalability capabilities. Uyuni is now the upstream for SUSE Manager.
With this release, Uyuni provides powerful new features such as monitoring, content lifecycle management and virtual machine management.
Both the Uyuni Server node and the optional proxy nodes work on top of openSUSE Leap 15.1 and support Leap 15.1, CentOS, Ubuntu and others as clients. Debian support is experimental. The new version of Uyuni uses Salt 2019.2, Grafana 6.2.5, Cobbler 3.0 and Python 3.6 in the backend.
“The upgrade involves the complete replacement of the underlying operating system,” according to a post on July 9 by Hubert Mantel on Github. “This is a very critical operation and it is impossible to handle any potential failure in a graceful way. For example, an error during upgrade of the base OS might lead to a completely broken system which cannot be recovered.
Given that the upgrade of Uyuni also involves upgrading the base operating system from Leap 42.3 to Leap 15.1, it is highly advisable to create a backup of the server before running the migration. If the Uyuni server is running in a virtual machine, it is recommended to take a snapshot of the machine before running the migration.
Migration is performed by first updating the susemanager package:
zypper ref && zypper in susemanager
Then run the migration script:
/usr/lib/susemanager/bin/server-migrator.sh
“This script will stop the services, subscribe the new software repositories and finally perform the actual update to the new version,” Mantel wrote on Github. “After successful migration, services will not be started automatically. The system needs to be rebooted and this will also re-start all the services. There is nothing additional the admin needs to do.”
The intention of the fork was to provide new inspiration to a Spacewalk, which had been perceived as idling in recent years. Uyuni is using Salt for configuration management, thereby inheriting its name: Uyuni refers to the world’s largest Salt flat, Salar de Uyuni in Southwest Bolivia.
There have been three openSUSETumbleweed snapshots released since last week.
The snapshots brought a single major version update and new versions of KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks.
ImageMagick’s 7.0.8.56 version arrived in snapshot 20190730 and added support for the TIM2 image format, which is commonly used in PlayStation 2 and sometimes in PlayStation Portable games. The snapshot also delivered an update for Mesa 3D Graphics Library with version 19.1.3 that mostly provided fixes for ANV and RADV drivers, as well as NIR backend fixes. File searching tool catfish 1.4.8 provided some fixes with directories and a fix running on Wayland. The GNU Compiler Collection 7 added a patch and fixed for a Link Time Optimization (LTO) linker plugin. The 9.0.1 glu, which is the OpenGL Utility library for Mesa, fixed a possible memory leak. The Linux Kernel was updated to 5.2.3; the new version made a few fixes for PowerPC and added Bluetooth for some new devices. Serval Python packages were updated in the snapshot. LLVM tools and libraries were updated in Tumbleweed with llvm8 8.0.1 but the changelog states not to run LLVM tests on PowerPC because of sporadic hangs. The 2.4.7 version of openvpn in the snapshot added support for tls-ciphersuites for TLS 1.3 and updated openvpn.keyring with public key downloaded from https://swupdate.openvpn.net/community/keys/security-key-2019.asc. A lengthy list of fixes were made to the VIM text editor in version 8.1.1741. Other packages updated in the snapshot were ucode-intel 20190618, xapps 1.4.8, ypbind 2.6.1 and zstd 1.4.1. The snapshot is trending as moderately stable with a rating of 79, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
KDE’s Frameworks and Plasma were updated in the 20190726 snapshot. Frameworks 5.60.0 had multiple fixes for KTextEditor, KWayland, KIO and Baloo. The new version requires Qt 5.11 now that Qt 5.13 was released. Plasma 5.16.3 adds new translations and fixes including the fix of compilation without libinput and an improved appearance and reduce memory consumption with Plasma Audio Volume Control. There was a major version update for the checkmedia to version 5.2, which fixed a compat issue with older GCC. The new major version also allows to set a specific GPG key for signature verification. GNOME’s bijiben updated to version 3.32.2 and the update of curl 7.65.3 fixed several bugs and makes the progress meter appear again. A Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures that could allow remote attackers to execute other programs with root privileges was fixed in the message transfer agent exim 4.92.1. The 11.0.4.0 version of java-11-openjdk also fixed several CVEs and cleaned up the sources and code. Phonon, which is the multimedia Application Programming Interface (API) for KDE, removed the QFOREACH function in the headers when building for Qt 5 in version 4.10.3. The snapshot is trending as moderately stable with a rating of 76, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Snapshot 20190724 had just three packages updated. GCC 9 received a small update that Included a fix for openCV3 builds with LTO and provided a fix for vector shift mis-compilation on IBM’s s390 architecture. The update of osc 0.165.3 fixed broken TLS certificate handling and the package ristretto, which is a fast and lightweight image viewer for the Xfce desktop, added support for Canon CR2 format and improved the “Sorting” menu with the 0.8.5 version update. The snapshot posted a moderately stable rating of 72, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week brought about two dozen new versions of software.
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