It’s been way too long since the last blog post, so we’ve got quite a lot to report on!
Plasma 5.17 Beta
The Beta version of Plasma 5.17 was released with many new features and improvements such as per-screen fractional scaling on Wayland, a new User Interface (UI) for configuring permissions of Thunderbolt devices and network statistics in KSysGuard. The latter requires some more privileges than usual for a user application, so is currently being looked at by the SUSE security team.
openQA found a few bugs already, like GIMP looking more “colorful” than usual and some applications mixing Kirigami and Qt Widgets breaking some keyboard shortcuts. Both of those were addressed meanwhile and will be fixed in the final release of 5.17.
If you haven’t tested the Plasma 5.17 Beta yet, there’s still some time left! If you come across a problem in the software, please head over to the KDE bug tracker; if instead you find an issue that is openSUSE specific, go over to the openSUSE bugzilla.
In case you face some severe issues, the automatic snapshotting of the root filesystem using btrfs has your back and you can simply go back to the working state by booting into an older snapshot and doing a rollback.
Argon, an installable live medium that includes Leap 15.1 with the Beta and doesn’t require any manual repository addition, is also available.
openSUSE Leap 15.2
Like it happened for Leap 42.2, 15.2 will also see major version upgrades of many components.
Next to a new version of the Linux kernel, it’s planned to ship with Qt 5.12 LTS, Plasma 5.18 (of course also LTS) and the latest KDE Frameworks and Applications, which we can get in early enough for proper testing to ensure the best user experience possible!
This means that the “Full Wayland” session that landed in Tumbleweed a few weeks ago will also be available in Leap 15.2 and support per-screen fractional scaling.
As the target versions of Applications, Frameworks and Plasma aren’t even out yet, we’re currently integrating Qt 5.12 LTS with the latest packages from Factory.
Qt 5.14
Users of Tumbleweed and Leap with newer KDE software are used to having the latest available features and bugfixes, which is only possible by keeping up with Qt development and acting proactively.
So while the 5.14 branch of Qt is still young, we’re already busy integrating it into our builds. During the initial packaging of the 5.14 Alpha some bugs (QTBUG-78867, QTBUG-78881, QTBUG-78911, QTBUG-78948) were already identified and most of them fixed by now, so the KDE:Qt:5.14 project is built and usable by now. To develop against Qt 5.14 and test your applications with it, you can add the repo and get started.
So far it’s still in the phase of integration and getting everything in shape to build against it, but soon we’ll submit it to the Factory staging area to see how it behaves in there.
One of the most user visible features is that the implementation for scaling (for HiDPI displays) was mostly rewritten. Other noteworthy changes are the addition of various backends for hardware acceleration of Qt Quick using a new abstraction layer (opt-in), which can now also take advantage of Vulkan and introduction of a new “qtquicktimeline” module, which allows for easier integration of timeline-driven animations into Qt Quick.
Bali’s newest tourist attraction, the Garuda Wisnu Kencana status, towered outside the window as participants discussed all things openSUSE and open source.
A number of participants traveled from all over the world to join students from the university. The students volunteered with running the summit and many made their first contributions to open source. Attendees from more than 20 nations attended the summit. Talks at the summit focused on open source technologies, community contributions, healthcare technologies like GNU Health, packaging, using the Open Build Service and much more.
Simon Lee and Dr. Axel Braun from the openSUSE Board provided attendees with a status update about the openSUSE Project and introduced Gerald Pfeifer as the new chairperson for openSUSE. GNOME‘s Executive Director Neil McGovern gave a keynote at the summit; the GNOME.Asia Summit will be next week in East Java, which is the island next to where the openSUSE.Asia Summit took place.
The organizers from the opensuse.id community put together a fantastic summit for the participants had several social events to collaborate on topics related to the project and expansion of the project and open source technologies within Asia. The project and attendees expressed their thanks to sponsors who helped to maked the summit a success. SUSE, Simplify8, Radiant Utama Interinsco TBK, MyCoop, PT Boer Technology, Excellent, Bogorwebhost, Linksys, Fans.co.id
The openSUSE.Asia Summit started a tradition at the first openSUSE.Asia Summit of passing along the Summit’s photo album; the organizing team from the previous year passes the Summit’s photo album to the organizers who are completing the current Summit. Max Huang passed the album to Kukuh Syafaat during the ceremonial end of the summit.
A really great tradition with the @openSUSE.Asia Summit; the organizing team from the previous year passes the Summit’s photo album to the organizers who are completing this year’s Summit. pic.twitter.com/57lzBCctp3
Following discussions about the “openSUSE Project logo & name change” that started in June on the openSUSE Project mailing list [1], the Election Committee received a request from the Board to conduct a vote whereby openSUSE members can indicate whether they are for or against the project name change.
The voting will start on Oct. 10 and end on Oct. 31, which will provide three weeks for members to vote. The result will be announced on Nov. 1.
The voting procedure will be similar to the board elections. Members will receive a voting link on their membership email alias, i.e @opensuse.org. Members should verify that their openSUSE email alias is working and redirecting to the correct email address. If you experience troubles with your email alias, please email admin@opensuse.org to resolve the issue.
Members who wish to change the target address of their email alias can do so by creating a ticket. That can be done by sending the change request to admin@opensuse.org.
Those who wish to become an openSUSE member they can apply for membership by following the instructions specified on the openSUSE Wiki page [2].
The LibreOffice and openSUSE communities will have a joint conference next year in Nuremberg, Germany, and for this special co-conference, we are having a logo competition. The dates of the event are still being finalized, but there are some things we can do beforehand.
A logo is essential for the conference and we want to visualize both communities during this co-conference as LibreOffice will celebrate its 10-year anniversary and openSUSE will celebrate its 15-year anniversary during the conference.
The LibOcon logo should not be confused with the LibreOffice 10th anniversary logo contest, which will be announced separately via the LibreOffice blog.
You have seen both the openSUSE Conference logo and LibOcon logo change over the years. For this unique co-conference, we would like to have a unique logo reflecting both communities in one logo.
The competition is open now and ends on January, 17, 2020. The organizing team will send “Mystery Box” as an appreciation for the best logo designed. This year, logo will be voted on by the organizers of the conference.
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 LibOcon/oSC20. Note that the attribution is going to be shown on the conference website.
Design must be original and should not include any third party materials.
Both monochromes and color formats are essential for submission.
Submissions must be in SVG format.
Design should reflect the LibreOffice and openSUSE communities.
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
Please submit your design to ddemaio@opensuse.org with the following entries:
Subject: Co-Conference Logo Design 2020 – [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 co-conference organizing team will decide on the logos, which is subject to the conditions that the logo meets all the requirements. The final decision will be made by the co-conference organizing team 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.
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!
It’s been way too long since the last blog post, so we’ve got quite a lot to report on!
The 
Following discussions about the “openSUSE Project logo & name change” that started in June on the openSUSE Project mailing list [1], the Election Committee received a request from the Board to conduct a vote whereby openSUSE members can indicate whether they are for or against the project name change.
The 
Three 
The snapshots furnished the update for 
Three 
There have been three 
Ahoy! 
