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KDE and openSUSE: Plasma 5.17, Qt 5.14 and more

Sixth openSUSE.Asia Summit Concludes

openSUSE Community Releases Leap 15.1 Version

Changing the Chair of the openSUSE Board

August 19th, 2019 by

Dear Community,

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!

Posted in Announcements, Board, Project | 7 Comments »

Kata Containers Packages are Available officially in openSUSE Tumbleweed

August 17th, 2019 by

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:

  • katacontainers.io is a great starting point.
  • For something more SUSE oriented, Flavio gave a interesting talk about Kata at SUSECON 2019,
  • Kata folks hang out on katacontainers.slack.com, and will be happy to answer any quesitons.

Why is it important for Kubic and openSUSE

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Announcements, Build Service, Tumbleweed, Weekly News | 1 Comment »

New 4.0.2 Version of Uyuni is Released

August 2nd, 2019 by

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.

Interested members can follow the project on https://github.com/uyuni-project, www.uyuni-project.org, via Twitter at @UyuniProject, or join #uyuni at irc.freenode.org.

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Posted in Announcements, Derivatives, Distribution, Leap | Comments Off on New 4.0.2 Version of Uyuni is Released

Mesa, ImageMagick, Plasma, Frameworks Update in Tumbleweed

August 1st, 2019 by

There have been three openSUSE Tumbleweed 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.

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Posted in Announcements, Tumbleweed, Weekly News | 1 Comment »

GNOME Packages, More Updated in Tumbleweed This Week

July 25th, 2019 by

Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been released since our last Tumbleweed update on Saturday.

The most recent snapshot, 20190723, updated Mozilla Firefox to version 68.0.1. The browser fixed the missing Full-Screen button when watching videos in full screen mode on HBO GO. The new 68 version enhanced the Dark Mode reader view to include darkening the controls, sidebars and toolbars. It also addressed several Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). The snapshot provided an update to GNOME 3.32.4, which fixed an issue that led to some packages with multiple appdata files not correctly showing up on the updates page. The Guile programming language package update to 2.2.6 fixed regression introduced in the previous version that broke HTTP servers locale encoding. Hardware library hwinfo 21.67 fixed Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD) detection. A major 7.0 version of hylafax+ arrived in the snapshot. The Linux Kernel brought several new features with the 5.2.1 kernel and enhanced security for a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel processors. The open-source painting program Krita 4.2.3 version offered a variety of fixes including a copy and paste fix of the animation frames. A few libraries like libgphoto2, libuv and libva received update. There were also several Perl and Rubygem packages that were updated in the snapshot. The file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment, thunar 1.8.8, fixed XML declaration in uca.xml and the 2.15 transactional-update package enable network during updates and allow updates of the bootloader on EFI systems. The snapshot is currently trending at a 93 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Among the top packages to update in snapshot 20190721 were gnome-builder 3.32.4, wireshark 3.0.3 and an update for GNU Compiler Collection 9. GNOME Builder fixed the initial selection in project-tree popovers, Wireshark fixed CVE-2019-13619 and GCC9 added a patch to provide more stable builds for single value counters. The dracut package updated from 044.2 to 049; this update removed several patches and added support for compressed kernel modules. The Distributed Replicated Block Device (drbd) 9.0.19 package fixed resync stuck at near completion and introduced allow-remote-read configuration option. GNOME’s personal information management application evolution updated to version 3.32.4, which added an [ECompEditor] to ensure attendee changes are stored before saving. GNOME’s Grilo, which is a framework focused on making media discovery and browsing easy for application developers, updated to 0.3.9 fixed core keys extraction. GNOME’s Virtual file system (gvfs) and programming language Vala were updated to versions 1.40.2 and 0.44.6 respectively. Krita was also updated in this snapshot. The 0.5.1 version of python-parso fixed some unicode identifiers that were not correctly tokenized.  The snapshot is currently trending at a 90 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

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Posted in Announcements, Kubic, Kubic, Tumbleweed, Weekly News | 2 Comments »

KDE Applications, Squid, SQLite, VIM Update in Tumbleweed

July 20th, 2019 by

Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots in the middle of this week brought new minor version updates to ImageMagick, Squid, SQLite, VIM and more. The new KDE Applications 19.04.3 version arrived in the first two snapshots.

The more recent snapshot, 20190718, brought a half-dozen new packages, which include fix for the UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) script data for Unicode 10+ scripts for the OpenType text shaping engine package harfbuzz 2.5.3. A two-year old Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) was fixed with the update of libpng12 1.2.59. The tool that cleans RPM spec files, spec-cleaner 1.1.4, added a temporary patch to fix a test that fails if there is no internet connection. Caching proxy squid 4.8 fixed GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 build issues and added a fix to prevent parameter parsing used for a potential Denial of Service (DoS). RISC-V support was added with the virt-manager 2.2.1 update and xclock 1.0.9 was also updated in the snapshot, which is trending at a 97 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Updates for KDE Applications 19.04.3 were completed in snapshot 20190717. More than 60 bugfixes were made and improvements were made to Konqueror and Kontact so there is no longer a crash on exit with QtWebEngine 5.13. Cutting groups with compositions no longer crash the Kdenlive video editor and the Python importer in Umbrello’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) designer now handles parameters with default arguments. ImageMagick fixed a parsing issue and optimized the PDF reader with the 7.0.8.53 update. GNOME’s hex editor ghex 3.18.4 migrated the build system to meson and added Open Age Ratings Service (OARS) metadata. The kernel-firmware was updated in the snapshot. The newer php7 7.3.7 provided more than a dozen bug fixes to include a fix for reproducible builds that failed with OpenSSL 1.1.1c. The update of text editor vim from version 8.1.1600 to 8.1.1694 provided a large amount of fixes to include a fix for tests that get stuck when running into an existing swap file. The snapshot is also trending at a 97 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20190716 started updating KDE Applications 19.04.3 and brought users of the rolling release 10 CVE fixes for Mozilla Thunderbird 60.8.0; the updated version also fixed problems when editing event times that related to AM/PM setting in non-English locations. The update to Ceph in the snapshot removed SuSEfirewall2 support. The update of gpg2 2.2.17 provided a new command –locate-external-key to locate the keys given as arguments. LibreOffice 6.2.5.2 removed some merged patches. Relational database management system sqlite3 3.29.0 added the “sqlite_dbdata” virtual table for extracting raw low-level content from an SQLite database to also include a database that is corrupt. The new major version of xreader 2.2.1 fixed incompatible pointer type issues and Linux syscall tracer strace 5.2 enhanced decoding of bpf, clone, inotify_init, mbind, and set_mempolicy syscalls. Other packages that received updates were python-qt5 5.13.0, python-sip 4.19.18 and rubygem-coffee-rails 5.0.0, which removed support for Rails below version 5.2 and added support for Rails 6. The snapshot is trending to project a 95 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer

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Posted in Announcements, Tumbleweed, Weekly News | Comments Off on KDE Applications, Squid, SQLite, VIM Update in Tumbleweed

Request Travel Support for the openSUSE.Asia Summit

July 19th, 2019 by

The Travel Support Program (TSP) provides travel sponsorships to openSUSE community who want to attend the openSUSE.Asia Summit and need financial assistance. openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 will be in Bali, Indonesia, at Information Technology Department, Faculty of Engineering, Udayana University on October 5 and 6.

The goal of the TSP is to help everybody in and around openSUSE to be able to attend the openSUSE.Asia Summit!

When and how

Requests for the TSP for this year’s openSUSE.Asia Summit have until August 24 to submit their request.

Remember: All requests will be managed through the TSP application at http://connect.opensuse.org/travel-support.

You will need an openSUSE Connect account in order to login to the application and apply for sponsorship. Please be sure to fulfill all of your personal details at openSUSE connect account to avoid delays or negative request. A good application with good information will be processed faster.

A few reminders

  • Please read the TSP page carefully before you apply.
  • Any information you send to the Travel Committee will be private.
  • We want everybody there! Even if you think you would not qualify for the travel support, just submit and make it worth! If you don’t try you won’t get!
  • If you submitted an abstract to be presented you should mention it in your application.
  • The Travel Committee can reimburse up to 80% of travel and/or lodging costs. That includes hotel, hostel, plane,train, bus, even gas for those willing to drive. Remember, no taxi!
    • Important: Food and all local expenses are on you!
  • We want to sponsor as many people as possible so please check the best deal.
  • The Travel Committee won’t be able to book or pay anything in advance. The reimbursement will be done after the event finishes and based on your expenses receipts.
  • no receipts = no money It is the rule! (Original receipts are required from German residences.)

If you have any question regarding your trip to the conference do not hesitate to ask the TSP or openSUSE.Asia Summit organizers.

We hope to see you there!

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Posted in Announcements, Conference, Summit, Weekly News | Comments Off on Request Travel Support for the openSUSE.Asia Summit

People of openSUSE: Sébastien Poher

July 13th, 2019 by

Sébastien Poher aka sogal

About me

I’m 1.80m, I love to wear unreadable thrash metal bands t-shirts and prefer beer over wine (or any sort of drinks really).

My Beginnings

The first computer I ever touched was an Apple II. I remember spending hours playing this one game on a 5 1/2″ floppy disk where I had to drive, via a clunky joystick, a spaceship through the abysses of an asteroid, killing monsters around.

I got into Linux in two steps, first, in 2007 but I was the only one among my friends to use it so I ended up sticking to the shitty OS I had. My next re-discovery of Linux was later in 2012 when I started professional training in system administration.

Why openSUSE

I tried many Linux and BSD distributions but always got frustrated after a while. Leap offered me the exact perfect balance I was looking for between stability, reliability and relative freshness of packages.

My first contribution

I wanted to have an up-to-date package of Tilix (a tiling terminal emulator) so I worked on it; this made me discover the Open Build Service (OBS), which is such a wonderful tool, but above all, I found it easy to contribute. I think that one strength of the openSUSE Project is that the step someone would need to make to start contributing is a really small one.

About the community

I am a bit of a misanthropist so seeing that people from different origins, that do not necessarily know each other, are able to work together in a constructive, peaceful and funny way provides me a good dose of hope!

What I do in the realm of openSUSE

I maintain a small set of packages. It’s fun to do and it makes me learn a lot about the process of creation and all the clockwork behind a distribution. However, the highlight of my openSUSE activities is my involvement in the French openSUSE community through an association called Alionet. We do our best to relay openSUSE’s news and documentation in French (yeah, French people are terrible at English).

Challenges that faces openSUSE

The lack of volunteers among the users community -at least around me- tends to be a real problem. It is hard to get people involved “on the field” and keep them motivated.

openSUSE needs…

A periodic communication targeted for end users. I am glad to see this “People of openSUSE” project being revived, I would be happy to see the same thing happening with short articles about different software available in openSUSE or tips and tricks related to Leap, Tumbleweed or other openSUSE projects. Maybe by the end of the year or next year I will have more time to make this happens.

Me beyond openSUSE

I learn to play drums. It is kinda hard yet funny to see that, at first, my body does not obey my brain but after a while they manage to work together and create a nice rhythm.

My Computer setup

I have a Thinkpad T450 running Leap 15.1 with GNOME. The apps I use the most are Evolution, Firefox, Tilix and Cherrytree.

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Posted in People of openSUSE | 1 Comment »

Tumbleweed’s July Snapshots Are Trending Strong

July 11th, 2019 by

There have been a total of five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots since the beginning of July and all the snapshots have a strong, stable rating.

The rolling release had the most updates arrive in the 20190702 snapshot. The packages update in that snapshot included Mesa 19.1.1 and Mesa-drivers 19.1.1 that had fixes for Intel ANV and AMD RADV driver as well as Nouveau and R300 Gallium3D drivers. The bzip2 file compression application fixed undefined behavior in the macros in version 1.0.7 and fixed a low impact Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). The programing language package guilef was updated to version 2.2.5 and provided bootstrap optimization. Portability improvements were made in the library for encryption, decryption, signatures and password hashing with libsodium 1.0.18. A major release of the PulseAudio’s Volume Control package pavucontrol 4.0 was made; the new version dropped support for Gtk+ 2 and added more than a handful of new language translations.

The most recent snapshot, 20190708, didn’t offer a changelog due to the server that the web app uses to produce the changelogs being upgraded to Leap 15.1. The changelog is expected to be included in the next snapshot that is released.

Just two packages were updated in the 20190704 snapshot. The newer vhba-kmp file system package from April 2019 fixed a crash when mounting disk image with the 5.1 Linux Kernel. The vm-install 0.10.07 package, which is a tool to define a Virtual Machine and Install Its Operating System, addressed the use of the ‘builder’ option in the config file that produces an error because it is deprecated.

The first snapshot of the month, 20190701, didn’t provide any new package releases, but there were some changes made to a few packages like the one to llvm8 (Low Level Virtual Machine) that increase RAM for armv6/7 to avoid the undesirable state of Out of memory (OOM). A patch was also dropped from the same package.

A few package updates were made available in the 20190703 snapshot. The Linux Kernel was updated to 5.1.15. The updated kernel offered some fixes for mediatek MultiMediaCard (MMC) flow and detection issues and it enabled System Management Bus (SMBus) on Lenovo ThinkPad E480 and E580. KDE’s Hex editor for viewing and editing binary files okteta 0.26.2 improved the maximum array size in structures extended to 64K.

All snapshots released this month so far have recorded a stable rating of 93 or higher, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

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Posted in Announcements, Leap, Tumbleweed, Weekly News | 1 Comment »

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 Logo Competition Winner

July 9th, 2019 by

The votes are in and the openSUSE Project is happy to announce that the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 logo competition winner is Hervy Qurrotul from Indonesia. Congratulations Hervy! As the winner, Hervy will receive a “mystery box” from the committee.

On this logo competition, we have 18 submissions from all over the world. All the designs are great. This logo competition is voted by openSUSE.Asia Committee and Local Team. Thank you for your vote.

We would like to say thank you to all logo competition participants, Andi Laksana, Anggara Permana Putra, Bayu Aji, Budi Setiawan, Durim Berisha, Hammouda Elbez, Haruo Yoshino, Hege Dalsgaard, Hermansyah, Ilham Yusuf Fanani, Ka Chung Chan, M Afifudin, Muhammad Luthfi As Syafii, Rania Amina, Wisnu Adi Santoso, and Yuha Bani Mahardika.  We look forward to see you at the Summit.

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Posted in Announcements, Conference, Events, Summit, Weekly News | Comments Off on openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 Logo Competition Winner

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