openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed has had five snapshots so far this month and a lot of those snapshots have includes several GNU packages.
There were many other packages and the first snapshot of the month included an update for KDE Plasma. Here are just a few of those packages that have been updated so far this month.
The Japanese-English Dictionary package edict was updated in snapshot 20180306 and about 6,000 new dictionary entries were added. Application developers will be happy to see flatpak-builder 0.10.9 fixed the build issues with glibc 2.27. The Windows registry hive extraction library hivex 1.3.15 improved performance by using a cache of iconv handles, especially when dumping out large hives and rubygem-unf_ext 0.0.7.5 was bumped up a version number to add Windows binaries for Ruby 2.5.
The 20180305 snapshot had a little more than a handful of upgraded packages with two related to the chinese language. GNOME desktop developers received the Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool glade 3.20.3, which added the GtkStackSidebar to the toolbox. The ibus-libpinyin package for pinyin and bopomofo input methods based on libpinyin for IBus fixed the config and translate input method name with the updated for 1.9.1 to 1.9.3. The libpinyin package moved to 2.1.91 and fixed zhuyin parsers. The 0.3.5 version of the xfce4-panel-plugin-pulseaudio package fixed a volume sink delay and added new management features for media players.
ImageMagick 7.0.7.24 removed some patches and fixed some timeout and exceeded memory issues in snapshot 20180304. Autoyast2 add missing textdomains to create proper pot files in version 4.0.36. The set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing through the Data Plane Development Kit package dpdk 17.11.1 made numerous fixes and changed the locations of the GPL and LGPL licenses. The snapshot also updated the GNU Compiler Collection from 7.3.0 to 7.3.1 and add conflicts to non-bootstrap variant for cross packages to silence the repo-checker. The text editor for the GTK toolkit geany 1.33 improved GTK3 theming and documentation and added a tool tip showing the full path on menu items representing documents. The libepoxy 1.5.0 update added new Application Programming Interface and updated the Graphic Library registry to OpenGL 4.6. The libstorage-ng 3.3.182 version updated translations and added unit tests documentation. More than 10 YaST packages were updated in the snapshot; the yast2-samba-server and yast2-samba-client packages replaced SuSEFirewall2 with firewalld. Read the rest of this entry »
A network outage this weekend will effect openSUSE services that have a Direct Connection to Nuremberg host infrastructure on Saturday, March 10, between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. UTC.
The outage will last about 30 minutes and take place between the above listed hours.
The outage effects only external connections due to maintenance in the datacenter. All services will run without any downtime.
The first weekend in March 2018, the openSUSE Heroes met again in-person, after one year of infrastructure work, which was mostly done from home.
After our last in-person meeting in December 2016, we saw each-other in person at openSUSE conference 2017 and maybe at some other events like release parties – but now it’s the time of the year when it’s very cold outside – so we decided to stay one weekend inside and talk about the topics for 2018 and the future of the openSUSE Heroes team. And getting some work done :).
You might imagine us now two days busy with hacking and a bunch of nerds in front of their preferred shell-window. But it’s the total opposite. Our main “tools” we used this weekend were a flip chart, our voices and a lot of coffee.
By the way, thanks a lot to SUSE for providing us with a room, a network connection, drinks, coffee and cookies. In fact we were given the new and shiny “SUSE Event Area” which was built by SUSE last year to host all kinds of internal, external and community events.
After one year of having our monthly meetings via IRC, we had a lot of topics to discuss and a lot of decisions to make about the openSUSE infrastructure in the future.
After a nice dinner on Day0, Friday 2018-03-02, where most of the Heroes arrived in Nuremberg, we started working on Saturday.
On the Day1, Saturday 2018-03-03 and Day2, Sunday 2018-03-04 we had the following topics on our list, worked through them, defined ToDos for the following months and assigned tasks.
Elections to fill three seats on the openSUSE Board are set to begin in the coming weeks and candidates are needed to fill these three positions.
Individuals who apply for an openSUSE Membership will be able to vote during elections and run for candidacy
Candidates elected to the position will serve a 24-month term. The terms of Gertjan Lettink, Bryan Lunduke and Tomas Chvatal will expire and this is a great opportunity for any member who is interested in helping the project from a seat like this to run and be elected
Members of the openSUSE board help to influence the future direction of the project. Members are encouraged to learn the election process, run for the board or propose a candidate.
The boot up time for KDE’s new Long Term Support release is faster and there is more optimization.
There have been performance optimizations all over the KDE desktop. The file operations in Dolphin are much faster now than with older KDE Frameworks releases. Plasma 5.12 has lower memory requirements and there are several new features users will notice from Leap 42.3 and Plasma 5.8.
The notification system gained support for interactive previews, which allows users to quickly take screenshots and drag them into a chat window, an email composer or a web browser; that makes it convenient for the user to not have to leave an application that is being used.
Music lovers will enjoy the new Music Controls in the Lock Screen. The new Media Controls include Previous and Next track. Play and pause are also included and it shows the song title that is playing. The lock screen controls can be disabled for added privacy.
The were plenty of updated packages in openSUSETumbleweed this week and KDE updates were made available for Frameworks, Applications and Plasma.
While the most recent snapshot didn’t include an update of a KDE package, four out of the six snapshots this week did.
Snapshot 20180220 brought a few lesser known packages. The C library for asynchronous DNS requests known as c-ares updated to version 1.14.0. The c-ares update provided a patch for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-2017-1000381 to protect against a network attack. The image view Eye of GNOME updated translations with the eog-plugins 3.26.2. The Xfce library targeted at application development known as Exo now has version 0.12.0, which was released from upstream six day before being released in this 20180220 snapshot. The requirements were updated for exo 0.12.0 and they include GTK 2.24, GTK 3.22, GLib 2.42, libxfce4ui 4.12 and libxfce4util 4.12. Developers looking to generate random numbers will find the update of the haveged 1.9.2 package. The Haveged package contains a daemon that generates an unpredictable stream of random numbers and feeds the /dev/random device.
Linux Kernel 4.15.4 provided a fix to auto-negotiate security settings mismatches the 20180219 snapshot. Issues with AppStream required appstream-glib to revert from version 0.7.5 back to 0.7.4. The snapshot brought the first point release for KDE’s Long Term Support release of Plasma 5.12. The Plasma 5.12.1 version fixed several bugs including a fix for the mouse settings module that was crashing on Wayland.
openSUSE participates again in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a program that awards stipends to university students who contribute to real-world open source projects during three months in summer. With this article, I will provide my experience as a former GSoC student and mentor, give you more details about the program and try to encourage students to get involved in openSUSE development through GSoC.
Why open source and openSUSE?
First of all, you may wonder why you should want to get involved in open source development. Everybody has their own reasons, but for me there are three main ones:
I have fun: The most important reason is that it is fun. At openSUSE, we have great conferences, geekos everywhere, geeko cookies, openSUSE beer, fun stickers,… and the most important part: we have fun when working!
I learn a lot: In most of the projects, every single line of code is reviewed. That means not only that the code quality is better, but also that every time you write something wrong or that can be improved, someone will tell you. In open source, we think that making mistakes is perfectly fine. That people correct you is the best way to learn.
People: I have the chance to work with really skilled people all around the world, who are interested in the same things as me.
Why GSoC?
Starting is always difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone! In openSUSE, you will always find people to help you, and with GSoC this is even easier. The best feature of the program is that you will always have at least one mentor (most likely two) who will lead you through it. In addition, you will work in a project used in the real world by many users and all your code will be released under an open source license, so everybody can access, use, study, change and share it. Last, you will receive a stipend between 2,400 and 6,600 dollars depending on the country.
Projects
At openSUSE, you can find projects written in Ruby on Rails, Perl, Ruby, HTML/JavaScript, C/C++ and much more. This year you can work during GSoC in some of the most central and biggest projects in openSUSE: Open Build Service, openQA and YaST. They will for sure be challenging projects to work in, but don’t get scared, as that means that you will learn a lot from it too. And remember that your mentors and other openSUSE contributors will be there to help you!
But we also have simpler projects such as Trollolo, where any computer science university student could get started with Ruby. The desire to learn is much more important than the previous experience and knowledge.
The streak of six Tumbleweed snapshots continued this a week as openSUSE’s rolling release has provided a consistent release of six snapshots per week this year.
There were hundreds of packages updated this week and sysdig, Freetype and Flatpak were just a few of the many packages to receive an updated version.
At the time of publishing this article, snapshot 20180213 was the most recent snapshot released. Mozilla Firefox 58.0.2 fixed a tab crash during printing. The package yast2-ca-management was dropped with the autoyast2 4.0.31 update. A new set of functions that allows 64-bit offsets even on 32-bit systems are now available with cryptsetup 2.0.1, which is a user-space utility for dealing with the DMCrypt kernel module for setting up encrypted disk volumes. Cryptsetup also increased maximum allowed Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF) memory-cost limit to 4 GiB. Another notable package in the snapshot was the update of the Ruby debugger package rubygem-byebug 10.0.0, which added Ruby 2.5.0 support and fixed a remote server crash when interrupting a client.
KDE Applications 17.12.2 was made available in the 20180212 snapshot; about 20 recorded bugfixes include improvements to Kontact, Dolphin, Gwenview, KGet and Okular. View the changelog for a full list of changes and fixes for Applications 17.12.2. Flatpak 0.10.3 fixed vulnerability in dbus proxy and updated a Polish translation. Position Independent Executables improvements were made with Snappy 1.1.7 as well as improvements to CMake build support for 64-bit Linux distributions. Added support for the USB 3.1 SuperSpeedPlus device capability was also made available in the snapshot with the usbutils 009 package. There were also several YaST package updates.
Let the fun begin! This week it was announced that the openSUSE Project is one of the 212 mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code, which is an annual international program that awards stipends to university students to write code and learn about open source development during their summer break.
The openSUSE Project has participated in GSoC since 2006 and has helped more than 50 students get started with free software development.
As a mentoring organization, eligible students will have an opportunity between March 12 – 27 to submit a project proposal to the GSoC program site. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over.
Community members have been running the combined booths for several years and each year more people join the booth to pass along their knowledge and experience with each of the projects.
People who register between now and the event can get a 50 percent discount on their standard registration price using the promo codes SUSE, GNOME or KDE50.
openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed has had five snapshots so far this month and a lot of those snapshots have includes several GNU packages.
A network outage this weekend will effect openSUSE services that have a Direct Connection to Nuremberg host infrastructure on Saturday, March 10, between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. UTC.
The notification system gained support for interactive previews, which allows users to quickly take screenshots and drag them into a chat window, an email composer or a web browser; that makes it convenient for the user to not have to leave an application that is being used.
While the most recent snapshot didn’t include an update of a 
With this article, I will provide my experience as a former GSoC student and mentor, give you more details about the program and try to encourage students to get involved in openSUSE development through GSoC.
The streak of six 
The 16th 
