openSUSE Conference 2019 in Nuremberg, Germany, is just four short weeks away. The conference will be from May 24 -26 at the ZBau and will start at 9:30 a.m. with a keynote from Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE’s President of Engineering, Product and Innovation.
To prepare for oSC19, there are a few things to know before going.
Money
See what the Euro conversion rate is at http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/. Keep your receipt when you convert money; you can get the same rate when you return to the same exchange where you converted the money into euros.
Arriving
Nuremberg is a smaller sized airport. People can take the U-Bahn to downtown Nuremberg. It only takes about 10 minutes by subway to get to the main station. From the airport, you will want to take U2 to downtown main station (Hauptbahnhof). One-way tickets are about 3 euro. Buy a one-way ticket at a vending machines. A 4-trip pass is 11 euro. An all-day pass is about 12 euro.
You can take a taxi to the hotel, but it’s just as easy to take the subway. Taxi stands are right outside the airport entrance. Costs will typically run between 10 and 20 euro. NOTE – Uber, Lyft and other share riding apps are not available in Nuremberg.
Almost all hotels do not run shuttle services, so don’t expect the hotel to pick you up.
Public Transportation
You can get around Nuremberg easily with public transportation. Again, one-way tickets are about 3 euro. The location of the Z-Bau is Frankenstr. 200. To get there, take U1 from the Nuremberg Hbf (Hauptbahnhof); it is just three subway stops from Nuremberg Hbf. Use U1 from the Bahnhof going toward Largwasser and get off on Franken Straße and walk to Franken Straße 200 (9-minute walk to the Z Bau). If you reached Hasenbuck, you have gone one station too far. https://www.vgn.de/liniennetze/schienennetz_nuernberg_furth/
Buy a one-way ticket at a vending machines; bring coins.
There are several different public transportation passes you can get during the openSUSE Conference. Please visit https://www.vgn.de/en/tickets/ for more information.
Parking
For those of you who drive, please note that you will need to park in a parking garage when downtown. A map at http://www.parkhaus-nuernberg.de/parkhaeuser/kartenansicht.html shows all the parkhaus in Nuremberg. Parking at the Z-Bau is free. If you want to park the car there overnight and take public transportation, that is probably your best option.
The more recent Tumbleweed snapshot 20190423, provided new cups-filters 1.22.5 that changed a Ghostscript call so that fixes the page count so that it works with Ghostscript 9.27 and later. AV1 decoder package dav1d 0.2.2 brings a speed increase between four and six percent for Multi Slot Amplitude Coding (MSAC) decoding with SSE. The kernel-firmware package was updated to 20190409 and updated the firmware file for Intel Bluetooth and Marvell firmware images. Indonesian translations were made to the libstorage-ng 4.1.112 package. Ruby 2.6.3 updated the Unicode version to 12.1 beta to adds support for New Japanese Era “令和” (Reiwa). Other packages updated in the snapshot were perl-DateTime 1.51 and perl-DateTime-TimeZone 2.35, python-parso 0.4.0, python-qt5 5.12.1 and rdma-core 23.0. This snapshot is currently trending at a 89 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Mesa 19.0.2 had a few fixes for radeon, radv and v3d in the 20190420 snapshot. A few other packages were updated in the snapshot like kipi-plugins 5.9.1, which was the first official stand-alone release outside of digikam. This snapshot is currently trending at a 97 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
KDE contributors offered up plenty of fixes and addon libraries to Qt with the update to Frameworks 5.57.0 in snapshot 20190419. KDE’s lightweight user interface framework for mobile and convergent applications called Kirigami had the most updates along with KIO and the file management functions it provides to Konqi users. Another package for developers/makers that arrived in the snapshot was python-setuptools 41.0.0; the package removes support for specifying an encoding using a ‘coding: ‘directive in the header of the file. When parsing setup.cfg files, setuptools now requires the files to be encoded as UTF-8. The java-11-openjdk updated to 11.0.3.0 added test cases for lenient Japanese era parsing and pushed several security fixes. This snapshot posted a stable rating of 97 on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Three quality openSUSETumbleweed snapshot were released since last Thursday with updated packages for Curl, Salt, FFmpeg and more.
Mozilla Firefox had a minor release of version 66.0.3 in the latest Tumbleweed 20190415 snapshot. The browser addressed some performance issues with some HTML5 games and provided a Baidu search plugin for Chinese users and China’s Internet space. The command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols, curl 7.64.1 fixed many bugs and added additional libraries to check for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) support. The update of libvirt 5.2.0 dropped a few patches and added several new features like Storage Pool Capabilities to get a more detailed list XML output for the virConnectGetStoragePoolCapabilites Application Programming Interface (API) and libvirt also enabled firmware autoselection for the open-source emulator QEMU. The newest salt 2019.2.0 package in Tumbleweed enhanced network automation and broadened support for a variety of network operating systems, and features for configuration manipulation or operational command execution. Salt also added running playbooks to the 2019.2.0 release with the playbooks function and it includes an ansible playbooks state module, which can be used on a targeted host to run ansible playbooks, or used in an orchestration state runner. The snapshot was trending at a 95 rating at the time of publishing this article, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Snapshot 20190412 was trending at a 94 and that package brought an update to Ceph that added a separate option to config a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) port. The cifs-utils 6.9 package, which is part of the Samba Project, added fixes for Azure and removed several patches. The libssh2_org 1.8.2 package fixed a misapplied patch that broke its previous version. A few YaST packages had some updates like the yast2-storage-ng 4.2.5 package that allows for a new format for importing/exporting Network File System (NFS) drives.
The 20190411 snapshot started off the week and it posted a moderately stable rating of 89. This snapshot brought the 5.0.7 Linux Kernel and it offered up a mitigation potential for a ptrace system call for PowerPC. There were some bug fixes for codecs, filters and formats in the ffmpeg 4.1.3 update. The JavaScript Bindings for GNOME, gjs 1.56.0, had a significantly large changelog recording info from the previous 1.54.3 version that was in Tumbleweed. The previous logs identified a GNU Compiler Collection 9 bug and added some ESLint rules. The new version was a stable version bump. The python-kiwi 9.17.35 package fixed regressions for the kiwi-repart dracut module. The wget 1.20.3 package fixed the buffer overflow vulnerability found in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-2019-5953. Text editor vim 8.1.1137 fixed several bugs including a Python test that didn’t wipe out hidden buffer and a space in number column that was on wrong side with ‘rightleft’ set.
We are very pleased to announce that installing the lightweight and slim desktop environment Xfce in openSUSE Tumbleweed just got faster and hassle-free!
Along with GNOME and KDE Plasma, Xfce can now be conveniently selected from the installer’s main screen, as your desktop environment from both DVD installer and net installer. All this is combined with a carefully picked selection of packages that rounds off our offered system to get you started quickly and easily.
Our Xfce team has invested a lot of work in the past months to optimize the “cute mouse” by focusing on the desktop and the underlying rolling release of Tumbleweed. It features applications that better suit the desktop, as well as new modern themes that make the default experience refreshing and enjoyable.
Finally, there is a relatively new project in the Open Build Service (OBS), which builds automatically and daily development versions of Xfce software from Xfce Git Master branch. Through this repository, openSUSE Xfce packagers and contributors are able to test commits and can spot bugs before official releases.
Xfce users are welcome to test it and contribute to it at X11:xfce:rat. [1]
Peter was widely known as founder of Scribus, the Libre Graphics Meeting and enthusiastic contributor to countless other Free Software projects. For openSUSE he took over responsibility as an active member of our package review team and has served as openSUSE Board member twice, from 2011-2012 and 2014-2016. Peter passed away a week ago after lengthy battle with cancer, he is survived by his wife Pauline and his daughter Stella. His obituary mentions ways to honor his life.
We will always remember Peter as fellow tinkerer, with an boundless passion to understand the inner workings and meanings of software and people. Farewell Peter, you’ll be missed by the openSUSE Community.
For the second time, Indonesia was chosen to host the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 event. A similar event was held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2016 and was attended by hundreds of local openSUSE lover as well as from other Asian countries. This year we are challenged to repeat the successful story of the openSUSE.Asia Summit on one of the most exotic islands in Indonesia, Bali.
openSUSE.Asia Summit is an event awaited by fans of openSUSE in Indonesia in particular, and activists of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in general. In this activity, experts, contributors, end users, and technology enthusiasts gather to share experiences about the development of openSUSE and other things related to FLOSS and have a lot of fun.
The island of Bali was chosen as the venue for the openSUSE.Asia Summit after being proposed by the Indonesian community during openSUSE.Asia Summit 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan. After going through a long discussion, the Asian committee chose Bali as the host of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019. openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 will be from October 5 to October 6, 2019, at Udayana University, Bali.
Goals to be achieved in the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 in Bali include:
To promote openSUSE in the Asian region.
To provide an alternative to the wider community that FLOSS can be a powerful tool for doing their daily job.
To attract new contributors for openSUSE from Indonesia and other Asian countries.
To provide a forum for sharing user and developer experiences because usually such discussions only occur online.
In the end, we are proud to present Bali Island to become one of the historical places for the openSUSE.Asia Summit :”)
Pre-announcement
openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 will immediately open a call for paper for prospective speakers. In addition, we will also open a logo competition for the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019. Surely this will be an opportunity for designers in Asia to compete with each other to show their abilities and contribute to this activity. We will inform you of more details about the above information in the near future through news.opensuse.org.
Eleven packages were updated in the latest snapshot of the week. Snapshot 20190226 updated the efivar 37 package, which is a tools and libraries package to work with Extensible Firmware Interface variables; the package add support for Embedded MultiMediaCard devices and for Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) root nodes without a device link in pseudo file system sysfs. The sensors 3.5.0 package add detection of Microchip MCP9808 and Nuvoton NCT6793D, which has yet to appear on the companies website. Bug fixes were made to the xclock 1.0.8, xev 1.2.3 and xfsinfo 1.0.6 packages. The xfsinfo package fixed a bug in 64-bit builds that caused the maximum request size to be incorrectly calculated. Other packages updated in the snapshot were File 5.36, python-idna 2.8 and python-python-dateutil 2.8.0.
Leap’s Beta phase is a rolling beta until it’s official release. Once released, it will begin its maintenance phase.
To celebrate the Beta phase, why not have a Pizza Party and test the openSUSE Leap 15.1 Beta.
Geeko in Nuremberg will have a Beta Pizza Party on March 1, 2019 during lunch. Any Beta tester in the Nuremberg area are welcome to attend. Just email ddemaio (@) opensuse.org.
If there’s no party near you, organize your own. Be sure to check the wiki page! Pick a local pizza place or get some delivered to your home or office; invite friends and colleagues and put your party on the wiki. A new openSUSE user may show up! If you are unsure of how to do it, read this.
The latest snapshot of the week, 20190219, had more than a dozen packages updated. A new Kerberos database module using the Lightning Memory-Mapped Database library (LMDB) has was added with the krb5 1.17 package, which brought some major changes for the administration experience for the network authentication protocol Kerberos. The permissions package update 20190212 removed several old entries and the kernel-space and user-space code package tgt 1.0.74 fixed builds with the newer glibc. A couple xf86 packages were updated. The 1.4.0 version of xf86-video-chips was a bug fix release for X.Org Server. There was an X Server crash bug with the version 1.3 affecting devices older than the HiQVideo generation. The change log said the code may not compile against X Server 1.20 since it no longer supports 24-bit color. A few other YaST packages were updated in the snapshot like yast2-installation 4.1.36, which had an update that saves the used repositories at the end of installation so as not to offer the driver packages again.
The 20190217 snapshot had just three packages updated. The keyboard management library libgnomekbd 3.26.1 fixed a build with new GLib and updated translations. VMcore extraction tool makedumpfile 1.6.5 added some patches, bug fixes and improved support for arm64 systems with Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The jump in the release of yast2-storage-ng from 4.1.53 to 4.1.59 provided quite a few changes like allowing the partitioner to create block cache (bcache) devices without a caching set and the newest version limits bcache support to x86_64.
The 20190215 snapshot finished the updates of KDE Applications 18.12.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.55.0, which started in the snapshot the day before. Multiple packages were updated in KDE Frameworks 5.55.0. Breeze Icons added a preferences-desktop-effects icon, KIO improved keyboard controls of the checksum widget, KTextEditor added a cancel button to stop long-running tasks in the search bar and KWayland added rows info to the plasma virtual desktop protocol. KDE Applications 18.12.2 had more than a dozen recorded bug fixes include improvements to Kontact, Ark, Konsole, Lokalize, Umbrello, and others. The address book now remembers birthdays when merging contacts from a bug fix with kdepim-addons and Ark no longer deletes files saved from inside the embedded viewer. An update to autoyast2 4.1.1 for the installation made changes to the reading of the IPv6 setting in order to initialize it correctly. Unit test were made in the libstorage-ng 4.1.88 package and it also had a change to detect Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASD) using virtio-blk. The python-cairocffi 0.9.0 package dropped Python 3.2 and 3.3 support. Several other YaST packages were updated in the snapshot including yast2-bootloader 4.1.17, yast2-configuration-management 4.1.3, yast2-firstboot 4.1.5 and yast2-network 4.1.39.
Out of 446 eligible voters, 46 more openSUSE Members than last elections, only 231 — 6 fewer than last elections — chose to cast their votes, leaving last spring’s elections holding the record both for most ballots cast and largest percentage of Members who took enough interest in openSUSE to take the time to cast their votes.
As incumbent, Christian is already sitting on the Board and will continue his duties for his second two-year term. Marina and Axel are expected to join him and take their seats for their first two-year terms sometime within the next couple of weeks.
Next Elections Expected Less Than a Year in Fall of 2019
The Elections Committee for the 2018-2019 openSUSE Board Elections — Ish Sookun, Edwin Zakaria, and Gerry Makaro — sincerely hope that the runners up will step up to run again in the next elections as two seats will be up for election, one for Simon Lees, who will be finishing his first two-year term, and the other to replace Gertjan Lettink, who will be ending his second two-year term on the Board.
Board Members can only hold two consecutive two-year terms under openSUSE rules.
openSUSE Conference 2019 in Nuremberg, Germany, is just four short weeks away. The conference will be from May 24 -26 at the ZBau and will start at 9:30 a.m. with a keynote from Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE’s President of Engineering, Product and Innovation.
Three quality 
We are very pleased to announce that installing the lightweight and slim desktop environment 
