Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week brought a few major release packages and a clear example for how the automated testing tool openQA can prevents a snapshot from being released.
The unicode character map Gucharmap, which uses the gtk+ toolkit and runs on any platform that gtk+ supports, was updated to version 10.0.0 in the repositories in the 20170625 snapshot. The GNOME project updated translations and support of editors like Bluefish as well as many others. Other major release were also in the 20170625 snapshot. An update of net-tools to version 2.0 dropped the network statistics (netstat) Extended Internet Daemon (xinetd) service to phase out xinetd. Users of the proc file-system get cgroup namespaces with the arrival of the psmisc 23.0 package.
Some minor version updates in the 20170625 snapshot were made to kexec-tools 2.0.14, which had backport upstream with fixes, and drbd 9.0.8, which is a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters, merged some changes preparing for compatibility with the Linux Kernel 4.12. Yast2-bootloader made some changes to autoYaST configurations in version 3.3.0.
A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots featuring new software were released this week along with an upgrade to GStreamer that allows for mp3 decoding to work out-of-the box.
The newest stable Linux Kernel 4.11.6 is also available in the latest Tumbleweed snapshot 20170620.
Updates in the repositories from the 20170620 snapshot brought both the 52.2 versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, which fixed some critical vulnerabilities. Systemd 233 provided a package for a new systemd-umount binary and, with the update of dracut 044.1, supports the new compatibility rule. Fontconfig’s 2.12.3 version fixed the build issues with gperf 3.1 and on GNU Hurd. The Beta 2 version of LibreOffice 5.4 cleaned up the license string and got rid of the Oxygen theme. A removal of support for old, non-systemd distros was made available in the snapshot with libvirt 3.4.0.
Snapshot 20170619 updated translations in both libgnome-games-support 1.2.2 and gnome-tweak-tool 3.24.1, which also added a way for handling a program interrupt signal.
Interviews with people involved in the openSUSE Project have returned and new pages will be added in the future highlighting individuals involved in the community project.
The first interview to be posted after a five-year hiatus was posted in November of 2016 and highlights Dominique Leuenberger, who is at VLC contributor and release manager for openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Sarah Julia Kriesch, who is a Working Student at ownCloud and member of the Heroes team at openSUSE, discusses in an interview in published in March how she got started with Linux and openSUSE.
The most recent interview published is from Leap release manager Ludwig Nussel, who is a volunteer for a fire brigade in Germany.
The website has interviews dating back at 2007; when many people involved in the project had less grey hair;-). Current interviews focus on newer project members. Interviews include many people involved in the project who participate and contribute to many other open-source projects like Linux kernel developer and Tumbleweed originator Greg Kroah-Hartman, former openSUSE Release Manager and KDE Release Coordinator Stephan Kulow and more.
Snapshot 20170612 is the largest snapshot of the week and centers mostly on fixing bugs and adding patches. GNOME’s Bijiben upgraded to version 3.24.0 and fixed a memory leak as well as cleaned-up some code. The library used mainly by GTK and GNOME Application, glibmm2_4 moved to version 2.50.1 and also fixed a memory leak. Other libraries updated in the snapshot were the portable renderer for Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha libass 0.13.7, emulation/playback library for video games and music libgme 0.6.1, and the machine learning software library opencv 3.2.0. The update to Linux Kernel 4.11.4 deleted several patches, including one for IPv6 and X11 package xlockmore 5.54, which fixed the xmb fonts and xjack mode. Yast2-trans removed obsolete Portable Object Template files and enhanced translations through the use of Weblate. Read the rest of this entry »
The care and thoroughness of making GNU Compiler Collection 7 the default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed produced a gradual decrease in snapshots over the past month, but it looks like snapshots of the rolling release are beginning to pick up the pace.
The four snapshots released this week aligns much to closer to upstream development and releases of GNOME, KDE, QEMU and Mesa top the list of this week’s new packages in Tumbleweed.
The newest snapshot, 20170605, saw a patch added for grub2 that fixed page fault exception when grub loads with NVIDIA cards and the libgcrypt 1.7.7 update made the noteworthy fix of a possible timing attack on EdDSA session key, which was previously patched. Nano 2.8.4 also improved PHP syntax highlighting in the snapshot.
Both Mozilla Thunderbird received changes to optimize and enhance compatibility with GCC 7 in the 20170604 snapshot with 64-bit. Expect 32-bit to come soon. QEMU 2.9.0 fixed several Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) and improved support for several architectures and virtualization. Snapshot 20170604 also fixed some minor vulnerabilities like CVE-2017-9351 with Wireshark’s 2.2.7 version update and sudo 1.8.20 fixed CVE-2017-1000367.
Rolling Development Still needs Testing, Promoters
Since changing to a rolling development version model for the eventual release of openSUSE Leap 42.3, challenges have arisen to get more people testing it.
There is no milestone releases (Alpha or Beta) for openSUSE Leap 42.3, but snapshots of the development version are constantly being released.
“So far I have not seen too many 42.3 bugs,” said Leap Release Manager Luwdig Nussel in his talk at the openSUSE Conference. “I don’t think we are bug free, so I think it just is not tested enough.”
Some Linux users might find a rolling development process for a Linux release to be less appealing for testing, but testing is certainly necessary before the actual release Leap 42.3 at the end of July.
The next minor version of Leap 42.3 is mostly a refresh and hardware enablement release that will have more than 10,000 packages. While the development version of Leap 42.3 it is still considerably stable because it is extremely hardened and shares sources from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12, the release could still use more testing and people willing to promote openSUSE’s next minor 42 series version.
Nussel said SLE 12 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and Leap 42.3 are developed in parallel to one another and both benefit from mutual bug reports.
The default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed became GNU Compiler Collection 7 after the release of snapshot 20170529 making openSUSE the first major distribution to have the new compiler by default.
While Tumbleweed still has GCC6, GCC7 is now the standard for completing executable binaries for the chameleon’s rolling distribution and the change momentarily slowed down the rapid release cycle of Tumbleweed.
“A major update like GCC always take a lot of preparation time and, as it shows in this case, even then some things can slip through,” wrote Dominique Leuenberger is an email to the openSUSE Factory Mailing List, which people who use openSUSE Tumbleweed should subscribe. Luckily, no damage was done to any system in the wild yet.”
The snapshot did expose a graphical glitch with Mozilla Thunderbird has since been fixed.
GCC 7 contains a number of enhancements that help detect buffer overflow and other forms of invalid memory accesses, according to its change log. Position Independent Executables was also enabled by default together with the switch to GCC7.
Snapshot 20170529 also brought a major version change to mono-core (version 5.0), which is an open source, cross platform .NET framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. Another major version change was made to xfce4-panel-plugin-mount, which updated from version 0.6.4 to version 1.1.2; the newer version offers various bugfixes, feature enhancements and port to GTK3. Two other major version changes also came in the snapshot with icu 59.1 and the advanced power management tool tlp 1.0.
Recent years have seen tremendous growth in the container technologies market. From being a non-existent category just a few years ago to being one of the most interesting, fast development and exciting areas.
Containers change the way we think about application architecture and the speed at which we can deliver on business requirements. They provide consistency and portability across environments and allow developers to focus on building a great product, without the distraction of underlying execution details.
Today the entire application delivery supply chain is changing as the age of abstract application creation is upon us. This change is fueled by the adoption of a few key technologies, including shared code repositories, continuous integration, continuous development, and cloud computing. However, the ultimate driver of this movement is a software delivery mechanism: containers.
Project Kubic is a generic project for the many new initiatives related to re-designing the operating system around principles of immutable infrastructure and the usage of a stack based on Linux, docker project and Kubernetes. The primary building block of the Kubic Project is the Container Host OS based on openSUSETumbleweed.
In the near future and with your support, we’ll be enabling Kubernetes and many other new features. This will allow you to easily build Container as a Service (CaaS) solutions and run them everywhere…
Traditional OS are cool and fun to hack on, but the model with a single runtime environment controlled by the OS and shared by all applications does not meet the requirements of modern application-centric IT.
Based on a monolithic approach, the traditional OS brings lots of challenges for managing the stacks running on top of it. With Kubic, we would like to rethink the OS by redesigning it for modern IT applications.
In agile environments, developers and DevOps engineers are taking responsibilities over their app and seeking control over the runtime underneath their applications, without necessarily owning the entire stack.
VMs provide a means for separation among applications, but this model adds resource and management overhead.
Join our Kubic Project and together we will build the next generation of Container OS
This year’s openSUSE Conference has so far been a blast and the talks from Day 1 of the conference have already been uploaded to the openSUSETV YouTube channel.
For the people who couldn’t make it to this year’s conference, they can watch the live stream of the conference at http://streaming.media.ccc.de/osc17/. There are two rooms (Galerie and Saal) being live streamed and recorded.
Starting out the conference, Matthias Kirschner, President of Free Software Foundation Europe, delivered a terrific keynote and gave several thought provoking questions about who will be the torchbearer for open-source software and questioned whether it is necessary to have a torchbearer since there are so many examples of success of open-source software.
Thorsten Kukuk introduced openSUSE Kubic as a project under the openSUSE Project and Leap release manager Ludwig Nussel touched on the status of Leap; past, present and future.
Sources from the beta version of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Service Pack 3 (SP3) arrived today in the latest build for openSUSE’s next minor release of the 42 series.
The transition to a rolling development process for openSUSE Leap 42.3 has changed the traditional milestone process, but fixed milestones are alive and well with SLE development and Leap is benefiting from that hardened, enterprise core.
The latest sources from SLE SP3 Beta included in Leap builds are security and bug fixes n SUSEConnect version 0.3.0. Additionally, cpupower updated to a turbostat version with 17.04.12. The shared zypper 1.13.27 version helps to tag packages installed by user request as ‘i+’. The beta and Leap build also cleanup an algorithm for rollback snapshots with Snapper 0.5.0. Ceph’s 12.0.2 sets higher disk and memory constraints so s390x builds don’t fail. SLE SP3 and Leap also share the same 4.4.68 Linux Kernel, which provides plenty of improvements for architectures and wireless drivers.
Yast2-installation moved Container as a Service Platform to yast2-caasp package and added a features request, which added Network Time Protocol Servers settings to the overview dialog.
Community packages differing from SLE SP 3 Beta that testers can find in Leap are new features from Mozilla Thunderbird 52.1.0 and security fix from Mozilla Firefox 52.1.1. This past week KDE Applications was updated in the Leap builds to version 17.04.0. Two weeks ago, a Leap build for 42.3 updated Mesa from version 11.2.2 to version 17.0.4 (now Mesa 17.0.5), so more Graphics Processing Units are supported.
“I’d like to ask package maintainers and users alike to check whether there are any bigger changes left to be done in 42.3,” release manager Ludwig Nussel wrote to the openSUSE Factory Mailing List. “If so, please submit affected packages ASAP.”
There are only a few more days left to get any major version updates in the next minor Leap 42 version. All major version updates have a submission deadline of May 21.
Leap 42.3 builds have been coming out on a regular basis with new community packages being updated in the newest builds. Testers are encouraged to test the rolling development and can download the iso image from the development button on software.opensuse.org. After installing Leap, testers can enter the terminal and enter zypper update for the newest Leap 42.3 packages.
Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week brought a few major release packages and a clear example for how the automated testing tool openQA can prevents a snapshot from being released.
A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots featuring new software were released this week along with an upgrade to GStreamer that allows for mp3 decoding to work out-of-the box.
Interviews with 
KDE Applications 17.04.2
The care and thoroughness of making 
The default compiler for 
Sources from the beta version of 
