• Windows 10 Will Finally Offer Easy Access to Linux Files [Ed: No, this is more WSL entrapment. They try to prevent people from using proper GNU/Linux with the actual kernel, either standalone or dual-boot. This is also about surveillance on one's files, keys, keystrokes, everything.]

• Zowe Makes Mainframe Evergreen [Ed: Swapnil Bhartiya greenwashing and openwashing 2-in-1]

  Zowe also offers a vendor-agnostic experience allowing users to mix and match tooling and technologies. It provides interoperability, through the latest web technologies, products, and solutions from multiple vendors, and it allows developers to use the familiar, industry-standard, open source tools to access mainframe resources and services.

• The ibmvnic driver with SR-IOV is now supported by SLES 12 and SLES 15 on IBM POWER9 processor-based systems

  The ibmvnic driver enables PowerVM Single Root I/O Virtualizations (SR-IOV) for improved network capabilities including reduced systems processor utilization, decreased network latency, and enforcement of network Quality of Service.

The lone snapshot of the week was 20190209. ModemManager made the jump from version 1.6.14 to 1.10.0 and consolidated common tag names among all the supported plugins as well as provided a new tag to allow specifying flow control settings to use in serial ports. The Mozilla Thunderbird 60.5.0 package gave more search engine options in certain locations offering Google and DuckDuckGo available by default. The email client also added Thunderbird FileLink with WeTransfer to upload large attachments. Thunderbird Filelink provides support for online storage services and allows upload attachments to an online storage service and then replaces the attachment in the message with a link. General-purpose parser generator bison 3.3.1 removed support for the 32-bit C/C++ development system DJGPP. The compiler cache, ccache 3.6, which speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations, fixed a problem due to Clang, which is a C language family frontend for LLVM, overwriting the output file when compiling an assembler file and added support for GNU Compiler Collection‘s `-ffile-prefix-map` option. The 1.12.12 version update for dbus stopped a few memory leaks and added a couple patches. The epson-inkjet-printer-escpr 1.6.35 version added support for new printer models EcoTank ET-M1100 and Epson WorkForce ST-2000. GNU C Library glibc 2.29 added getcpu wrapper function, which returns the currently used CPU and NUMA node, and optimized the generic exp, exp2, log, log2, pow, sinf, cosf, sincosf and tanf functions. Cross-platform widget toolkit gtk3 3.24.5 implement gdk_window_present for Wayland, updated translations and refreshed the theme. The health-checker 1.1 package added new plugins for cri-o and kubelet. Users of the professional-quality vector-graphics application Inkscape can now use the 0.92.4 version; the new version improves preferences of the measuring tool when grids are visible and fixes a crash that would happen when a user does a Shift/Ctrl-click when handling shapes. Tumbleweed users will have 1.7x faster performance with Ruby 2.6 as the default as compared to Ruby 2.5. Other library packages updated in the snapshot were libosinfo 1.3.0, libsodium 1.0.17, libsolv 0.7.3, libstorage-ng 4.1.86 and libzypp 17.11.1.

Following a move by SUSE blacklisting legacy / less-used file-systems in SUSE Linux Enterprise, OpenSUSE is looking at doing the same to blacklist the kernel modules for a number of esoteric file-systems as well as the likes of JFS and F2FS.

While users will be able to adjust their modprobe configuration files to override these kernel module blacklist entries, OpenSUSE is looking at following SLES' lead into trying to ween users off these legacy file-systems or file-systems that have history of security issues or other concerns.

Another three snapshots were released this week for openSUSE Tumbleweed bringing updates for ImageMagick, Mesa, Apache, Ceph, Flatpak Builder, Python and more. Plus, new major versions of Bash, glusterfs, libvirt and openconnect were updated this week.

The first snapshot of the week, 20190201, was a complete rebuild of the distribution and the snapshots released since have gradually improved in quality, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The most recent snapshot, 20190205, brought support HEIC EXIF & XMP profiles with the minor version release of the graphics editing tool ImageMagick 7.0.8.25. The 18.3.2 version of the Mesa library and Mesa-drivers were updated, which provided a number of fixes for the RADV Vulkan drivers. The apache2 package was updated to 2.4.38 and the update lists the mod_lua module as stable. Fixed conflicting items in rule dialogs were fixed with the autoyast2 4.1.0 update. Ceph’s updated package had a fix for SignatureMismatchError in s3 commands. The support library used in the Xfce desktop exo 0.12.4 fix highlight rendering with GTK 3. The scalable, distributed file system glusterfs had a major update jump from version 4.0.2 to 5.3. The new version added several new management and standalone features and the dot three minor version provided a fix for Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) client’s memory leak. The major release of openconnect 8.02 added Cisco-compatible DTLSv1.2 support. Another major version release was libvirt 5.0.0 that added support for Open vSwitch with the new feature for Xen. Other packages that were updated were the kernel firmware, gnutls, libstorage-ng 4.1.84, llvm 7.0.1, mercurial 4.9 and python-setuptools 40.7.2. The sysconfig package moved backward from version 0.85.0 to 0.84.3.