• Krita, Linux Kernel, KDEConnect Get Updated in Tumbleweed

  There have been a few openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released in the past two weeks that brought some new features and fixes to users.

  This blog will go over the past two snapshots.

  The last snapshot, 20180416, had several packages updated. The adobe-sourceserifpro-fonts package updated to version 2.000; with the change, the fonts were refined to make the Semibold and Bold heavier. Both dbus-1 and dbus-1-x11 were updated to 1.12.6, which fixed some regreations introduced in version 1.10.18 and 1.11.0. The gtk-vnc 0.7.2 package deprecated the manual python2 binding, which will be deleted in the next release, in favor of GObject introspection. Notifications that caused a crash were fixed in kdeconnect-kde 1.3.0. The 4.16.2 Linux Kernel made ip_tunnel, ipv6, ip6_gre, ip6_tunnel and vti6 better to validate user provided tunnel names. Due to a build system failure, not all 4.16.2 binaries were built correctly; this will be resolved in the 20180417 snapshot, which will be released shortly. Krita 4.0.1 had multiple fixes from its major version upgrade. The visual diff and merge tool meld 3.19.0 added new features like a new per-pane status bar with selectors for syntax highlighting and text encoding. Python Imaging Library python-Pillow 5.1.0 removed the freetype-2.9.patch and YaST had several packages with a version bump.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing in the SLE 15 Beta Program!

• SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Prepares HPC Module

  The upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is offering an HPC (High Performance Computing) module for development, control, and compute nodes. Today that SLE15-HPC module is now available in beta.

Quite a few snapshots have been released this week and the last one for OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, bringing some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software. Among these, we can mention the recently released Linux 4.16 kernel series as the operating system is now powered by Linux kernel 4.16.2.

"The 4.16.2 Linux Kernel made ip_tunnel, ipv6, ip6_gre, ip6_tunnel and vti6 better to validate user provided tunnel names. Due to a build system failure, not all 4.16.2 binaries were built correctly; this will be resolved in the 20180417 snapshot, which will be released shortly," said Douglas DeMaio in a recent report.

The release of openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled to be release during the first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic on May 25.

The package submission deadline for non-bug fix package updates is April 24 as Leap enters the release candidate phase. The scheduled release for Leap 15 is May 25 at 12:00 UTC.

Leap has been using a rolling development model for building Leap 15 beta versions. Bug fixes and new packages have been released via snapshots to users testing the beta versions. The snapshots for the test version will stop and maintenance and security updates for Leap 15’s release will begin next month. Linux professionals and anyone looking to use Leap 15 are encouraged to test the beta versions as there is still snapshots being released and announced on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List. A list of items to test is available here.

Also: OpenSUSE Leap 15 Planned For Release At The End Of May

openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed produces high-quality snapshots and a new rating tool for the snapshots has labeled two out of the last four snapshots as stable.

The past two snapshots are still pending a rating as it takes about a week after the snapshot release to develop a rating. This blog will cover the last two snapshots that are pending and list some of the new software that arrived in the snapshots.

The most recent snapshot, 20180326, had several new packages including python-packaging 17.1 and python-setuptools 39.0.1. The python-packaging 17.1 dropped support for python 2.6, 3.2, and 3.3. The update version python-setuptools from 38.5.2 to 39.0.1 now vendors its own direct dependencies and no longer relies on the dependencies as vendored by pkg_resources. The C library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archive, libzip 1.5.0, enabled more functionality by updating dependencies and simplified the licence by the use of a standard cryptographic library instead of custom Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementation. IRC client hexchat 2.14.1 made some changes to the preferences so the window can be scroll-able. GNOME’s messaging program empathy reverted back to version 3.12.14 and gnome-documents 3.28.0 updated translations and replaced pkgconfig(libgepub) with pkgconfig(libgepub-0.6). The Linux Kernel 4.15.13 became available in the snapshot, which added the Intel Total Memory Encryption feature, and YaST had several packages updated including autoyast2 4.0.44, which can properly abort when probing devices fails during installation.

Also: Linux on Raspberry Pi: SUSE support turns $35 board into enterprise IoT platform