Plasma 5.6  and Qt 5.6 have yet to make it in a Tumbleweed snapshot, but the packages are are in staging and the latter will likely arrive after Plasma 5.6. Until then, there are four snapshots the have been released since the last update.

Snapshot 20160405 provided and update to gtk3 to 3.20.2, which provided a fix for a blue background in emacs. Wine updated to 1.9.7 providing improvements to the WebServices reader and drag and drop. Xf86-video-intel was also in the snapshot and backported several patches.

Snapshot 20160404 provided a Btrfsprogs update to 4.5.1 from 4.4.1 and perl-bootloader updated to .911 with the subpackage YAML. Mercurial updated to it’s latest version 3.7.3 and yast2-sound updated to 3.1.9 fixing a dependency on yast2.

Snapshot 20160401 Updates to freetype2 and dolphin and the 20160331 snapshot made an update to GCC 5 and xfsprogs updated to 4.5.

openSUSE Conference

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There are 15 more days to submit a proposal for the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg June 22 – 26, so I would like to provide an update to the community about the conference.

As you might already be aware, there will be SaltStack, ownCloud, Kolab and SUSE Labs summits during the conference and we also plan on having a program for kids on Saturday, June 25.

The planning of the conference is coming along well. There will be a pre-conference party at the Kater Murr starting at 7 p.m. June 21. There will be plenty of entertainment during the week as well.

Everyday, there will be a keynote. The keynote speakers who have confirmed are Norman Fraser, Ph.D., who is the CEO of SoftIron, Frank Karlitschek from ownCloud, and Michael Miller, President of Strategy, Alliances & Marketing for SUSE. We will have one more keynote as well, but we have not confirmed it yet.

The conference page has a list of hotels that are recommended, so if you haven’t booked your hotel, take a look at the list.

The T-Shirt Design Contest ends on April 2 and during our next organizing meeting, we will announce the winner of the contest and start getting the T-Shirts printed for the conference. Thank you to all the people who have submitted a design. There is still two days left to submit a design.

We have several sponsors for this year’s conference and we are looking forward to seeing everyone there.

openSUSE will have HackWeek the week following the conference, but it will kick off on Friday, June 24 and continue into the next week, so if you feel like hanging around Nuremberg for HackWeek, we will have a place for you to Hack at the SUSE Headquarters from June 27 to July 1. Participate in one of the projects listed or make one on the website.

Visas

If you plan on attending the conference from a non-European Union country, please view the requirements for entering the country.

You may be required to visit an embassy and have a formed signed to receive a travel visa. Email [email protected] if you need about attending oSC16.

openSUSE Tumbleweed had some significant changes this past week with KDE Applications updating to version 15.12.3, which includes Long Term Support version of KDE Development Platform 4.14.18, and zypper updating to 1.13, but what is likely the biggest news is GNOME 3.20 is on the verge of being released.

Tumbleweed users might be using the latest GNOME release that has been thoroughly tested by openQA by this evening.

Arriving in GNOME 3.20 is a new cross-distro framework for building and distributing desktop applications with Builder and XDG-Apps. Wayland is available with 3.20, but not as the default. To try it out, select GNOME on Wayland from the gear menu on the login screen. The release of 3.20 is also a big release for GTK+, which provides more flexibility and power to theme authors.

Tumbleweed’s 20160326 snapshot provided a some new feature outside of GNOME 3.20’s new features as well.

The network manager has a new feature to determine if you are online. The network manager communicates with conncheck.opensuse.org to determine if a TW user has connectivity. To disable the feature, Tumbleweed users will need the NetworkManager-branding-upstream package.

Other News

openSUSE has been steadily transitioning its translations to Weblate, which just deployed version 2.5. If anyone would like to contribute to the openSUSE Project by translating release notes and other information about openSUSE and the project’s efforts, Weblate is translations made easy with a simple dashboard and progress bar to let people easily know where they can help with the project. There are even some additional tools being developed for Weblate by the openSUSE community.

The openSUSE is looking for a maintainer to help support 32-bit architecture for Tumbleweed. If anyone in the community is interested, email [email protected] or join #opensuse-factory on IRC.

Four snapshots released this week provided plenty of new packages for openSUSE Tumbleweed users, but what is coming in a future snapshot is what has people excited.

Python 3.5.1 and Linux Kernel 4.4.4 are expected to be updated this week in Tumbleweed snapshots.

Plasma 5.5.5 released earlier this week in snapshot 20160303 also has people excited.

Snapshot 20160304 provided updates for YaST, Kiwi and perl-bootloader. Snapshot 20160305 provided updated packages for DigiKam and systemd rpm macros. Snapshot 20160307 had the most diverse updates to grub2, libzypp, Plasma Frameworks, xen and Samba.

In other news related to the project, Ludwig Nussel, who is the new release manager for openSUSE Leap, is drafting a release schedule for Leap 42.2 and is expected to brief that at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg this June.

Since the last update on openSUSE Tumbleweed, there have been five snapshots and some of those snapshots have brought some interesting new packages.

The 20160225 snapshot allows Tumbleweed users to add a package called ‘discover‘, which is the KDE software installer, implemented as an app store like application.

KDE users can zypper install discover to get the app store based on AppStream.

Another package worth noting is the OpenLDAP package that checks password strength and enforces password strength policies that will comply with IT needs. The feature comes in snapshot 20160229 as a ppolicy-check-module.

Snapshot 20160226 updated the Linux Kernel to 4.4.2. That snapshot also added minor updates for YaST.

Among other packages updated in Tumbleweed this past week are Thunderbird to version 38.6.0 in the 20160225 snapshot and FireFox to 44.0.2 in the 20160229 snapshot.

Snapshot 20160228 updated some python packages and snapshot 20160224 updated KDE Framework to 5.19.0.

Samba and Wayland both had updates this past week and TreeLine, which is used for managing, organizing and outlining, updated to 2.0.2.

Two more snapshots are expected to be released by the end of the week. openQA is not a blocking factor for Tumbleweed anymore and the amount of snapshots released shows how quickly testing of builds have improved.

Libreoffice is currently building on the Open Build Service and will take a few more hours to be built. Without any issues, it might be in one of the next two snapshots.

Tumbleweed users can plan on seeing GNOME 3.20 by end of the month or in early April if all goes expected to plan as the next major release of GNOME is currently going through its release candidate process.

Google announced yesterday (Leap Day) that the openSUSE Project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

University students can spend their summer break writing code and learning about open source development with openSUSE while earning money through Google’s 12-year old, annual international program.

“Mentoring is a big part of the openSUSE culture,” said Richard Brown, the chairman of the openSUSE Board. “To be selected as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code is an immense honor. The value GSoC brings is immeasurable because it does more than just support students learning and contributing to open source; it teaches them to build interpersonal skills while doing something technically challenging and gives them an opportunity to use their theoretical knowledge from university studies to solve real-world problems.” Read the rest of this entry »

openQA workers that keep Tumbleweed tested and rolling have almost been replenished.

The new hardware can run more workers and is newer, bigger and faster, which increases the speed of openQA testing. One of two Intel E5-2630 v3 is partially running while the other has yet to be integrated into the openSUSE infrastructure. Each machine has 8 cores with 16 threads for a total of 16 cores of 32 threads when both machines become fully functional. The new hardware has each have 256GB of RAM and 400GB Intel NVMe SSDs.

SUSE’s infrastructure team was really helpful in getting the new machine working with openSUSE infrastructure and deserve a lot of credit for their efforts. Thank you SUSE.

The latest, full-testing went through in six hours as opposed to the normal 14 hour duration. That, plus the additional workers currently running greatly increase openQA’s speed.

Since the last update, which informed readers about openQA workers (hardware) that went down, openSUSE Tumbleweed has released three snapshots.

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