Welcome to the monthly update for openSUSE Tumbleweed for April 2024. This month began after addressing last month’s supply chain attack against xz compression library for the rolling release. An explanation of that XZ Backdoor, how it was address and what was learned can be found on news.opensuse.org.

A flurry of updates, enhancements, and crucial security fixes arrived in openSUSE’s rolling release this month as the busy season for conferences begins. Should readers desire a more frequent amount of information about snapshot updates, readers are encouraged to subscribe to the openSUSE Factory mailing list.

New Features and Enhancements

• Linux Kernel: The month of April had a few kernel updates.

The openSUSE project is excited to announce that Leap Micro 6 is in its alpha development stage.

Building on the solid foundation of its predecessors, Leap Micro 6 continues to provide a stable, secure and scalable platform for modern lightweight host operating systems that mirrors features and enhancements of SUSE’s commercial SL Micro release.

With the upcoming release of Leap Micro 6, users of Leap Micro 5.4 will need to plan their migration either to Leap Micro 5.5, directly to Leap Micro 6 or a commercial version, as version 5.4 will reach end-of-life upon the launch of Leap Micro 6. Those currently on Leap Micro 5.5 will have the option to upgrade to version 6 or remain on 5.5 until the subsequent release.

Users familiar with Leap Micro 5.5 will remember its standout features, such as enhanced SELinux capabilities, improved podman-docker and Hyper-V support for AArch64,

openSUSE maintainers received notification of a supply chain attack against the “xz” compression tool and “liblzma5” library.

Background

Security Researcher Andres Freund reported to Debian that the xz / liblzma library had been backdoored.

This backdoor was introduced in the upstream github xz project with release 5.6.0 in February 2024.

Our rolling release distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE MicroOS included this version between March 7th and March 28th.

SUSE Linux Enterprise and Leap are built in isolation from openSUSE. Code, functionality and characteristics of Tumbleweed are not automatically introduced in SUSE Linux Enterprise and/or Leap. It has been established that the malicious file introduced into Tumbleweed is not present in SUSE Linux Enterprise and/or Leap.

Impact

Current research indicates that the backdoor is active in the SSH Daemon, allowing malicious actors to access systems where SSH is exposed to the internet.

As of March 29th rever

March has been an exciting month for openSUSE Tumbleweed users as GNOME 46 made its way into the rolling release like KDE’s Plasma 6 did a few weeks ago.

The GNOME users and developers not only get the upgrade in the rolling release but in the Aeon Desktop derivative. The release in the Slowroll distribution will likely see an update between April 2 and April 14.

GNOME’s version 46 codenamed “Kathmandu” pays homage to the contributions from GNOME.Asia 2023 organizers and has significant improvements and new features. A standout feature in GNOME 46 is the new global search functionality within the files app. This feature enables users to search across all configured locations directly and an addition of filters by file type and mo

Plasma Arrives in openSUSE’s Releases

22. Mar 2024 | Douglas DeMaio | CC-BY-SA-3.0

A lot of excitement was brewing at the announcement of KDE’s Plasma 6 release and now the MegaRelease has arrived in openSUSE Tumbleweed and Kalpa while plans for Slowroll are progressing.

Rolling release users and the developer community get an upgrade that marks a monumental shift for KDE desktop users. The update will make it into a Slowroll release in April as the distributions steady paced version-bumps are expected between April 2 and April 14.

Almost a decade from the release of Plasma 5, the desktop experience for Plasma 6 begins. The transition not only signifies an advancement in aesthetic and functionalit

From Dominique Leuenberger at Tumbleweed - Review of the week 2024/10

• KDE Frameworks and Plasma 6: Lots of progress since last week. By now we reached the QA phase. Optimistic souls bet on next week (no promises though!)
• KDE Gear 24.02.0 – Requires KDE Frameworks 6 and will land at the same time

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

We have officially reached ‘spring’ (according to some calendars/regions). We cleaned up the staging projects: we accepted all the good things you submitted that passed staging. Neat, eh? That’s what we do all the time anyway, so it’s not that special. The progress on RPM 4.20 fixes in the spec files has been slowing down a bit, but we’re nearing the end. This morning, there were 235 spec files left in Factory that needed touching – and many submit requests are still pending.

In sum, we have released again 6 snapshots this week (0301…0306), containing these changes:

• ImageMagick 7.1.1.29
• P

The openSUSE Project is thrilled to announce the Beta release phase of Leap 15.6.

Feel free to download Leap 15.6 Beta images from get.opensuse.org and test it out, or upgrade from your existing Leap 15.5 system by running zypper --releasever=15.6 dup. You might want to get familiar with known issues in Leap 15.6.

Show your support by dropping in today at our Thursday Weekly Meeting at 20:00 UTC and participate in the live Leap 15.6 Beta testing event aka “Bug Day”. The event will be live streamed to the openSUSE channel on youtube.

“Let’s make sure that Leap 15.6 runs well on your hardware

Welcome to the monthly update for openSUSE Tumbleweed for February 2024. This month we get one more day in February because of Leap year, but here is what we have for the month. This blog aims to provide readers with an overview of the key changes, improvements and issues addressed in openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots throughout the month. Should readers desire a more frequent amount of information about openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, readers are advised to subscribe to the openSUSE Factory mailing list.

New Features and Enhancements

• Linux Kernel: February brought updates to the Linux kernel, progressing through versions 6.7.2 to 6.7.6. These updates focus on enhancing memory management, addressing some security vulnerabilities, and introducing support for new hardware models, ensuring improved compatibility and performance across various systems.
  • Fixes for various issues, includi

Like many open-source projects, the Uyuni Project has a long tradition of fostering community engagement and open dialogue, which is why those who are interested in configuration management should consider joining the Uyuni Community Hours scheduled for Feb. 24 at 15:00 UTC.

Uyuni Community Hours sessions take place on the last Friday of the month. The sessions offer an invaluable opportunity for both the community and the project’s development team to come together.

During these sessions, participants are presented with the latest developments surrounding Uyuni. This open forum allows the community to ask questions, provide feedback and suggest features or enhancements directly to the development team. This proactive approach helps Uyuni to evolve and align with the needs and expectations of its user base.

The se

For our German-speaking retrogaming and Ambermoon fans, here are two podcasts from Stay Forever:

• Stay Forever - Ambermoon
• Stay Forever - Ambermoon-Interview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Ambermoon is a role-playing game developed and published by Thalion Software, released in 1993 for the Amiga. It was the second part of an unfinished trilogy (Amberstar, released in 1992, being the first).