The weekly review: LibreOffice 5 in Tumbleweed, Leap trends, landing page almost ready

Tumbleweed had four snapshots since our last weekly review, upgraded to a newer Kernel and has the latest LibreOffice 5, while Leap’s roadmap was published and version 42 is a trending topic on the Factory mailing list.

Tumbleweed - TW

Tumbleweed 20150807 snapshot last Friday gave many users an update they had been anticipating for a while; LibreOffice 5!

The updated version gives users improved user interface and design. LibreOffice 5 has a new AutoCorrect extension to simplify Emoji and other Unicode character input using de facto standard Emoji shortcodes, and other keywords surrounded by colons. It is now possible to crop an image with the mouse. Crop image, Format ▸ Image ▸ Crop menu entry and Graphic toolbar.

LensFun updated to 0.3.1 and improved performance when used with 32-bit float image buffers and introduced automated testing. It has new interchangeable lenses for Canon Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus Panasonic, Samsung and Sony models.

In the 20150810 snapshot, the Linux Kernel was updated to 4.1.4, which is trailing the newest 4.1.5 stable kernel, but expect the newest stable kernel soon.

Leap

Since the announcement of the Leap roadmap, it’s had several email topics circulating on the Factory mailing lists. Some people are wondering what packages have been accepted into Leap. The list of packages is more than 6,000 and more are expected.

A list that updates every six hours shows packages in Factory, which are not yet in Leap. Package maintainers need to make a conscious effort to submit items in Factory to Leap if they want them in 42.1.

Maintainers and developers submitting their packages to Leap are asked to add the information to the Leap Features template on the wiki. This will highlight new features and versions in Leap and, if you email ddemaio@suse.de, I can highlight some of these new items in news.opensuse.org.

Leap 42.1 aligns with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1, which recently released a Beta. The source code from SP1 will be included in the second Milestone, which is expected to be released on Sept. 4. Leap and SLE share a common core, which aids in getting your contributions in future releases of SLE.

Landing Page

The new landing page for openSUSE is nearly finished. There are 17 languages for the new landing page and the page will help people unfamiliar with openSUSE a better understand the differences between Leap and Tumbleweed. The page will develop more as time goes on and contributors are more than welcome to refine it. Getting better information out to the public about the project is a step in the right direction.

FrOSCon

Next weekend we will be at the Free and Open Source Software Conference at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. The conference takes place August 22 – 23 at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Grantham-Allee 20, 53757 Sankt Augustin. Come see us at our booth and watch the excellent presentations that will be at this FOSS event.