Tumbleweed Goes Astronomical

Astronomers using openSUSE Tumbleweed received some major software enhancements in a snapshot this week and the four snapshots released also addressed some architecture issues and critical bug fixes.

The snapshots also brought new versions of the Linux Kernel, git, GNU Compiler Collection and mpg123.

The most recent snapshot to be released, snapshot 20171001, provided an update to the programming tool binutils 2.29.1. An update of the branch head of GNU Compiler Collection 7 disabled a patch to verify a test case. The network authentication protocol krb5 1.15.2 fixed a Key Distribution Center (KDC) Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability caused by unset status strings; Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE-2017-11368).

Snapshot 20170929 updated ImageMagick 7.0.7.4 and fixed numerous memory leaks. The Linux Kernel was updated to version 4.13.4 and made several changes, which included fixes for PowerPC and S390. The KBD Project, which offers the package that helps with managing the Linux console, virtual terminals, keyboards and more, received an update to kbd 2.0.4. Git 2.14.2 provided various fixes for output correctness. An updated version of the Router Advertisement Daemon to radvd 2.17 added systemd service file. Several bugs were fixed with the update of php7 7.1.10 including bug 75093 that affected curl detection for OpenSSL, which was not detected. A proper fix for the xrpnt overflow problems were made for the MPEG Audio Player and decoder library mpg123 with version 1.25.7.

The 20170928 snapshot updated the had an enormous amount of configuration updates for the new version of aaa_base. The 14.335 version of the installation-images-Kubic package, which is related to the Container as a Service Platform based on openSUSE and kubernetes or Project Kubic, included all mouse drivers in its newest version. Astronomers using openSUSE Tumbleweed will be excited to see the updated package of libindi 1.5.0, which added several new drivers and detectors like the  Digital Setting Circles drivers, which is like GPS for a telescope, and Software-Defined-Radio drivers for radio astronomy. Both updates of the util-linux and util-linux-systemd packages to version 2.30.1 dropped an upstream patch.

Beginning the week, snapshots 20170927 brought three new major versions . Spec-cleaner 1.0.0 fixed some code-block error detection and both yast2-apparmor and yast2-ruby-bindings packages updated to version 4.0.0 to avoid at version numbering problem. Other YaST package will soon jump to a YaST 4 version. The open source video editor for Linux Pitivi added many performance improvements with version 0.99 and cups-filters 1.17.6 is now compatible with newer versions of Poppler above version 0.58.