Update to Kernel 4.14 Among This Week’s Tumbleweed Snapshots

The past week brought new features to openSUSE Tumbleweed with a snapshot that included Linux Kernel 4.14. New features like HDMI Consumer Electronics Control support for Raspberry Pi and the merging of Heterogeneous Memory Management to the mainline this Long-Term Support Kernel are promising.

openSUSE’s rolling distribution produced four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week and brought many other goodies.

Topping off the latest snapshot, 20171121, was a service release of mono-core 5.4.1. Mono,  which is the open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime, provided a handful of bugfixes. Code-cleaning in setup.py was made available with the update to python-ldap 2.5.2. The administration and debugging tool for the XFS file system had an enormous amount of updates with the xfsprogs 4.13.1 version, which has new extent lookup helpers.

The 20171120 snapshot, which provided Linux Kernel 4.14, had updated versions for the IP lookup program GeoIP and the expat library. GeoIP 1.6.11 provided a fix for the use of a NULL pointer when opening a corrupt database with GeoIP_open and expat 2.2.5 provided several fixes including a security fix. Text editor GNU nano introduced the ability to record and replay keystrokes with version 2.9.0 and python-setuptools 36.7.2 fixed duplicate test discovery on Python 3.

KDE users received KDE Applications 17.08.3 this week in the 20171117 and 20171116 snapshots. The newest applications from the KDE community include bugfixes include improvements to Kontact, Ark, Gwenview, KGpg, KWave, Okular and Spectacle. Okular no longer crashes after certain rotation jobs and archiver Ark preserves file modification dates when extracting ZIP archives. The file system utilities for maintaining the ext2, ext3 and ext4 file systems, e2fsprogs, updated to version 1.43.7 and fixes of error handling in journal replay as well as updated translations. The replacement of the NIS library that used to be in GlibC, libnsl 1.2.0, made the code more portable.

Mozilla’s Firefox Quantum 57.0, which has a redesigned interface, arrived in snapshot 20171116. The new browser takes full advantage of the processing power in modern devices, according to the release notes. In addition to the multiple updated to Applications 17.08.3 released in snapshot 20171116, KDE Framworks 5.40.0 also arrived in the snapshot and provided serveral functionality fixes. Among other packages updated in the snapshot were python-jedi 0.11.0, python-kiwi 9.11.17 and rsyslog 8.30.0, which now handles (JSON) variables in case-insensitive way and fixes a memory corruption during configuration parsing.