LibreOffice, Firefox, Curl Receive Updates in Tumbleweed

Several packages were updated this week for openSUSE Tumbleweed as was expected after the holiday season. Five snapshots of the rolling release have been delivered so far this week after passing the rigorous testing applied by openQA.

The releases are trending incredibly stable with trending or recorded ratings abovea 96 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The most recent snapshot, 20200112, updated Xfce desktop environment with an update for xfce4-session 4.14.1 and xfce4-settings 4.14.2. Various developer visible changes were made with Google’s 20200101 re2 library for regular expressions updates. GNOME’s application for managing images with a users Flickr account, frogr 1.6, removed the deprecated use of GTimeVal. The open source platform for the scale-out of public and private cloud storage, glusterfs 7.1, fixed storage rebalancing caused by an input error and fixed a memory leak in the glusterfsd process. ImageMagick version 7.0.9.14 optimized the special effects performance of Fx and virglrenderer 0.8.1, which is a project to investigate the possibility of creating a virtual 3D GPU for use inside qemu virtual machines to accelerate 3D rendering, added some patches. The snapshot continued to update packages for KDE Applications 19.12.1 that started in the 20200111 snapshot. Improvements to the scroll wheel speed was made for KDE’s Dolphin, the video editing software Kdenlive had multiple fixes and an adjustment for faster rendering, and obsolete code was removed from Applications’ diagram package umbrello. Most of the KDE Applications packages also updated the Copyright year to 2020.

In addition to the  KDE Applications 19.12.1 packages that began arriving in snapshot 20200111, KDE’s Plasma 5.17.5 also arrived in the snapshot. The updated Plasma fixed a regression in the “Port the pager applet away from QtWidgets” and fixed the drag from Dolphin to a virtual desktop switcher widget. The Plasma NetworkManager also had a fix for a crash when changing advanced IPv4 configurations. The much-anticipated fix for the security vulnerability in Firefox was made with the Mozilla update to Firefox 72.0.1; there were eight Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) fixes in the update from the previous 71 version included in Tumbleweed, but the 72.0.1 fixed the bug that hackers could use to access a computer of anyone using the browser because of incorrect alias information in the IonMonkey JIT compiler. LibreOffice 6.4.0.1 added a patch to fix a button that allowed the wrong ordering of a Qt interface and curl 7.68.0 had a lengthy amount of fixes and changes to include adding a BearSSL vtls implementation for the Transport Layer Security (TLS). openSUSE’s snapper 0.8.8 version had a rewrite of a subpackage from Python to C++ and several YaST packages were updated, which included the fixing of an error during an upgrade if /var/lib/YaST2 was missing when using Btrfs.

Troubleshooting tool sysdig was updated in snapshot 20200110; it fixed a memory leak as well as updated the use of Kubernetes APIs to support version 1.16.vMany GNOME packages were updated to version 3.34.3 and the fwupd 1.3.6 package for updating firmware added a new plugin for working with embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) devices. A drop of python3-setuptools dependencies from rpm-build was made with the update of rpm 4.15.1 and Optimized Inner Loop Runtime Compiler (orc) 0.4.31 fixed various PowerPC issues.

Snapshots 20200109 and 20200108 had a minimal amount of package updates, but the Linux Kernel was updated to version 5.4.7 in the 20200108, which provided a large amount of updates from the previous 5.3.12 kernel Tumbleweed was running. Updates for Btrfs in the kernel were plentiful and there were about a handful of fixes in the kernel for IBM’s s390 and for the file system ext4.