Frameworks, Gear, Pipewire Update in Tumbleweed

There was no slowing down of snapshots this week as new software continues to flow with daily openSUSE Tumbleweed releases. Tumbleweed went seven for seven this week!

Just two updates were in the 20211214 snapshot. The remote accessing package remmina 1.4.22 provided fixes for freerdp3 compatibility, and remmina also had a fix for a crash if the main window is closed. The libcap-ng 0.7.11 package, which analyzes a system for apps with too many privileges, removed unneeded rules.

Among the many packages that arrive in snapshot 20211213 were KDE’s Gear 21.12.0 and Frameworks 5.89.0 versions. Gear 21.12.0 had some Dolphin file manager enhancements like a Ctrl + i filter feature that brings up a box under the main panel, which added a new Detailed View feature through a right click on an empty space; select the View Mode > Details from the pop up menu. The screenshot application Spectacle gives KDE users a cleaner look of images they drag and drop from Spectacle’s preview panel to Dolphin or to an online image storage site for sharing. The Kdenlive video editor from Gear improved the motion tracking tools; Just use the box in the monitor to cover the area to track, click Analyse in the effects panel, and have fun! The video editor also has a new audio effect that removes background noises from recordings; the Noise Suppressor allows for a voice grab in the audio effects tab to be dropped onto an audio track for clean up. Frameworks 5.89.0 had a considerable amount of bug fixes for the Breeze Icons, which included the addition of a missing kmail breeze icon. The KContacts fixed address formatting for country-only addresses and deprecated countryToISO/ISOToCountry in favor of KCountry. Both KIO and Kirigami had some changes; the latter package lets the escape key close and push the dialog layers. The application library exo updated to version 4.16.3 and fixed compilation warnings; the package that is targeted at application development for Xfce also added typecheck verification to prevent a GTK bug warning. The mpg123 1.29.3 package fixed typos and added a note about equalizer frequency bands in the man page. The updated 370 version of xterm improved performance over slow connections and suppressed the loading of italic font in a few places when the colorITmode is enabled. Other packages to update were yast2-bootloader 4.4.10 and yast2-storage-ng 4.4.23, which added support for mount options use with libstorage-ng to determine whether a efibootmgr is available.

The second update of the week for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture package arrived in snapshot 20211212. The alsa 1.2.6.1 version fixed the configuration for device parsing. Several alsa changes were made in the kernel-source 5.15.7 update. The kernel also had several KVM fixes to include a shadow nested paging that does not have Protection Keys for Userspace. Since there is now a require dependency, wireplumber became the session manager for pipewire 0.3.40 in the snapshot; “when in doubt, the suggested package is selected,” according to the changelog. The python-cryptography package updated from version 3.4.8 to 36.0.0, which went through a version number change in September. The new Python Package Index has the entire X.509 layer written in Rust; this allows alternate asymmetric key implementations that can support cloud key management services or hardware security modules provided they implement the necessary interface. About 10 more updates arrived in the snapshot.

Quite a few GNOME packages received a version bump in snapshot 20211211. While there were translation updates for gnome-maps 41.2, gnome-software 41.2 fixed a crash when processing age ratings and reloaded application details only when the items were not installing/removing the application. The gupnp 1.4.1 package fixed a regression in the async deprecated Application Programming Interfaces. Mozilla Firefox 95.0 updated in the snapshot, and fixed some Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. The release appears to be a nod at Windows 95 now that the browser is available in the Microsoft Store. A fix in the use of the default log writer with journald namespaces was made in the glib2 2.70.2 update. Other packages to update in the snapshot were hwdata 0.354, FireEye’s hxtools 20211204, LibreOffice 7.2.4.1, Node.js, 16.13.1, vte 0.66.2, yast2-installation 4.4.28 and more.

Three packages were updated in snapshot 20211210. An added method to disconnect proxy signals was made in the gnome-remote-desktop 41.2 update; the package, which can also be used for screencasting, made warning messages a little bit more explicit. The Linux laptop battery Optimizing package tlp 1.4.0 renamed “Battery Features” to “Battery Care” and introduced plugins to support Battery Care for non-ThinkPads; ASUS, Huawei, LG, Lenovo and Samsung are the first to benefit from the plugins. The kernel headers were updated in the linux-glibc-devel 5.15 release.

Most of the updates in snapshot 20211209 were PyPi updates with the exception of the libffi 3.4.2 and nvme-cli 1.16 updates. Snapshot 20211208 provided the first asla 1.2.6 update, which improved the support of multiple formats in the Pulse-code modulation. The sudo 1.9.8p2 package fixed a few minor memory leaks and sudo_logsrvd now only sends a log ID for the first command of a session, so there is no need to send the log ID for each sub-command. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot like screen reader orca 41.1, soundtouch 2.3.1 and yast2-journal 4.4.1, which is preparing code for Ruby3 along with many other YaST packages.