cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/37281970

Believe it or not, an unexpected conflict has arisen in the openSUSE community with its long-time supporter and namesake, the SUSE company.

At the heart of this tension lies a quiet request that has stirred not-so-quiet ripples across the open source landscape: SUSE has formally asked openSUSE to discontinue using its brand name.

Richard Brown, a key figure within the openSUSE project, shared insights into the discussions that have unfolded behind closed doors.

Despite SUSE’s request’s calm and respectful tone, the implications of not meeting it could be far-reaching, threatening the symbiotic relationship that has benefited both entities over the years.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17607748

Slowroll, which has a more modest update cadence than Tumbleweed, is gaining acceptance as a balance between the rapid updates of Tumbleweed’s rolling releases and the traditional Leap release.

Slowroll is nearly ready for full deployment and the development team has been working diligently to prepare the next version bump, with planned updates scheduled for July 9, August 9 and Sept. 9. These updates are expected to maintain a consistent monthly cadence to ensure users have timely and stable updates.

One of the critical updates pulled in will include the latest OpenSSH CVE fixes, which have already been made available in Tumbleweed. This fix enhances the security of Slowroll & ensure that it remains a robust and reliable distribution for users.

Highlighted Features of Slowroll

Balanced Update Cadence: Slowroll offers a monthly rolling update cycle that provides users with the latest features and security updates while ensuring stability through extensive testing and validation.

Beta Phase: Slowroll is now in the Beta phase, indicating its near readiness for full deployment. Users can expect a reliable experience with continuous improvements.

Continuous Improvement: The distribution integrates big updates approximately every month, alongside continuous bug fixes and security patches, ensuring a secure and up-to-date system.

Statistics and Status

According to the latest statistics available on the Slowroll Stats page:

Tumbleweed had 2813 updated packages since the last version bump

Slowroll received 1316 updates from 871 different packages and only 339 updated rpms are Slowroll-specific builds

Origins and Purpose

Slowroll, introduced in 2023, was designed as an experimental distribution. Its primary goal is to offer a slower rolling release compared to Tumbleweed, thus enhancing stability without compromising on access to new features. The distribution continuously evolves with big updates integrated approximately every month, supported by regular bug fixes and security updates.

It’s crucial to understand that Slowroll is not intended to replace Leap. Instead, it provides an alternative for users who desire more up-to-date software at a slower pace than Tumbleweed but faster than Leap.

If you try Slowroll, have a lot of fun - rolling… slowly!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11932658

The openSUSE community is pleased to announce that it will have short sessions aimed at encouraging people on how to contribute to the project.

A group of volunteers will present short 15-minute sessions that are streamed and/or recorded on openSUSE’s YouTube channel that are aimed at teaching people about packaging, using the Open Build Service, creating tests for openQA and other development areas.

The first session about “Basic use of OBS/osc using a version bump as an example” is set to begin tomorrow, on Feb. 15 at 21:00 UTC.

Another talk, “Packaging Guidelines (Patch Policies) and Submission of New Packages”, is scheduled for Feb. 27 at 16:00 UTC.

More sessions are expected to be scheduled for future dates.

The sessions are listed on the openSUSE Calendar; look for the Contribution Workshop sessions marked in orange.

Those who are interested in presenting should fill in the blank area for future sessions listed in the email about the events.

Giving a session is a great way to give back to the community and provides opportunities to teach others skills and knowledge about open-source development.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10523858

We currently have a generic port for Nvidia Tegra 2/3/4 devices using U-Boot as bootloader, supporting 9 different devices at the time of writing. This wouldn't have been possible without the work of Svyatoslav Ryhel (also known as Clamor), who has been working on Tegra devices for the last few years and is also a maintainer of Nvidia Tegra SoCs in U-Boot.

The wiki page has a list of supported devices.

Svyatoslav ported most of these devices without owning one, just relying on testing from people. This means anyone having such a device can reach him and eventually will be able to replace the old proprietary vendor bootloader with U-Boot.

OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, the long-awaited release of the independent, community controlled distribution’s fixed point release branch (as opposed to its rolling release branch), has been released.

This is expected to be the last major release featuring the Plasma 5 desktop.

In the 1.5 years since the previous fixed point release, OMLx 4.3, many things have changed.

Among others, the new release is based on kernel 6.6 LTS (kernel-desktop-6.6.2 - 6.7.0-rc2 is also available), Mesa 23.3.0-rc4, Qt 5.15.11+KDE Patches and 6.6.0, KDE Frameworks 5.112, KDE Gear 23.08.3, Plasma 5.27.9.1, LibreOffice 7.6.3, and other current Open Source software.

Outside of component updates, this is the first fixed point release that merges the / and /usr filesystems.

All recent security vulnerabilities (such as the frequently reported ones affecting glibc and curl) have been addressed as soon as relevant patches have been available.

We strongly recommend to all users of OMLx 4.x releases to proceed with a fresh installation of 5.0.

People using OpenMandriva ROME (Rolling release) or Cooker don’t need to update. All new features provided in 5.0 are already available on the rolling release branches and have been tested extensively there.

New variants of the distribution - such as a server centric spin and versions for various ARM boards, will follow shortly - we’re still working on the best way to bring features like a fully open graphics stack even on the Mali G610 GPU found, for example, in Rockchip 3588 boards. Current snapshots are promising.

A RISC-V port is also in progress, but will likely not be ready for a fixed point release before 6.0.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, in the backgrounds section we have included a parade of the most significant OpenMandriva wallpapers.

Last month I upgraded my computer with new parts. I kept my old DVD drive that I mainly use to rip CDs. I have now however run into an issue that has stumped me. When I tried to rip some used CDs I bought the resulting FLACs had a terrible crackle, making them unlistenable. So I started looking into the issue and tried different ripping programs and CD players. Trying to play a CD also produces a crackle with most players. Some players can't even see my CD drive. I have installed rippers and players from distro repos and flatpaks and it makes no difference. I have even tried booting into live environments of different distros and the problem persists.

Now, the real kicker for me is that VLC (from flathub or distro repos) plays and rips the CDs with no issues. VLC is not a great tool for my purposes however. EDIT: Kaffeine flatpak also plays CDs without issue.

There are no error messages (aside from some players which can't even see the drive) to go off of. Google has failed me. CD error correction makes no difference, just makes ripping terribly slow. Some attempts to fiddle with pipewire also produced no result. Encoders work fine when encoding from different sources, so they are probably not the problem, and the same issue happens when playing the CDs.

On my old setup this worked fine. I can also watch DVDs without trouble.

Does anyone have any idea where to go from here? If it wasn't for VLC I'd think this is a hardware issue, but now I've no real idea. I'm currently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who took their time to comment and make suggestions. I have been unable to make any headway into solving this. My uneducated guess is that this is some weird edge interaction between the optical drive, motherboard, and libcdio/cdparanoia. Purely speculating, this may be an issue with buffering/caching. It seems to me that applications that rely on libvlc do not have this issue. I tried using a portable USB DVD drive and it worked fine, as at least there was no crackle. I really don't know how to proceed from here, so I'll probably just use a USB drive for now. A commenter suggested getting a separate SATA card to bypass the SATA ports on the motherboard, and that sounds plausible, but I haven't tried it. Any explanations are welcome!