Linux

Hello everyone!

I'd like to announce the start of development and the public availability of what we currently refer to as Leap 16.0 pre-Alpha. Since this is a pre-Alpha version, significant changes may occur, and the final product may look very different in the Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, or General Availability stages. The installer will currently offer you Base, GNOME, and KDE.

Users can get our new Agama install images from get.opensuse.org/leap/16.0. The installer will currently offer you Base, GNOME, and KDE installation.

Leap 16.0 is a traditional distribution and a successor to Leap 15.6 with expected General Availability arriving in the Fall of 2025.

We intend to provide users with sufficient overlap so that 15.6 users can have a smooth migration, just like they're used to from previous releases.

Further details are available on our roadmap. The roadmap is subject to change since we have to respond to any SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 schedule changes.

Users can expect a traditional distribution in a brand new form based on binaries from the latest SLES 16 and community packages from our Factory development codebase.

There is no plan to make a Leap 15.7, however, we still need to deliver previously released community packages from Leap 15 via Package HUB for the upcoming SLES 15 SP7. This is why there are openSUSE:Backports:SLE-15-SP7 project and 15.7 repos in OBS.

The target audience for pre-Alpha are early adopters and contributors who would like to actively be part of this large effort. Adopters should consider booting Agama Media from time to time just to check compatibility with their hardware.

For non-contributor users, I highly recommend waiting until we have a Beta, which is expected in the late Spring of 2025.

Specifically for Agama I highly recommend using github.com/agama-project and collaborating with the YaST team on suggestions and incorporating any changes.

For the rest of the components, the workflow isn't changing; just select version 16.0 for bug submissions.

Feature requests will be reviewed every Monday at a feature review meeting where we'll convert code-o-o requests into JIRA requests used by SUSE Engineering where applicable.

The factory-auto bot will reject all code submit requests against SLES packages with a pointer to code-o-o. You can get a list of all SLFO/SLES packages simply by running osc ls SUSE:SLFO:1.1:Build.

Just for clarification SLFO, SUSE Linux Framework One, is the source pool for SLES 16 and SL Micro 6.X.

I highly recommend using code-o-o to co-ordinate larger community efforts such as Xfce enablement, where will likely need to update some of SLES dependencies. This allows us to share the larger story and better reasoning for related SLES update requests. The list of features is also extremely valuable for the Release article.

For quality control, we have basic test suites based on Agama installations in Leap 16.0 job group. Later, we plan to rework the existing Leap 16.0 Images job group for testing the remaining appliance images.

The project where we maintain community packages is subject to change as we have not fully finalized yet how to make Package HUB; we may use a similar structure with Backports as in 15.3+).

Further test suite enablement is one of the areas where we currently need the most help. Related progress.opensuse.org trackers poo#164141 Leap 16.0 enablement and poo#166562 upgrade from 15.6.

Another area where you can help is new package submissions and related maintainer review of package submissions to Leap 16.0. These reviews make sense as we'd like to check with maintainers whether that software in a given version makes sense for inclusion into Leap 16.0, rather than blindly copying all packages over.

Do you want to help us on this front? Spread the news and feel free to join the #openSUSE_Marketing Telegram channel(https://t.me/openSUSE_Marketing)! https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Marketing_team

Many thanks to all who helped us to reach this point.

Lubos Kocman on behalf of the openSUSE Release team

I've been using volumeicon for a long time, to enable the audio hotkeys on my laptop. But the problem is that if you plug in a USB or bluetooth headset, it doesn't automatically switch to it as the default. You'd have to kill the service and restart it.

So I wrote a script that can offer me all the same functionality, and just mapped my audio hotkeys in my WM.

Thought someone might find the source useful.

Can I use it fully offline?

How do I back it up to USB drive?

What does the day-to-day operation of Pass compared to Keepass look like?

I am trying to learn it as I want to use it, as I think that keepass is bloated for my use case, and I would appreciate any help here.

Hi folks,

I have Alpine Linux installed in an encrypted LUKS partition. I came across this tutorial which shows how to setup a key in a USB drive and when the drive is inserted and the computer booted, the LUKS partition auto-unlocks with the key on the USB drive.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1414617/configure-ubuntu-22-04-zfs-for-automatic-luks-unlock-on-boot-via-usb-drive

I would like to setup the same thing but I do not have Alpine linux installed on ZFS, so I'm looking for ways to adapt the instructions.

So far, what I've done is:

1. I've setup the key on the usb stick and I can unlock the LUKS partition with that key.
2. create a /etc/mkinitfs/features.d/usb-unlock.sh script with the following content:

(the echo to /dev/kmesg was to check whether the script did indeed run at boot by trying to print to the kernel messages but I can't find anything in the kernel messages).

#!/bin/sh

echo "usb-unlock script starting..." > /dev/kmsg

USB_MOUNT="/mnt/my-usb-key" # The USB stick mounting point
LUKS_KEY_FILE="awesome.key"  # The name of your keyfile on the USB stick

# Search for the USB stick with the key
for device in $(ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/*); do
    mount $device $USB_MOUNT 2>/dev/null
    if [ -f "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" ]; then
        # Unlock the LUKS partition
        cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 cryptroot \
            --key-file "$USB_MOUNT/$LUKS_KEY_FILE" && exit 0
    fi
    umount $USB_MOUNT
done
echo "No USB key found, falling back to password prompt." # this message never appears, despite not having found the key on the usb stick

echo "usb-unlock script ending." > /dev/kmsg

3. I added usb-unlock to the features in mkinitfs.conf:

mytestalpine:~# cat /etc/mkinitfs/mkinitfs.conf 
features="ata base ide scsi usb virtio ext4 cryptsetup keymap usb-unlock"

4. run mkinitfs to rebuild the initramfs. Then reboot to test the implementation, which was unsuccessful.

What am I missing / doing wrong? Thank you for your help!

Edit: forgot to add step 4

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/2098933

I wanted a podcast player that looks great and could be used in my region, with Fedora. So I found Musicpod as flatpack and downloaded it. But when I open it, and want to add podcast it says "It looks like your computer isn't connected to the internet" so I can't search. My internet is connected, I use other apps, without problem. Its on Fedora 40, with VPN on. Anything I have to change,or do you recognize this issue?

This is Cage, a Wayland kiosk. A kiosk runs a single, maximized application.

This README is only relevant for development resources and instructions. For a description of Cage and installation instructions for end-users, please see its project page and the Wiki.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.

I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.

Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.

Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).

So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.

I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.

What distribution could meet my needs?

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in KDE Apps”! In case you missed it, we announced this series a few weeks ago, and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps and supplement Nate's This Week in Plasma published yesterday.

This week we had new releases of Tellico and Krita. We are also covering news regarding KDE Connect, the link between all your devices; Kate, the KDE advanced text editor; Itinerary, the travel assistant that helps you plan all your trips; Marble, KDE's map application; and more.

Solution:
hd-idle is the way to go (if you read their README, they explain that most drives don't support idle timers)

I've been looking into spinning down the drives of my NAS, as I use it infrequently and that brings power drain down from ~30W to ~17W.

Problem is, hdparm -S doesn't seem to do anything for these particular drives: if I set it and wait for the appropriate amount of time (eg. 5 seconds if set to 1) the drives are still reported as "active/idle" and power drain doesn't go down.

Both hdparm -y and hdparm -Y work fine, but I don't seem to be able to find settings for them in tlp (probably because they are commands rather than settings?).

Besides the caveats about disks living longer if they are kept spinning, are there reasons why I shouldn't setup a cron job (well, a systemd timer) that runs hdparm -Y every 10 minutes? (for example, could hdparm -y cause errors if run while the drive is being backed up?)

PS: According to hdparm's manpage, -y puts the drive standby mode while -Y puts it into sleep mode. Considering that in my case power drain seems the same either way, should I prefer one or the other?

So I have this weird deja vu situation where I distinctly remember an EXIF viewer tool called exiv4(with a 4) but the only "exiv" tool I can find is exiv2. I can't get over this feeling that I used an EXIF viewer called exiv4, however. I can only find an old Stack Exchange post mentioning it. Does anyone know about an exiv4 tool, or am I just crazy?

The problem (for those who are unaware of it)

Moved it to the end, to keep the focus on the solution.

Solution

GNU is a desktop OS that was never completed. Linux is a desktop OS that was never completed.

GNU/Linux is a hybrid OS.

Musl, etc. are libraries that were never OSes.

• So Alpine would be a Community/Linux OS.
• Debian would be a Community/GNU/Linux OS.
• FreeBSD would be a Community/BSD OS.
• Ubuntu would be an Enterprise Community/GNU/Linux OS.

I was thinking ontologically to resolve this problem. It is often confusing to explain to ordinary people why Linux has so and so differences and so and so commonalities, and then the community gets toxic once you get to whether it's GNU or Linux.

So I think this is a good solution that solves the argument of calling it systemd/Freedesktop/KDE/LightDM/GNU/Linux or the other party that says it's either GNU or Linux alone.

Why can't you include GNU in the Community?

Because GNU was an independent OS, and the project did a lot for software freedom, and it was even pivotal to the success of Linux, yet the community does not honour their wish to mention their names, because of aesthetic problems. GNU has never self-identified as a component collection like Freedesktop.

The problem (for those who are unaware of it)

Not everyone may be aware of this, but from the time GNU and Linux based hybrid operating systems became a thing, there was a debate about what they should be called. An OS has a kernel and the userland. Both GNU and Linux were independent operating systems, both of which were never completed.

GNU was a project by FSF under Richard M. Stallman to replace the proprietary UNIX OS. Linux was a hobbyist project by Linux Torvalds to make an OS that would run on the Intel 80386 CPU, while BSD/386 was facing a lawsuit from AT&T for releasing proprietary UNIX source code. GNU was planning to make a microkernel based OS, and it was planning to develop the kernel slowly, while Linus started Linux from the kernel side, with a monolithic architecture.

Since Linux was free software and could run directly on the new hardware, it gained the support of the hacker community, who added patches to the GNU userland to make it work with Linux. But when Linux finally became an OS with the help of GNU, the hacker community said they only care about Linux, not the GNU programs, and gave no recognition to GNU.

Because of this, Stallman asked the distributions to be called GNU/Linux, and that sparked flame wars because of how it is bad to pronounce, and how a distribution has many components beyond just GNU, and that therefore the kernel that runs on the hardware is what should describe the OS, and further several ad-hominem attacks on the personal life and behaviour of Richard Stallman.

Eventually, the name Linux caught on, but sympathizers of GNU are requested to call it GNU/Linux. This continues to be an unresolved, but sidelined dispute that seems unfair to GNU, especially considering most "Linux programs" are actually dependent on GNU GLIBC, and won't run on the other Musl LIBC based systems. Anytime someone mentions it, because there is no easy solution to it, it turns into a flame war.

ZLUDA is a compatibility layer for Nividia’s CUDA on other processors

Yesterday I tried to install the latest NVIDIA drivers on my Linux Mint laptop (version 21.3, Cinnamon Edition) and my Driver Manager said that, since i have Secure Boot enabled, I had to create a Mok key for my drivers so I could use them with Secure Boot. So I created a password and restarted my PC. However, I didn't know what to do in the MokManagement screen, so i turned off my PC and then turned it on again to be able to start over. After turning my PC on and off a few times to try a few different buttons thqt I ended up not understanding, I looked up a tutorial and tried to follow it. But when i clicked "Enroll MOK" this time, instead of showing "View Keys", it asked if I wanted to delete my existing keys.

What should I do to get this to work? I turned off my PC after this and switched back to the open source drivers because, again, I had no idea what to do. Did I fuck up my drivers? Can I try to redo the process to make it work? What about the extra keys I created? I'm really confused. Thanks in advance.

I was setting up my laptop for traveling and adding Wireguard VPN configuration.

The Wireguard config generated by router only contains IPv4 address (10.0.5.x), and while testing the VPN to my surprise "what is my ip" websites can find my IPv6 address (I USB tethered mobile connection to my laptop).

It looks like NetworkManager does nothing about IPv6 connection if VPN doesn't have IPv6 settings, which is bad for road warrior type of VPN configuration.

Is there an easy toggle to turn of IPv6 if VPN is connected and otherwise? Or is only option to disable all IPv6 no matter what?

Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.

What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?

Visit about:compat in your firefox. I find it insane that these exist.

Edit: I've learned that this is part of the webcompat system addon developed by Mozilla and other contributors. I see why this is beneficial default behavior, since FF has no chance of getting enough market share to matter more if things are broken.

However, this behavior is too intrusive for my taste. For example this injection: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/8a4afb4d34f8/browser/extensions/webcompat/injections/js/bug1472075-bankofamerica.com-ua-change.js is basically just to silence annoying user reports.

Also, Every site FF pretends to be a different UA on is artificially reducing FF market share data.

I'm curious what the difference is between Balenca etcher and Ventoy for writing isos to a live USB for distro hopping purposes. I see both recommended in fourms. Is there any advantage to using one over the other? Are they both equally safe/secure?

I'm also curious about trying out new distros. I've been using LMDE for about a year now and it's been fine, but I want to expand my knowledge and see whether LMDE is my favorite distro or not. I'm not the most well versed in Linux and don't have any prior programming experience so a beginner/mid level distro is what I'm looking for. I want something I can test out without connecting to WiFi (so not arch).

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.