14 DAY TRIAL // openSUSE Project's Dominique Leuenberger shares today a short review of the third week of 2018 for users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system, informing them about the latest software updates.
Four snapshots were released this week for OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, which is a rolling release GNU/Linux distribution where users install once and receive updates forever. Probably the most important change added in these snapshots was related to the graphics stack, which was updated to Mesa 17.3.2, a release that neede to be split into two parts to improve the build performance of the distribution.
"In order to improve the distro build performance, Mesa was split into two parts to be built. Users that updated their system using “–no-recommends” did not get Mesa-dri auto-installed, resulting in the graphical system possibly not starting up. Simply install Mesa-dri for now manually (dependency chain fixes are underway)," said Dominique Leuenberger in the mailing list announcement.
Besides that, openSUSE Tumbleweed received the Linux 4.14.13 kernel with some patches against the Meltdown security vulnerability, as well as KDE Applications 17.12.1, OpenSSH 7.6p1, Squid 4.0.22, BIND 9.11.2, RPM 4.14, mpfr 4.0, Xen 4.10.0, Wireshark 2.4.4, ModemManager 1.6.12, librsvg 2.42.0, btrfsprogs 4.14.1, MariaDB 10.2.12, python-Pillow 5.0.0, icu4j 60.2, python-rpm 4.14.0, cpupower 4.15, and GNOME Software 3.26.4.
KDE Plasma 5.12.0 coming soon
In early February, openSUSE Tumbleweed users will also receive the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS desktop environment, which should debut officially on February 6, 2018. Other than that, it looks like the development team decided to completely drop SunRPC support for the GNU C Library (Glibc). Dominique Leuenberger says that TI-RPC support will replace SunRPC, with IPv6 support built-in.
Until then, openSUSE Tumbleweed users will receive the recently released Linux 4.14.14 kernel and KDE Frameworks 5.42.0 software suite in a snapshot that's coming next week, which will also include Ruby 2.5. All users are urged to update their installations as soon as possible to receive the new software and security updates mentioned in this article and keep updating to new snapshots.