Today, the openSUSE project has published Release Candidate 2 of openSUSE
12.2, with a final release targetted for mid September.
In the two weeks since the previous release candidate, a flurry of last minute
fixes have arrived, mostly in higher level packages as the basic stack has
been stabilised and locked. Read on for detailed coverage of the changes.
In a late change to the layout of the release, it was decided to move many
manuals and books off the DVD medium to save space. These are now part of a
'books' pattern which can be installed separately.
Smaller low level fixes were made to systemd, kiwi, clicfs and udev. The
kernel firmware package and PCI ID lists were updated with support for the
latest hardware. GRUB2 saw fixes and a branding update for its terminal views.
Mesa was updated to the latest version.
Polkit privileges were relaxed slightly to allow all users to install online
updates, when logged in. Several errors in PackageKit's zypp backend
affecting the GNOME client were resolved.
As security issues become apparent in the software versions to be shipped in
12.2 become known, fixes are proactively applied. This includes openjpeg and
tiff libraries. libjpeg-turbo and libgadu received minor version updates, and
crashes in libimobiledevice and gphoto2 were fixed. GPhoto2 also received the
latest USB IDs for PTP cameras and devices.
The base system saw some cleanups to the default filesystem package, including
the removal of legacy symlinks to removable disk devices from very old
versions of SUSE Linux, as well as many fixes in bind, patch updates and a
security fix to bash, systemd improvements were made to autofs and rsync, the
SSL feature of ntp was unbroken, and an AppArmor profile was added to colord.
NetworkManager received a patch to enhance certificate checking in enterprise
networks. Plymouth, the new splash screen in 12.2, had a version bump and
received many minor fixes. IPv6 support was enabled in avahi.
Mysql had an important bugfix that caused excessive disk usage on UPDATE
queries, security fixes came to apache2, systemd support was fixed in tomcat,
and postfix and kvm both saw minor version updates.
YaST fixes were relatively minor: the bootloader utilities saw a few GRUB2
fixes, including support for adding failsafe kernel parameters, and the ntp
tool had a couple of fixes including one that the ntp service is actually
started when configured to do so.
Developer platform updates came to gcc, llvm, python (2) and php5. Python 3
was updated to version 3.2.3.
The intel video driver was updated to version 2.19.0, enabling new SNA and
GLAMOR backends, and including many fixes to the default UXA backend. A
critical bug was found and fixed that caused gnome-shell to crash after resume
or suspend.
lxdm, the LXDE display manager, received a bugfix preventing excessive CPU
usage. A patch was added to XFCE's panel clock applet to show a calendar
popup, and its netload applet was updated.
KDE 3 was patched for udisks2 to properly unmount optical devices when a
physical eject button is pressed.
KDE 4 had a long-running mail duplication bug when using local filtering
fixed, and USB sticks are now mounted with flush instead of async options,
preventing an error on unmount when a long-running write is still in progress.
GNOME saw many bugfixes across its packages, including inkscape, rhythmbox,
Eye of Gnome, gnumeric, evolution, gnote, rednotebook, vinagre, virt-manager,
texmaker, and gnome-screensaver. Gnome Shell was updated to 3.4.2 with many
fixes, gtk went to version 3.4.4, and the accountsservice backend for Gnome
Online Accounts also saw many improvements. Tap-to-click and disabling the
touchpad while typing were set by default. Additional translated
documentation was added to Gnucash.
LibreOffice got a version bump, and its artwork and branding was updated to
the final release versions.
Finally, the translation teams have been hard at work and those have been
integrated in 12.2, and the multinationalisation developers made fixes to
input methods.
Of course you're wondering how you can help. This can start with testing. Go
to http://software.opensuse.org/developer/ , download the latest RC and try it
out on your system! You can then check the most annoying bugs
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Most_annoying_bugs_12.2_dev
to see if your problems are there, if not, you can see the list of bugs
and/or file a new one in Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/query.cgi?classification=openSUSE&field0-0-0=op…
&type0-0-0=substring&value0-0-0=openSUSE
If the bug you find is very serious, add it to the list of annoying bugs!
If you are a packager (or want to be one!) there is of course also plenty to
do. Fixing bugs in packages is a nice way of learning the ways of packaging
(see the Packaging portal for documentation:
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Packaging ). You can read about how to do this:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Factory via a simple set
of steps which in openSUSE are commonly known as 'BURP-ing':
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2011/05/16/have-you-burped-yet-today/
We'd like to thank everyone working on openSUSE for being so cool. As we're
focussing on 12.2, no top-ten factory contributors this time but we might
start releasing that number more frequently in the future ;-)
--
Will Stephenson, openSUSE Board, Booster, KDE Developer
SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284
(AG Nürnberg)
Maxfeldstraße 5
90409 Nürnberg
Germany
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