Kernels Becoming Tumbleweed Norm, Grub 2 Gets Release Candidate

Two Linux Kernels per week in openSUSE Tumbleweed is becoming the norm as the rolling release is providing daily snapshots of new software that are closely aligned with upstream development.

Kernel 4.9.8 and 4.9.9 were released in the 20170208 and 20170212 snapshots respectively and the later brought a fix for a Btrfs system call.

Beside the 4.9.8 Kernel in the first week’s snapshot, 20170208, Mesa users will be happy to see version 13.0.4 had a specfile fix for build configuration for ARM, Power PC and s390 architectures. Gimp 2.8.20 made the color selection of the paint tool more robust and updated translations for a number of European languages. Several other packages were updated in the repositories from this snapshot and python3-kiwi 9.0.2 and vim 8.0.311 provided the most fixes.

Snapshot 20170209 brought the first major release of libosinfo (Operating System information database) in Tumbleweed with version 1.0.0, which focuses on metadata about operating systems and provides a single place to manage it in a virtualized environment.  F Virtual Window Manager (FVWM) 2.6.7 added a handful of new features and removed several other features like  GTK 1.x support.

Plasma 5.9.1 came in the 20170211 snapshot and AppArmor 2.11.0 update provided multiple improvements and fixes, one of which fixed an issue that Kernel 4.8 and above affected Apparmor policy enforcement. Libssh hackers made use of their time at FOSDEM and squashed bugs, which came in the libssh 0.7.4.

Both 20170213 and 20170214 snapshots provided updates for KDE Applications 16.12.2. GNU Compiler Collection 6.3.1 provides from architectural fixes and grub2 now has a Release Candidate 1, which came in the most recent snapshot.