New Kernel, HarfBuzz Versions update in Tumbleweed

Consecutive openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been rolling out to users each day this week.

Among the few major version releases this week are the 5.19 Linux Kernel and the 5.1 HarfBuzz version, which both arrived in snapshot 20220810.

Snapshot 20220810 also brought tons of other packages. Highlights being discussed about the release of kernel 5.19 point to increased arm support, TCP improvements related to larger IPv6 package sizes, and graphical improvements for Intel and AMD GPUs. The text shaping engine harfbuzz 5.1 fixed regressions in bitmap font rendering, improved support for some Arabic and Hebrew fonts and improved the handling of command line options. The hplip 3.22.6 package added support for several new printers and added support for new distros that were recently released. There were Italian and Serbian translation changes in the gnome-software 42.4 update, which also fixed detail text when it contains markup. An update of webkit2gtk3 2.36.6 fixed the handling of touchpad scrolling on GTK4 builds as well as several crashes and rendering issues. Other packages to update in the snapshot were postfix 3.7.2, ModemManager 1.18.10, mutt 2.2.7 and more.

The open-source antivirus engine ClamAV updated to the 0.103.7 version in snapshot 20220809. The updated package allows for the skipping of files in solid archives and upgrades the UnRAR library to version 6.1.7. An update of the Remote Desktop Protocol package freerdp 2.8.0 backported several items and prevent out of bound reads for ffmpeg. The kernel-firmware package provided several Intel Bluetooth updates and added firmware for audio amplifier chip Cirrus CS35L41. Also in the update was the atomic updates package transactional-update, which transitioned from release candidate to the actual 4.0.0 version. The package used in MicroOS added a method to delete a snapshot and changed the “List” method of snapshot D-Bus. An update of yast2-trans enhanced several Swedish translations. A majority of the remaining packages in the snapshot were RubyGems updates.

While the successor of snapshot 20220808 had RubyGems updates, this snapshot had mostly Python Package Index updates. Among the updated PyPI package were python-httpx 0.23.0, python310-pyparsing 3.0.9 and python-kiwisolver 1.4.4. An update of python-setuptools went from the 58.3.0 version to 63.2.0; this newer python-setuptools included performance optimization, removed some packaging dependencies and fixed some broken functionality appearing in version 60.8.0. Two other important packages to update in the snapshot were virt-manager 4.1.0, which refreshed and dropped patches, and rpm 4.17.1, which fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; CVE-2021-3521 was a flaw in RPM’s signature functionality.

Snapshots 20220807 and 20220806 both had several RubyGems updated. The 20220807 snapshot updated the boot processing package plymouth to a 22.02.122 version, which updated a script for source-code beautifier uncrustify. Another major version to arrive this week was an update of hwinfo 22.0. The hardware information tool improved treatment of NVME devices, fixed a compiler warning and added a new NVME hardware class.

KDE fans received an update in snapshot 20220805. KDE’s Plasma 5.25.4 arrived in the snapshot and added keyboard navigation support in the Plasma Desktop. The power consumption controller PowerDevil updated battery notifications and now shows a notification when AC voltage is plugged in when the battery drains. GNOME’s text editor gedit 42.2 fixed text cut off situations and updated translations. An aws-cli 1.25.45 update added requirements in the spec file for setup.py. Almost a year’s worth of updates arrived in the libostree 2022.5 version. The version provided fixes for s390x SE, Application Programming Interface additions and fixed Rust bindings.