Sync Updates for Week 28, 2024

EbonJaeger

Heya folks! It's time to bring you another news update!

Our Linux kernel (current branch) has been updated to 6.9.8. As we stated in our announcement post, the kernel patches for AppArmor confinement support for Snaps have been dropped. We have added details and information to our Help Center to assist with migrating away from snaps. If you use snaps, you may wish to check it out. The unsnap program has been added to the repository for ease of migration. Details about how to use it are also in the Help Center article.

Firefox has been updated to 128.0 (already cherry-picked for security fixes). With this update, you can now translate selections of text between languages using the context menu. It now also supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which aims to be an alternative to the current status quo of user tracking for ad attribution. The full release notes can be found here.

GNOME has been updated to version 46.3, bringing improvements to GNOME Shell, Mutter, Nautilus, and more. This release features improved performance when using multiple virtual monitors, iBus support in pop-ups, hardware-accelerated rending when running headless, and an Activities Overview animation when windows overlap workspaces. The full changelog is available here.

font-manager was updated to 0.9.0. This version switches the UI from GTK3 to GTK4+LibAdwaita. Digikam was also updated to 8.3.0, going to Qt 6.

The NVIDIA GLX driver (nvidia-glx-driver) has been updated to 550.100. This fixes a bug that caused OpenGL triple-buffering to behave like double-buffering. In related news, XWayland has been updated to 24.1.1, which should resolve a bunch of issues for NVIDIA users. Also, KWin has been patched to disable triple-buffering for NVIDIA users to resolve some issues in 6.1; the Plasma developers will re-enable support once a proper fix has been found.

Python compiler cython has been updated to the latest in the 3.x series, 3.0.10. This work was done by @androidnisse, and it marks their first major rebuild contribution! Congratulations, and thank you! :smiley:

We have a few new additions to the repository this week. For our XFCE users, xfdashboard is now available. xfdashboard provides a GNOME Shell and macOS Exposé like dashboard for XFCE. It can be configured to run with any keyboard shortcut and when executed provides an overview of applications currently open enabling the user to switch between different applications.

XFDashboard preview screenshot

For any Qt application developers, GammaRay has been added to the Solus repository. GammaRay is a software introspection tool, enabling you to observe and manipulate your program at runtime. This is a powerful development and debugging tool when working with Qt applications. Our package bundles the Qt6 prober with the client; if you want to use this with Qt5 applications, you will also need to install gammray-probe-qt5.

GammaRay object inspector

zlib-ng has replaced zlib on Solus this week. zlib-ng is much more maintainable for its developers, and it comes with a nice speed boost. Many programs that interact with archives should be faster now, as zlib is used by so many of them. Here are the benchmarks from initial testing last year:

pngbench Before: 176.908669ms | After: 136.276966ms testfile
zlib_test Before: 730.7 ms | After: 427.3 ms

For a bit of levity, fortune-mod is now in the repository. It is derived from the NetBSD fortune program that displays a random fortune from a database of possible fortunes.

dosbox-staging has been included to replace the old dosbox program. DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox, retaining compatibility with existing configurations, and adding a bunch of new and advanced features.

In more gaming news, SSL/TLS should now be working with our Wine package (thanks, @Staudey!). We've also modified our glibc package to allow users on non-AVX2-compatible CPUs to run Steam games. See here for details.

Our Solus Package Taskforce:tm: (we're still workshopping the name) has been hard at work this week bringing the repository up to current standards:

Adding appstream metainfo - 229 packages (down 1) need appstream metainfo added
Adding homepage key - 319 packages (down 47) left without homepages
Fixing packages that do not build - 18 packages (up 1) do not build
Replacing obsolete macros in recipes
- cargo: 21 (down 8) packages
Tagging packages for deprecation - 44 packages (up 1) tagged

Most of these tasks are beginner-friendly, and can be a great way to learn Solus packaging. We invite anyone that has the time and inclination to join us!

If you would like to join:

Join Solus Packaging Room on Matrix
Read and practice our packaging documentation
Submit your first Pull Request. We recommend doing the homepage task
Follow along the review process until your PR gets merged
Continue on contributing!

Security updates

Node.JS packages received security updates this week:

nodejs was updated to 20.15.1-118 (@ReillyBrogan). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-36138, CVE-2024-22020, CVE-2024-22018, CVE-2024-36137, CVE-2024-37372.
nodejs-18 was updated to 18.20.4-2 (@ReillyBrogan). Includes security fixes for CVE-2024-36138, CVE-2024-22020.

As always, install the latest updates so you have the latest protections.

General updates

For the full list of package changes, click here.

That’s all for this week, folks! Tune in again next time for more Solus news!

Solarmass

no problems to report!

brent

~ $ fortune
What awful irony is this?
We are as gods, but know it not.

~ $ fortune
Support your local church or synagogue.  Worship at Bank of America.

~ $ fortune
A Hollywood producer calls a friend, another producer on the phone.
	"Hello?" his friend answers.
	"Hi!" says the man.  "This is Bob, how are you doing?"
	"Oh," says the friend, "I'm doing great!  I just sold a screenplay
for two hundred thousand dollars.  I've started a novel adaptation and the
studio advanced me fifty thousand dollars on it.  I also have a television
series coming on next week, and everyone says it's going to be a big hit!
I'm doing *great*!  How are you?"
	"Okay," says the producer, "give me a call when he leaves."

addicted.

androidnisse

brent glad it is used.

WetGeek

Two laptops and four VMs updated with absolutely no issues. Thanks to you and the rest of the team for all you do!

SlowNicoFish

Great sync!
Do we know when the nvidia-glx-driver 555 will hit stable?

Harvey

SlowNicoFish
It was in stable but too many people had issues so it was rolled back. If you want to use it anyway you should switch to the beta driver in the repo which is currently at 555.58.02.

ReillyBrogan

SlowNicoFish When a release is out that fixes the issue of some users not having any usable displays. As Harvey said the beta driver is still on 555 and we intend to keep it on that version while we wait for 555 to stabilize.

Lucien_Lachance

great update, even better write-up by @EbonJaeger , really appreaciate these
kde (desktop) and gnome (laptop) all good

niobleoum

I had somehow peculiar issue with GNOME apps (such as Lollypop), the app would not launch and freeze the system if anything else was attempted to launch in the meantime. Once I got through few iterations of terminal launch attempts they actually all started to work as expected. It took me few reboots though. Since they started working right, even after fresh system reboot, the problem seem to solved itself, but I guess that occurrence might be of value for the maintainers. (Picture: the terminal feedback of attempts).

minh

This nvidia driver update killed my PC. It shows error that fail to prepare initd (or something similar) after reboot. It worked fine with the previous update, but not this time. I have to boot from live iso and chroot to remove nvidia driver, then it could boot again. I also tried to reinstall again or install beta driver 555, but same issue.

ReillyBrogan

minh How big is your boot partition?

minh

ReillyBrogan I thought about this as well and tried to clean up. Here is my EFI folder

-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh 928K 13. Jul 22:32 bootloaderx64.efi
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh  152 13. Jul 22:32 BOOTX64.CSV
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh  74K 13. Jul 22:32 grubx64.efi
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh  71M 13. Jul 02:04 initrd-com.solus-project.current.6.9.8-294
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh  40M 13. Jul 02:04 initrd-com.solus-project.current.6.9.8-294.nvidia
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh  13M 13. Jul 02:04 kernel-com.solus-project.current.6.9.8-294
-rw-r--r-- 1 minh minh 829K 13. Jul 22:32 mmx64.efi

I do dual boot with Win11 and dare not to resize the NTFS partition next to it. Should I?

ReillyBrogan

Hmm that should be big enough, and you have enough space for the new nvidia initrd extension. Does sudo usysconf run -f help at all?

minh

ReillyBrogan I did that as well, no luck. I managed to set up a second 1G EFI partition and add new EFI boot entry use efibootmgr. Then install the driver and reboot. Same error

ReillyBrogan

minh Hop on Matrix if you can, we can help you better there

FAb7D

Good job!

asianbullet

Hey there, 1st time poster please be gentle. I’ve also had the same issue as user minh concerning the Nvidia driver conflict. The boot error is very quick & reads as “Error preparing initrd: Device Error” in red then quickly flashes to “start_image() returned Device Error” & then proceeds to boot into my second physical drive with windows

I rebooted & had to be quick to Ctrl+Alt+F2 which gave me the options to boot into the current kernel or the previous kernel. Using the previous kernel it didn’t boot but was able to tty & rollback. Obviously I got curious, I just backed up all my application configs & decided to bork it & do a fresh install from the 4.5 ISO

After the fresh install I purposely did NOT install the Nvidia drivers & just updated the OS. I rebooted & ran the eopkg check which reported three broken packages cups-browsed, apparmor & linux-current-6.9.8-294-1-x86_64 (which is of most concern). I followed the troubleshooting page & it fixed cups-browsed, apparmor but not the kernel itself

I rebooted & tried again via the ‘grep broken’ command, it now shows clr-boot-manager failed

I did note the error is on the boot partition nvme0n1p1 (as it’s now a fresh install so the boot EFI partition size is now 1GB). So I rebooted & mounted nvme0n1p1 & ran the ’grep broken’ command again & got;

Which give it the all clear, however upon reboot & eopkg check it still gives me the linux-current as broken so the fix did not stick? I even ran ‘sudo usysconf run -f’ to be on the safe side but no joy upon another reboot
I again was curious so I doflicky'd the Nvidia driver install & I end up with the original error “Error preparing initrd: Device Error” again
I have an Nvidia GTX 980 & my specs are below

Thankfully I’ve got an integrated GPU on the CPU so I’ll make do with that for now...very curious

minh

asianbullet The boot error is very quick & reads as “Error preparing initrd: Device Error” in red then quickly flashes to “start_image() returned Device Error” & then proceeds to boot into my second physical drive with windows

I have exactly the same error. I think it's something to do with Nvidia driver, I tried previous boot kernel (6.8) as well. Mine has an integrated GPU as well, but I just stay with nouveau in the meantime.