Solus Updates for Week 44, 2024

EbonJaeger

Heya folks! Happy... Tuesday sync? That's right! We're sending out updates today, instead of Friday. Everyone has been hard at work updating packages now that the release freeze period has concluded.

@joebonrichie has updated our GNOME stack to GNOME 47!

This release provides support for accent color customization, improved support for small screens, persistent remote sessions, and new styles for dialog windows. The full release notes can be read here, and they have a video you can watch here.

There are a couple of items to note with this update. GNOME Terminal no longer has transparency support or command completed notification support. This is due to Fedora dropping their patches, which we also used.

This update also includes another new terminal for the GNOME desktop, ptyxis. It features first-class support for containers, profiles, transparency (currently must be set via GSettings), and more.

@ReillyBrogan has updated our linux-current kernel to the 6.11 series. To see what's new, check here. In addition, a LACT-related override patch for the amdgpu kernel driver has been added, and linux-firmware has been updated to 20241017.

@ReillyBrogan, @Staudey, and @joebonrichie have made and tested some important improvements to our NVIDIA driver packages. The Wayland experience with NVIDIA is much improved, and rootless xserver support is now actually working. egl-gbm has been added, and the NVIDIA Beta driver has been updated to the 565 series.

Users who originally installed Solus 4.5 or earlier will notice that their system information now shows as Solus 4.6 Convergence. The /etc/os-release file is now owned by a new package instead of baselayout, as we cannot yet safely update the latter. lsb-release now sources data from os-release, making updates simpler for us, since now we only have to make changes in one place instead of two.

GNOME isn't the only desktop receiving updates this week. The KDE Frameworks suite has been updated to 6.7.0, and KDE Gear has been updated to 24.08.2. Several bugfixes for Qt have been backported, kirigami-addons has been updated to 1.5.0, and pulseaudio-qt has been updated to 1.6.1. Lastly, kunifiedpush support has been added to both Neochat and Tokodon, and Neochat now supports authenticated media via libquotient 0.9.

The Hyprland stack has been updated to the latest versions. In addition, two packages have been added to it. hypridle is Hyprland's idle daemon. It supports loginctl commands via DBus (lock / unlock / before-sleep), and inhibit DBus commands, used by Firefox, Steam, and other applications. hyprlock is a GPU-accelerated screen-locking utility. It uses the ext-session-lock protocol, and has full fractional scaling support.

Firefox has been updated to 132.0. The full release notes can be found here. In addition, GNOME search integration has been added.

Users of XFCE may be interested to learn that the trash plugin for the panel is now being built with Thunar.

Lastly, we have another new package in the repository. quickemu is a QEMU wrapper that enables you to quickly create and run optimized virtual machines. You choose the operating system, and quickemu takes care of the rest. Check it out!

Solus Cleanup Crew™️

Our Solus Cleanup Crew™️ has been hard at work this week bringing the repository up to current standards. The task of replacing obsolete macros is now complete, and a new initiative has been added to replace package homepages pointing to wiki.gnome.org. GNOME is sunsetting the wiki, so the relevant package homepages have to be updated. See this issue on our tracker for more information.

Adding appstream metainfo - 200 packages (no change) need appstream metainfo added
Adding homepage keys - 20 packages (no change) left without homepages
GNOME Wiki retirement - 85 packages (New)
Fixing packages that do not build - 17 packages (up 5) do not build
Replacing obsolete macros in recipes
- cargo: 0 packages (Task Complete!)
Tagging packages for deprecation - 30 packages (no change) 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 the 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

XOrg has an update for the XOrg server and XWayland to address CVE-2024-9632. Make sure to install updates for the latest security protections!

System updates

Mesa 24.2.5
intel-media-driver 24.3.4: Hardware acceleration for Lunar Lake
ppp 2.5.1
Freerdp 3.9.0
xorg-driver-input-libinput 1.5.0
network-manager 1.48.12
iwd 3.0
Rust 1.82.0
openjdk updates
- openjdk-11: 11.0.25
- openjdk-17: 17.0.13
- openjdk-21: 21.0.5
Samba 4.19.8
fwupd 1.9.26
sof-firmware 2.11
bash 5.2.37

Notable app updates

inkscape 1.4
libreoffice 24.8
LACT - update + add amdgpu overdrive kernel patch
Audacity 3.6.4
prism-launcher 9.0
heroic-games-launcher 2.15.2
vscode 1.94.2
zed 0.158.1
Virtualbox 7.1.4
ldc 1.39.0
Docker 27.3
Element 1.11.82
tuxpaint 0.9.34
typst 0.12.0

General updates

The full list of updated packages can be found here.

That’s all for this week, folks! We'll be here same time, same place next week for another roundup of the news!

Known issues

Plasma ISO requires creation of a kwallet key file before connecting to a network.

elfprince

EbonJaeger quickemu is a QEMU wrapper that enables you to quickly create and run optimized virtual machines. You choose the operating system, and quickemu takes care of the rest.

This looks cool!

Yannnd

After finishing the updates my system refused to switch off/reboot/log out: clicking the 'off' icon didn't work. After rebooting with the hardware power switch all seems OK.

UncleSlacky

Yannnd Same here, had to do "sudo shutdown -r now" instead to reboot.

mbevks

Yannnd Same issue. Worked fine after rebooting.

mbevks

Yannnd Same issue. Worked correctly after shutting down and restarting the computer. I'm on Budgie.

Harvey

Are you both using gnome?

Axios

Harvey Using budgie hit shutdown but it didnt popup secondary screen waited and it shut down
other than that appears no issues.
I mean waited seconds not long but slow

UncleSlacky

Harvey Budgie.

nolan

Axios Using budgie hit shutdown but it didnt popup

Can confirm that, a reboot from terminal was enough. Everything looks good for now 👍️

Harvey

This is why we want offline updates (Both gnome-software and Discover support it).

If people encounter this as already hinted a hard shutdown / reset is not needed. Just open a terminal and run reboot or halt -p to power off.

Axios

Harvey ugh ya that update was from terminal.

brent

nolan budgie, I normally gnome-terminal/rebootand that worked. did not try anything else

Harvey This is why we want offline updates (Both gnome-software and Discover support it).

interesting. good.

flanier

I didn't realize Hyprland was in the repos. I assume it gets treated like Sway when it comes to support and packaging. I've watched several people's YouTube reviews and demos of it(especially @mylinuxforwork channel), and it looks like a very cool tiling window manager. I tried to play with it on a virtual machine a while back, but Hyprland and VirtualBox didn't get along. I may have to give it another try either in a VM again or on an older laptop.

banger

One machine done reboot and all came back up, looks ok. Will do main machine after backup finishes.

banger

Installing egl-gbm, version 1.1.2, release 2
File conflicts:
/usr/lib64/libnvidia-egl-gbm.so.1 from nvidia-glx-driver-common gets replaced by egl-gbm package

Extracting the files of egl-gbm
Installed egl-gbm
Installing 95 / 233
nvidia-glx-driver-common-560.35.03-548-1-x86_64.eopkg [cached]
Installing nvidia-glx-driver-common, version 560.35.03, release 548
Upgrading to new distribution release
Extracting the files of nvidia-glx-driver-common
Not removing conflicted file : /usr/lib64/libnvidia-egl-gbm.so.1
Upgraded nvidia-glx-driver-common

Seeing the above on main machine should I reboot?

ReillyBrogan

banger Did your updates actually fail or did you just notice that in the output? If the latter then that's normal and happens when a file is moved from one package to another.

banger

ReillyBrogan

Yes I just noticed it in the output so its safe to reboot I assume. Nothing to indicate the updates failed.

WetGeek

One laptop and three of my VMs installed perfectly. The Plasma VM just displayed a black screen, with the mouse cursor only visible in the window's client area. It's bedtime here, I'll fuss with it in the morning, and maybe I'll figure out how to fix it. G'night all!

WetGeek

WetGeek The Plasma VM just displayed a black screen, with the mouse cursor only visible in the window's client area.

I was really tired at the time, and what I was trying to say was that the mouse cursor was NOT visible in the window's client area. I could click in the system area - such as to close the window - but could do nothing with the Plasma client.

This morning it occurred to me that things didn't go black until after I'd logged on, so I thought I'd try an X11 session instead of my default of Wayland. Indeed, that worked. I was able to start a session and install the 203 upgrades, but after a reboot, a Wayland session was no longer avaliable as an option. Just X11.

Since I'd updated the host machine (my laptop) first, I was obviously using the upgraded VirtualBox to run these VMs, and since there's been no problem with my laptop (also using Wayland), my initial assumption is that the root cause of these troubles is with the upgraded VirtualBox system on the laptop. Why it should affect just the Plasma VM I don't know. Perhaps that's the only VM that uses Wayland at this point? I'm not sure.

I shouldn't need to do this, but out of curiosity I'm going to install the guest additions to see whether that has any effect on that VM. Beyond that, I'm out of ideas. It's not a tragedy for this one VM to use X11 until things get fixed, so I can wait patiently to see whether it works better after the next VirtualBox upgrade.

Harvey

A new entry to the repository this week was Sweethome3D thanks to @androidnisse

AlphaElwedritsch

Pain free as always. Solus 4.6 is now showing up everywhere. Awesome
Thanks guys...