Solus Updates for Week 45, 2024

EbonJaeger

Heya folks! It's Friday, and that means it's time for the weekly Solus roundup!

Plasma users rejoice! Our Plasma stack has been updated to the latest in the 6.2 series (6.2.3 at the time of writing). Highlights for this release include many enhancements for digital artists, color and power management, accessibility enhancements, and more. Check out their announcement here.

In addition, KDE Gear has been updated to v24.08.3. Among all the changes are:

neochat: Adjustments to make it work with the newly released libquotient 0.9
kdevelop: MesonManager: remove test suites when a project is closing
kdevelop: Fix a qml crash building timeline with Qt 6.8

The full announcement for KDE Gear can be read here.

Several Qt patches have been backported that improve hidpi text rendering. Applications that use qtwebengine, like RSS Guard, will see significant enhancements.

Before:

After:

Several more Qt applications are now using Qt6:

seafile-client
onionshare
yacreader
doxywizard

On the GNOME front, triple-buffering support has been re-enabled. The GNOME extension for workrave has been updated and fixed for GNOME 47.

Wlroots was updated to v0.18, along with sway and labwc to their new major versions. Performance should be enhanced, especially for NVIDIA users.

LACT should now definitely be fixed for amdgpu users.

VS Code has been updated to 1.95.0. It now uses a newer Electron version that supports the activation protocol, so the issue of save/open file dialogs opening behind should now be resolved for all users.

qBitTorrent has been updated to v5.0. This release has many new features, and a plethora of bug fixes. The full announcement can be found here.

Shortwave has been updated to v4.0. The MRPIS media controls have been rewritten, song notifications are disabled by default, no more loading on startup, and a refreshed UI using libadwaita. You can read the full announcement here.

Zenity, a tool applications can use to show different kinds of pop-up dialogs, was updated to the latest major version. In this version, it has been ported to libadwaita, changing its appearance significantly.

Our zsh package has been changed to not source /etc/profile. This prevents errors since our /etc/profile sources other shell scripts that are not compatible with zsh. Scripts that should be sourced are now sourced directly in /usr/share/defaults/etc/zsh/zprofile.

Package manager and tooling

Our package building pipeline is now using fully Nuitka-compiled, stand-alone Python3 components. This work is a prerequisite for supporting UTF-8 text in packages, and being able to safely update CPython.

Pisi and eopkg have been updated to add versioned FilesDB and LazyDB instances, which are used to speed up eopkg searches for locally installed packages and their files. These databases will now be regenerated automatically as necessary. For the full details, check out this Pull Request.

Solbuild is quicker now, too, since it is no longer using fakeroot. In addition, when building against your local repository, it will print out a list of packages in your local repository at the start of the build. See here for the changes to Solbuild.

Because of all of these changes, packagers are highly encouraged to do a solbuild reset. If you have fast internet, run go-task solbuild-reset from the packages' repository. If you have slower internet, run sudo rm /var/lib/solbuild/images/* && sudo solbuild init -p {unstable,main}-x86_64, which won't nuke your solbuild cache.

Additions and deprecations

Our barrier package has been deprecated this week. It is no longer maintained or supported upstream, and the core developers have joined the input-leap project. Barrier users will have input-leap installed automatically.

The redis package has been deprecated as it is no longer considered Open Source. It has been replaced by valkey, a well-maintained fork of Redis.

lyrebird has been deprecated as it is no longer maintained upstream. EasyEffects is the suggested replacement, which is already present in the Solus repository.

drive has been deprecated as the upstream repository has not had activity in years, and no longer builds.

This week sees the inclusion of hut into the Solus repository. hut is a CLI tool for working with SourceHut projects.

wtype has also been added to the repository. wtype is an xdotool type tool for Wayland.

Solus Cleanup Crew™️

Our Solus Cleanup Crew™️ has been hard at work this week bringing the repository up to current standards. We just finished the font appstream metainfo task 🎉! Now, all available fonts should be visible in GNOME Software and KDE Discover. In addition:

Adding appstream metainfo - 199 packages (down 1) need appstream metainfo added
Adding homepage keys - 12 packages (down 8) left without homepages
Migrating homepages pointing to GNOME Wiki - 69 (down 16)
Fixing packages that do not build - 16 packages (down 1) do not build
Tagging packages for deprecation - 26 packages (down 4) 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

There are some security updates this week. As always, install all updates to have the latest vulnerability protections!

apr was updated to 1.7.5-11 (@davidjharder). Includes security fixes for CVE-2023-49582.

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

NVIDIA laptop users might have the built-in display stay black when resuming from sleep / suspend. This is likely due to the NVIDIA drivers. If you have the proprietary NVIDIA drivers (nvidia-glx-driver) installed, there is a thread on their forums for feedback on the 560 driver, for those interested.

Sebastian

EbonJaeger Pisi and eopkg have been updated to add versioned FilesDB and LazyDB instances, which are used to speed up eopkg searches for locally installed packages and their files. These databases will now be regenerated automatically as necessary. For the full details, check out this Pull Request.

After running the update, I immediately rerun eopkg to install a package prior to a reboot. This lead to a rebuild of FilesDB. Is this expected behaviour? Does the updated eopkg need to rebuild FilesDB on first run?

VTMarik

Sync went great, first time I find myself catching the sync before the post!

pillmuncher

The move from Barrier to Input Leap required a little setup but was was problem-free. Other than that, everything seems to work.

Yannnd

pillmuncher The only thing I had to change was the autostart entry. input-leap communicates well with Barrier 2.4 on Debian 12 (which doesn't know input-leap yet)
Everything else went fine 👍️
EDIT: I'm sorry, too fast: there is a .deb available at https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/releases/tag/v3.0.2

WetGeek

Update of my Plasma laptop went well, however, an update of my Plasma VM did not. I suspect that there is, or was, an upstream issue at Oracle, and if it's not already fixed, I hope for a resolution from them soon. There is a workaround, though, so all my VMs are usable for illustrating answers to forum questions. And that's really their only raison d'etre.

I'll explain. After I update each VM, I typically just shut it down instead of rebooting. That's because I usually have no reason to restart it at that time ... I just want to make sure it's up-to-date the next time I use it. It will load all the new packages if/when I start it again. If I do a shutdown now after an update has finished, the VM now enters an error state so serious that I need to use a long press on the power switch to recover. This doesn't happen just for Plasma, but for all of the VMs.

After restarting the host, and launching the VM to load all the new packages, if I execute another shutdown now command, it all works as expected. The end result of this adventure, for each VM, is that the update works, but it makes an update pretty painful. The workaround I mentioned: if I do execute a reboot after each update, then I can execute shutdown now without any problems. So, I'm convinced that the root cause of the problem is in the current VirtualBox, and as soon as the upgraded packages have been loaded, everything seems to work okay.

Since there is a workaround, and my four Solus VMs are quite usable now, I'm happy to wait for the next sync to see whether my idea is correct - that it's an issue that Oracle has already fixed.

Lucien_Lachance

excellent update as far as i can tell, plasma

Lucien_Lachance

oops bug, merkuro calendar no longer working

QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/main.qml:344:26: Type IncidenceInfoDrawer unavailable
qrc:/IncidenceInfoDrawer.qml:111:13: Type IncidenceInfoContents unavailable
qrc:/IncidenceInfoContents.qml:8:1: module "QtLocation" is not installed

ReillyBrogan

Lucien_Lachance does it work if you install qt6-location? If so I'll fix it

Lucien_Lachance

ReillyBrogan hi, yes but only after a reboot.
it does spawn a trillion lines like this though

qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*
qt.qml.list.incompatible: Cannot append QQuickRepeater(0x563d665ee990) to a QML list of QQuickAbstractButton*

x 100000

ReillyBrogan

Lucien_Lachance I checked and I get those errors with the previous version, so I don't think that's a new bug. I'll add qt6-location as a rundep so it's pulled in automatically

ianmjones

Another new package that missed getting a mention is snippetexpander, it lets you save your often used text snippets and then auto expand them whenever you type their abbreviation. It also has a handy search and paste window that you can open with a global shortcut (I use it that way the most).

Snippet Expander's website: https://snippetexpander.org/

As well as the package maintainer, I'm the author, and happy to answer any questions if you ping me on a new forum thread.

EbonJaeger

ianmjones Sorry about that. Right now, I have no way to get a summary of added and removed packages, so I have to go through all the commits in the cycle looking for particular commit messages. I've made an issue to hopefully improve this in the future.

banger

Fine on my two physical Plasma Desktops and Weather Report Widget has been fixed so it doesn't crash plasmashell when loaded anymore. Will update the VM on Tuesday when I boot into Win 11 for patches.

beevomit

Thank you for the hut CLI add!

I usually build it myself, but having it as a package makes it even more convenient.

Solarmass

Flawless update!

ianmjones

EbonJaeger no worries, not a biggie, no need to apologise.

Axios

No issues to report. All went well

brent

Axios was out of town a few days. my update went great as well.

alfisya

Sebastian It only happens if you switch between py2 and py3 version of eopkg. Do you use the py3 version before? If you tried packaging, our build pipeline is all py3 by default. You might not realized, you used py3 eopkg there. It is also quite harmless, it just takes time.