Heya folks!

It’s time for your (usually) weekly dose of package update news! This week, @algent updated the entire Perl stack, @ReillyBrogan updated the kernels, systemd, and much, much more.

Team member Algent this week undertook the Herculean task of updating our whole Perl language stack to 5.38.0. While we now have much newer, better versions of all these packages, you may have to re-install Perl modules that you had installed previously through CPAN or other non-Solus sources.

ReillyBrogan updated our kernels to 6.4.9 and 5.15.125 while enabling many more network, Bluetooth, and sound drivers. If you’ve had trouble with uncooperative Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices, it might be a good time to test them again. He also fixed a few issues, including sound no longer working after logging out and back in, re-enabled core dump collection, spice-vagrant not launching automatically in Virtual Machines, and more.

Our version of systemd was updated with separate initrd and global systemd timeout defaults. This ensures that less performant systems do not have mount units fail during boot. This should help people who had swap inexplicably fail to start on boot previously. In addition, we have summoned more Celtic magic / improved system shutdown speed, as units which are slow to stop will be killed after 10s (down from the default of 90s).

@joebonrichie and Algent deprecated more Python2 packages, greatly reducing the number that are left. Python 2 is dead, long live Python 3!

@ZachBacon updated some GNOME applications and libraries to the latest point releases.

Other package updates were done by our wonderful contributors. Thank you!

As mentioned last week, we were strongly considering deprecating Julia. We now plan to deprecate the Julia and package juliaup instead. This will simplify maintenance of other packages while leaving a straightforward way for Julia users to manage their own environment.

That’s all for this one, folks! If you haven’t seen our recent blog post or our recent package repo migration announcement, check them out!

How did the sync go for you?

This poll has ended.

    KNOWN ISSUES AND WORKAROUNDS

    • Issue: Starting qt5 applications (including VLC, Virtualbox, qBittorrent) on GNOME and Budgie has a 25 second delay before they appear:
      Solution/Workaround: FIXED in hotfix sync. Update again and reboot. Note that our fix is to disable the plugin that themes your qt5 applications with your GTK theme. We don't know if this will be re-enabled or not as the plugin is unmaintained upstream.
      If qt5 applications matching your GTK theme is important to you and you are familiar with GVFS/GIO/qtstyleplugins please feel free to hop on our Matrix and help us fix this
    • Issue: Login to Plasma desktop is not working. The login page appears but logging in just sits and does nothing.
      Solution/Workaround: The cause of this has been identified. The new SDDM 0.20.0 update fixes an issue where the user profile (.bashrc and others) might not be sourced for the graphical shell on login. This means that if you have a broken .bashrc that it is now possible that your login may halt.
      Solution: Switch to an alternate TTY if possible and fix your .bashrc or other profile file. If TTY login is broken as well you may need to boot from a rescue USB in order to mount your filesystem and manually edit that file.
    • Issue: Duplicate audio devices, bluetooth devices not automatically switching profiles on calls, other sound weirdness:
      Solution/Workaround: The cause of this has been identified as a regression in Pipewire. An upstream patch exists and fixes the issue however the current migration of Phabricator to Github prevents us from building updated packages. Once that is complete we can build with the upstream fix and hopefully cherry-pick the package to stable
    • Issue: My Bluetooth is working now. Wait, that's not an issue...
      We made a lot of changes to our kernel to hopefully fix bluetooth for most people. Enjoy!

    Awesome, i will update my laptop after come home from my trip, and see if bluetooth work. 🥳

    128 Budgie packages, you rascals. solus-hardware-config? where have you been? more intel and firmware and microcode updates, yay! A veritable PERL-a-rama tonight. Rebooted, no problem at all.
    thanks all--

    Everything wen great, no hiccups what so ever. 🎉

    Just when all hope was basically lost for my Bluetooth ever working....

    EbonJaeger ReillyBrogan updated our kernels to 6.4.9 and 5.15.125 while enabling many more network, Bluetooth, and sound drivers. If you’ve had trouble with uncooperative Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices, it might be a good time to test them again.

    My last words on my post - Bluetooth Not Working (May 21, 2022):

    @xjdwc Still no success. Thanks for all your suggestions. Hopefully a future update magically fixes it.

    *Updates laptop ...
    *Reboots ...
    *....

    Bluetooth Working!!
    This is the update that has finally fixed my Bluetooth issue!

    Thanks Team 🙂

        Have to report some strange behavior on Plasma. Apparently, at least on my machine, sddm can't start a plasma session, either Wayland or X11. Running manually dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland from tty1 instead works.

        xjdwc
        Ahhhhhhhhhhh Cooool
        I know couple other users that will be on cloud nine if there bluetooth works
        after trying to get it to work.

        I just wanted comment on how the creation of this thread really helps people out and gives them
        some kind of outlook about things and a sense of moving foward.
        And thank the dev for creating it (It Appears to be a big Plus)

            Axios I just wanted comment on how the creation of this thread really helps people out and gives them
            some kind of outlook about things and a sense of moving foward.
            And thank the dev for creating it (It Appears to be a big Plus)

            I agree completely.

              Using Solus and following this forum make using Solus feel personal and like being part of something, not like most of the other distros. I like it 🙂

              We did a quick hotfix to fix the reported issue with QT applications (Virtualbox, VLC, qBittorrent etc) not appearing for 25 after launching them on Budgie and GNOME desktops.

              If you had this issue please update again and reboot your computer.

                I have issues with evince and leafpad.
                The evince issue I observed already before this weeks sync, and it is persistent. With some pdf documents, evince starts right away, but then needs up to 10 seconds to load the document, while other pdf documents load right away.

                Leafpad needs up to 30 seconds to start.

                  Sebastian I don't use leafpad but I can't reproduce Evince sluggishness. Just opened up a dozen pdfs from a few KB to 11MB and all pretty snappy....albeit all from the same folder. Indexing? (spitballing)

                      brent As of the evince issue, this might simply be a pdf file integrity issue. I have several pdf files from different sources that lead to evince needing at least 10 seconds to load them. Some of them I checked for integrity here.

                      With the following result:
                      Compliance pdfa-1a
                      Result Document does not conform to PDF/A.
                      Details
                      Validating file "Anlage-0.pdf" for conformance level pdfa-1a
                      The schema description for namespace 'pdfx:' (http://ns.adobe.com/pdfx/1.3/) is missing.
                      The key StructTreeRoot is required but missing.
                      The document does not conform to the requested standard.
                      The document's meta data is either missing or inconsistent or corrupt.
                      The document doesn't provide appropriate logical structure information.
                      The document does not conform to the PDF/A-1a standard.

                      So, evince issue might therefore only affect currupted PDF's.
                      Zathura by the way opens theses files without a problem.

                          @Sebastian thanks for sharing all that. no way would I use that site though. they get your documents and ip address, document metadata, and probably more; that's TMI for me personally.
                          the valuable output sorta kinda reminded me of using adobe pitstop, in the day.
                          I wonder if there is a standalone pdf foss app that measures pdf integrity? another way to check is to print the pdf to postscript but you'd still need preflight tools to get that data (maybe scribus?) but convoluted compared to just doing it now. all the other services they provide at that website I can do via gimp, office suite,scribus, pdfunite..

                          ps--this is the second time I've seen zathura mentioned in a week. maybe will try it. edit/format