• openSUSE Leap 15 Operating System Enters Beta, Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15

• OpenSUSE Leap 15 Beta Snapshots Begin, Powered By Linux 4.14 + Plasma 5.12

  The first public beta snapshots have begun for openSUSE Leap 15, the distribution that will be mirroring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 that is under development for release this summer.

• Ruby on openSUSE

  Ruby is a wonderful programming language. Every year in December as a kind of Christmas present there is a new release. It's great to be on a language which is kept up to date but it comes with the challenge to manage multiple Ruby versions. There are a couple of solutions around such as RVM, rbenv, or chruby but they all have their drawbacks.

  What would a Linux distribution do? At openSUSE, we package all the versions in the Build Service. We also package many gems but this is an effort which is sort of futile given the huge and growing number of gems and their versions. But you do reliably get the Ruby interpreter and gem tool as openSUSE package. To not create conflicts all the executables are suffixed with the Ruby version. That allows for parallel installation of multiple Ruby versions. It also works for all the executables installed through gems. The drawback is that you don't get the executable names you would expect because of the additional suffix.

Eight new snapshots have been released for OpenSuSE Tumbleweed since our last report, bringing users the beta version for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS desktop environment, which is coming in early February, along with the first point release of the KDE Applications 17.12 software suite and KDE Frameworks 5.42.0.

"The largest snapshot of the week was no doubt snapshot 20180122. The snapshot provided KDE Applications 17.12.1, Frameworks 5.42.0 and the beta version for KDE’s next Long-Term-Support (LTS) release of Plasma 5.12. Tumbleweed users can try out the new items in the 5.12 LTS like the new KDE Store, which brings a wide selection of addons," Douglas DeMaio wrote in a weekly report.

• OpenSUSE Rolling Out Retpoline Support, Xen Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation

  SUSE's Richard Brown has issued a status update around openSUSE's ongoing mitigation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

  The big piece of news is openSUSE is rolling out Spectre V2 mitigation soon using Retpoliens rather than their current microcode approach where they ended up pulling that anyhow in light of the Intel CPU microcode troubles recently reported of reboots, etc.

• The future of openSUSE-Education

  The openSUSE-Education project tries to support schools using openSUSE. We create and describe additional software-repositories for educational projects and we created Add-on medias and finally a live DVD from the regular openSUSE distribution.

  As you can see in our timeline, we achieved quite a lot in the past years, had fun and meet a couple of very nice people out there in our spare time. But the main team members moved on to new projects, with the hope that we would one day find some time to work more on openSUSE-Education again. This does not seem to happen – at least not for the foreseeable future.

• Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel Comes Back, Champions Open Source for Multi-Cloud

  Mirantis brought back its original CEO and Co-founder Adrian Ionel (pictured), to move the company beyond private cloud and help its customers adopt multi-cloud strategies. Alex Freeland, who is also a co-founder, will step down as CEO but remain a board member.

  Ionel served as CEO from the company’s launch in 2011 until 2015, when he left to start up Dorsal, an open source software support firm. During his initial tenure at Mirantis he led the company’s investment in OpenStack, growing its customer base to more than 200 enterprises.

• Highlights of YaST Development Sprint 49

  Time goes by and the YaST wheel keeps rolling. So let’s take a look to what have moved since our previous development report.

• Storage-NG Now Active In openSUSE Tumbleweed

  SUSE's libstorage-ng back-end for YaST's new low-level storage library is now active within the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution.

  Libstorage has traditionally been responsible for SUSE/openSUSE's disk/partition/LVM management and other storage device management. After more than two years of work, libstorage-ng has replaced libstorage within Tumbleweed.