Optimal Release for Linux Professionals Arrives with openSUSE Leap 42.2

More Enterprise

That’s right. After basing openSUSE Leap 42.1 on SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise), Leap 42.2 gets even more source code from the release of SLE 12 Service Pack 2. New technologies such as NVDIMM, OmniPATH, Data Plane Development Kit with openVSwitch are back ported for the release. XEN no longer requires it’s own kernel and is supported by the default kernel. Along with the shared SLE codebase, openSUSE Leap 42.2 gets packages, maintenance and bug fixes from the openSUSE community and SUSE engineers. The 42 series of Leap achieves at a minimum 36 months of maintenance and security updates starting from 42.1.

Server Ready

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is the first Leap release to offer a Server profile as clear option during the installation. With no graphical environment, a Server install of Leap stands ready to do whatever you need from it. Something as simple as running a Web or Mail platform is easier than ever, as are complex projects using virtualization or container technologies.

It’s also good to remember that Leap and all other openSUSE and SLE distributions have support for a full-featured textmode installer, giving all the same functionality as the graphical installer without the need for X. Our installer is also fully capable of doing installations remotely using VNC or SSH, letting you set up your openSUSE Leap server without needing to be anywhere near it at all.

The Return of the Konqi

Konqi has returned and is in full force. Plasma 5.8 brings a whole new component to openSUSE Leap. As the first Long Term Supported release for Plasma, Plasma 5.8 complements stability-minded Leap users. In unison with Qt 5.6 and Frameworks 5.26, Plasma 5.8 will bring Leap 42.2 users excellent KDE reliability and stability.

The Kernel

The 4.4 LTS Linux Kernel for openSUSE Leap 42.2 improves file system performance and features, including a new balance filter for Btrfs. The default kernel now has paravirtualization enabled. The kernel version also improves cryptography and security support for Trusted Platform Module 2.0 chips as well as adds support for nested Virtualization through KVM. Networking is dramatically improved for IP Virtual Server and IPv6 and of course there is more updates and changes for the multiple architectures.

Containers

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is ships with Docker 1.12 which builds upon Dockers recent adoption of runC and containerd to bring the latest orchestration features, such as Docker Swarm.

IDEs and tooling

Leap 42.2 carries a mature, LTS version of the Qt 5 GUI toolkit (5.6). With more than 800 improvements from the previous version in Leap 42.1, Qt 5.6 also brings some non-critical security fixes in the Qt framework and in third-party libraries.

gtk 3.20, shared with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2, provides a solid & stable toolkit for building gtk based applications. GNOME Builder is offered as a powerful general purpose IDE for not only gtk applications based on C, C++ and Vala, but many other languages in addition.

For all your compiling needs Leap 42.2 contains gcc 4.8.5, 5.3.1 and 6.1.1. llvm-clang is also available at version 3.8.0. Leap also includes CMake 3.5 providing a powerful, cross-platform build environment for open-source project developers.

The OpenSSL toolkit found in Leap 42.2 is 1.0.2h, which modifies behavior of ALPN and prevents ASN.1 BIO from excessive memory allocation. OpenSSH is version 7.2p2 in this latest stable release and sanitizes X11 authentication credentials.

Languages and Libraries

Programming languages found in openSUSE Leap 42.2 include Python 2.7, Ruby 2.1 and Perl 5.18. This Leap release provides new major version libraries for libvirt (2.0) and libzypp (16.2). Leap also has the well established glibc 2.22 and libsigc++ 2.8, which defines signals and connects them to any callback function, whether static or virtual.

Virtualization

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is full of virtualization solutions. QEMU 2.6.1 and VirtualBox 5.0.24 make openSUSE Leap 42.2 a perfect base system to distribute applications. Set up is easy with YaST and gnome-boxes, so you’ll be able deploy solutions quickly and easily. openSUSE Leap 42.2 has Xen and KVM. It also supports Linux containers in the form of both Docker and LXC.

YaST Goodness

YaST Sprints leading up to the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 have brought tons of goodness and are making YaST more intuitive than ever. The YaST community revamped the user interface to improve usability and continues adding new tools and modules that have been in Tumbleweed for some time and are now been added to the Leap family.

yast2-alternatives is a new module to manage openSUSE’s alternatives system developed during Google Summer of Code 2016. Another module, yast2-vpn, is a module for configuring VPN gateway and clients. yast2-auth-client is another module to configure centralized system authentication and it has been almost completely rewritten. New features to YaST have improved bootloader management, which offers support for Trusted Boot and has a revamped configuration of password protection. yast2-firewall now includes full support for firewalld, in addition to the already existing SuSEFirewall2.

When something goes wrong during installation, the system now offers the possibility of starting a debugger; users with Ruby knowledge can use it to check what went wrong or even to work around the problem. There have also been several enhancements, including installer memory usage being significantly reduced. The selection and configuration of keyboard layouts and console fonts has also been adapted for better compatibility with systemd. There are several other YaST improvements that can be found on the features page.

Managing Systems

openSUSE Leap has Samba 4.4.2, which has improved support for working against a Windows 2003 domain. systemd 228 creates a plain directory instead of a subvolume (even on a Btrfs file system) if the root directory is a plain directory, and not a subvolume, which should simplify things with certain chroot() environments which are not aware of the concept of btrfs subvolumes. AppStream version in Leap enhances the interaction of software repositories. MariaDB remains the same version as it was in the previous release and MySQL’s small upgrade to version 5.1.35 resolves a number of issues including a failover being triggered inadvertently and a failover process that kept trying to connect to an unavailable server.

It is also worth remembering that openSUSE Leap uses Delta RPMs for all maintenance updates, ensuring that the long term bandwidth requirements for maintaining your Leap system are as small as possible.

KDE

openSUSE Leap 42.2 is the first to offer KDE’s Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma. Feature rich with excellent performance, Plasma 5.8 LTS is the default desktop environment in openSUSE. Previous KDE users who moved away should reassess this release, with Plasma 5.8 bringing significant improvements in stability as well as new features. Plasma 5.8 improves multiple monitor support out-of-the-box in openSUSE Leap 42.2.

Jump List Actions are new in KRunner and it doesn’t only open applications, but can be used to start certain actions directly when the application starts. Drag and drop support was added to bring search result to any application. System administrators will enjoy the Kiosk support from an improved Plasma in Leap 42.2. Android phone users can get phone integration with KDE Connect from the Google Play store; all they need to do is enable the KDE Connect service in the SUSE firewall module in YaST. Using KDE Connect, users can get text messages on their desktop or easily transfer files to their phone.

GNOME

The stability of GNOME 3.20 offers conservative upgrade users new privacy controls to improve per-application location access, quick access to media controls directly from the shell, and keyboard shortcuts and gestures can be easily learned with new shortcut overlay windows. Many GNOME applications have shortcut windows for 3.20, including Files, Videos, Photos, gedit, Builder, Maps and more. In each application, the shortcut window can be opened from the application menu, or by using the Ctrl + / or Ctrl + F1 shortcut. GNOME can now access Google Drive directly from the Files application in openSUSE Leap 42.2. More than 28,000 changes were made for GNOME 3.20 by approximately 870 contributors. Check out the release notes for GNOME 3.20.

Other desktop environments

openSUSE Leap 42.2 offers users the option to choose their desktop; try MATE, Xfce, Enlightenment or Cinnamon. LXQt 0.11.0, which has an improved user experience thanks to several bug fixes, ships in openSUSE Leap 42.2, but is not available in the installer. LXQt 0.11.0 introduces pavucontrol-Qt, the Qt port of PulseAudio’s mixer pavucontrol the UI of which is based upon GTK.

Internationalization

This openSUSE release is the first to use Weblate to coordinate the translation of openSUSE into more than 50 languages. openSUSE’s Weblate interface enables everyone (from dedicated translators to casual contributors) to take part in the process and makes it possible to coordinate the translations of openSUSE with the ones for SUSE Enterprise Linux, boosting collaboration between community and enterprise.