Release Notes #

The installer now supports a new system role Transactional Server that is an outcome of the openSUSE Kubic effort. This system role features a new update system that applies updates atomically (as a single operation) and makes them easy to revert should that become necessary. These features are based on the package management tools that all other SUSE and openSUSE distributions also rely on. This means that the vast majority of RPM packages that work with other system roles of openSUSE Leap 15.0 also work with the system role Transactional Server.

Note: Incompatible Packages

Some packages modify the contents of /var or /srv in their RPM %post scripts. These packages are incompatible. If you happen upon such package, file a bug report.

To provide these features, this update system relies on:

Important: Transactional Server Needs At Least 12 GB of Disk Space

The system role Transactional Server needs a disk size of at least 12 GB to accommodate Btrfs snapshots.

To work with transactional updates, always use the command transactional-update instead of YaST and Zypper for all software management:

When using this system role, by default, the system will perform a daily update and reboot between 03:30 am and 05:00 am. Both of these actions are systemd-based and if necessary can be disabled using systemctl:

tux@linux > sudo systemctl disable --now transactional-update.timer rebootmgr.service

For more information about transactional updates, see the openSUSE Kubic blog posts https://kubic.opensuse.org/blog/2018-04-04-transactionalupdates/ and https://kubic.opensuse.org/blog/2018-04-20-transactionalupdates2/.

The minimal system installation lacks certain functionality that is often taken for granted:

The installer will only propose a partitioning scheme if the available hard disk size is larger than 12 GB. If you want to set up, for example, very small virtual machines images, use the guided partitioner to tune partitioning parameters manually.

Prior to installing openSUSE on a system that boots using UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), you are urgently advised to check for any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends and, if available, to install such an update. A pre-installation of Windows 8 or later is a strong indication that your system boots using UEFI.

Background: Some UEFI firmware has bugs that cause it to break if too much data gets written to the UEFI storage area. However, there is no clear data of how much is “too much”.

openSUSE minimizes the risk by not writing more than the bare minimum required to boot the OS. The minimum means telling the UEFI firmware about the location of the openSUSE boot loader. Upstream Linux kernel features that use the UEFI storage area for storing boot and crash information (pstore) have been disabled by default. Nevertheless, it is recommended to install any firmware updates the hardware vendor recommends.

Together with the EFI/UEFI specification, a new style of partitioning arrived: GPT (GUID Partition Table). This new schema uses globally unique identifiers (128-bit values displayed in 32 hexadecimal digits) to identify devices and partition types.

Additionally, the UEFI specification also allows legacy MBR (MS-DOS) partitions. The Linux boot loaders (ELILO or GRUB 2) try to automatically generate a GUID for those legacy partitions, and write them to the firmware. Such a GUID can change frequently, causing a rewrite in the firmware. A rewrite consists of two different operations: Removing the old entry and creating a new entry that replaces the first one.

Modern firmware has a garbage collector that collects deleted entries and frees the memory reserved for old entries. A problem arises when faulty firmware does not collect and free those entries. This can result in a non-bootable system.

To work around this problem, convert the legacy MBR partition to GPT.

The YaST installer does not scale its UI for High-DPI displays by default. If you have a computer with a high-DPI display, you can set YaST to scale its UI automatically for the display. To do so, add the parameter QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 to the bootloader command line.

Deprecated packages are still shipped as part of the distribution but are scheduled to be removed the next version of openSUSE Leap. These packages exist to aid migration, but their use is discouraged and they may not receive updates.

To check whether installed packages are no longer maintained: Make sure that lifecycle-data-openSUSE is installed, then use the command:

tux@linux > zypper lifecycle

Removed packages are not shipped as part of the distribution anymore.

With the kernel shipped in openSUSE Leap 15.0 GM, the Nouveau driver for Nvidia graphics card may hang at reboot, shutdown, or during runtime power management actions. This bug occurs primarily on system with hybrid graphics, such as laptops that include integrated Intel graphics and a discrete Nvidia graphics card.

The bug will be fixed in a maintenance update for the kernel. However, as the installation image does not receive updates, this issue may occur during installation or first boot even after that update has shipped. In that case, as a temporary workaround, boot with the option nouveau.modeset=0. After the updated kernel including the fix is installed, you can remove this option again.

The KDE Plasma Wayland session is not supported with the proprietary Nvidia driver. If you are using KDE and the proprietary Nvidia driver, stay with the X session.

In previous versions of openSUSE, the compose key combination allowed typing characters that were not part of the regular keyboard layout. For example, to produce “å”, you could press and release Shift–Right Ctrl and then press a twice.

In openSUSE Leap 15.0, there is no longer a predefined compose key combination because Shift–Right Ctrl does not work as expected anymore.

In the past, you could use /etc/sysconfig or the YaST module /etc/sysconfig Editor to define the login manager and desktop session. Starting with openSUSE Leap 15.0, the values are not defined using /etc/sysconfig anymore but with the alternatives system.

To change the defaults, use the following alternatives:

For example, to check the value of default-displaymanager, use:

tux@linux > sudo update-alternatives --display default-displaymanager

To switch the default-displaymanager to xdm, use:

tux@linux > sudo update-alternatives --set default-displaymanager \
  /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/xdm

To enable graphical management of alternatives, use the YaST module Alternatives that can be installed from the package yast2-alternatives.

When using GNOME Shell together with a login manager other than GDM, such as SDDM or LightDM, the screen will not blank or lock. Additionally, switching users without logging out is not possible.

To be able to lock the screen from GNOME Shell, enable GDM as your login manager:

The default login manager for KDE, SDDM, does not scale its UI for High-DPI displays by default. If you have a computer with a high-DPI display, you can set SDDM to scale its UI automatically for the display using the configuration file /etc/sddm.conf:

[X11]
EnableHiDPI=true
ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi DPI_VALUE

Replace DPI_VALUE with an appropriate DPI value, such as 192. For best scaling results, use a DPI value that is a multiple of the default 96 DPI.

YaST does not scale its UI for High-DPI displays by default. If you have a computer with a high-DPI display, you can set YaST to scale its UI automatically for the display. To do so, set the environment variable QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1.

Qt supports automatic per-monitor scaling on X. It uses the DPI value of the virtual X screen to calculate the font size for the primary monitor. By default, this value is 96 DPI. It uses the relative DPI of the primary monitor to derive font DPI for all other monitors.

Two widely used desktops will override this behavior of Qt, therefore this note does not apply to them:

On other desktops, this behavior of Qt can lead to undesirable situations such as the following: If the primary display is High-DPI (>= 144 DPI), fonts in Qt applications that request scaling, such as VLC, are effectively scaled to half the desired size on all monitors. Applications which do not request scaling, such as YaST (with default settings), use the same DPI value on all monitors. Hence, they will look smaller on the High-DPI monitor.

You can use one of the following workarounds for this issue:

Firefox and Chromium normally allow Web-based tools such as videoconferencing applications to share the entire screen or individual application windows. This functionality is currently not supported in either browser when using a Wayland session.

To be able to share your screen in Firefox or Chromium, use an X session instead.

The codecs to play MP3 media files are shipped as part of the standard repository.

To use this decoder in gstreamer-based applications and frameworks, such as Rhythmbox or Totem, install the package gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

LibreOffice 5.3 and higher do not support legacy Type-1 fonts (file extensions .afm and .pfb) anymore. Most users should not be affected by this, as current fonts are available either in the format TrueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf) formats.

If you are affected by this, convert Type-1 fonts to a supported format, such as TrueType and then use the converted fonts. Conversion is possible with the application FontForge (package fontforge) which is included in openSUSE. For information on scripting such conversions, see https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/documentation/scripting/.

FreeType 2.6.4 has a new default glyph hinting interpreter (version 38) that more closely matches other operating systems but may look “more fuzzy” to some. To restore the previous FreeType behavior, set the following environment variable at any level (system-wide, user-specific, or program-specific) of your choice:

FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35"

Plasma browser integration for Firefox and Chromium/Chrome allows monitoring multimedia and downloads using KDE system tools and gives quick access to tabs via the Run Command bar of the KDE Plasma desktop.

The browser integration functionality consists of two parts that need to work together:

Note that this functionality is officially still in development and openSUSE Leap 15.0 ships with an early version of it.

Because of conflicts with Emacs modules from the default installation, openSUSE Leap 15.0 can no longer load the psgml module automatically. For more information, see the file README from the package psgml.

openSUSE Leap 42.3 shipped with GPG 2.0, while openSUSE Leap 15.0 includes GPG 2.2. In between these GPG versions, support for GPG V3 keys was removed. If your system's key database still contains GPG V3 keys, you may receive warnings about this when executing Zypper or rpm commands, as these commands are checking the integrity of the package database. These warnings take the form warning: Unsupported version of key: V3.

Usually, these warnings are benign, as these keys may have been used for repositories that are no longer enabled on the system or that have since had key updates. However, if these keys are still in active use by the upstream repository, they must be replaced as soon as possible:

To delete such keys, perform the following:

In the past, there could be confusion over the difference between how the very similarly named systemctl subcommands reload and restart worked for AppArmor:

Unfortunately, systemd does not provide a solution within its unit file format for the issue posed by the restart scenario.

Starting with AppArmor 2.12, the command systemctl stop apparmor will not work. As a consequence, systemctl restart apparmor will now correctly reload AppArmor profiles.

To unload all AppArmor profiles, use the new command aa-teardown instead which matches the previous behavior of systemctl stop apparmor.

For more information, see https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=996520 and https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=853019.

openSUSE Leap 15.0 introduces a new default Btrfs subvolume layout that aims for the following:

Instead of using multiple Btrfs subvolumes for different subdirectories of /var, openSUSE Leap 15.0 ships with a single subvolume for all of /var. This new subvolume has copy-on-write functionality disabled.

There is no defined way of upgrading to this new Btrfs subvolume layout. Therefore, if you want to take advantage of it, make sure to freshly install openSUSE Leap 15.0 instead of upgrading.

For more information on the default Btrfs subvolume layout before and after this change, see https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:BTRFS.

RFC 4361 updates the client-id defined in RFC 2132, section 9.14 to be compatible with DHCP 6 client-id (duid). The use of an RFC 4361 is mandatory on Infiniband (RFC 4390) and is also required to perform DNS record updates in the same zone for DHCP 4 and DHCP 6 addresses also on Ethernet.

In openSUSE Leap 15.0:

To send the client-id during the installation, use linuxrc (also see https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Linuxrc) with the following ifcfg:

ifcfg=eth0=dhcp,DHCLIENT_CLIENT_ID=01:03:52:54:00:02:c2:67,DHCLIENT6_CLIENT_ID=00:03:52:54:00:02:c2:67

For more information, see the documentation for the options dhcp4 "create-cid", dhcp6 "default-duid" in man 5 wicked-config, wicked duid --help, and wicked iaid --help.

The traditionally used RFC 2132 DHCPv4 client-id on Ethernet is constructed from the hardware type (01 for Ethernet) and followed by the hardware address (the MAC address), for example:

01:52:54:00:02:c2:67

The RFC 4361 client-id starts with 0xff (instead of the hardware type), followed by the DHCPv6 IAID (the interface-address association ID that describes the interface on the machine), followed by the DHCPv6 DUID (client-id which identifies the machine).

Using the above hardware type-based and hardware address-based DUID (LLT type used by default), the new RFC 4361 DHCPv4 client-id would be:

The xx:xx:xx:xx in the DUID-LLT is a creation timestamp. A DUID-LL (00:03:00:01:MAC) does not have a timestamp.