Release Notes

42.1.20170515

Abstract

openSUSE Leap is a free and Linux-based operating system for your PC, Laptop or
Server. You can surf the web, manage your e-mails and photos, do office work,
play videos or music and have a lot of fun!

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Table of Contents

Installation

    Minimal System Installation
    UEFI—Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
    UEFI, GPT, and MS-DOS Partitions

System Upgrade

    Network Interface Names
    Btrfs: Disk Space Leak after System Rollbacks

General

    Non-Oss Repository

Technical

    Printing System: Improvements and Incompatible Changes

Miscellaneous

    KDE and Network Authentication
    No Screensaver Support in KDE Plasma

More Information and Feedback

The end of the maintenance period for openSUSE Leap 42.1 is now reached. To
keep your systems up-to-date and secure, upgrade to a current openSUSE version.
Before starting the upgrade, make sure that all maintenance updates for
openSUSE Leap 42.1 are applied.

For more information about upgrading to a current openSUSE version, see http://
en.opensuse.org/SDB:Distribution-Upgrade.

For the release notes of previous releases, see http://en.opensuse.org/
openSUSE:Release_Notes.

Installation

This section contains installation-related notes. For detailed upgrade
instructions, see the documentation at https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/
leap/startup/html/book.opensuse.startup/part.basics.html.

Minimal System Installation

In order to avoid some big recommended packages from being installed, the
pattern for minimal installations uses another pattern that creates conflicts
with undesired packages. This pattern,
patterns-openSUSE-minimal_base-conflicts, can be removed after installation.

Note that the minimal installation has no firewall by default. If you need one,
install SuSEfirewall2.

UEFI—Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

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-installed Windows 8 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. Nobody really knows how much "too much"
is, though. 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.

UEFI, GPT, and MS-DOS Partitions

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 GRUB2) 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
consist of two different operation: 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 may end up with a non-bootable system.

The workaround is simple: convert the legacy MBR partition to the new GPT to
avoid this problem completely.

System Upgrade

This section lists notes related to upgrading the system. For detailed upgrade
instructions, see the documentation at https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/
leap/startup/html/book.opensuse.startup/cha.update.osuse.html.

Network Interface Names

When upgrading a remote machine from openSUSE 13.2, make sure your network
interfaces are named correctly.

openSUSE 13.2 used so-called predictable network interface names (for example,
enp5s0), whereas openSUSE Leap 42.1 uses persistent interface names (eth0).
After upgrading and rebooting, the network interface names may therefore
change. This could lock you out of the system. To avoid interfaces from being
renamed, run the following command for each of your network interfaces before
you reboot the system:

/usr/lib/udev/udev-generate-persistent-rule -v -c enp5s0 -n enp5s0 -o /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Replace enp5s0 with the name of your network interface.

Btrfs: Disk Space Leak after System Rollbacks

By default, openSUSE 13.2 used a Btrfs partition layout that allowed for disk
space to become permanently occupied with stale, inaccessible contents after
the first system rollback was executed. This layout issue was fixed in openSUSE
Leap 42.1. However, the fix can only be applied to newly installed systems.

If you are upgrading from openSUSE 13.2, you cannot convert the file system to
the new layout, but you can reclaim the lost disk space.

Data Loss with Non-Standard Settings or No Rollbacks

The following procedure will only work properly on installations set up using
the default proposal created by the openSUSE 13.2 installer.

Additionally, you must have previously made a system rollback.

If you have set up your Btrfs file system with a non-standard configuration or
have not previously made a system rollback, executing the following procedure
can incur data loss.

 1. Mount the initial root filesystem:

    mount /dev/<ROOT_FILE_SYSTEM> -o subvolid=5 /mnt

 2. Remove all files below /mnt that are not in a subvolume:

    find /mnt -xdev -delete

 3. Umount the filesystem again:

    umount /mnt

General

Non-Oss Repository

After the installation, the non-oss repository is disabled.

Enable the openSUSE-Leap-42.1-Non-Oss repository using YaST or on the command
line using zypper:

zypper mr -e repo-non-oss

Technical

Printing System: Improvements and Incompatible Changes

CUPS Version Upgrade to 1.7

The new CUPS version introduced some major changes compared to 1.5 that may
require manual configuration adjustments.

  • PDF is now the standard print job format rather than PS. Therefore
    traditional PostScript printers now also need a filter driver for printing.

    See https://en.opensuse.org/Concepts_printing for details.

  • The network printer discovery protocol has changed. The native method to
    discover network printers is now based on DNS Service discovery (DNS-SD,
    that is, via Avahi). The cups-browsed service from the cups-filters package
    can be used to bridge old and new protocols. Both cupsd and cups-browsed
    need to run to make "legacy" clients discover printers (that includes
    LibreOffice and KDE).

  • The IPP protocol default version changed from 1.1 to 2.0. Older IPP servers
    like CUPS 1.3.x (for example in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11) reject IPP 2.0
    requests with Bad Request (see http://www.cups.org/str.php?L4231).

    To be able to print to old servers, the IPP protocol version must be
    specified explictly by appending /version=1.1 to either:

      □ The ServerName settings in client.conf (for example, ServerName
        older.server.example.com/version=1.1).

      □ The CUPS_SERVER environment variable value.

      □ The server name value of the -h option of the command line tools, for
        example:

        lpstat -h older.server.example.com/version=1.1 -p

  • Some printing filters and back-ends were moved from the cups package to the
    cups-filters package.

  • Some configuration directives were split from cupsd.conf into
    cups-files.conf (see http://www.cups.org/str.php?L4223, CVE-2012-5519, and
    https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789566).

  • CUPS banners and the CUPS test page were moved from the cups package to the
    cups-filters package (see http://www.cups.org/str.php?L4120 and https://
    bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735404).

Miscellaneous

KDE and Network Authentication

When using the KDE display manager SDDM with an authentication method that
provides a high number of users, SDDM becomes unusable. Additionally, if the
automounter is used, SDDM may block for a long time on startup trying to mount
every user's home.

Modify /etc/sddm.conf to contain the following entries:

[Theme]
Current=maldives

[Users]
MaximumUid=1002

See https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=953778 for details.

No Screensaver Support in KDE Plasma

KDE Plasma does not support screensavers by default. If you prefer to have a
screensaver, install the package xscreensaver.

Set xscreensaver to start with the desktop session by selecting K+Settings+
Configure Desktop, then choose Startup and Shutdown+Autostart. Click Add
Program, type xscreensaver and click OK.

To configure the screensaver, use xscreensaver-demo.

More Information and Feedback

  • Read the README documents on the medium.

  • View a detailed changelog information about a particular package from its
    RPM:

    rpm --changelog -qp FILENAME.rpm

    Replace FILENAME with the name of the RPM.

  • Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of the medium for a chronological
    log of all changes made to the updated packages.

  • Find more information in the docu directory on the medium.

  • https://activedoc.opensuse.org/ contains additional or updated
    documentation.

  • Visit https://www.opensuse.org for the latest product news from openSUSE.

Copyright © 2015 SUSE LLC

Thanks for using openSUSE.

The openSUSE Team.

