ALP - The Adaptable Linux Platform – is a new operating system from SUSE to run containerized and virtualized workloads. It is in early prototype phase, but the development is done completely openly so it’s easy to jump in to try it. For this trying out, I used the latest encrypted build – as of the writing, 22.1 – from ALP images. I imported it in virt-manager as a Generic Linux 2022 image, using UEFI instead of BIOS, added a TPM device (which I’m interested in otherwise) and referring to an Ignition JSON file in the XML config in virt-manager.

One thing I wanted to investigate during the Hackweek was trying out whether openSUSE Leap would offer my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 a nice and stable option for motion detection camera recording. I have had RPi 3 Model A+ doing this for a longer time, and a Zero model before that, but the newer RPi Zero 2 has been a bit unstable for so far unknown reason. There are also some unoptimal combinations of too old or too fresh software in the official Raspberry Pi OS releases.

I’ve always, or at least ever since the development of the iconic Nokia N9 and the projects I was working on at the time, wanted “60 fps” silky smooth behavior from both phones and computers, and learned to be sensitive to that. GNOME has been fighting back a bit on that front for several years though on HiDPI displays, with also regressing at least on openSUSE a bit earlier which I was unable to pinpoint exact reason to.

I received a new laptop for work - a Dell XPS 13. Dell has been long famous for offering certain models with pre-installed Linux as a supported option, and opting for those is nice for moving some euros/dollars from certain PC desktop OS monopoly towards Linux desktop engineering costs. Notably Lenovo also offers Ubuntu and Fedora options on many models these days (like Carbon X1 and P15 Gen 2). Obviously a smooth, ready-to-rock Ubuntu installation is nice for most people already, but I need openSUSE, so after checking everything is fine with Ubuntu, I continued to install openSUSE Tumbleweed as a dual boot option.

Google Pixel phones support what they call ”Motion Photo” which is essentially a photo with a short video clip attached to it. They are quite nice since they bring the moment alive, especially as the capturing of the video starts a small moment before the shutter button is pressed. For most viewing programs they simply show as static JPEG photos, but there is more to the files. I’d really love proper Shotwell support for these file formats, so I posted a longish explanation with many of the details in this blog post to a ticket there too.

I’ve had a somewhat recent AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics card in my Mini-ITX PC for over a year already, and one long term interest I have would be to be able to enhance old videos. Thanks to Hackweek I could look at this as one of the things that I’ve waited to have time for. In recent years there have been approaches to use eg neural networks to do super resolution handling of photos and also videos, so that there would be more actual details and shapes than what would be possible via normal image manipulation.

I was looking forward to updating a package (enchant) with a backported patch from upstream and wanted it to be included in both SLE offerings and openSUSE. I’m used to working within the community from the past, so even though I’m a SUSE employee I wanted to contribute without using anything internal. I filed a bug and did a request to first get the patch into Tumbleweed via GNOME:Factory. That was easy, but then I looked on how to get the same patch into the stable releases.