It’s time for more development news from the YaST Team. In this occasion, most of the work has gone into improving features already implemented in previous sprints and, thus, presented in former blog posts. That includes:

• Improvements when writing wireless security settings for NetworkManager
• Fixes in the new management of hibernation
• Possibility to tweak the I/O device autoconfiguration in the installed system
• Usability improvements regarding nested items in the table widget
• Better LibYUI packaging including a revamped CMake build system
• Enhancements in the YaST Autoinstallation module regarding partitioning
• Many other improvements and fixes here and there

As you surely remember, in the previous sprint we added support for writing basic NetworkManager configuration during installation. But it was quite limited regarding wireless, so it only was capable to translate WPA-PSAK and open wireless configuration. During this sprint, we enhanced the NetworkManager config writers to support the same wireless setups that are currently supported by wicked (WEP, WPA-EAP…). In addition, some UI problems were found and fixed.

In the previous sprint we also improved the hibernation support by tuning the scenarios in which YaST adds the resume= parameter to the bootloader configuration. While testing that improved behavior, some problems were detected both by ourselves and by the awesome QA team at SUSE. Now all those inconvenients are fixed: the bootloader proposal is properly recalculated when needed, the resume parameter is not longer added for small swap devices and we improved the detection of virtual setups in which traditional hibernation is not wanted.

But not all the features we polished during this sprint are so recent. For several months, we have been describing the different steps in the implementation of support in YaST for I/O devices auto-configuration on s390 mainframes. The latest reference was on our blog post of sprint 105 (time flies!). But we still had one more thing in our TO-DO list and, since we recently had to modify the YaST2 Tune module to remove some obsolete settings, we decided to take the opportunity and also add the I/O device autoconfig checkbox to that module. See details and screenshots at this pull request.

We also improved the usability of our most recent LibYUI feature. In the YaST partitioner, which is so far the only application using the new feature to have nested rows in a table, the [Space] key did not only open or close tree branches in the ncurses text-mode interface. It also sent an “Activated” event (the counterpart of double-clicking an item in the Qt graphical user interface), resulting in a quite confusing behavior. See the fix for more detailed information.

And talking about LibYUI, we also decided it was time to tackle one big problem that we have been dragging for too long. The structure of our development repositories and our over-complicated CMake build environment was making too hard to add new features to LibYUI without risking breakage in the distributions. Every change implied a lot of extra synchronization work, which also was an obstacle for external contributions and maintaners of additional plugins and backends. After several weeks of work, we have now walked the first step out of that mess with the new CMake build system for LibYUI

And there is no YaST Team sprint without some news about AutoYaST. This time we have improved the part of the YaST Autoinstallation module that can be used to create and tweak the <partitioning> section of the AutoYaST profile. Apart from several small fixes (like improved visualization or fixes in the fstopt field), it’s now possible to manage <drive> sections to describe NFS and tmpfs file systems.

As usual, there would be much more to report like usability improvements and speedups in YaST Network, fixes in hwinfo or important updates in the documentation… but we need to go back to coding at some point!

So see you again in a couple of weeks with more news about YaST and, if everything works as expected, some reflections about the long-term future. Stay safe and have a lot of fun!