KaOS 2016.03

Mar 14, 2016

KaOS is proud to announce the availability of the March release of a new stable ISO.

The Plasma Desktop includes Frameworks 5.20.0, Plasma 5.5.5, KDE Applications 15.12.2 and not yet released ports of KDE Applications. A few enhancements to the Plasma 5 experience have been added, these are KaOS specific extras.
You now have the option to calculate the md5sum from any file from the Dolphin service menu.
Since the kf5 move there has not been a fully working GUI for user management, there is one added now for KaOS, you will find it under systemsettings, account details.
From there you can create new users, change existing user(s) role or delete a user. Also added it is a KCM for locale/language settings.

Thanks to the contributions of fabianalexisinostroza & forostm the artwork received a redesign in many elements. A new icon theme for light and dark themes has arrived. The Midna Dark theme received a complete overhaul with a new plasma theme, window decorations, colorscheme and new sddm & splash themes. The new work brings to Midna Dark a complete unified look.

Most notable major updates to the base of the system are a Glibc 2.23/Binutils 2.26 based new toolchain, a move of the xorg stack to 1.18, gstreamer group is at 1.6.3, a move to Pacman 5, Linux 4.4.5, Mesa 11.1.2, Pulseaudio 8.0 and Mariadb 10.1.12.

Calamares, the used installer framework, has moved to the 2.1 series.
Highlights of the changes and additions:

• Thoroughly rewritten partitioning feature, now based on KPMcore
  (the same library used by KDE Partition Manager)

• The choice page in the partitioning module now shows disk changes in
  real life, with much improved preview widgets, which are now not just
  preview but also selection widgets for the Replace feature
• Tooltips in partition views.
• All new non-blocking asynchronous device rescans with spinner UI throughout
  the partitioning module
• Added support for setting partition flags (including the EFI system partition flag)
  while creating or editing a partition in the manual partitioning page.
• Overhauled modules system, allowing for much more flexibility in configuring
  and arranging views and jobs.

• Added a check and warning when installing in EFI mode with manual partitioning
  without setting up a mount point and/or flag for the EFI system partition.

Among the new applications that are now fully ported to Qt5/Frameworks 5, Kjots, Keneric, Kcolorchooser, SqliteBrowser and Grub2-editor.

KaOS uses the Systemd provided Systemd-boot for UEFI installs.

Known issues:

• Clementine will segfault on start due to a change in Sqlite, please update your system to correct this, it will bring a new Sqlite.
• Installing on RAID, LVM, LUKS is currently not possible