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Reports of KDE neon Downloads Being Dangerous Entirely Exaggerated

When you download a KDE neon ISO you get transparently redirected to one of the mirrors that KDE uses. Recently the Polish mirror was marked as unsafe in Google Safebrowsing which is an extremely popular service used by most web browsers and anti-virus software to check if a site is problematic. I expect there was a problem elsewhere on this mirror but it certainly wasn’t KDE neon. KDE sysadmins have tried to contact the mirror and Google.

You can verify any KDE neon installable image by checking the gpg signature against the KDE neon ISO Signing Key.  This is the .sig file which is alongside all the .iso files.

gpg2 --recv-key '348C 8651 2066 33FD 983A 8FC4 DEAC EA00 075E 1D76'

wget http://files.kde.org/neon/images/neon-useredition/current/neon-useredition-current.iso.sig

gpg2 --verify neon-useredition-current.iso.sig
gpg: Signature made Thu 19 Jan 2017 11:18:13 GMT using RSA key ID 075E1D76
gpg: Good signature from "KDE neon ISO Signing Key <neon@kde.org>" [full]

Adding a sensible GUI to do this is future work and fairly tricky to do in a secure way but hopefully soon.

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KDE neon Inaugurated with Calamares Installer

You voted for change and today we’re bringing change. Today we give back the installer to the people. Today Calamares 3 was released.

It’s been a long standing wish of KDE neon to switch to the Calamares installer.  Calamares is a distro independent installer used by various projects such as Netrunner and Tanglu.  It’s written in Qt and KDE Frameworks and has modules in C++ or Python.

Today I’ve switched the Developer Unstable edition to Calamares and it looks to work pretty nicely.

However there’s a few features missing compared to the previous Ubiquity installer.  OEM mode might be in there but needs me to add some integration for it.  Restricted codecs install should be easy to add.  LUKS encrypted hard disk are there but also needs some integration from me.  Encrypted home holders isn’t there and should be added.  Updating to latest packages on install should also be added.  It does seem to work with UEFI computers, but not with secure boot yet. Let me know if you spot any others.

I’ve only tested this on a simple virtual machine, so give it a try and see what breaks. Or if you want to switch back run apt install ubiquity-frontend-kde ubiquity-slideshow-neon''.

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Get Yourself on www.kde.org

Google Code-in has just finished where school pupils do tasks to introduce themselves to open development.  I had one to update the screenshots on www.kde.org.  The KDE website is out of date in many ways but here’s a wee way to fix one part of it.  Despite me having about half a dozen students work on it there’s still some old screenshots there so if anyone wants the satisfaction of contributing to www.kde.org’s front page here’s an easy way.

www.kde.org has screenshots of all our apps but many still use the old KDE 4 Oxygen widget theme and icons.

For 10 screenshots which is using the old theme take a new screenshot using the new theme.

They can be checked out from Subversion here https://websvn.kde.org/trunk/www/sites/www/images/screenshots/ also provide one the resized screenshot which is 400 pixels wide exactly.

Keep the filenames the same and in lower case.

Upload as a single .zip or .tar.gz containing the screenshots with the right file name and a folder resized/ with the 400px screenshots

For bonus points you could go through the index file to make sure it’s current with KDE applications https://www.kde.org/applications/index.json
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Plasma Wayland ISO

Plasma is nearing a new release and with 5.9 coming shortly we have the question of should we switch Neon to use Wayland by default for the Developer Unstable edition. To evaluate it I updated the Plasma Wayland ISO and found it pleasingly functional on VirtualBox.  Time to install this setup on my real hardware and see what breaks.

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KDE neon Now Available on Docker

KDE neon provides an easy and elegant way for people to test the latest from KDE, or use the latest releases of KDE Software.

Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed.  You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome.  Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.

So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.

I’ve created two Docker repos each available with the same flavours we have for the Neon packages: Developer Unstable & Stable and User normal & LTS.  The repos are kdeneon/plasma (2GB download) which has image with the same Plasma and limited apps our downloadable ISOs do, and kdeneon/all (getting on for 4GB download) which has all the apps built by Neon.

To give it a try first set up docker as you would for your distro.  For Ubuntu distros that means running:

apt-get install docker.io xserver-xephyr
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

and log out and in again

Then if you want to run a full Plasma session you can:

Xephyr -screen 1024x768 :1 &
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix kdeneon/plasma:dev-unstable

This starts the X-server-in-a-window Xephyr then it runs the Docker client which tells your local Docker server to fetch the kdeneon/plasma image from the Docker Hub server and run a full Plasma session.

If you just want to test one application, that’s no problem too:

xhost +
docker run -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=:0 kdeneon/plasma:dev-unstable okular

This drops access restrictions to your X server (should be safe because network access is still off but reverse it once you’re done if you want to be sure), grabs kdeneon and runs okular.

Here’s me running dev-unstable and user edition at the same time as running Okular from dev-stable to check the recent save-open dialog bug is fixed.

It runs as user ‘neon’ with password ‘neon’ with unrestricted sudo access.

Let me know how you get on (here, Reddit, neon@kde.org mailing list, bugs.kde.org, Telegram, IRC, whatever), I’m quite new to making Docker images so any improvements welcome.

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In other news, our friends at OMG Ubuntu tried out KDE neon