Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager version 1.2.0 is out.

The applet now supports OTP codes (in the format supported by the pass OTP plugin). The ‘clock’ icon appears next to all passwords, even those that do not have OTP code. This is a limitation caused by the passwords being stored in files encrypted and being decrypted only when the user requests it - so the applet cannot know whether there’s an OTP code available in the password file until you click on it. There were also some small fixups and UI improvements.

Tarball:

https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-pass/plasma-pass-1.2.0.tar.xz

Checksum:

SHA-256: 01f0b03b99e41c067295e7708d41bbe581c0d73e78d43b50bf86b4699969f780
SHA-1:   07a32d21b0c4dd38cad9c800d7b8f463f42c39c6

Signature:

0ABDFA55A4E6BEA99A83EA974D69557AECB13683 Daniel Vrátil <dvratil@kde.org>

Feel free to report any issues or feature requests to KDE Bugzilla.

Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager version 1.1.0 is out.

There’s only one bugfix, but an important one - the applet now no longer freezes during filtering, so searching for your passwords is faster and more comfortable. The new release also contains new and updated translations.

Tarball:

https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-pass/plasma-pass-1.1.0.tar.xz

Checksum:

SHA-256: a9789142c1b487f41e245bde9179d7857972c521df906e58176e0b0c0c3cdc39
SHA-1:   427e6bae205c29bd26db6e3590c3e9d75accc537

Signature:

0ABDFA55A4E6BEA99A83EA974D69557AECB13683 Daniel Vrátil <dvratil@kde.org>

Feel free to report any issues or feature requests to KDE Bugzilla.

Last year I wrote about Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager. Over the couple last months I got some emails from packagers from various distributions asking for a proper release so they can package it…so here it is, proudly announcing Plasma Pass 1.0.0.

Here’s a video of how it works:

Tarball:

https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-pass/plasma-pass-1.0.0.tar.xz

Checksum:

SHA-256: 9821c5ad80e4370dce002855bd0300d234feec249258b01fafd9e3a9241cbc66
SHA-1:   8d877b4d4bbbbf12890ba77c03c5cdd62b8279d6
MD-5:    69928b6df32ba82d0436a6d0abf73a8a

Signature:

0ABDFA55A4E6BEA99A83EA974D69557AECB13683 Daniel Vrátil <dvratil@kde.org>

Feel free to report any issues or feature requests to KDE Bugzila.

You may have heard about pass, the standard Unix password manager. I learned about it from Milian Wolf some months ago and I really liked it for its simplicity, respect for privacy and multiplatform support. And so over the past months, I started to slowly change my passwords to randomly generated ones stored in pass.

To get a password from pass, you simply type pass -c SomePath/SomeService into console and pass will copy the password straight to your clipboard. Super simple. Slightly less comfortable when you are dealing with websites though. Luckily there's a wonderful browser extension called browserpass that can fill online login forms with a single click and has automatic password matching based on the current domain.

But sometimes even I am simply too lazy to open Yakuake and type in a command, so I started looking for some GUI. There's qtpass, but that's not exactly what I was looking for. And so I dusted off my QML knowledge and wrote Plasma Pass: a systray Plasma applet to quickly find your password and copy it into the clipboard with a single mouse click. The applet also takes care of removing the password from the X11 clipboard as well as Klipper after 45 seconds so it won't leak accidentally through your clipboard history.

The source code is currently available in my scratch repo: https://cgit.kde.org/scratch/dvratil/plasma-pass.git/ plasma-pass.git repo: https://cgit.kde.org/plasma-pass.git.

And now back to fixing Akonadi ;-)

Plasma 5.6 will be out in two weeks but the Plasma team has just released Plasma 5.6 beta which already features all the new yummy things and improvements as well as bunch of bug fixes that will be available in the 5.6 release.

Among other things Plasma 5.6 brings improved color scheme support, task manager on steroids, some new applets as well as further progress on the Wayland front. Two completely new things come as a tech preview: GRUB2 and Plymouth themes to make your system look fancy from the first second you power it up (see instructions below how to enable them).

You can ready the release announcement with more detailed descriptions and screenshots here.

The Fedora KDE SIG team has updated the Plasma 5 Unstable Copr repository so you can get a taste of Plasma 5.6 on Fedora 23 now (sorry for the lack of F22 builds). Rawhide will probably get the beta update some time next week.

$ dnf copr enable @kdesig/plasma-5-unstable
$ dnf update

Due to some changes in upstream releases of KActivities it is possible that you will get package conflict between kactivitymanagerd-debuginfo and kf5-kactivities-debuginfo. In that case please uninstall the kf5-kactivities-debuginfo package. This will be fixed properly once we roll out KDE Frameworks 5.20.

If you want to try the new GRUB and Plymouth themes, install the new packages

$ dnf install grub2-breeze-theme plymouth-theme-breeze

To enable the GRUB theme, edit /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"
GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub2/themes/breeze/theme.txt

and generate new GRUB configuration:

$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

To enable the Plymouth theme, run

plymouth-set-default-theme breeze --rebuild-initrd

If you run into any packaging issues, please talk to us on #fedora-kde on IRC or kde@lists.fedoraproject.org. If you find any bugs or crashes, please report them to bugs.kde.org so that Plasma developers can fix them before the final 5.6 release.

Plasma 5.3, new feature release of KDE workspace, has been released on Tuesday and you can get it now on Fedora.

Plasma 5.3 brings new features, improvements and almost 400 bug fixes for basically all of its components ranging from power management to various applets.

For users of Fedora 20 and Fedora 21 the traditional COPR repository has been updated. If you already use it just do yum update. If you want to switch to Plasma 5 from KDE 4 just follow the instructions on the main page.

Fedora 22, which is currently in beta, already has the 5.3 update in updates-testing and we are continuously polishing the update. For all KDE users updating to Fedora 22, when it's released in May, it will also mean final bye bye to KDE 4 and switch to Plasma 5. Fedora 22 repositories also features the latest release of KDE Telepathy, which finally brings IM integration into Plasma 5.

If you want to try out Plasma 5.3 on Fedora but don't want to install it on your computer yet there's, as always, a live ISO available for you based on Fedora 22 beta. And this time I did include a working installer (for real!), so when you change your mind just click "Install" ;-)

We welcome any feedback and testing from users, feel free to report any bugs to bugzilla.redhat.com, talk to us on #fedora-kde IRC channel on Freenode or join our mailing list.

It's here! Plasma 5.2 has been released just yesterday and you don't have to wait a single minute longer to update your beloved Fedora boxes :-)

I won't go into detail here about all the new awesome things that are waiting for you in Plasma 5.2, but I totally recommend that you go and read Plasma 5.2: The Quintessential Breakdown by Ken Vermette while you are waiting for your package manager to wade through the update. You can also read the official Plasma 5.2 release announcement, it has fancy animated screenshots ;).

And there's other news related to Plasma 5.2 and Fedora: Fedora rawhide has bee updated to Plasma 5.2 too. This means that KDE SIG will ship Plasma 5 in Fedora 22! Of course we will still maintain the Copr repository for our Fedora 20 and Fedora 21 users.

So, how to get Plasma 5.2 on Fedora?

On rawhide, just do dnf update. On Fedora 20 and Fedora 21, if you are already running Plasma 5.1.2 from dvratil/plasma-5 Copr, then all you need to do is to run dnf update. If you are running Plasma 5.1.95 (aka Plasma 5.2 beta) from dvratil/plasma-5-beta Copr, then it's time to switch back to stable:

dnf copr disable dvratil/plasma-5-beta
dnf copr enable dvratil/plasma-5
dnf update

If you are still running KDE 4 and you want to update to Plasma 5.2, just follow the instructions on dvratil/plasma-5 Copr page.

And if you don't feel like installing Plasma 5 on your production box right away and would like to just try it out, there's a live ISO for you. This time I did not forget to add Anaconda, so once you decide that Plasma 5 is good enough for you, you can just install it right from the ISO ;-)

EDIT: I might have included Anaconda, but did not add grub2 to the ISO, so the installer would fail anyway. This has been fixed and updated images are available now on the same link. If you are planning to install from the live ISO, please download the updated images (29-Jan-2015 00:42)

Oh, and if anyone is around in Brno next week for DevConf, let us know and we can informally meet for ceremonious consumption of beer to celebrate the Plasma release ;)

On Tuesday KDE has released first beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.2. Plasma 5.2 is adding many new features and improvements and we would welcome testers to help find and fix bugs before the final release.

Fedora users are welcome to try out Plasma 5.2 beta, either by running Fedora Plasma 5.2 beta live ISO, or by installing packages from plasma-5-beta Copr (see Installation Instructions on the Copr page)

Check out the release announcement to see what new features and improvements are waiting for you in Plasma 5.2. Final release will be in two weeks on January 27, after that we will update the plasma-5 Copr to get the update to all our users :-)

Fedora KDE SIG is happy to announce that latest version of KDE Frameworks 5 have just reached stable repositories of Fedora and  brand new version of KDE Plasma 5 is now available in the our Plasma 5 COPR.

KDE Frameworks 5.3.0

The third release of KDE Frameworks brings mostly bugfixes. KDE Frameworks 5 is a collection of libraries and software frameworks created by the KDE community. It's an effort to rework KDE 4 libraries into a set of individual and independent, cross platform modules that will be readily available to all Qt-based applications.

KDE Frameworks 5 are available in official Fedora repositories for Fedora 20 and the upcoming Fedora 21.

KDE Plasma 5.1

KDE Plasma 5 is the next generation of KDE workspace based on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks. It's latest version brings many bug fixes, performance improvements but also many new features! Dark color theme for the Breeze style, more widgets, improved Task switcher, reworked tray icons and much more. You can read about all the new things in Plasma 5.1 in the official release announcement.

To install KDE Plasma 5 on Fedora, just add the Plasma 5 COPR repository to yum, and simply run yum install plasma-5.

Live ISO

Do you want to give Plasma 5 a try, but don't want to install it yet? Easy! We have prepared a live ISO image based on Fedora 20 for you! You can get it from here: http://pub.dvratil.cz/plasma/iso/5.1/ (use Torrent for faster download).

Do you need help? Come talk to us: either on #fedora-kde IRC channel on Freenode, or join our mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org.

Hello! This is me, reporting from Randa KDE meetings!

I decided to go to Randa to work with the KDE Mutlimedia team on getting Phonon GStreamer 1.0 port out and to discuss future directions of Phonon. As you could figure out from Harald's blog, my mission was successful (mostly). All the original porting work was done by Rohan Garg, Torrie Fisher and Harald Sitter, so big thanks to them! Here in Randa I was mostly fixing existing Phonon GStreamer bugs and polishing the 1.0 port to make it ready for release (had to undust my glib skills :P). An just three days ago, we pushed out first public beta. That night we also fixed a bug that made videos in Gwenview have a blue tint, but the fix is not in the beta release.

Even though it was not part of the plans for Randa, I spend all Wednesday trying to fix some issues in Plasma 5 that were too annoying for me to just continue ignoring them - so in Plasma 5.0.2 the labels in Kickoff will finally be properly centered and in Plasma 5.1 the date will return to the Digital Clock applet. I also submitted patches to add keyboard layout changer and CapsLock-on warning to the new screen locker.

I tried to avoid working on KDE PIM here, but got bribed by chocolate into fixing a specific bug related to contacts and events tags, which I started working on, but haven't finished yet.

And now it's time to leave. If it was up to me, I could just stay in this beautiful place all year... :-)

Many thanks to Mario and the team for organizing the Randa meetings, many thanks to sponsors who made this possible financially and finally huge round of applause to the kitchen team for preparing such delicious meals :-)

See you all in Brno in couple weeks!