Today we released Plasma 5.2 and this new release comes with two fixes for security vulnerabilities in our screen locker implementation. As I found, exploited, reported and fixed these vulnerabilities I decided to put them a little bit into context.

The first vulnerability concerns our QtQuick user interface for the lock screen. Through the Look and Feel package it was possible to send the login information to a remote location. That’s pretty bad but luckily also only a theoretical problem: we have not yet implemented a way to install new Look and Feel packages from the Internet. So we found the issue before any harm was done.

Also: Plasma 5.2 for openSUSE? You bet!

KDE is one of the oldest open-source desktop projects which can be found today, and over the years it has established a rich history of highs and lows. During some points it has been the undisputed ruler of the desktop world, while other times it had fallen behind or faced hard trials.

A memory everything but forgotten, just over 6 years ago KDE tore itself apart in spectacular fashion to assemble itself anew. Brave users who wandered through the rubble and wreckage saw developers rebuild the KDE before their eyes, witnessing the birth of ‘Plasma Desktop’ and it’s sister project ‘KDE Development Platform’. It was universally understood that this twisted gnarled creature of a computing experience was both hideous yet full of potential, and over 5 years of refining Plasma it had struggled, crawled, hobbled, walked, run, and eventually mature into a fine desktop.

Following a month of usage at a group of pre-selected customers, Kolab Systems is happy to announce general availability for Kolab Enterprise 14. This latest feature release of Kolab Enterprise will be supported until 2019 and packs a whole set of new capabilities including tags, notes, better resource management, task delegation capabilities, usability improvements for deployments with very large numbers of shared groupware folders and much more.

Furthermore Kolab Systems is happy to once again extend the list of supported platforms to include Enterprise Linux 7 and Debian 7.0 "Wheezy". This release is accompanied by the launch of the brand new web site kolabenterprise.com to go hand in hand with kolabsystems.com.

For KDE users on Fedora, the Fedora 22 release is seeking to focus on the still-maturing Plasma 5 shell that's powered by KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5.

An in-progress change proposal for Fedora 22 is to use Plasma 5 (and KF5/Qt5) with the latest KDE components to be fully-packaged in time for F22, an upgrade path be provided from KDE 4, and to retire any KDE 4 packages in Fedora that aren't compatible with the "KDE 5" work.