14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the independently-developed KaOS GNU/Linux operating system announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the KaOS 2017.07 updated installation medium for the July 2017.
Every month, the KaOS devs push a new, up-to-date Live ISO image of their GNU/Linux distribution, which is built around the latest KDE and Qt technologies. And this time is no different, as KaOS 2017.07 incorporates the recently released KDE Plasma 5.10.3 desktop environment, KDE Applications 17.04.3 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.36.0, all built on the Qt 5.9.1 application framework.
As expected, KaOS 2017.07 ships with the latest point release of the Calamares 3.1 universal installer framework, specifically version 3.1.1, which fixes a weaker password salt issue that was recently discovered and patched by the Calamares development team. All GNU/Linux distributions that use the Calamares installer as default graphical installer in their ISOs should follow suit as well.
"Systems installed by Calamares up to and including Calamares 3.1 have a weaker password salt than they should. This weakness does not weaken the password security for logins on a single user system. It does weaken the password if an attacker can obtain the password hash through some other means. With Calamares 3.1.1 this issue is corrected thus it is vital to get this new ISO out," explain the KaOS devs.
KaOS now powered by Linux kernel 4.11.9, Mesa 17.1.4
Among other improvements that landed in the KaOS 2017.07 release, we can mention the in-house built Welcome application has been completely rewritten in QML, the first run wizard was revamped and updated to the latest Qt/PyQt 5.9 libraries, KDE's Dolphin file manager received a few adjustments for power users, and a couple of more QML apps made their way into the KaOS repos, Koko and Kube.
Under the hood, KaOS 2017.07 is powered by the Linux 4.11.9 kernel, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6.4.0, Binutils 2.28, LLVM/Clang 4.0.1, Mesa 17.1.4, Glib2 2.52.3, DBus 1.10.20, Porotobuf 3.3.2, PyQt 5.9, and Kmod 24. Therefore, all existing KaOS users are urged to update their installations as soon as possible, and newcomers can download the KaOS 2017.07 64-bit Live ISO right now from our website.
