Archive for May, 2008

Firefox EULA

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

WTF is that:

So, according to my girlfriend, firefox is no longer free. After seeing this dialog, I think I agree with her. What’s next? Validating your copy of firefox? or Please type your security code? Seriously, not cool.

gpk-application multiple package selection

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

In 0.1.x PackageKit had a restriction it could operate on only one package at a time. This sucked for a multitude of reasons, the main one being that to install a few packages you had to wait for the preceding one to finish.

In an ideal world, we could still query a software list while we are updating, but a lot of the backends do not allow that, giving unpredictable results or ‘just‘ corrupting caches.

One of the main feature requests for 0.2.x was to handle multiple packages in one transaction. The API was slightly changed in PackageKit to support this in 0.2.1, and now the client tools like pkcon and gpk-install-package-name all accept more than one package at a time. Yay for the command line.

This left gpk-application, aka “Add/Remove Software” – which was much trickier to do in a sane way. Now, I’m not saying the screenshot below is sane, but it certainly works, and we can improve it in the few weeks before 0.2.2 is released.

Comments welcome.

BIOS Update for T61

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

If you are using a new T61 or T61p please check your bios version. You can do this using:

lshal | grep system.firmware.version

If you are not running 7LETB7WW, then you really need to update your BIOS to v2.17-1.08

Symptoms of an old BIOS version are hard hangs when docking/undocking from the smart dock, or the USB might mysteriously stop working with Disabling IRQ #19 in the logs.

KDE love!

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Recently, Daniel and Adrien have been rocking with KPackageKit and QPackageKit.
The library is coming on nicely, and the tools are starting to look very KDE like. They could do with a hand, so if you want to get involved, jump on the mailing list and introduce yourself to those two dudes.

See here for a sneak preview. There’s also a screenshot of the OpenSuse updater, which is also working with a PackageKit backend now.

Next step, world domination. Seriously, rock on.

How about something like this?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Okay, I’ve added the needed stuff in desktop-file-utils for the yum backend to pick up the virtual mime-type provides in rpm with the help of hadess. Now all we need is a new rpm version with support for this, and then for rpm based distros (e.g. Fedora) it should just work. For Ubuntu the data is already present in the ton of desktop files that are shipped in gnome-app-install – and I’m sure it will be easy to get at this data in the apt2 backend. Other distros will have to work out how to do this, although I’m sure one of the existing methods will be easy to adapt.

So, enough of the geeky. What do you all think of this:

Code about to hit master…

Comments?

No application for this file type…

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Anyone know how I could hook PackageKit into this UI so that it handles some recognised formats?

For instance, in this case, we could prompt to install Inkscape to view the file. But I don’t want to do lots of waiting if PackageKit can’t find anything that matches the mimetype. Ideas welcome, as I’m really not sure how this code works at all. I’m guessing nautilus, but it could be gio for all I know….