Technical Blog of Richard Hughes

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.

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.

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?

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….