ken’s blog

GNOME Live images are available for 2.20.1, come get gettem’

http://torrent.gnome.org

Let’s talk Conary! If you have questions about Conary package
management, or just want to get together to chat with people using and
managing Conary-based Linux systems, join us at the Conary BOF! A BOF
(Birds-of-a-feather) is an informal information swap hosted by
enthusiasts of a particular topic.

Conary Birds-of-a-feather
Hosted by: Ken VanDine, Michael K. Johnson, and Stephanie Watson
Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 7:00 PM EST
rPath corporate office, 701 Corporate Center Drive, Suite 450, Raleigh, NC

We look forward to you joining us!

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I am very excited to report that we have decided PackageKit is ready for wider spread use. Foresight users will all get PackageKit with their next update, and hopefully all future updates will be performed with PackageKit.

I have been extremely pleased with the progress of PackageKit, I really think it is the right solution and other distros should consider including it in the future. Richard Hughes and the other developers have really done a great job with it. For more information on PackageKit, check out the project site.

As a distro guy, I am always very interested in ways to encourage open source projects to work together. FOSSCamp is designed to do just that. I would encourage anyone in the Boston area, or willing to visit the fine city of Boston to come and hang out for a couple days (Oct 27-28).

I am sure there will be lots of good times, and great topics discussed. I am hoping to talk about desktop technologies, package/systems management, and online desktop possibilities.

We might represent different distros, but we will always have GNOME in common.

Jorge and I at the Ohio Linux Fest after-after party.

This was my first year attending the Ohio Linux Fest, and what a great event. I had a chance to meet lots of cool people and have some great conversations. The .ORG Desktop Corner, which consisted of Foresight, GNOME, Fedora and Ubuntu Ohio Loco, was a real smash. We had the first 4 tables near the entrance, and was so much more crowded than the rest of the show. Linux on the desktop was obviously important to people this year.

Kevin did a great job running the Foresight, with some great help from Ryan, and Michael. We had 250 DVDs to give out, which I think ran out after just a couple hours, and lots of stickers.

On Friday night, Jorge Castro and I were invited to give a talk about GNOME on Saturday (another talk was canceled). Obviously with short notice, we had to do a little cramming to get some slides ready and figure out how we would tag team the talk. Fortunately I think both Jorge and I work best under pressure, and things seem to go off well (besides OOo eating Jorge’s work). I hope all that attended enjoyed it as much as I did.

In the afternoon, Michael and I hosted a Conary BoF. We had a pretty full room, and everyone seemed to “get it”. Lots of great questions, and we spent some time to really talking about the stuff we love. We even ran over by an hour, and nobody seemed anxious to leave… which must be a good sign
No question, I will be going back next year!

Michael K Johnson and I just made it into Columbus for Ohio Linux Fest. I am very excited, this is the first show that we will actually have a Foresight booth. Come stop by, we have some DVDs of 1.4 and with any luck will have some stickers to give out.

I will also be giving a talk about rPath built appliances on the Open Source Solutions stage at 11am… so be there or be square!

If I can rally enough interest, we will host a Conary BoF… So look for that or track me down, I will be the guy in the bright green Foresight t-shirt ;-D

Woot! Conary 1.2 has been released with many new features. Read the announcement for a run down of all new features/improvements. Foresight users will see it in their next update, enjoy!.

As Paul mentioned in his blog post, we are having a developer meeting on IRC (#foresight-devel on Freenode) next Wednesday, October 3rd at 1:00 p.m. EST. Anyone interested in giving back a little and helping to make the world a better place, come join us. Not a developer? Don’t worry… we have lots of ways for people to help out, testing, documentation, translations, packaging, sysadmin, etc… lots of ways to get involved and there is no better time than now!

You can find the agenda and more info here. So come join us, #foresight-devel on Freenode.

PackageKit is still young, not quite complete, and the API is still in the works. However…. It has amazing potential and I am sure it will really rock. As of now, the conary backend is about 80% complete and needs testing. I would love to have some folks try it out and report bugs. If the bug seems to be related to conary, please specify the backend-conary component in bugzilla.

Current operations that are supported include:

• refresh-cache
• seach-name
• search-details
• get-updates
• update-system
• install
• remove
• get-depends
• get-description

To get it:

sudo conary update PackageKit gnome-packagekit