I’ve been quietly admiring the Debian BASH command not found functionality for a while. For those unfamiliar with the functionality, it suggests installing packages if you typed a command that is not installed. It also seemed to be pretty helpful suggesting replacements for typos. When Rahul opened a bug to include this in Fedora, I … Continue reading Command not found
In newer versions of gnome-packagekit there’s a tool called gpk-service-pack: This tool I’ve explained in the past, and there is now lots of information and diagrams in the help file about how it all works and what the point of the tool is. Anyway, the point of this blog post isn’t to promote service packs; … Continue reading pkcon list-install foo.package-list
PackageKit has always had a log viewer, but I would be the first to admit that it looked shite, and wasn’t really useful for anybody. I’ve spent a couple of hours, adding more columns and adding a filter facility so that you can narrow down the results to something useful. Use cases for this tool: … Continue reading Software Log Viewer
As part of GSoC 2008, Shishir Goel added Service Pack functionality to PackageKit. To explain what a service pack is, it’s best to show a few use-cases. You have seven desktops you’ve just installed with Fedora 9. Each one needs to have 204Mb of updates installed. You have a laptop that needs network drivers before … Continue reading Service Pack GUI?
If you want to see how your codecs are going to be installed in Fedora 10, watch this screencast. This automatic process relies on the user adding an external repo (as most of the formats are non-free), but that’s pretty easy. Comments, as ever, appreciated.
Bedhad has done some great work to allow us to detect when a font is needed and execute a dbus method. It’s not yet finished, but the UI should look something like this: Actually in gnome-packagekit git, but nothing uses it yet… Comments? Suggestions?
I’ve just been banned on the Fedora Forums. I’ve been asking users with PackageKit bugs to report them upstream on the mailing list or in bugzilla, explaining what common error messages mean, and how to fix other problems. This, it turns out isn’t what the forums are for. I guess it’s just for uniformed users … Continue reading Fedora Forums
The LSB Package API is an recently suggested interface that allows ISVs to install LSB-compliant applications in such a way that they are integrated into the distribution’s packaging system. This enables users to manage third-party software packages as easily as packages installed from the distributor, and frees ISVs from the need to provide packages for … Continue reading LSB Package API
gpk-application now offers you to run the application you just installed. It uses the just-installed desktop files to try to get the executable names and localised descriptions. There’s heuristics to only show the true application rather than any importer or viewer with the same executable name. Anyway, it looks like this: New UI? Comments, suggestions?
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 … Continue reading gpk-application multiple package selection