PackageKit is landing

Category: Ubuntu

I finally found some time to create Ubuntu packages of PackageKit. PackageKit is an effort to provide a common, sane and smooth software installation process among all/most distributions. Currently the APT backend (used by Debian and Ubuntu) only allows to search and refresh the cache. But a lot of people are interested in bringing it forward.

You can download the packages from the personal package archive (PPA) of the Ubuntu PackageKit team:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/packagekit/ubuntu gutsy main

sudo apt-get install packagekit-gnome

Furthermore you have to start the packagekit daemon manually before you launch a PackageKit application. In the future DBus (1.1.2/1.2.0) will start the packagekit daemon automatically if needed:

sudo packagekitd

There are some basic demo/prototye applications for PackageKit, that are part of packagekit-gnome.

The long term plan is to port gnome-app-install and update-manager to PackageKit. But they won't be shipped before Hardy+1, since Hardy is going to be a LTS release providing a stable and rock solid platfom.

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  1. Vincent hidden

    Saturday, 19-01-08 11:59

    Does packagekit-gnome depend on any Gnome-specific tools? If so, would it be possible to also create packagekit-gtk for use in Xfce? Surely most of PackageKit's features would still be available if you strip out the Gnome dependencies? It'd be a shame to not allow Xfce users enjoy this without having to install Gnome...

    Thanks,

    VIncent

  2. Peteris Krisjanis

    Saturday, 24-11-07 12:19

    Nice to hear that PackageKit is that "holy one package solution". Same API over all distros, so, pratically, you can write installer, say, in python with using this API and you get no problem install.

    That simply rocks!

  3. zerwas n/a

    Saturday, 24-11-07 02:30

    Thank you very much for packaging PackageKit :-)

    Weiter so! :-D
 

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