Deploying Limba packages: Ideas & current status

The Limba project does not only have the goal to allow developers to deploy their applications directly on multiple Linux distributions while reducing duplication of shared resources, it should also make it easy for developers to build software for Limba. Limba is worth nothing without good tooling to make it fun to use. That’s why […]

AppStream/DEP-11 for everyone! (beta!)

One of the things we discussed at this year’s Akademy conference is making AppStream work on Kubuntu. On Debian-based systems, we use a YAML-based implementation of AppStream, called “DEP-11”. DEP-11 exists for historical reasons (the DEP-11 YAML format was a superset of AppStream once) and because YAML, unlike XML, is one accepted file format by […]

Limba Project: Another progress report

And once again, it’s time for another Limba blogpost ๐Ÿ™‚ Limba is a solution to install 3rd-party software on Linux, without interfering with the distribution’s native package manager. It can be useful to try out different software versions, use newer software on a stable OS release or simply to obtain software which does not yet […]

AppStream 0.8 released!

Yesterday I released version 0.8 of AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software metadata, that is currently used by GNOME-Software, Muon and Apper in to display rich metadata about applications and other software components. ย What’s new? The new release contains some tweaks on AppStreams documentation, and extends the specification with a few more tags and refinements. […]

How to build a cross-distro package with Limba

Disclaimer: Limba is still in a very early stage of development. Bugs happen, and I give to guarantees on API stability yet. Limba is a very simple cross-distro package installer, utilizing OverlayFS found in recent Linux kernels (>= 3.18). As example I created a small Limba package for one of the Qt5 demo applications, and […]

Introducing Limba – a software installer experiment

As some of you already know, since the larger restructuring in PackageKit for the 1.0 release, I am rethinking Listaller, the 3rd-party application installer for Linux systems, as well. During the past weeks, I was playing around with a lot of different ideas and code, to make installations of 3rd-party software easily possible on Linux, […]

Listaller + Glick: Some new ideas

As you might know, due to invasive changes in PackageKit, I am currently rewriting the 3rd-party application installer Listaller. Since I am not the only one looking at the 3rd-party app-installation issue (there is a larger effort going on at GNOME, based on Lennarts ideas), it makes sense to redesign some concepts of Listaller. Currently, […]

Listaller: Back to the future!

It is time for another report on Listaller, the cross-distro 3rd-party package installer, which is now in development for – depending how you count – 5-6 years. This will become a longer post, so you might grab some coffee or tea ๐Ÿ˜‰ The original idea The Listaller project was initially started with the goal to […]

AppStream/DEP-11 Debian progress

There hasn’t been a progress-report on DEP-11 for some time, but that doesn’t mean there was no work going on on it. DEP-11 is Debian’s implementation of AppStream, as well as an effort to enhance the metadata available about software in Debian. While initially, AppStream was only about applications, DEP-11 was designed with a larger […]