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, […]

The state of AppStream/GNOME-Software in Debian Jessie

… or “Why do I not see any update notifications on my brand-new Debian Jessie installation??” This is a short explanation of the status quo, and also explains the “no update notifications” issue in a slightly more detailed way, since I am already getting bug reports for that. As you might know, GNOME provides GNOME-Software […]

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 […]

AppStream 0.7 specification and library released

Today I am very happy to announce the release of AppStream 0.7, the second-largest release (judging by commit number) after 0.6. AppStream 0.7 brings many new features for the specification, adds lots of good stuff to libappstream, introduces a new libappstream-qt library for Qt developers and, as always, fixes some bugs. Unfortunately we broke the […]

Tanglu 2 (Bartholomea annulata) status update #1

It is time for a new Tanglu update, which has been overdue for a long time now! Many things happened in Tanglu development, so here is just a short overview of what was done in the past months. Infrastructure Debile The whole Tanglu distribution is now built with Debile, replacing Jenkins, which was difficult to […]