First week of freedom

Last week I finished my work placement year, and I am now back to being a Student \o/. After losing a couple of days failing to move due to the flooding here in Britain, I have begun catching up on all the things I have had too little time to complete over the past few weeks.

I have spent quite a bit of time re-writing the YaST based wizard I for simple software installation from web pages. Although there are only minor changes to the user interface. It is now considerably more powerful.

The XML format used for the single click install has been discussed over the past few weeks and is now nearly finalised, it should now be potentially usable by other distributions too.

Amongst other improvements it is now possible to:

- Have one “install now” link that will work for multiple distributions & versions.
- Have translatable descriptions/summaries etc.
- Install patterns
- Have conflict resolutions specified in the xml format.

The user interface has been simplified somewhat and there is now better reporting of installation status / errors.

Hopefully the new version will find its way into one of the next openSUSE 10.3 alpha or beta1.

Implementing this was an interesting challenge due to limitations in the YaST platform. Particularly challenging was parsing non-trivial XML and communicating between multiple instances of YaST (One running a limited user, one running as root). The latter was required as we do not want to request root privileges until the user has been able to review the changes that will be made to his or her system.

Next week I am off on holiday, hopefully the rain might stop for at least some of the week.

: 28 Jul 2007 19:06 |  Tags: Suse |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem