Qt frontend for PackageKit

The development of Qt frontend for PackageKit produced first visible results in form of a working GUI. In the meantime, the library for Qt itself was rewritten to use D-BUS.

Richard Hughes posted the first screenshot of the Qt gui for PackageKit:

A public git repo can be found at git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/QPackageKit. At the same time the Qt bindings have been reworked:

Kevin Krammer, a KDE developper. [...] said that using the DBus interface would be cleaner and would make it easier for KDE devs to use the lib. [...] I started the bindings again, from scratch, using the DBus interface.

With such a library chances might be realistic that one day a PackageKit GUI becomes a full member of KDE 4.x and will be shipped with it by default. Many backends are supported already by PackageKit, and others are coming in the near future: OpenSuse plans to implement support as well:

> Are we going to want to use PackageKit for
> Package Management as well?
Yes, as it provides an easy (and community driven) way to make ‘role based’ systems management happen.

Smolt passes the 200k entries mark

The hardware data collection tool Smolt passed the 200.000 mark.

Smolt, the distribution independent hardware data collection tool reached another mile stone: it passed the 200.000 entries mark. Almost all machines are still Fedora machines by now since other distributions haven’t picked up the tool – yet. Fedora 8 has until now less than 8k entries and the release didn’t seem to leave a step or spike in the data collection which means that Fedora has a constantly growing user base quite independent from distribution releases. At the same time more and more entries can be found in the Hardware Wiki which has been introduced a month ago.

While the new mile stone is important and good news the the real push for Smolt is still missing: at the moment no other larger distribution besides Fedora has started using Smolt by default. But that could change in the future since the Smolt team is already providing prepackaged clients for other distributions and discusses with them the inclusion by default.

A last word about the current hardware statistics themselves: it looks like that there are more and more Dual Core machines out there. The number of Single Core machines is shrinking day by day and will soon pass the 50% mark. At the same time the number of VMWare installations stays roughly constant with a few less than 10%.