Today I have been trying the lastest enhancements Narayan did to his updater applet in order to provide feedback to him. It is looking really good and it feels really light and fast.
There are some issues pending, one has to do with authentication as ZMD does not provide a way to authenticate without knowing the root password for tcp/ip based connections. For now Narayan implemented a password dialog on startup which uses a helper program to authenticate, but we hope to have a usable solution soon. Zen Updater can do it because it uses .NET remoting over Unix domain sockets, so zmd knows who is talking to.
Narayan’s SOC project covers all the Zen functionality, and that is mostly done. The next step will be adding support for smart and direct system access (via zypp) backends, which should be trivial to add.
If you want to help testing, or give it a try, I have created packages using the build service, you can find the repositories here. The package name is opensuse-updater.
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It looks great but I can’t seem to use it. If I try to add a repository. It says “We are adding a server to the updater, this may take long time. Please be patient”. And it just sits there. If I kill the app it won’t come back up again…
Looks nice, but it lacks one important feature. Something it has in common with all the other updaters for Suse, but a feature i think is very important in an updater. The ability to see why the update is needed, and what it fixes. A nice feature for instance mandrivas drakupdater has had for ages. When you select a package you can se a description of the update. This way you may stay better informed of what is actualy going on with the updates, rather than just knowing if you have the last update or not.
Seems nice, but exactly same problem as Goddang described.
why install and cancel are swapped?
Hi all,
Thanks for trying it out. There are two possible reasons why its not working. First, it requires either the ZMD from factory or a patched ZMD. I recommend the zmd from factory as the patched one is buggy, but if any of you want it, please email me at narayannewtonATgmail.com and I will send it to you. Second, you need to set “remote-enabled” to true on ZMD. It will then work. The problem is that it communicated with ZMD via the tcp server at this point, which is by default off. We will have to using a unix sockets server, when support for that is added to ZMD. Thanks again for trying the updater.