Keryx Project » News

0.92.4.1 Released

mac9416 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:34:52 +0000

Yesterday, Chris uncovered the fix for something that’s been bugging (groan) Keryx users for some time now. The bug prevented Keryx from downloading all “recommend” packages, preventing installation on the target machine. For example, if a user wanted to download VLC, Keryx would fail to download the recommended package “vlc-plugin-pulse”.

The bug has been fixed in a new release, 0.92.4.1, and is available on the Download page.

Website Updates

Chris Oliver — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:45:23 +0000

As we are getting ready for 1.0 in the coming weeks, I thought it would be nice to update the website a bit. I moved a few things around but tried to make it more consistent and easier to find things. If you can’t find something just leave a note in the comments or forums and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Let me know what you think of the new site. Like it? Hate it? We are always looking to improve the project all around so if you’ve got ideas, let us know!

Progress For Version 1.0

Chris Oliver — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:55:19 +0000

I’m sure you’re all interested in progress of Keryx 1.0 now that we have posted some pretty mockups. I’ve finished (for the most part) the new backend of Keryx that we call Unwrapt (play on words, un- as in not required and APT all blended into something that sounds like unwrapped, creative huh? ). With this finished, we can begin implementing the interface which we are going to do using GTK and actually building off the Quickly framework. It’s pretty awesome now being able to use Glade to design the GUI (now that Glade is finally up to par with what we needed) and the interface is coming along quickly and looking pretty decent! Here are some sneak peaks! We should have 1.0 ready for release by the end of August if everything goes good!

As always if you are interested in contributing to Keryx, please do! You can make a donation on our contribute page and we welcome anyone who would like to contribute code to visit our Launchpad.net page. Those of you who wish to translate Keryx should wait until we make a formal request on the blog asking for translators. We are still finalizing the english version and will let you know when translations are ready to be started! Thanks for your support!

Version 1.0 Interface Mockups

mac9416 — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:19:40 +0000

Chris has been working hard on Unwrapt, which will be the backend for Keryx 1.0. As that is coming along, we will need to think about the Keryx 1.0 interface. Chris has asked me to take some of the ideas which we’ve talked about and turn them into GUI mockups.

Several changes to how Keryx 1.0 will operate are going to require changes to the GUI. For one thing, “projects” will be called “computer profiles”, or simply “computers”. Since Keryx will no longer be carried on a flash drive, profiles will not be stored with Keryx. Instead, users will “Add a computer” to a flash drive of their choice.
Also, users will no longer select a project from a drop-down list to open it. They will select the drive they’re using to store profiles and select a computer from a list of profiles stored on the drive.

The package management window is also getting a face-lift. In previous versions, Keryx has listed a lot of not-completely-necessary information for each package, making the list crowded. Now, only package names will be listed. When the user selects a package, a new pane will appear on the right providing the details of the package as well as a download button.

When the user downloads a package, a new Downloads tab will appear. Each package being downloaded will be listed along with its full URL and a progress bar. The tab will also include a Cancel button (Hurray!).

Everything in the preferences window will simply be moved to a tab.

Finally, when more than one tab is up, the welcome screen will remain in a tab titled “Home”.

These mockups were made using Pencil. If you’d like to tinker with them yourself, just download the Pencil document.

Please let us know what you think!

Flash Drives Anyone?

Chris Oliver — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:48:24 +0000

Recently I’ve been contemplating the idea of selling some flash drives that had Keryx pre-installed on them. This might be convenient for people to just purchase a flash drive to use specifically for Keryx that included all the software preloaded on it and ready to go. I want to gauge the interested on this before I do anything though. Are you interested in this idea? Would you want them to have Ubuntu installed on them too? What size storage would you like? How much are you willing to pay? Let me know in the comments and if people are interested, I’ll see what I can come up with.

Keryx Shwag!

Chris Oliver — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:39:13 +0000

Available starting today is our CafePress store! You can buy things like Keryx tshirts, hoodies, and gift items to support the project! http://shops.cafepress.com/KeryxProject

Package and PPA

Chris Oliver — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:59 +0000

I’m happy to anounce, as of today Keryx now has an Ubuntu package and PPA available for installation. You can now add the Keryx PPA to your Ubuntu system and install Keryx easily.

Some of you may be wondering, what good is this? Well if you’re online machine runs Ubuntu, you can easily install Keryx on there and you no longer have to fiddle with Keryx on your flash drive (depending on your choice of installation methods). You can now get Keryx updates easily by updating APT like normal as well!

Lucid Project Available

Chris Oliver — Wed, 26 May 2010 01:37:54 +0000

Slowly but surely, we have just released the Lucid 32 and 64 bit pre-made projects for download. For those of you who don’t know, the pre-made projects are built to allow users to start using Keryx to download packages without the need to go home and create a project before use. Instead you can simply download these projects, put them in the projects folder and open up the one that matches your offline installation. These projects will download the dependencies for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu at once in order to save time and effort. The projects also assume you are downloading packages for a fresh install.

You can find the projects here: http://launchpad.net/keryx/stable/0.92/+download/projects.zip

0.92.4+1 Preview Release: CLI

mac9416 — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:40:20 +0000

We have put together a list of goals for 0.92.4+1 (as it will be known until we decide on a version number) which will address 0.92.x’s biggest problems and give us a better feel for what 1.0 will look like. Since each of the features is stand-alone, we can release them one at a time for testing, then bundle them all together to make one grand release.

First on the list is a full-featured command line interface. 0.92.x has had the ability to create projects on the command line for a while, but most features have remained GUI-only. This has been a real problem for command-line-only users. So, we’ve implemented the CLI and released it for your enjoyment. Here’s what it looks like in action:

A few things you’ll need to know about this preview release:

Since it is a development release, there will be no single-file binaries; just source code.
Because we’re moving Keryx development into Quickly, the main executable will be in bin/keryx.

That’s it! Download it, test it, and let us know how it goes.

0.92.4 Released

mac9416 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:38:50 +0000

The two major new features in Keryx 0.92.4 are:

Package installation tool:
Say goodbye to ‘sudo dpkg -i –force-all ./*’!
Linux binary:
No more installing GUI dependencies!

As a bonus, we have a new tutorial on Keryxproject.org.

So get over to the Download page and check it out!