After having some good conversations with Pawan Neupane over the past couple of weeks, he recently presented me with a list of questions he had regarding not only Keryx in general, but the underlying architecture, which essentially was the basics of apt. Since most hardcore users will be using other applications like apt-offline or the synaptic download scripts, I felt this was probably something many users might also be having problems with. I have posted our question/answer session on the wiki in the form of a FAQ which you can find here: http://keryxproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ. Hopefully this will provide some answers for common questions I’ve been asked. If you have another Q/A that you’d like to see on the FAQ, just ask on the forums or shoot us an email either directly or through the Contact page.

Chris Oliver

Although 0.92 has been left out in the rain, the development team has decided to hand it an umbrella.
One of the irritating things about earlier releases of 0.92 was that it would download the same files, though they were already in the packages folder, overwriting the old ones and wasting bandwidth. That’s behind us now, thanks to modifications made by jaseen that cause Keryx to skip files that have already been downloaded.

Also, Keryx 0.92.3 downloads not only dependencies, but also pre-dependencies and recommends, ensuring that you will get all the packages you need to install your software.

One less visible improvement is the inclusion of the LocalRepo-Add.py (creates local repositories) and VerifyChecksums.py (deletes corrupt package files) scripts in the doc/ directory — both thanks to jaseen.

And finally, another small improvement allows Keryx to be used with any Linux distro with APT installed — not just Ubuntu and Debian.

So, head on over to the Download Page and get 0.92.3. For the hacking types, the Keryx source code has been packaged for downloading. You can get it at the Launchpad 0.92 download page.

UPDATE: We found a bug in 0.92.2 today that would cause dependency calculations to quit considerably early than they should be, leaving you with download lists that were incomplete at best (for example, with ubuntu-restricted-extras on the default jaunty project it was going to download 0 dependencies). We’ve patched this and rereleased 0.92.2. This will only affect the 45 people or so who have already downloaded 0.92.2. Sorry for the trouble! – Chris

UPDATE 2: I added some features to the setup script that builds Keryx releases. One improvement is that it automatically packages everything so once a new release is ready we don’t have to manually package it like we used to be doing (sad huh? ). The main reason for replacing 0.92.2(.1) with 0.92.3 is that the build script has been improved to create a single file executable for Windows using py2exe. The zip file contains 2 dlls to allow Keryx to run on Win2000 and XP installations that may be missing these important dlls from their system32 directories. – Chris

So, as most of you know, 0.92 is being locked outside in the rain while 1.0 is slowly brewing in the basement. This release is definitely much more of a community involved release in that I want it very easy for contributors to do just that, contribute. 0.92 was more of a test, see who’s interested, if this would work, if its worth my time to continue working on it.

Without further adieu, I would like to announce our first Keryx Development meeting in IRC. The meeting is scheduled for June 25 at 7pm GMT -5 but you can easily find out what time it is for your timezone here: http://is.gd/10pQJ You can join via any IRC client including the Web based Java client on freenode: http://java.freenode.net//index.php?channel=keryx

The meeting is open to anyone who would like to come and see where Keryx will be heading in the next couple of months. We have a wiki page setup with the agenda is located here: http://keryxproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=6/25/2009

If you’ve got any questions, bring them! We are always open to new ideas, especially with this innovative GUI we are dreaming up right now. Hope to see you there!

Keryx 1.0 development is well under way! Improvements will include:

• Greater speed
• Easy package installation
• Single-file executables for Windows, Linux, and possibly Mac
• An improved Command Line Interface
• And much more!

The command-line portion of 1.0 is already usable. You can get the latest code at Keryx’s Launchpad page. If you do test the code please tell us how it went. To reach us go to the Contact Us page.

Here is Keryx 1.0 in action:

A bug has been discovered in Keryx that causes it to display the “Please create the project on the plugin’s supported OS” error when run on Jaunty. The problem has been fixed in 0.92.1, so just head over to the Download page and pick it up!

From now on, at least while I have internet connectivity, #keryx on irc.freenode.net shall be logged with my own custom made IRC bot using Python-irclib. If any discussion happens you will be able to review the logs later on at your on discretion. Logs will be stored at http://keryxproject.org/logs for anyone who is interested. Source code for the IRC bot can be found on my blog’s project page at http://excid3.com/projects/logbot. Enjoy!

Well, Dreamhost screwed up royally and lost all of my data. Sorry for the problems! Site will be back up in a few days after my classes are finished this week.

Sorry about the mess! I’m going to try to get the site back up and then backed up immediately so this doesn’t happen again! If you need anything contact me at excid3 [at] gmail (d0t) com