Gsoftware vs Gnome-packagekit

http://worldofgnome.org/fedora-20-gnome-software-tips-and-tricks/

Fedora & GNOME Software | Tips and Tricks

First I apologize for doing only Fedora. This isn ' t a dis-respect to other distros, neither means the Fedora is better from Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo or whatever E Lse. I may write a post Why do I ended up to use only Fedora, but for now unfortunately, I ' m not sure that the things I'll try T o Explain would work for Arch and ubuntu-gnome users, which I think is the majority.

Gsoftware brings significant changes in Fedora (& Beyond), and changes the "the" to that system updates internally, it C Hanges the the-the-end-users update software, and even changes the "the", application developers publish their software .

One of the technical goals of Gsoftware and his main developer, Richard Hughes, was to create a high-level Framework that W Ill work distro-agnostic. When the Canonical launched software Center (USC), it was (and it still are more than ever) an ubuntu-specific application. Other communities couldn ' t simply ports USC to their distro, either for technical or licences reasons-or both.

None really blamed Canonical for the, because it is perfectly understandable. It's hard-to-write "generic" applications, applications that'll run everywhere, as this could reduce quality for your own Platform, while at the same time it'll acquire more resources.

Gsoftware even if it is designed to run in any distro, it prioritizes fedora and it treats Fedora as a first client citize N, and this was something that I could say for the whole Gnome. This is my personal thought, and it doesn ' t deflect GNOME's position in any case. At some point, I'll try to collect some opinions from developers around.

Anyways, Fedora and gsoftware! Fedora & GNOME software

Note that I am not reviewing gsoftware, but I am just point out some kinda hidden things.

Gsoftware is the only pre-installed UI for installing software under Fedora 20. Gsoftware makes updating simple. Maybe too simple. By ' Update ', I both mean updating an existing software to a newer version, or installing new packages.

When we have a set of updates coming, the Shell send us a notification and ask us if we want to update.

View button opens Gsoftware, which I has already on anyway. Notice that Gsoftware lets me know that I only had 9 updates, when in reality there is than, plus 3 removals. This is due a grouping mechanism, which categorize various packages into parent-levels.

Gsoftware list acts like a tree and we can navigate into 2 levels. First level displays all the children of the parent category, and at second level each child shows us more info about Itse Lf. Fantastic work in this, it'll satisfy both new-comers and more experienced users.

The bellow figure something strange is happening. Yum shows me that there is updates, while Gsoftware doesn ' t.

That's because Gsoftware notify for updates only after have downloading them silently on background. Gsoftware uses idle bandwidth to download packages, but whats the definition of idle bandwidth? When someone plays FPS, the last thing he wants, was an updating on background.

In any case, the user should is able to control auto-updates and even disable them. Gsofwtare at least in this version doesn ' t permit that-and actually doesn ' t give any option at all.

As a matter of fact, Gsoftware doesn ' t handle downloading, this is a job of Gnome-settings-deamon. Hack gsofwtare Options through GSettings

In order to get some control over how Gsoftware works, we'll need to install Dconf-editor, the front-end of GSettings. In my opinion dconf-editor are the first tool that we had to get in any Gnome installation, as it provides lots of useful Options for every aspect of Gnome.

Get it either from the Gsoftware or from terminal.

$ sudo yum install Dconf-editor

Navigate to Org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates schema.

GSettings code have been changed for f21/rawhide and so this it'll be deprecated

You'll find anything that need. You can disable auto-download, your can change the updating-time and you can disable auto-updates. Frequency of updates is set to 86400 seconds, that's 24h. This was a day, I think;)

This was a very self-explanatory section, so I won ' t go though all the options. What I'll highlight here, it's if you disable the Auto-download-updates key, and you'll never get an update notificatio N from Gsoftware, because it is only notifies when have downloaded the updates. Of course can disable the whole plugin, with the 1st option.

I did a extensive testing of those options, and I needed many times to manually set last-updates-notification keys, to my Current date Time-stamp. To get your system time-stamp you can use the date command.

$ date +%s

One of the reasons that took me a long time to test this and drive me into confusion was because GSettings (actually Dconf ) got bugged. Hopefully, GSettings provides a monitor option that lets if a key is know, so I changing-track it.

As a side note if you want to restart Gnome-settings-daemon there are both choices.

Restart it

$/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon-r

Or Kill It

$ killall Gnome-settings-daemon

Kill would actually restart the Deamon because is an auto-restart service. As an extra info can check on Desktop file.

$ gedit/etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop

...
Exec=/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon-localeexec
onlyshowin=gnome;
Nodisplay=true
x-gnome-autostart-phase=initialization
x-gnome-autostart-notify=true
X-gnome-autorestart=true #You can set this to false, to disable Auto-restart

installing Packages on Gsoftware

Right now, the Gsoftware includes all available applications from Fedora Repos, and not a packages like libraries. That's not going-to-change-in-the-the-is by-design decision. So the-available option to search and install a library in Fedora, the command line.

I would prefer to a advanced mode in Gsoftware, which is it would let me to install a single libraries. As an alternative we can use the old.

You can install the them by:

$ sudo yum install Gnome-packagekit-installer gnome-packagekit-updater

Those would work fine as everything goes through PackageKit and so works together, but I reckon you to avoid them, since th e command line does the job much better. gsoftware Next Day

Gsoftware is progressing very nicely and very fast. You can see some of the new things that has landed, and the truth is that Gsoftware 3.10 were meant to be a Tech Preview, While the stable release was scheduled for GNOME 3.12. I am not quite sure what Fedora ships it as the *only way* to install and update software.

There was some more things I want to talk about, like how fast this thing was, but I guess I would does that on another post. screenshot of the day

Honestly, I didn ' t set this up!

Yum gives updates, DNF gives updates, PackageKit gives me updates, and gsoftware insist that everything are up to Date.

Yeap, Linux is all about choice;)