About a month ago i sat down to upgrade my windows XP for the last time, one last update before my univeristy license expired because of me finishing my education. What i really like is the ease of use this windows update thingy works with - well the user interface part of things.
I had to reboot three times just to apply some simple security fixes, all the while a lot of dialog boxes flashed on the screen, sometimes not even giving me time to read them. Add to this that only microsoft programs (and not even all microsoft programs, office has it's own update procedure) use windows update, and e.g. firefox, virus scanner and virtools has it's own updating mechanism. Alas one updating interface per program - and you need to spend time on each program to check for updates.
Contrast this scenario with the situation on most linux distributions (Debian in my case) and you have a much more prettier situation, the upgrade procedure never requires a reboot, every information useful to me is presented to me using a simple and standardardized interface (read: debconf frontend), and all programs on my system uses the same upgrading mechanism (read: apt-get).
The gap that we (yes, i'm pretending to be a Debian maintainer now, which i'm not) need to cover is very small, all the infrastructure is in place, we only need a simple gui interface.
I have tried to implement such a system using python-gtk and calling apt-get directly from the program, a better way for doing this is certainly preferable (python-apt), and how the program should interface with debconf is another thing, it is available from my Repository in the afg category (acronym for: APT For Grandma').
The program is not meant as a big program selection system like, aptitude or synaptic, but a simple interface that my grand mother can run to apply the security patches that might be availble - such that when you have run this program you know that your system is secure.
The interface is supposed to be as simple as possible, upon startup it retrieves the newest package list, it presents the user with a list of packages with available updates, and the user just pushes the button "Install updates" and watches (or my commonly goes back to work) as the "x" turns into an "ok" sign in turn for each package.
Could someone please implement this :-)
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Comments (4)
LOL, just saw that you have also taken the nerd test, HA i got a higer ranking then you. :P
It should not be long before i will change my own page, so that it can also become a blog.
Damn! My nerdlyhood is shattered :-)
Enter the blogosphere, it is nice and cozy. A very interesting blog is KS and girlfriends' http://www.skriverier.dk
Take a look at Ubuntu's update tool which was shipped with Hoary first. It's exactly what you (and grandma!) want.
Screenshot at:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/ReleaseNotes504/document_view
Ahh, wonderful, i guess all the nice words that the LUG Radio guys (http://lugradio.org) says about Ubuntu is true. (and they are not commonly people of positive critisicsm :-)
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