kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

ancleessen4 · 2012-02-19 18:28:15

@jjacky
Thanks for your patience.
notification-daemon was installed but I needed xfce4-notifyd.

Now I have the onscreen news notification with "Show news" button.
However, after viewing the news (and the items are tick checked) and pressing "Mark as read" my mouse over tooltip still reports '10 unread news'....

EDIT:After a restart of kalu all looks normal now and my Arch logo has turned grey - yipee!!

Also, will there be an option to position on screen notifications as for the moment they pop up over my conky?

Last edited by ancleessen4 (2012-02-19 18:30:43)

jjacky · 2012-02-19 19:05:08

hmm.. you shouldn't need xfce4-notifyd. I just tried to be sure, it works. As long as you have notification-daemon installed and that it is running (I had to start it manually), it works. (And if you wanna keep xfce4-notifyd, you don't need to keep notification-daemon.) Anyhow, glad you got it working.

As for the notifications themselves, it's not up to kalu, but your daemon. E.g. w/ xfce4-notifyd if you start xfce4-notifyd-config (If you have an XDG menu it should be "Notifications" under "Settings") you can set the template, position, etc

jjacky · 2012-02-21 15:30:43

Ok, a new version (0.0.4.1) is out, with a Preferences window. Also, a couple of changes regarding thoose, in case you tweaked your kalu.conf manually :
- UpgradeAction used numbers (0, 1, 2), this has been changed to strings: NONE, KALU or CMDLINE
- All Verbose* options are gone, as are the associated templates. This was just overly complicated for no good reason. Now there are just one template per notification type. "Upgrades" is used as "main" ones, that is all its fields are required; For other templates, if you don't define a field then the value for "Upgrades" will be used (except "Watched AUR" which falls back on "AUR" first, and "Upgrades" if nothing is set in "AUR" of course)
- Also, kalu would always check for news regardless of the settings, fixed.

SteveK · 2012-02-23 20:32:58

Thanks for this jjacky, I've been playing with kalu for a week or so and I like it .

One thing that does bother me is the use of the term upgrade rather than update. Normally upgrade would mean improving something, whereas update would mean to make current. For kalu I think update is a better terminology.

Cheers

Steve

jjacky · 2012-02-23 21:38:54

Thanks for the feedback.

As for upgrade vs update, I went with upgrade to keep consistent with pacman's terminology, since what kalu checks for/does is about what a pacman -Syu does, where -u is short for --sysupgrade: "Upgrades all packages that are out of date."
So I'm not sure changing it would be best in that regard (although if it does bother you, you can tweak the notifications templates, that's still that ). But I already wondered about that, actually... Still not quite sure what's best.

-jacky

jjacky · 2012-03-03 00:34:53

New version (0.0.6) is up, and fixes a nasty bug:
- When performing a sysupgrade through kalu's updater, when (new) optionnal dependencies were to be listed, kalu would crash. Note that "only" kalu (aka the GUI) would crash, the updater part would still run fine and complete the upgrade, as the log (pacman.log) would show. Still pretty bad, and fixed.

Misfit138 · 2012-03-03 02:04:48

Haven't tried it yet, but thanks for your hard work and time on this.

samhain · 2012-03-06 00:10:07

Suggestion / Feature request:
It would be nice if the "System upgrade" option from the right-click menu could be configured exactly as the "Upgrade System" button from the notifications.

Cheers.

jjacky · 2012-03-06 09:54:10

samhain wrote:

It would be nice if the "System upgrade" option from the right-click menu could be configured exactly as the "Upgrade System" button from the notifications.

Do you mean that they both do the same/use the same settings, or that the menu could have its own (separated) settings ?

If the former, I think it's a good idea yes; Thinking about it, those two are (should be) really just 2 GUI elements for the same feature. If the later however, I'm not sure I like that, or see why it would be interesting.

samhain · 2012-03-06 13:32:35

jjacky wrote:

Do you mean that they both do the same/use the same settings, or that the menu could have its own (separated) settings ?

Definitely the former.
I always prefer to launch my update through a terminal, and I'm sure there are lots of other archers that do likewise.

Besides, I'm having trouble with Policy Kit in Openbox. I get an error when I launch the upgrade GUI "Error: Failed to initialize: Authorization from PolicyKit failed"
I'm pretty sure that it works fine under Gnome or KDE and it is just a problem related to Openbox sessions and Policy Kit. But I'm too lazy to fix it and I don't want to switch away from Openbox. It doesn't really matter 'cause, as I said, I prefer command line upgrade and Kalu already does everything I need and more.

jjacky · 2012-03-06 14:31:33

samhain wrote:

Besides, I'm having trouble with Policy Kit in Openbox. I get an error when I launch the upgrade GUI "Error: Failed to initialize: Authorization from PolicyKit failed"

If you get that message right away (i.e. you're not asked for your password), I'd say it's probably because you do not have a PolicyKit auth agent running. Assuming you have policykit and gtk3 installed (which you should, as kalu requires both) you could probably install polkit-gnome to resolve this.

Anyhow, new version (0.1.0) is up, and works as described: both the button on notifications and the item on kalu's menu now do the same (and are only present if enabled).

samhain · 2012-03-07 12:33:49

jjacky wrote:

you could probably install polkit-gnome to resolve this..

polkit-gnome is already installed and running, and I still get the error.
Maybe I forgot to configure something? Do I need to fiddle with policy kit rules?
Anyway, I recently switched Archlinux from 32 to 64 bit without doing a fresh install, and the system has been behaving a bit wonkish since then, so the problem can be related to any number of things.

Damm! now I'm curious and I want to give the GUI upgrader a try!!

jjacky wrote:

Anyhow, new version (0.1.0) is up, and works as described: both the button on notifications and the item on kalu's menu now do the same (and are only present if enabled).

Thank you very much!!

jjacky · 2012-03-07 13:33:28

samhain wrote:

polkit-gnome is already installed and running, and I still get the error.
Maybe I forgot to configure something? Do I need to fiddle with policy kit rules?

No you shouldn't have to. The policy used by kalu is installed as /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.jjk.kalu.policy and uses auth_admin for active sessions, so if you have a running daemon yet aren't asked for a password, I would guess first check that your session is seen as active (by ck-list-sessions), if not that might explain it. And if it is, well then I'm not sure... I believe polkit defines it so that admin identites are users in the group wheel, are you in that group? Also maybe check the logs after having tried & gotten that error ("Authorization from PolicyKit failed"), there might be something in there...

samhain · 2012-03-11 14:46:47

I fixed it.

My session was not being seen as active, because I use Slim as login manager and I was missing the following line in /etc/pam.d/slim

-session optional pam_ck_connector.so

Thanks for your advice, you gave me the clue to figure out what was happening

jjacky · 2012-03-11 15:05:51

Cool, glad you got it working

anexsia · 2012-03-21 01:06:07

Thanks for this program jjacky! I'm a new arch linux user and this was the perfect finishing touch to my desktop I love it.

Roken · 2012-03-21 02:33:06

I still have a minor issue with kalu, though it's working pretty well now. However, it won't upgrade AUR packages. I usually use packer, and have configured kalu to use:

packer -Syu --auronly --noedit --noconfirm

but it just ignores AUR altogether when actually updating (it does notify me of updates though). Have I missed something or is this a bug?

jjacky · 2012-03-21 09:26:47

kalu's system updater uses libalpm, and as such will only update "official" packages from the repos, yes. (It does the same as what `pacman -Syu` would)

But you can use the "Update AUR packages" button to start an helper when AUR upgrades are available. Two things:
- since packer is a CLI tool, you should actually start a terminal emulator first. So instead of "packer" it should be something like "urxvt -e packer"
- I don't know packer, but if it requires root privileges then you also need to use sudo, e.g. "urxvt -e sudo packer"

airydragon · 2012-03-22 02:38:54

thanks for your efforts, kalu is great.

i'd like to ask some features for future releases:

1- sort by column option on packages grid

2- add checkboxes to select/unselect packages, similar functionality like yaourt's manual selection

3- click to tray icon may show/hide kalu windows

also would you like to move your repo to github?

jjacky · 2012-03-22 10:52:46

Thanks for the feedback.

1. you mean in kalu's updater? Yes, that should be doable.

2. that won't happen, no. kalu's updater does what a pacman -Syu would, and that is you either upgrade your system or you don't, there's no package selection to be done. (besides, it would probably only be a good way to break things...) If for some reason there's a package you really don't want to upgrade, you can always edit your pacman.conf and add it to IgnorePkg

3. good idea, I'll see if I can add something like that.

As for the repo, no I'm fine on bitbucket (besides, I use mercurial, not git)

jjacky · 2012-03-26 16:29:23

new version (0.1.4) is up:

- added section "Misc" under Preferences, with options to define action on single- & double-click on systray icon: nothing, check for upgrades, system upgrade, hide/show opened windows
- kalu updater: one can now click on columns to sort packages
- Preferences/Misc: option to disable sane sort indicator
- tooltip: now indicates if/how many dbs can be synchronized (regardless of upgrades avability). Can be disabled via option under "Misc" in Preferences
- fixed possible memory leak if showing news failed on parsing
- showing Preferences without "Upgrade system" button enabled didn't have PostSysUpgrade list disabled, fixed

Also, a changelog is available as /usr/share/doc/kalu/HISTORY

@airydragon: hide/show opened windows is available, but not used by default. You'll have to set it manually in your Preferences.

dtw · 2012-04-12 21:35:48

This is awesome - thanks

This thread also put me onto xfce4-notifyd which I don't know existed (zomg ponies!)

However, I really dislike the icon - can I swap it? I'm figuring it doesn't use /usr/share/pixmaps/kalu.png

.:edit:.

I'm guessing I can't so could you make it customizable in the config, please.

Last edited by dtw (2012-04-12 21:37:19)

jjacky · 2012-04-12 22:47:48

You mean the icon used on notifications? No, it's not customizable at the moment; I could see how to change that, e.g. maybe simply use /usr/share/pixmaps/kalu.png indeed

dtw · 2012-04-13 08:06:40

I did mean on the notifications, yes.

Having it pointing at files that exist in the filesystem would be great but I bet you can add systray icon customisation to the preferences no probs

jjacky · 2012-04-14 11:37:40

New version (0.1.5) is up. Changes since last version are :

- Now using automake & autoconf. (Hopefully) this shouldn’t really change much for most people, but if you don’t care for kalu’s updater and only want to use kalu as update notifier, you can use option --disable-updater to configure. You’ll get a smaller binary, no second binary (kalu-dbus) nor dependency to DBus/PolicyKit.

- When starting an external process to perform sysupgrade (or AUR upgrade), kalu now waits for the process to end (being “busy” meanwhile), and runs another check right after, to refresh its state.

- kalu always shipped with a man page, and recently a changelog. Both can both easily be read using menus Help & Change log.

- Added new option to customize icon used on notification: none, kalu’s default, or specifying a file to load the icon from. The icon will be shown full size, so e.g. using /usr/share/pixmaps/kalu.png will uses kalu’s icon at 48x48 (if loading icon fails, silently falls back to kalu’s default icon).

- kalu’s updater always used /etc/pacman.conf (instead of whatever is set in Preferences), fixed

- Parsing kalu.conf would report & stop on first error, now it ignores the line, continues parsing, and report all errors (at once)

- kalu’s updater: log messages longer than 1023 characters would be truncated, fixed

- Other minor fixes

Thanks to all those who reported bugs or suggested features.

Arch Linux

#26 2012-02-19 18:28:15

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#27 2012-02-19 19:05:08

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#28 2012-02-21 15:30:43

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#29 2012-02-23 20:32:58

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#30 2012-02-23 21:38:54

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#31 2012-03-03 00:34:53

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#32 2012-03-03 02:04:48

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#33 2012-03-06 00:10:07

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#34 2012-03-06 09:54:10

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#35 2012-03-06 13:32:35

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#36 2012-03-06 14:31:33

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#37 2012-03-07 12:33:49

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#38 2012-03-07 13:33:28

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#39 2012-03-11 14:46:47

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#40 2012-03-11 15:05:51

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#41 2012-03-21 01:06:07

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#42 2012-03-21 02:33:06

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#43 2012-03-21 09:26:47

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#44 2012-03-22 02:38:54

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#45 2012-03-22 10:52:46

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#46 2012-03-26 16:29:23

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#47 2012-04-12 21:35:48

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#48 2012-04-12 22:47:48

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#49 2012-04-13 08:06:40

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

#50 2012-04-14 11:37:40

Re: kalu: Keeping Arch Linux Up-to-date

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