I just released the first beta release of Jockey 0.5, which fixes a ton of bugs compared to the first Alpha from two weeks ago. Compared to 0.4, it grew quite a lot of new features:
- Split program into a privileged system D-BUS backend (access controlled by PolicyKit), and unprivileged frontend. This provides a cleaner design, gets rid of ugly distribution specific hacks and makes the program more portable.
- Add support for detecting printers. Add Driver DB implementation for openprinting.org database lookup. Supports package systems “apt”, “urpmi”, and “yum” right now.
- New Driver DBs can now added dynamically at run time through a D-BUS call (such as adding an XMLRPC compatible DB on a new server).
- Upstream OSLib now uses PackageKit’s “pkcon” for query operations, so that distributions which support packagekit do not need to implement their custom functions for it. (Package installation/removal does not use packagekit yet, due to a bug in dbus-glib, but it is planned).
- Provide a session D-BUS interface so that applications like system-config-printer can call Jockey through an abstract interface for looking for a driver for a particular device. This will search for a driver in all databases, ask the user for confirmation, and install it.
- Add support for “recommended” driver versions, in case several different versions of a driver are available (which is e. g. the case with the proprietary NVidia driver, or lots of drivers from openprinting.org).
- GTK and KDE user interface got some usability and workflow improvements. They also show the license and support status now:
- KDE user interface got ported to PyKDE 4:
As of today, 0.5 beta 1 was uploaded to Ubuntu Intrepid, too.
#1 by Wouter on 2008/09/26 - 00:26
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From the first picture: driver is not installed… -> Activate huh? Activating a driver that is not installed?
And from the dialog it is not clear if you need a proprietary driver to get it working at all (like with the printer?) or if it is an alternative to the already included drivers like the nvidia one.
#2 by martinpitt on 2008/09/26 - 09:39
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@Wouter: What’s wrong with “Activate”? We had some different wording proposals, and that seemed like the best one so far.
For graphics drivers, the description field points out whether this driver will just improve functionality, and thus merely provides an alternative. For printer drivers we really don’t know if it *would* work in some way with any of the drivers we ship by default, but then again system-config-printer is clever enough to not pop up jockey in the first place if there is a good driver already.
#3 by Vadi on 2008/09/26 - 14:20
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How can you activate something that’s not installed?
It has to be consistent. If activate, then say the driver isn’t activated.
#4 by Vadi on 2008/09/26 - 14:21
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Also, I liked the simple interface that was before. Some people just don’t care about the details, they just want it to work, and the details would seem confusing.
It would be best if the details were in an GtkExpander, imho. Just like the Update Manager hides the details into it.
#5 by martinpitt on 2008/09/26 - 15:23
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Right, the string inconsistency (installed/activate) is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jockey/+bug/274697 . I just fixed it in trunk.
#6 by Wouter on 2008/09/26 - 17:08
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On my system, the introduction text isn’t shown, it only says no proprietary drivers are in use. Is that normal or a bug? Could be because I use dutch localization…?
One suggestion for the way the printer driver is shown: (ML3456,…), that should show a complete list in the description field. Showing only one model out of a list is not that useful.