Listaller Project

What is Listaller?

Listaller is a cross-distribution application management and software installation tool based on PackageKit. It provides a meta package format which covers current LOKI and Autopackage setups as well as it is providing a very flexible way to install software across different distributions needing just one package.

Listaller is quite easy to use, developers can build installations using an GUI-wizard or via commandline, and users find a simple setup wizard on every new software installation.
Listaller combines the features of a package-management with the need to install newer software on Linux than available in a package manager. It can also be used to install proprietary software like games etc.
Listaller installation packages (extension: *.ipk) can be installed on many different Linux distributions, but they do not replace the distribution's package system or cause problems with it
The software was not designed to install libraries or something other shared stuff, its aim is to unify and to simplify software installations on Linux.

Listaller also provides a graphical application management tool, which is compatible with Autopackage, LOKI/Mojo, IPK and native package installations. So end-users can manage all applications, independent from how they were installed. Since 0.4b, Listaller provides a nice GLib-based library to write custom frontends for it. The project is based on the great PackageKit project, so it will run on most Linux distributions. It also uses PolicyKit and a SQLite database.

Try Listaller?

Click on the item "Get Listaller" in the main menu an you'll get further instructions to download the latest Listaller release.

We need help!

Do you want to support the Listaller project? Great! You can help translating the Listaller applications to other languages, help writing the documentation, design new banners or icons and - of course - help developing the Listaller toolset. Alternatively you can build IPK packages for our getIPK service. Look at our "Get Involved" page and join our team at Launchpad for more information. If you want to contact us, please leave an message on our mailinglist.

Last Updated on Saturday, 26 June 2010 21:10

Get snapshots of the Listaller development branch at http://ppa.launchpad.net/ximion/ubuntu/pool/main/l/listaller/

You can report bugs, ask questions or commit blueprints for new features at Launchpad.

Project news:

Listaller 0.4 released

Today Listaller 0.4-beta was released, bringing a bunch of bugfixes and a lot of changes and new features.
Listaller 0.4b got the following new features:
    * General code cleanup: Most parts of Listaller were rewritten
    * IPK1.0 standard: The package format uses a similar syntax like Debian packages use. The new syntax replaces the old XML-based files which were hard to read.
    * Completed PackageKit integration: We dropped the previous native package installation solution and ported all parts to PackageKit. (In previous versions Listaller connected directly to APT/Yum/Zypper etc. through an own abstraction layer. Now PackageKit is used instead.)
    * New libInstaller: A library which covers all Listaller functions. This makes it possible to write more advanced frontends in other languages.
    * Removed catalogue support: We will do a cooperation with the PAPPI project which will remove the need of a software-store like feature. Also the distributions have very good solutions by their own now.
    * Revised GUI surfaces & Qt4 GUIs
    * LZMA compressed IPK packages (makes packages over 20% smaller)
    * PolicyKit support for all Listaller modules
Read the full release announcement if you want to know more about this release!
Listaller 0.4b release imminent

Now, after 10 months of development time (far too long), we're going to release Listaller 0.4b. There are just a few issues to be fixed until Listaller 0.4b is ready.
Since today the translatable strings in Listaller won't change anymore, so all translation made in Launchpad will be final. More about the new features in Listaller 0.4b can be found in the release announcement later, when it is released.
Listaller 0.4 snapshots available

Since today we will offer precompiled Listaller 0.4 snapshot packages on our download page. Listaller 0.4 needs to be tested before it is released and the snapshots give us the perfect opportunity to receive some user-feedback.
We are miles away from the first beta release, but people who wanted to test Listaller got only the old 0.3 release. The 0.3 release with IPK/IPS0.8 is not really usable anymore, because no packages exist to install.
Cause Listaller has had only preview releases until 0.4, we will replace the generic download page with a "snaphot download-page", where new compiled Listaller snaphots can be downloaded.
PackageKit 0.5.4 and Listaller

PackageKit just switched to a new interface API using GLib2, which is available in the PackageKit 0.5 series.
Because the upcoming Listaller 0.4 release will be the first stable Listaller release, we decided to use the new PackageKit API and drop the support for all lower versions.
As consequence of this, Listaller 0.4 will depend on minimum PackageKit version 0.5.3. This means, that older Linus distributions will need an upgrade to a higher PackageKit version, which is sometimes impossible because of missing dependencies. This is really bad, but we do not want to ship old messy code within the upcoming release.
openSUSE and Fedora hopefully will include the new PackageKit version within the new release, for users of Ubuntu Karmic we will create a PPA, containing the new version.
Debian stable is currently unsupported, we will have support for Debian Squeeze.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 08 December 2009 16:52