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Jacman
Overview
Jacman is a GUI frontend to the excellent pacman software management software that comes with the equally excellent ArchLinux. Hopefully the "J" makes it obvious that this is a Java application. Arch's philosophy is to keep things simple and to keep the user in control. Generally, GUI based configuration tools were deemed "anti-Arch" as they tended to contradict the philosophy by concealing functionality. Whilst developing Jacman, it has been a design goal to not break the philosophy, but inevitably it does. Whilst Jacman is only a front-end to pacman, it doesn't provide access to all of pacman's functionality.
However, there was a reason for that! I wanted Jacman to provide a visual window for only a subset of common tasks: installing, removing, updating and re-syncing. Some people may like this, as it allows people to quickly explore which packages are available.
Jacman is free and open source. It is released under the Apache license (although v0.1 was released under the GPL licence).
News
Features
Er, it's pacman front-end, so it does what pacman does - just better looking! :P
Screenshots
The main Jacman window. (For some reason, the frame icon doesn't show the transparency)
Selecting the Install Package option brings up this window. Initially it needs to load all the package data which will take a few seconds. This is what you'll see.
The Install window with all the packages loaded. Clicking a package shows all the information about it, including a dependency tree. The search box searches the packages titles and descriptions on the fly as you type. The Filter list allows you to add a filter to show only those packages not currently installed, or all the available packages. Click the check box beside each package you are interested in.
Jacman installing the selected packages. It simply runs the equivalent pacman command and displays the output in a console. I forgot to switch to root!
Jacman can be accessed via the system tray if you enable it. It's still very experimental at the moment.
It's possible to even enable the option of showing Jacman's window size and position when moving or resizing the frame. Just some useless eye-candy :)
The main Jacman window in Polish.
It's possible to even enable the option of showing Jacman's window size and position when moving or resizing the frame. Just some useless eye-candy :)
Download
There's nothing here yet. Jacman is free and open source. It is released under the Apache license (NB, v0.1 was released under the GPL).
Please select the version you wish to use:
The jacman.jar file isn't runnable with `java -jar jacman-0.1.jar' as many would expect as it contains other jars within. It's merely there as a bundle for the PKGBUILD.
NOTE: Before you can utilise Jacman on your system, you must ensure that the Java Runtime Envinronment (version 1.5 or greater) is also installed on your computer. pacman -S j2re!!!
Documentation
No documentation available yet. I'm hoping Jacman won't need any!
