Andrew Roberts - Software - Jacman @ School of Computing, University of Leeds

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Jacman

Overview

News

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

8th Decemeber 2006 - Jacman 0.4 released

It's been a quiet year on the Jacman front. So, as a Christmas gift to the Arch Linux community, here is the latest version 0.4 release of Jacman. There's no new functionality to speak of - the changes are largely cosmetic, as well as some improvements under-the-hood. Go to the download section to grab this release.

18th January 2005 - Jacman 0.3.1 released

Jacman v0.3.1 was released tonight due to poor QA on my part with the 0.3 release that missed a significant bug when Jacman loaded. Apologies for this. Should be fixed now. Go to the download section to grab this release.

17th January 2005 - Jacman 0.3 released

It's been ages since we've made a release - sorry about that. I guess that's because v0.2 covered the main functionality, and so there wasn't a huge rush to add tons of features. Anyway, it's a new year, lots of cool ideas coming from the Jacman team and we've put the wheels back in motion. Multi-lingual support, preferences dialog, system tray access, pacman-optimize and colour console sum up this release. See the Readme for more information.

25th July 2005 - Jacman 0.2 released

It's been a long wait until this release. Sorry about that! It's been a busy month, but I hope the wait was worth it. Special thanks to Jon-Anders (SoniX) for contributing a lot of great code to sort out the console component, amongst other things. This means that the issues with curses-based output from Pacman is now fixed. Also, "rollback" functionality has been added. This provides the ability to return to a previous version of a package in a couple of clicks. Some other little tweaks have also been added. See the Readme for more information. Jacman is now released under the Apache license.

23rd June 2005 - Jacman 0.1 announced

Screenshots available (see below), but the program won't be released for a few days yet, as it's not quite done.

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!

Screenshot of Jacman in the system tray.

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:

0.4	jacman-0.4.jar	jacman-0.4-1.pkg.tar.gz	Readme.txt	jacman-0.4_src.jar
0.3.1	jacman-0.3.1.jar	jacman-0.3.1-1.pkg.tar.gz	Readme.txt	jacman-0.3.1_src.jar
0.3	jacman-0.3.jar	jacman-0.3-1.pkg.tar.gz	Readme.txt	jacman-0.3_src.jar
0.2	jacman-0.2.jar	jacman-0.2-1.pkg.tar.gz	Readme.txt	jacman-0.2_src.jar
0.1	jacman-0.1.jar	jacman-0.1-1.pkg.tar.gz	Readme.txt	jacman-0.1_src.jar

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!

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