Dear milestone testers! openSUSE 11.3 looks to be getting in good shape, and there are about two months to go [1] before the first of the RC releases and three until the final release. There are numerous things to be excited about with 11.3 as has been the case with every prior release. One of these is definitely the gtk interface to YaST Sotware Management module [2,3], much revamped since 11.2. It would be very nice of you to test this thoroughly for bugs, but also for usability issues and suggest improvements and peeves :) here and over at bugzilla [4]. In the following I would like to run you through some of the more notable changes in the interface. Please note that there is enough time yet to make minor modifications in the design if required. 1. Main interface revamp: The package-list shown by default is now categorised by (Packagekit) groups and further separation into "Available", "Upgrades" and "Installed" tabs has been done away with. Instead this has been implemented as a separate "Status" filter (below the Category box). By default this filter is set to "Any Status". Selecting the "Upgradeable" filter here for example shows all those packages which have upgrades from the subscribed repositories and brings out an "Upgrade all" button just below the package list. The package-list can now show various columns like repositories, etc. The columns shown by default are Tick-action, package-name, and package-version. Selecting a package for installation is now much easier. For packages that are not installed, check the tick-box to the left of the package-name in the main list and it is selected for installation. Installed packages are already ticked, you have to un-check it to have the package removed. The upgrade button appears just beside the version column for every package that has an update candidate. For such packages both the installed and latest available versions are shown in the version column. When one selects a package for installation/update/removal it brings up a summary line in the status bar along with an Undo button (that undoes this installation/removal request alone) and a link to a "Summary of changes" box [see point 2]. There is a menu-bar at top that largely mirrors the menu-bar in the qt version. 2. A "Summary of changes" box: that contains all the packages selected during the session for installation/update/removal alongwith Undo buttons for the manually selected packages. Selecting "undo" also applies the changes to the corresponding dependencies pulled in automatically by the dep-solver. This replaces the list of changes sidebar implementation which was a part of the package-manager in its 11.2 and previous avatars. Also with a button to access the "History" viewer [see point 3]. 3. A "History of changes" box: that is accessible from either the top-menu "Extras" or from the "Summary of changes" box. This shows the entire history of installed/upgraded/uninstalled packages, and subscribed/removed repositories, categorised conveniently by date (the full history-viewer in all its glory has not made it into M5, it should be in factory [5] soon however and you can already try it from svn [2] if feeling adventurous :) ). You can select a package and hit the "jump-to" button to switch to the package in the main interface and uninstall/re-install a removed package from there. This is in response to feature # 305859. It enables the user to look up a package installed, say, recently that he/she does not like or finds unuseable and remove it and the dependencies it pulled in easily. This should go extremely well if the Unneeded packages group is implemented later [6]. 4. When one switches to the "Repository" categorisation (left-sidebar, select Repositories from drop-down header), the button "Switch all packages to that from this repository" shows up just below the main interface. All the development work thanks to the yast2-gtk maintainers. Discussions pertaining to all points have been taking place at http://groups.google.com/group/yast2-gtk. There is enough time yet for your suggestions regarding the design and usability of yast2-gtk to be given thorough consideration for implementation. Please do use it and let us know what you think of it and the changes you would like to see to make yast2-gtk more useable. You may reply to this mail for general feedback and/or put in a bugzilla report if you meet a crash, etc. Better still you may subscribe to the above google-group and post your suggestions there. Happy testing! Bye -- Atri [1] http://www.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_11.3/ [2] http://en.opensuse.org/YaST2-GTK http://svn.opensuse.org/svn/yast/trunk/gtk/ [3] Installed and used by default on GNOME; KDE users may install the package yast2-gtk using zypper > sudo zypper install yast2-gtk and use the interface by issuing the following command as root > yast sw_single --gtk [4] https://features.opensuse.org/305859 [5] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/YaST:/Head/ look for yast2-gtk > 2.21.36 [6] https://features.opensuse.org/300758 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+help@opensuse.org