A sbopkg GUI

An interesting post appeared in LQ, announcing a graphical user interface for sbopkg based on PyQt. It is described as being similar to the Synaptic Package Manager, just simpler. The developer is Gernot Walzl and his web-page contains a lot of interesting stuff, among which the sbopkg_gui can be found.

Sounds promising. :)

I decided to check it out. I am using Slackware64 14.1 -multilib and I have sbopkg (version 0.37.1) already present and the repository points to 14.1 and is up-to-date.

I downloaded and installed this package: sbopkg_gui-20160621-noarch-1scr.tgz.

The program can be run as a normal user, since it relies on sudo for its operations. The window shows the SBo repository for Slackware 14.1, with information parsed from the README of each entry. I like that, it is (usually) much more informative than what slack-desc provides:

In the screenshot above, I am about to install perlprimer. Its dependencies are listed in the “Requires” field, where libwww-perl is shown in green, because it is already installed.

It is interesting to see that the program is aware of packages that were installed from a source other than SlackBuilds.org. For example I have a lot of things installed from SlackOnly and sbopkg gui sees them fine. When upgrading or uninstalling such package, sbopkg gui warns the user that they were installed from an alternative source. I was actually looking for such a feature and even asked at LQ…

I do not particularly like typing my password every time I want to do something with the program. Therefore, I modified the .desktop file, to make the program open through ktsuss in order to have a su authentication. I also made some cosmetic changes to the name and specified an icon:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=SBopkg GUI
GenericName=Package Manager
Comment=Install and remove software
Exec=ktsuss sbopkg_gui
Categories=System;
Icon=system-software-install

So far I have not had problems with the tool. In fact it looks really neat, providing a quick and convenient way of browsing SlackBuilds.org. I hope its development continues.

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