PacKommander Home Page





What is PacKommander ? 

        PacKommander is a simplistic graphical frontend to pacman, the wonderful package manager of Arch Linux. As the name might suggest, it is actually a simple Kommander script. It is 'simplistic' in the sense that it is just a GUI frontend which uses pacman at the back to get things done!


Why ?                                 

        Frankly, I think the actual (command line) pacman absolutely rocks, and there is no need for a GUI frontend to it ! Having said that, there are many people who'd disagree.  They argure that pacman being a wonderful tool, we should have an equally wonderful graphical frontend to it.  Also, GUI tools are always handy for newbies! Besides that, many actions concerning package management can be greatly facilitated and made easier  using a good GUI frontend.

 History   ( :P)                        

        The philosophy of Arch Linux says that there will be no GUI tools for configuration, etc. in its bid to keep things simple ( and I personally support that KISS principle!) . Hence, there will never be an 'Official' GUI frontend to pacman. That doesn't imply there can't be unofficial ones, though. In fact, people have been contributing a number of them. Most of them are great software, but they all have their problems. Some (guzuta, gtkpacman) seem to be dead projects, while others (Jacman) are too heavy on system resources.
        I was looking for a GUI frontned to be included in my pet project March Linux  , which is a "distrolet" of Arch. I wanted it to be simple, fast and light, yet functional. Since none of the existing ones fully catered to my needs, I thought of creating my own! The easy-to-use app called Kommander made the process quite simple for me.      

Features                              

Download  & Installation    

    The current version of PacKommander is 2.5 .
You can download the tar.bz2 file  HERE  from  sourceforge.net.


Dependencies :  

     There is nothing really to install it ! Once you have installed kommander, and extracted the tar.bz2 file, just open a terminal in the location of extracted files (as normal user) and type (without quotes) :  

'  kmdr-executor packommander.kmdr  '

This will start the GUI.

Known bugs / Problems   

  • Pressing the ESC key (even by mistake) closes the app as it is, WITOUT A WARNING!! This is not a problem with packommander itself, but the kmdr-executor! If anyone knows of a solution , please inform me.
  •  For some bizarre reason, the program might refuse to work properly when started as ROOT. Better start it as normal user, since root permission will be automatically sought for via gksudo/sudo as and when required.
  • There are certain problems with the layout and the app may look bad with resolutions other than 1024x768 (NOT tested with other resolutions). Layout design is not very easy with kommander, it seems. I'v tried to rectify it and make it look as good as possible. It is recommended  that you MAXIMIZE the window after starting the app.

Screenshots                     

Click on images for seeing larger size :

  Image hosted at imageshack.us     Image hosted at imageshack.us     Image hosted at imageshack.us     Image hosted at imageshack.us




     Alternatively, you can visit
  this Picasa Web Album

License                                           

GNU GPL

Contact Me                                     


For any suggestions /comments /queries feel free to mail me (Sayan Chakrabarti) at  s26c.sayan@ubuntu.co.in
This is my first serious attempt at developing anything, so I'd love to hear from you, esp. if you find this software useful! :-)






                         
SourceForge.net Logo    Thanks to sourceforge.net for hosting this project.           Document made with Nvu