The new shiny Smolt client

It has been a long since I last blogged (last dating from January)... I haven't blogged since then mostly because I'm not that good when it comes to write more than 5 lines of text and also because I've been busy with my studies/exams which have finished 2 weeks ago. So... what I've been up to in these last 2 weeks?! Well, first week was dedicated to random useless stuffs like catching up on new movies, going out with friends (lots of drinks involved, obviously!) and, most of all, sleeping (yesterday when I woke up and looked at the clock it was 4pm!) - it fells so good sleeping with nothing to worry you about, doesn't it?!

Since end of last week I restarted working on my Smolt Qt Client, which was born during first semester exams (nothing to do in that boring and meaningless period, right?). But before I continue, let me quote what the Smolt project is all about:

Smolt is, very simply, a hardware reporting tool for Linux based systems. It was originally written for Fedora and now also supports SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu. It gathers information from users, and stores them in a queryable database with a web frontend that produces statistics.

More information about Smolt here. The original Smolt client was written in GTK but the Smolt maintainer decided to replace it by mine - "With great power comes great responsibility".
The client is quite a straightforward port of the GTK one as you can see:

Smolt GTK client

Smolt Qt client

Noticed the new "Distribution" tab? In a near future it will provides distribution specific information such as installed packages. It has been developed by Sebastian Pipping as a Google Summer of Code 2009 project to support Gentoo, though support for other distributions are currently under development (openSUSE/SUSE Linux, Fedora and Debian):


I will be fixing last bugs found to then push a new release version out late this week, so before openSUSE 11.2 feature/version freeze. In the meantime if you want to try it and even report bugs, checkout my home:cgoncalves:playground repository for the smolt-snapshot package:

openSUSE 11.1:
# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_11.1/ home:cgoncalves:playground
openSUSE Factory:
# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cgoncalves:/playground/openSUSE_Factory/ home:cgoncalves:playground

# zypper ref home:cgoncalves:playground
# zypper in smolt-snapshot

Please, give us feedback! We want to know your opinion about Smolt!