The PackageKit

PackageKit is an extremely flexible yet simple method for managing software in any Linux distribution. It integrates with many existing package management systems, and provides easy-to-use graphical tools for installing and updating software. PackageKit is also different from others tools. It does not slow down your start up, in the KDE (and only in it) version you only lose 1~2mb of RAM as this is a KDED module and does not have to load a complete program.

PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. PackageKit is this amazing idea of having a tool for managing packages that works identically on every distribution. It’s got both a GUI and a command-line tool. PackageKit is slow, the interfaces are all lousy, and it has plenty of other shortcomings as well. PackageKit is responsible for the system update and it looks like it does the job very well. A nice icon in the shape of a star will appear in the system tray area, if updates are available, and you can left click on it to get some options.

PackageKit is a daemon started on demand via dbus, all the commands to the daemon are also passed via dbus, which makes it platform independent. The actions are controlled by PolicyKit, which allows to define precisely the rights of each user. PackageKit is an effort to provide a common, sane and smooth software installation process among all/most distributions. Currently the APT backend (used by Debian and Ubuntu) only allows to search and refresh the cache.

OpenEmbedded is a tool which allows developers to create a fully usable Linux base for various embedded systems. It has been designed to be able to handle different hardware architectures, support multiple releases for those architectures, and utilize tools for speeding up the process of recreating the base after changes have been made. By developing a common back end and front end for package management a common interface for the users is realized. By rewriting from scratch the interface can be designed to use newer technologies like PolicyKit to provide additional security.