The pessimist in me expects this will become just another Linux/Unix/BSD installation tool, thus diluting the pool of installation and update offerings for the 27 gajillion Linux distributions. Maybe this time, however, the hoped for universal cross-distro package management tool and software installer will be found with recently updated Nixstaller tool that has been under-way for the past year and a half or so.
Nixstaller is an Open Source project with the goal to create user friendly and flexible installers that work on various UNIX like systems.
Main Features
- Three different installer frontends, powered by GTK+2, FLTK and ncurses.
- Support for many common UNIX like systems (see table below)
- Can be fully translated (English and Dutch translations are already provided)
- The installation files can be compressed with lzma, gzip and bzip2.
- The installation files that should be used can depend on the current system.
- Lua support is provided to configure the installer and to program the installation procedure. This allows very flexible configurations.
- Very few dependencies: the end user and install creator only needs one of the supported systems. For compilation SCons (and python) is also required.
It’s an interesting project, and certainly not the first such undertaking. Given the slow track of progress, I’m extra skeptical, but I fully support any efforts to more closely unify Linux distributions. I feel anything that legitimately makes using Linux easier while not taking away capabilities from power-users that know their ways around is a good thing to have.
[tags]Linux, Universal installer, Nistaller[/tags]