GNOME Releases Stripped-Down Developer Kit

by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 17, 2010Comments (0)

The GNOME project released a new version of its Developer Kit, a platform for testing, documenting, translating, and developing its desktop software. Project contributor Og Maciel says essentially everything is new in this update now that all packages are built directly from git.gnome.org.

The most notable difference, however, is how tiny the new kit is -- less than 700MB, down from 1.4GB. The development team replaced the Firefox browser with Epiphany, pulled out codecs and other unnecessary cruft, then repackaged the kit into its current diminutive form.

The GNOME Developer Kit uses a package management system that may be unfamiliar to some. "The package management system behind the GNOME Developer Kit is called conary and is considered by many as the next generation package management system when compared to some of the popular options out there,"explains Maciel. "One of the reasons behind this claim is the fact that your entire system is actually completely maintained in a versioned state, and conary is always 'aware' of what is installed on your system and what files and dependencies make up the entire 'set'. This allows for some pretty nifty operations such as rolling back to a specific state of your system."

Check out Maciel's blog post for a full run down on conary and how to use it to install and remove packages, and update your system. To learn more about the GNOME Developer Kit, head over to the project's Web site for details. When you're ready to download the kit, it's available as a VMware image, an installable ISO, and a RAW filesystem image.