Petter Reinholdtsen

Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable
25th May 2016

The isenkram system is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware related packages. The idea is to have a database of mappings between hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to install the packages to use a given hardware dongle. Some use cases are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader; and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to install the driver for it. The system work well, and even have a few command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).

The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found good documentation and example code on how to use it. But aptdaemon is going away and is generally being replaced by PackageKit, so Isenkram needed a rewrite. And today, thanks to the great patch from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the rewrite finally took place. I've just uploaded a new version of Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit. To check it out, install the isenkram package and insert some hardware dongle and see if it is recognised.

If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup program. This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:

% isenkram-lookup 
bluez
cheese
fprintd
fprintd-demo
gkrellm-thinkbat
hdapsd
libpam-fprintd
pidgin-blinklight
thinkfan
tleds
tp-smapi-dkms
tp-smapi-source
tpb
%p

The hardware mappings come from several places. The preferred way is for packages to announce their hardware support using the cross distribution appstream system. See previous blog posts about isenkram to learn how to do that.

Tags: debian, english, isenkram.

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