Posts Tagged ‘Flatpak Sandbox’
New Flatpak Linux App Sandboxing Release Makes Installations and Updates Faster
Flatpak, the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework formerly XDG-App, received a new major update that brings lots of new options and commands, as well as various other improvements.
Flatpak 0.11.8 is now the most advanced version of the universal binary format used to make the distribution of Linux apps a breeze across multiple Linux-based operating systems. It adds a new “–allow=bluetooth” permission to allow the use of AF_BLUETOOTH sockets and tab-completion for the zsh (Z shell) UNIX shell.
It also introduces a new and handy “flatpak repair” command that allows users to check and repair Flatpak installations and introduces new “-all” and “–unused” arguments to the “flatpak uninstall” command, allowing users to remove everything along with the remaining runtimes.
Also new in Flatpak 0.11.8 release are the “–show-location,” “–show-runtime,” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak info” command, as well as the “–show-runtime” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak remote-info” command. Additionally, the framework now sends a new “Flatpak-Upgrade-From” HTTP header during upgrades.
P2P operations now work offline, faster installations and updates
Among other noteworthy changes implemented in Flatpak 0.11.8, we can mention that P2P operations now work offline, Flatpak now makes use of p11-kit-server, if it’s installed on the host OS, to forward the host certificate trust store to the sandboxed application, and defaults new Flatpak installations to bare-user-only repos for compatibility with file systems that do not support xattrs.
To make it easier for application developers to implement installation and updates in frontends, Flatpak 0.11.8 introduces a new transaction API in the libflatpak library. This release also adds an extra layer of optimizations to Flatpak installations and updates, especially for pruning and triggering operations, making them a lot faster than in previous releases of the sandboxing framework.
Last but not least, the “flatpak uninstall” command has been updated to no longer allow users to remove a runtime if it’s required by an installed application, adds a workaround for a hang that might occur on some hosts during app startup, and makes the “flatpak info,” “flatpak list,” “flatpak search,” and “flatpak remotes” commands work correctly on hosts that don’t include /var/lib/flatpak.
Flatpak 0.11.8 requires bubblewrap version 0.2.1 for system-bwrap, and respects multiple extension versions match during automatic downloading of extensions. Watch out the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for this release in the coming days and update as soon as it’s available for installation. Alternatively, you can download the sources and compile it yourself.
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Flatpak Now Updates Apps
Alex Larsson released at the end of last week a new stable update of the Flatpak 0.10 Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App) for GNU/Linux distributions.
Bringing a month’s worth of improvements, Flatpak 0.10.2 is out with support for OSTree 2017.14, which is required for building the new release. An interesting feature of Flatpak 0.10.2 is the ability of the “flatpak update” command to update apps from both system and user installations by default.
In addition, all Flatpak remote-* commands now automatically decide by default if they need to use either the –system or –user arguments, based on the given remote name. The “flatpak remote-ls” command has been updated as well to list the content of all remotes when no remote is given.
Flatpak 0.10.2 also makes the “flatpak update” to be less noisy when updating appstream information, and updates the “flatpak install” command to support the –reinstall argument for uninstalling previously installed versions of apps and letting users pass absolute pathnames for remote names.
“flatpak install now allows you to pass an absolute pathname as remote name, which will create a temporary remote and install from that. The remote will be removed when the app is uninstalled. This is very useful during development and testing,” reads the GitHub release notes.
flatpak override gets some new features too
The “flatpak override” command received some improvements as well in the Flatpak 0.10.2 release, being able to override globally with no argument and to support the –nofilesystem properly, which can be used for hiding certain directories, even those with Home access, for all Flatpak apps (e.g. flatpak override –nofilesystem=~/.ssh).
Lastly, Flatpak 0.10.2 addresses a regression that breaks xdg-user-dirs and theme selection for KDE apps, and Flatpak is now capable of creating CLI (command-line interface) wrappers for all installed apps, allowing users to start Flatpak apps by their application ID when adding /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin or ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin to their PATH.
Flatpak 0.10.2 is available for download right now from its GitHub releases page as a source tarball if you fancy compiling it yourself on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, and it should soon make its way into the stable software repositories of various Linux-based operating system, so make sure you update to this version at your earliest convenience.
Keywords:
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