The registration form now uses reCAPTCHA instead of the regular captcha shipped with php-fusion. This will hopefully reduce the creation of new spam accounts. If you have any problems creating a new account please let me know (using the contact page).

New release: 0.5.1
A new release has been released. It fixes several bugs and adds Polish translations. Changelog:
- Fixed: LZMA encoder had unresolved symbols on older Linux systems (reported by John Tsolox)
- Fixed: Missing large file support (LFS) for Linux 32 bit and Solaris (reported by Edward Rudd)
- Fixed: Linux 64 bit LZMA encoder was actually a Linux 32 bit binary.
- Fixed: OpenSolaris might produce invalid embedded archive.
- Fixed: PackageToggleScreen didn't disable package selector when it was disabled.
- Fixed: Solaris su helper had unresolved symbol to nanosleep on Solaris 10. (Reported by Marc Rios)
- Polish translations (thanks to Jusko)

Many thanks to those who notified me about the bugs listed above. The release the can be downloaded from the download section.

Status update
Besides this new release, much work has been done on 'Nixstbuild' which is a graphical interface for Nixstaller powered by Qt4. Although it was started a long time ago, it was only after some time ago that it received more serious attention.

Nixstbuild will have an 'expert mode' (screenshot below) which will provide all Nixstaller's feature through it's user interface. This mode assumes that the user is familiar with Nixstaller and hence it's name. For those who are less familiar or have fewer requirements several other modes will be supported aswell. These modes let you create installers with most basic (but also some advanced) features through a simple wizard.

Below is a screenshot for the expert mode. Note that the interface itself still needs work (eg. icons).

Many thanks to Jusko who provided Polish translations for Nixstaller 0.5! The file can be downloaded here.

Simply extract the archive to your project's 'lang/' directory and add "polish" to cfg.languages in your project's config.lua file. You can also extract the files to Nixstaller's lang/ directory so they will be automatically copied by genprojdir.sh for new projects.

After over a year of development version 0.5 has been released! This version consists of many changes, including several bug fixes and lots of new features.

The biggest new feature is dependency handling. This allows your installer to verify the software's dependencies and handle any missing or incompatible dependencies. In case the installer finds any dependency problems it can warn the user and tell what to do next. It's also possible to bundle dependencies and let the installer install them itself. These dependencies will be installed to a seperate location so they will not interfere or be interfered. To reduce the install package size it's possible to make these dependencies 'external' so they can be downloaded by the installer when it needs to.

GTK frontend dependency screen.

Another major new feature is UTF-8 support. This means that Nixstaller can finally be reasonably translated. For the same reason Nixstaller now additionally supplies two new translations: Bulgarian and Lithuanian.

Some other new features include:

• Unattended installers. Using this installation type the installation process can be done without any user interaction, ideal for automated installations.
• A function can be defined inside an installation screen's class that is called continuously when the screen is active. This allows Lua code to be executed in the background.
• Extended widget functionality: widgets can be disabled/enabled, functions to add or remove elements from menus, checkboxes and radiobuttons and text label attributes.
• Much of the core installation code has been moved to Lua, therefore this functionality can now also be used by install creators.
• Extended installer commandline support: option to choose a frontend, improved usage display and an option to dump installer information.
• Binary delta code is replaced by 'subarchives' (extra layer of compressed archived files). This way installers have even less size overhead.
• Installers can now (optionally) auto detect the user's language.
• And much more... see the CHANGELOG for more info.

On a related note, the about page was updated and the site has a new FAQ so you may want to check these out.

As you probably have noticed the site got a major facelift. Hope you like it!

I've updated all the 0.4 Nixstaller packages, as they were missing a lzma compressing utility for Linux (x86, linked with libstdc++.so.6). Thanks to W.P. van Paassen for mentioning.

When you run 'geninstall.sh' and you see the following error

Lua error detected: While parsing ./src/lua/geninstall.lua: Could not find a suitable LZMA encoder

you are affected by this. You can download one of the updated packages or add the missing file. To add the missing file see this thread: Link.


Besides this, here is a status update:
I've been very busy with work/school, but in the little time I still have I continued to finalize the dependency system. As mentioned in the previous post, I've been busy with a script to simplify dependency configuration for your installer.

One of the features is to create 'dependency packages' (see the news update from June 27) from templates. These templates hold information about the name, description, dependend libraries etc. In the last couple of days I created over 100 of these templates, which in total register more than 400 common libraries. The script also supports project scanning, which means that dependency packages are generated for those who have existing templates. In other words, creating dependency packages for your project will be simplified a lot as much of it is automated.

First of all some advertisement for W.P. van Paassen, who made a Nixstaller based installer for the Linux port of Atomic Worm [link]. So you know what to do if you're in a gaming mood :)

Staying a little bit on the games subject, Edward Rudd, one of the people from Penumbra [link], is working on a Mac OS X port for Nixstaller. So in other words, Nixstaller may soon have a port to one of the remaining popular UNIX systems.

Now some news from me:
I'm currently very busy with the dependency system I discussed earlier. Most of the big parts are nearly finished, such as finding required dependencies (manually programmed and automatic through system library scanning), downloading dependencies (dependencies can be seperated or bundled), user interaction incase of missing dependencies which the installer could not deal with and a tool that will make finding and defining dependencies for your project (much) easier.