I've been experimenting with making tutorial videos / screencasts:

The Zero Install Injector is named after the concept of "dependency injection". In this post, I'll try to explain what this means and why we use it.

The 2007 Zero Install survey is now up, so please submit your feedback there!

There's also some discussion on the LSB packaging list about third-party installation, including Zero Install.

A while ago Thomas Leonard wrote about Ubuntu integration and asked the question "Can we get rid of ROX-Session?". This inspired me to attempt to replace it with the Xfce session manager and it turns out that it is both easy to do and works very well.

Note: An updated version of these instructions can be found on the Ubuntu page.

Can we get rid of ROX-Session? It should be possible to integrate ROX with your existing session manager. In this experiment, I configure a fresh Ubuntu installation to run ROX, without using ROX-Session.

Following on from the work to allow adding ROX applications to the Xfce panel, I've created Zero2Desktop. This adds a launcher for any Zero Install application to the GNOME or KDE Applications menu. To run it:

Having Zero Install check for updates once a month or so is handy, as it keeps you up-to-date, but it's pretty annoying that you have to wait for the check just when you're trying to start a program. Especially if there aren't any updates available anyway! I've just committed some new code to do the checking in the background, using the D-BUS notification daemon to let you know if there are updates. This screenshot shows what happens when I run Inkscape:

I've made the first release of 0publish-gui today. This is a GTK utility for creating and editing Zero Install feeds. This should make it a lot easier to get started. Here's a tutorial with lots of screenshots. Have fun!

Summary:
create self-contained bundles from a Zero Install feed

Current stable version:
0.1

Primary author(s):
Thomas Leonard

I've been doing some work on the GUI for 0compile, used to build programs from source. Here are some screen-shots showing how we can download and compile ROX-CLib.