A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a blog article by Duncan Mac-Vicar - it was all about a very interesting concept to modernize the web interface of Spacewalk. With great interest I have taken note of that a combination of defacto standards like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and HTML5 was used to pretty up the frumpy interface. Later I found out that these changes have already been applied in Spacewalk 2.1 - I totally missed that, what a pity! 🙁

Further changes and hints

Beside the new "responsive" web interface there were plenty of other enhancements like a new date picker and a passwort-meter which displays the strength of a defined password.

The integrated OpenSCAP system has been extended by some new functions, at about 200 bugs were fixed. Application and script developers will love to hear that the Spacewalk API now comes with 10 new calls. Spacewalk 2.1 will be the last version that is supported to be installed on a EL5 system (RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, OEL) - Fedora 18 is already unsupported as host system.

The modern web interface will soon be ported to the source code base of SUSE Manager.

Of course I immediately started upgrading my local playground. There is a informative Upgrade guide in the wiki linked on the Spacewalk homepage - you might want to have a look there: https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/HowToUpgrade

The new web interface

Like mentioned above the new web interface was modernized and glamed up using HTML5, Bootstrap and jQuery - it is now "responsive" which enables it to be used acceptably on mobile devices (smartphone, tablet). Here are some screenshots of the web interface on my Google Nexus 7:

I really appreciate this update! The new interface looks more clean and well-designed than the elderly look. I'm really interested to see what the implementation in SUSE Manager will look like and whether Red Hat Satellite will also get a new design. 🙂