Snapd 2.0.10: new media interfaces, channel switching

If it hasn’t already, snapd 2.0.10 should be making its way to your 16.04 systems. Here is what’s new!

The 2.0.10 release contains a number of improvements and fixes over the 2.0.9 release that was available before. The highlights:

Channels

Channels (stable, candidate, beta, edge) usage has been streamlined on the client.

As a shorthand to --channel=<channel>, you can now use --<channel> with the refresh and install commands.

For example:

Interfaces

New interfaces have landed with this release, giving you more freedom to interact with the OS, while keeping your app into the bounds of the existing confinement. This allows, for example, for improvements in the VLC snap’s user experience.

mpris (new)

• Allows snaps such as music players to connect to D-Bus as an MPRIS server.
• You can see an usage example in the VLC snapcraft.yaml.

camera (new)

• Grants access to /dev/video0 (although, note the following issue: https://pad.lv/1600719)

optical-drive (new)

• Grants read access to optical drives.

home

• Allow gvfs shares in home.

General

• Snaps can be launched under KDE Neon

• SNAP_COMMON and SNAP_USER_COMMON are paths to unversioned data directories

• Better handling of removed `snap try` directories

• Fixes towards running snapd inside LXC

• `snap change <taskid>` shows task progress

• Auto-connect the home interface only if running on classic

The changelog is available here and the full details can be found here: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/tree/2.0.10

Let us know what you think!

We’d like to hear your feedback about snapd and snap technologies. Is there an interface you would need for your app to be working better? Can we do better with integrating with a particular distro? Here’s how we can talk:

• Send an e-mail to the Snapcraft mailing list

• File a bug in Snappy

Original article