ken’s blog

Foresight developers and community members have been hitting the streets in NC over the past couple days.  What brings them from all around the world to the humble south you ask?  Foresight 20/20 of course!  It has been so exciting preparing for the first official gathering of Foresight developers, we will surely have fond memories of this event.  If you are in the area, we will be kicking off in the morning at 9am and after wrapping up for the day heading out for dinner and drinks, on both Saturday and Sunday.

Our friends over at Shuttle have helped us put together a contest. Do you want to learn packaging? Are there applications you want/need that aren’t yet available in the Foresight repository? Come read about the contest, http://www.foresightlinux.org/contest.html

There will be a meeting in #foresight on Freenode tonight (March 30) at 9PM EST. Come join us, it is bound to be fun and who knows… maybe you can win one of those cool KPCs with Foresight pre-loaded

Update: The Q&A on IRC is actually at 9PM EST

Kevin will be running the GNOME booth at Flourish this year. Flourish is a FLOSS conference located in Chicago, Illinois, USA with a focus on FLOSS in business and academia. Kevin really needs volunteers to help work the booth. The conference is on April 4-5th in Chicago, IL at the University of Illinois Chicago
(UIC) campus. If you are willing to help work the GNOME booth, let me know and I will get you in touch with Kevin.

Woot… I love seeing this cool little box available for sale, of course pre-loaded with Foresight

Also, the customizable version of the KPC is available for pre-order directly from Shuttle.

So the bittorrent tracker on http://torrent.gnome.org is really flaky, it just loses it’s mind about once a day and needs a restart.  Can anyone suggest potential replacement trackers?  Here are our four basic requirements:

1. be a tracker
2. have simple stats (# downloads)
3. ability to seed
4. not crash

Seems like simple requirements… please help

The Foresight marketing team published our new website. The new site sports the new (not that new) logo, a new layout and should be much more maintainable. There is also room for the additional KDE and XFCE pages as well as translations. Thanks to all the folks that have helped out, we really appreciate it. Keep up the great work!

• Eric Lake
• Kevin Harriss
• Paul Cutler
• Thorsten Panknin
• Richard Johnson
• Stephanie Watson
• Paul Scott
• Alexandru Bucur

Next up… i18n!

Foresight Linux 2.0 has been released, featuring GNOME 2.22. Available for download from rBuilder for both x86 and x86_64 architectures.

Foresight Linux is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date. Foresight includes innovative applications that make using your computer easy, including Banshee for music management, F-Spot for photo management, as well as vibrant user and developer community.

New in Foresight 2.0:

The Foresight 2.0 features a new tar-based installer, that should install in less than 10 minutes, including formatting a 200 GB hard drive. Foresight is also developing new editions including KDE and XFCE in addition to GNOME available for x86 and x86_64 processors. Foresight is proud to be the first distribution to ship with:

• PackageKit to help users update their system and add and remove software
• Syslinux, a new bootloader to replace GRUB.
• GNOME-Do: GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present in your GNOME desktop environment (applications, Evolution contacts, Firefox bookmarks, files, artists and albums in Rhythmbox, Pidgin buddies, etc.) and perform commonly used actions on those items (Run, Open, Email, Chat, Play, etc.).

Users should also find it much easier to use binary video card drivers from Nvidia and ATI than in Foresight 1.x. Transmission is also included as the default Bittorrent application.

For more information, please visit http://www.foresightlinux.org/

Because your desktop should be cool.

Updated:

Awesome news… Shuttle released a press release today:

Shuttle Teams with Foresight Linux on $199 KPC
City of Industry, CA., MArch 4, 2008

Shuttle today announced that the newly launched $199 KPC will feature the Foresight Linux operating system. With an intuitive interface and user focused design, Foresight does away with the need for users to be familiar with Linux.

A host of the latest software is packaged with the operating system, giving users convenient and enjoyable access to music, photos, videos, documents, and the Internet. Even keeping up-to-date with the latest features and fixes is a simple process with the user friendly update button.

Foresight uses the revolutionary Conary® Package Manager developed by rPath and distributed as Open Source software under the terms of the Common Public License. With the Conary® Package Manager, the system updates only the specific files in packages which need to be updated so updating takes little time and bandwidth.

Shuttle’s KPC includes many software packages already installed, including the OpenOffice.org® office suite, the Firefox® web browser, the Pidgin instant messenger, the Banshee music player, the Totem movie player, the F-Spot photo organizer, and Compiz for 3D desktop effects. For more details visit: http://us.shuttle.com/kpc

I am fortunate enough to have received one of these little boxes already, and I am pretty impressed. Great value for the $199 price tag. And of course it is linux friendly, Foresight worked perfectly out of the box. All the way from sound, compiz, to suspend/hibernate, all just worked. In fact, this was a pre-release box they sent and it already had Foresight pre-loaded! So exciting, everyone go buy one

More information at Shuttle’s KPC website.

Wow time flies… I just renewed the foresightlinux.{org,com,net} domains, which reminded me it has been 3 years since the first release of Foresight. My baby is growing up

Just a reminder, I will be at SCALE in Los Angeles this weekend, hanging out with Kevin Harriss and Paul Cutler in the Foresight booth, swing by and say hi.

I am also very excited to be doing the GNOME: Ten years of Freedom talk on Satruday at 1:30pm and a Conary BoF on Sunday at 6:00pm.