ken’s blog

This weekend I hacked firstboot in Foresight so the first user added gets sudo access. Also added gksudo to all the apps that need to run as a privileged user. Now, users don’t need root for much, unless they are more seasoned Linux/UNIX geeks.

Also fixed many bugs since the first release (0.1) of Foresight. Things are looking good for 0.2, which I am working as I type this.

I think things are shaping up pretty good. I may be a bit biased

Foresight Desktop Linux 0.1, this is the first alpha release of this new distro. Please download, install and report bugs today!

What is cool?

GNOME — Foresight comes with GNOME 2.10 Beta 2

Conary — Foresight is built on the paradigm shifting conary package management system.

Mono — Prepackaged Mono 1.1.4 and many mono apps, Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot, Monodevelop, etc…

GNOME Office

Howl

And more… try it, you’ll like it…

For more info, checkout our site (still a major work in progress) http://www.foresightlinux.com

Getting robbed sucks worse!

Last week the head gasket blew on our mini-van. So, had it towed into the dealer. Initial conversation with the Dealer they said it would be in the ball park of $800-900 if they had to do both heads. Then the real quote came at $1600. I told them that wasn’t even in the same town as the original estimate and they needed to explain the difference. After some stumbling around he agreed to speak with his service manager. They called back and said they could do it for $1060. That was at least closer so I told them to go ahead. Now of course, nearly a week later, they finished to work and it is nearly $1600. For different reasons, like the bolts were rusty on the manifold and had to be sent to the machine shop… etc… I guess they were gonna get their money, no matter what!

Just upgraded to 1.5, couldn’t have been easier

So my cold turned into more than just a cold. Friday night it became an ear infection, that really sucked! Saturday morning I paid my doctor a visit and she prescribed some anti-biotics which are now starting to help. Basically, I was so congested for so long that it cause the infection. Still haven’t shaken the congestion, but at least my ears don’t hurt anymore.

In other news, I whipped up ISOs for Foresight… but they don’t quite work. There was a path bug in anaconda that causes it to bomb right when it starts installing packages. I created a patch for it and applied it to my shadow. But, now there is a shadow bug and I can’t regenerate the ISOs until someone pokes at things a little. Should be able to get that fixed on Monday and I can quickly get ISOs for version 0.1 published.

Also thanks to Lode for donating some bandwidth for the ISOs.

I know this seems to be popular thing these days… I hope it works.

There is need for some cool artwork for use in Foresight Desktop Linux project. Currently we need a logo and FDL branded wallpapers. There has been no firm “branding” decisions made, so many things are flexible. Even the tagline, “because your desktop should be cool!” could change.

You can read a little about what FDL is all about at www.foresightlinux.com.

Please send suggestions or samples to the mailing list, which can be found here.

Thanks!

Being sick sucks! Ashlyn, my 2 year old daughter was sick from Thursday thru Monday. Which of course made sleep scarce in my house. She is feeling better now… but she got me sick. Felt like crap yesterday and even worse today… very little sleep last night and I am having trouble sleeping again tonight… I am now writing about my boring troubles just to pass the time I hope everyone else sleeps well!

Good night

Got 208 packages built out of a total of 563… Woo Hoo!

But…. I hit a snag…. not enough disk space on my build box. Or… should I say the partition. I was building the full distro on a 10GB partition, with 5GB free… (that was dumb) So, now I just moved my build over to a 113GB partition and fired it back up again. Lets hope that finishes without any more errors.

Added more stuff to Foresight…

Wrote some content for the website, still need more.

Cooked up GNOME 2.10 Beta 2.

Created a custom GDM theme

Reset some of the defaults in GNOME, like colors etc.

Fixed some bugs… possibly introduced more

Renamed the repository to conary.foresightlinux.com@fl:desktop…

So, if you haven’t guessed yet… the new name is Foresight Linux. You can see the beginnings of our website at www.foresightlinux.com.

Howl is now cooked into the repo… looks cool!