ken’s blog

Foresight is only translated as well as the applications included, which in the GNOME world isn’t really that bad. But there is always room for improvement and Foresight maintains quite a few things that haven’t been translated yet, website, wiki, etc.

I am very pleased to see some community members looking to get involved in localization. We now have volunteers for German and Portuguese, as well as a volunteer to organize the initiative.

• i18n-Team wiki page
• i18n mailing list

There is also now an IRC channel on freenode dedication to the translation team, #foresight_i18n

Have you noticed how Linux desktops are getting more and more beautiful? Foresight Linux is one of those pretty distributions. The developers of Foresight pride themselves in delivering a Linux desktop that is not only functional, but also includes the latest bells and whistles - both technical and visual. rPath based distro to keep an eye on.

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Introducing Foresight Linux 1.0!

Foresight Linux is a desktop-focused Linux system that just works. Our mission is to provide a truely useful desktop system that is friendly for the novice user, as well as flexible for the power user. Foresight comes with the GNOME desktop, Banshee for your music, F-Spot for your photos, and Open Office for your office needs. Great attention has been paid to making things simple and integrated. For example, NetworkManager makes it simple to connect to wireless access points. Foresight System Manager handles keeping your system updated. You can even auto update if you wish, or get notifications when there are updates available and apply them yourself through an easy-to-use web interface.

I am also pleased to announce some enhancements to our website, specifically our new forum. Many people have requested a forum in the past. So lets all help make it a success. You can find it at http://www.foresightlinux.org/forum. We are also evaluating wiki systems, so stay tuned.

Foresight Linux is a community effort and has come a long way. We have been at it for nearly 2 years now and have some great folks helping out. It has been a blast, and we feel like it is mature and 1.0 quality. We are always looking for more contributers. If you have strong beliefs about what makes a good desktop distribution, we would love your help. You can find us via IRC #foresight on freenode, mailing lists and our forum all linked from the community page of the website.

The future! What does the future hold? Well, stay tuned. There are some exciting things down the road as we work towards 2.0. For example, x86_64 version, maybe a KDE version of Foresight, and more.

For a long time now I have been looking forward to a better way to deal with cd/dvd burning than just wrapping a GUI around cdrecord. There are people working on it, libburn, but for a while I feared the project dead. It has beed revitalized and recently released 0.3.0.

Not many applications are using libburn yet, but I have high hopes. Rumor has it that brasero (Default burning app in Foresight) will use libburn 0.3.0 in the next revision. In preparation, I have added libburn and libisofs to Foresight…

The libburn guys are even working on a cdrecord drop in replacement that uses libburn, “cdrskin”. Which replicates all the command line behavior of cdrecord.

Announcing the first version of the rBuilder package search/install plugin. It is still needs some UI work, but it works. To try it:

sudo conary update raa-plugin-search=raa.rpath.org@rpl:1

The plugin utilizes the new search terms that rBuilder just introduced. Specifically it searches by branch. The included configuration file sets the branch to search to “rpl:1″. This will search for a package in all projects on the “rpl:1″ branch. This is probably desirable for rPath Linux 1 based systems. For Foresight, you will want to search on additional branches. Updating “raa-desktop” will bring in the appropriate overrides for Foresight. This will search using these branches: ‘fl:1-devel’, ‘fl:1-contrib’, ‘rpl:1′.

If you would like to override yourself, set the search.branches list in /etc/raa/custom.cfg

search.branches = ['fl:1-devel', 'fl:1-contrib', 'rpl:1']


So there is a very cool new packaging feature in conary, derived packages. Read all about it… We should be able to use it quite a bit in Foresight, which will make package maintenance a fair bit easier.

It is in conary tip now, and should make it in a release real soon.

For those interested in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the command line utilities for bundling images (I prefer to use rBuilder built xen images) are now packaged in contrib repository.

sudo conary update ec2-ami-tools=contrib.rpath.org@rpl:1