ken’s blog

What a great time in Ohio!

This was my first year attending the Ohio Linux Fest, and what a great event. I had a chance to meet lots of cool people and have some great conversations. The .ORG Desktop Corner, which consisted of Foresight, GNOME, Fedora and Ubuntu Ohio Loco, was a real smash. We had the first 4 tables near the entrance, and was so much more crowded than the rest of the show. Linux on the desktop was obviously important to people this year.

Kevin did a great job running the Foresight, with some great help from Ryan, and Michael. We had 250 DVDs to give out, which I think ran out after just a couple hours, and lots of stickers.

On Friday night, Jorge Castro and I were invited to give a talk about GNOME on Saturday (another talk was canceled). Obviously with short notice, we had to do a little cramming to get some slides ready and figure out how we would tag team the talk. Fortunately I think both Jorge and I work best under pressure, and things seem to go off well (besides OOo eating Jorge’s work). I hope all that attended enjoyed it as much as I did.

In the afternoon, Michael and I hosted a Conary BoF. We had a pretty full room, and everyone seemed to “get it”. Lots of great questions, and we spent some time to really talking about the stuff we love. We even ran over by an hour, and nobody seemed anxious to leave… which must be a good sign

No question, I will be going back next year!

Ohio Linux Fest

Michael K Johnson and I just made it into Columbus for Ohio Linux Fest. I am very excited, this is the first show that we will actually have a Foresight booth. Come stop by, we have some DVDs of 1.4 and with any luck will have some stickers to give out.

I will also be giving a talk about rPath built appliances on the Open Source Solutions stage at 11am… so be there or be square!

If I can rally enough interest, we will host a Conary BoF… So look for that or track me down, I will be the guy in the bright green Foresight t-shirt ;-D

Conary 1.2!

Woot! Conary 1.2 has been released with many new features. Read the announcement for a run down of all new features/improvements. Foresight users will see it in their next update, enjoy!.

Get Involved with Foresight Linux

As Paul mentioned in his blog post, we are having a developer meeting on IRC (#foresight-devel on Freenode) next Wednesday, October 3rd at 1:00 p.m. EST. Anyone interested in giving back a little and helping to make the world a better place, come join us. Not a developer? Don’t worry… we have lots of ways for people to help out, testing, documentation, translations, packaging, sysadmin, etc… lots of ways to get involved and there is no better time than now!

You can find the agenda and more info here. So come join us, #foresight-devel on Freenode.

PackageKit in Foresight

PackageKit is still young, not quite complete, and the API is still in the works. However…. It has amazing potential and I am sure it will really rock. As of now, the conary backend is about 80% complete and needs testing. I would love to have some folks try it out and report bugs. If the bug seems to be related to conary, please specify the backend-conary component in bugzilla.

Current operations that are supported include:

• refresh-cache
• seach-name
• search-details
• get-updates
• update-system
• install
• remove
• get-depends
• get-description

To get it:

sudo conary update PackageKit gnome-packagekit

GNOME 2.20 Live

The GNOME 2.20 Live images are all available now, come check them out at http://torrent.gnome.org. This time around I cut out the VMWare ESX and Xen domU images, just no real demand for them. So if anyone has a specific need for them please let me know.

Live images available as VMWare, QEMU/Parallels, and Live CD.

Ahoy!

New Foresight and GNOME releases on International Talk Like a Pirate Day — how much fun is that! I am very pleased to announce Foresight 1.4 with GNOME 2.20. In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, we are featuring two versions of the release notes for your enjoyment:

Release notes: http://foresightlinux.org/releases/1_4/

Release notes written by our resident pirates: http://foresightlinux.org/releases/1_4/pirate/

You can find more information about Foresight on our website at http://www.foresightlinux.org. Download Foresight Linux 1.4 at http://foresightlinux.org/downloads/ — or we just might make you walk the plank!

Fun with big wheels at OSCON 2007

Sri and I met up for the Sun Party at OSCON back in July. Here is a picture (crap quality, sorry) of him in the big wheel races… I wish I could say he was the big winner

Me pushing Sri in a race.

Clearly Sri’s big wheel is pink.

Michigan!/usr/group, what a great group

I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with the folks from MUG last night. Such hospitality, we were really treated so well, even had a limo driver provided (thanks Jim!). Thanks so much for having us.

For anyone looking for the slides we used in the presentation, you can get them here http://people.rpath.com/~johnsonm/mug2007/

Michigan!/usr/group here i come!

Anyone in the Detroit metro area? Michael K Johnson and I are heading up to the Detroit area to talk about building appliances for the Michigan!/usr/group. We will be discussing software appliances, conary packaging, release management, and so much more. Come out and say hi, and we welcome lots of Q and A afterwards.

A fun part of the trip will be flying Air Johnson.