ken’s blog

Pidgin sucks less for IRC

Now that we have the message indicator applet in Jaunty, I decided to give pidgin another try as an IRC client. A little background for those that have not had the pleasure of hearing my constant complaining about how pidgin just isn’t an IRC client, I love xchat-gnome for IRC. I have tried pidgin on many occasions, mostly because I would really prefer use a single app for IM and IRC. Pidgin just never felt right to me, mostly because I felt like it was impossible to follow as many channels as I am generally in.

This has changed now, not because pidgin has gotten better at IRC, but because of the message indicator applet. The message indicator grabs notifications from notify-osd that are based on human to human interaction, and stores them in a little applet in the panel that indicates what might need your attention. Currently only evolution and pidgin support it, but hopefully many more soon (gwibber, please gwibber!). Now when people highlight me in a chat, IM or private message me I see the nice little indicator with a star showing it needs attention.

I am very happy to say I can use Pidgin for my daily IRC use… Yay for a single client finally!

I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear that the indicator-applet is included in Foresight as well, just add it to your panel.

Happy New Year

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and lots of Foresight for all!

I am trying to resist the urge to make predictions for 2009.  Let’s just say we’ll kick ass in 2009, and leave it at that.

Submission deadline for 2.5

Now that we have all had a few days to digest this, lets get down to business. I have created a wiki page outlining the process and listing the objectives for 2.5 in a table of FITS issues.

Road map

Please look over it, if you have other objectives you would like to add, please file issues assigning the fix version to 2.5. That will make them show up in the table on the wiki page. I am setting a deadline of Wednesday, Nov 19 1200 UTC. To find the time in UTC, run ‘date -u’.

Please get your submissions in! We will quickly review the submissions and update the issues to reflect fix version. I want to start the planning stages pretty quickly after the deadline, gathering requirements and designing the solutions. Please include as much detail as possible in the issues, and please review the issues we already have adding comments. The more information the better.

Software Freedom Conservancy

I am very proud to announce that Foresight is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  This is very exciting, we really love what the conservancy is all about and are in great company, and of course now we can accept donations.  You can read the full announcement here and if you want to donate to the Foresight project, you can now find a Google Checkout donation form our the Foresight website.

Shamless donation request below

Cool feature I bet many people haven’t used

Conary packaging is easy, but there are times where you hit some harder things and you really need to hit the docs.  There are plenty of docs now on conary, and a few clicks in a web browser generally can get you what you need.  However, there is a very cool command line interface to the packaging docs call “cvc explain”.  I keep running into people that haven’t seen it, so lets get the word out!

You can run “cvc explain [method]” to get the documentation for that method.  Here is an example:


$ cvc explain DanglingSymlinks
Conary API Documentation: PackageRecipe.DanglingSymlinks

NAME
====

r.DanglingSymlinks() – Disallow dangling symbolic links

SYNOPSIS
========

r.DanglingSymlinks([filterexp] || [exceptions=filterexp)

DESCRIPTION
===========

The r.DanglingSymlinks() policy enforces the absence of dangling
symbolic links; that is, symbolic links pointing to targets which no
longer exist.

If you know that a dangling symbolic link created by your package
is fulfilled by another package on which your package depends,
you may set up an exception for that file.

EXAMPLES
========

r.DanglingSymlinks(exceptions=’%(htconfdir)s/run’)

The %(htconfdir)s/run file is a symlink that is intentionally
left dangling within this package, because we know that it will
be satisfied by runtime dependencies at installation time.

Foresight 20/20 kicks off!

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.

Announcing Foresight 2.0 with GNOME 2.22

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:

3 years of Foresight

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

So close

Macbook Air vs. Commodore 64, amazing the Macbook Air wins

Keeping tabs on the GNOME Developer Kit

I finally got around to setting up a commit mail list for the GNOME Developer Kit. If you want to keep an eye on what is going on, check it out. You can of course subscribe, or just follow the feed.