ken’s blog

It’s been a while since I have blogged about the GNOME Developer Kit. It has still been building daily, so plenty of updates. I have added some additional packages by request, hopefully they will help make it into an even more useful tool.

Added:

• Anjuta
• Meld
• MonoDevelop
• valgrind
• translate-toolkit
• poedit

I have also modified the build system to use the svn revision for package version. I am now able to do a comparison of the latest revision in svn and the latest package version, and only rebuild the package if it has a new revision. Another beneft this gives us is an easy way to see what svn revision of a package you are running. Here is an example:

conary q glib
glib=r6302-1-1

More great news, Joshua Hesketh has started documenting some ways to use the devel kit for development. More coming soon… stay tuned!

So I finally got notification that I could get my n810 in the US… yay! Rushed over to the site they sent me to just to find out them rejecting my discount code. The error I get is “there is no balance”. Is anyone else experiencing this? I used the contact page to ask for help, but no reply yet.

UPDATE: Just talked to OgMaciel, he said this is the same problem he had when he ordered his n800 last time around… this is a sad trend!

February will be a busy month, first SCALE in Los Angeles and later in the month FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels. There are a couple of *don’t miss* talks on the packaging track at FOSDEM this year:

• Conary Packaging: Simply Powerful by Michael K Johnson
• PackageKit by Richard Hughes

I am also very excited to get the opportunity to hang out with some of the long time Foresight contributors, Antonio Meireles (doniphon), Mark__T and hopefully some others from Europe (pscott I am looking at you!).

I am hoping to do a lightening talk on the GNOME Developer Kit in the GNOME Dev room.

We have been on the hunt for a volunteer to head up a GNOME booth at the Southern California Linux Expo in February, but no luck yet, which is very disappointing. I would really hate for GNOME to miss the opportunity to participate in SCALE. I will be at SCALE myself, working the Foresight booth and giving a GNOME talk.

The great guys running SCALE have been holding a spot for GNOME, which I really appreciate. Is there anyone in California (or willing/able to travel to LA) who can take the lead on this? Or even just help out? Surely there must be someone in southern California who loves GNOME that would be willing to hang out and talk to folks for a couple days, it really is fun. Any takers, please let me know.

Want to improve the coolest project on the planet? Too hard to build all of GNOME from source, just to use the latest development code?

We are delighted to introduce the GNOME Developer Kit, with daily builds of GNOME. It is currently available in VMWare live image and installable ISO forms.

Once you download it, you will easily be able to update it every day with PackageKit or Conary, so no need to download new versions. There will be new downloads available regularly, probably daily, so when you download it, it will be ready to go immediately, without waiting for additional updates. The best of both worlds!

Remember, there are many ways to get involved with GNOME, not just coding. We need documenters, translators, testers, and developers. For ideas, visit the GNOME Love page.

As we are actively developing Foresight 2, it might be a good time to look for a new default messenger. Pidgin has been good for us and sort of the defacto standard for linux desktops. However, I am very interested in the future and where messaging is going. Telepathy, calling themselves a “Flexible Communications Framework”, is very interesting. The idea of a common framework for accessing a variety of communications services is very appealing. Not only can this be used for messaging and presence information, but now other desktop applications could potential tap into that framework very easily, via dbus. The possibilities are very cool!

A number of the pieces are packaged up for the Foresight 2 alphas, including Empathy and Banter clients.

I am looking for feedback, should Foresight Linux 2 default to using telepathy for messaging, not shipping pidgin by default? Let me know what you think!

I am very pleased to announce the first alpha release of Foresight Linux GNOME Edition. Yes you heard that right, GNOME Edition. Foresight will no longer be GNOME only, there will soon be KDE and XFCE editions. There are quite a few things of note with this release, including both x86 and x86_64 support.

Check out the full announcement here.

You can download it here:
x86
x86_64

Foresight Linux 2 is shaping up very nicely. We should be able to swing a FL 2 Alpha1 release later this week, very exciting.

A brief list of what’s new:

• GCC 4.1.1
• Xorg 7.3
• Conary 2 (soon)
• Lightening fast installer (Full install in about 5 minutes)
• And more…

Stay tuned…

Woot! Foresight was just accepted for a dotORG booth at SCALE. What is SCALE? Southern California Linux Exposition in Los Angeles this coming February. Get venue for us, and the guys organzing it are quite cool. Also a big thanks to our chief cheerleader (marketing dude), Kevin Harriss for setting this up.

The Foresight Linux Project is proud to announce the release of Foresight Linux 1.4.1.

Foresight Linux is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date; a revolutionary package manager, Conary; the latest GNOME desktop environment and an innovative set of excellent, up to date packages.

Foresight Linux 1.4.1 features the latest GNOME (2.20.1), as well as introducing PackageKit. PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier. The primary design goal is to unify all the software graphical tools used in different distributions, and use some of the latest technology like PolicyKit to make the process suck less. For more info, check out http://www.packagekit.org.

Release notes
Download

You can find more information about Foresight on our website at http://www.foresightlinux.org

We hope you enjoy using Foresight Linux as much as we do. Because your desktop should be cool.