Proud of my little girl

Ashlyn, my 5 soon to be 6 year old, just did a very good deed.  She hasn’t had a hair cut in over 2 years, saving up to donate her hair.  I am so proud of her, she made the decision to do it herself.  This week she got 10 inches cut off to donate to Children with Hair LossCHWL is a great organization, they use the hair to cover the heads of children that have lost their hair for medical reasons.

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Foresight Linux, Distro of the year!

Ars Technica awarded Foresight distro of the year alongside openSUSE.  Obviously I am very excited and proud that Foresight was recognized, but I have to send a big congrats out to the openSUSE guys too.  They have done some great stuff this year, keep it up!

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Ars Technica review of rBuilder

Ars Technica just posted a review of rBuilder, check it out.

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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.

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We want you!

Foresight Linux release planning

The road to Foresight 2.5 includes you!  Historically we have not provided the level of transparency needed to enable more people to participate in Foresight’s core development.  I am very excited about the packagers that have joined in to help, but I suspect them and others have trouble figuring out what is needed.  They have done a great job of packaging new applications and helping to grow our repositories, and we appreciate that.  However, Antonio (doniphon) and I do most of the distro work, and that is our fault.  We tend to have a good understanding of what needs to be done, and we just do it.  This leaves others either not knowing what they can help with, or feeling like they might step on our toes.

So what do we need to do?  Log all issues we are working on, or plan to work on in FITS (Foresight Issue Tracking System) and continually log our progress on tasks.  Not only does this provides us a high level view of where we are, and what needs to be done, but it also provides a wider audience a list of tasks they can step up and accomplish.

We are going with short 1-2 month sprints instead of long 6 month development cycles.  During these sprints we will continually push features into mainline, continually delivering innovation.

  • Sprint Kick off/planning cycle
    • A larger meeting to discuss major objectives for the sprint
      • Break it down into the top level objectives and create issues for them in FITS
      • Hopefully find a driver for each top level objective
    • Organize smaller planning discussions, ideally done via FITS
      • Break down the top level objective into smaller issues in FITS
      • Document requirements of success for each objective
      • Assign a mentor
      • Assign a due date.
      • Create Use Cases for testing
  • Tracking and status reporting
    • Each assignee will continue to update the progress of tasks via FITS
    • Regular blogging of your progress on your piece of the road map, lets make this fun!
    • Weekly status reports
  • Mentoring
    • We should have some more experienced people available to act as mentors.
    • Sounding board for ideas
    • Contribute to and approve designs
    • Help define measurement for success
    • Review/approve completed tasks before pushing to mainline

The key for success is maximum transparency, this means using FITS and the foresight-devel mailing list as much as possible. If you would like to participate, please send an email to our development mailing list. You can find information on the lists here.

For a list of objectives we are already thinking of for Foresight 2.5, check out this list

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LSB 4.0 Beta, powered by rPath

Today the Linux Foundation announced the first beta release of the LSB 4.0 Sample Implementation.  This is a very exciting release, in the past the SI has always been based on linux from scratch, for 4.0 the SI is now built using the rPath tools for 7 arches!

The LF folks have done a great job, I really love seeing our tools used to build for some many architectures: x86, x86_64, ppc32, ppc64, s390, s390x, IA64.

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GNOME Live

After some delays… sorry everyone, the GNOME 2.24 Live demos are available. Come and get them at http://torrent.gnome.org.

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Appliance creation made easy

After my post the other about the recent addition of the ubuntu platform in rBuilder Online, I had a bunch of inquires asking “What is this appliance creator thing?”  Let me start out by explaining that Appliance Creator isn’t actually a product or service of it’s own, it is a feature of rBuilder.  The goal here is to make it as simple as possible to take your application and create an appliance with JeOS to get it running.  You can import your application from an rpm, deb, or a tar/zip archive (not source), and with a few clicks of the mouse have an appliance that can be downloaded or booted in the cloud.

I have put together a screenshot tour, taking you through the process.  Please note the captions along the bottom, they should help explain what each step is all about.  Another handy hint, you can use the “N” and “P” for next and previous to navigate (using lightbox).

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New Shuttle SFF box linux exclusive

Shuttle computers just announced the availability of their latest small form factor box, the x2700.   Weighing in at a mere 4.5lbs and measuring just 7.3″ wide and 2.8″ tall, it is available exclusively with Foresight Linux.  That’s right, our friends over at Shuttle are very Linux friendly, and they continue to prove that.

The x2700 is available with your choice of the GNOME or the new Kid’s editions of Foresight.

Not only is the x2700 nice and small, it is also quite energy efficient featuring the new Intel Atom processor.

(L)9.8 X (W)7.3 X (H)2.8 Inches

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Foresight Kid’s edition

Foresight Kid’s edition is now available for your kid’s enjoyment.  I know my 5 year old has absolutely loved it.

The Kid’s Edition is  for children featuring a number of education and entertainment applications,  a customized GNOME desktop environment and an innovative set of excellent, up to date software applications.

The Foresight Kid’s Edition features the following applications:

Education

  • Tuxpaint, an award winning drawing program for children ages 3-12.
  • Tux Typing, and educational typing tutor for children.
  • GCompris, an educational software suit that includes many different activities for children ages 2 to 10.
  • Tux, of Math Command, an education arcade game starring Tux based on the class game “Missile Command”.

Entertainment and Games

  • SuperTux, a classic 2D jump ‘n run sidescroller with a similar style to the original SuperMario games.
  • SuperTuxKart, a 3D kart racing game featuring numerous tracks, characters and items.
  • Foobilliard, a 3D billiards / pool game.
  • GNU Chess, a chess game.
  • Super Maryo Chronicles, a 2D side scroller game featuring many different stages and levels..

Read more about it.

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