ken’s blog

A little story about my first x86_64 Foresight test box. We have been in the need for some test hardware and a very generous Foresight team member offered to donate almost an entire box, CPU, motherboard, RAM, Hard drive, and a video card. Just missing a case and power supply. He even shipped it to me (Thanks Paul).

After receiving the hardware, I rushed out to purchase the cheapest case and power supply combo I could fine and get started. After installing all the components, and getting it powered up, I ran into a problem getting it to boot. Upon further inspection, there was a bit of damage on the edge of the board… I assume shipping injury.

This damage was enough that it couldn’t detect the fan attached which was telling it to shutdown. Not desirable. The CPU was a socket 754, as I started to hunt for a cheap motherboard for the CPU, Michael Johnson piped up and offered a socket 939 motherboard he had laying around and Michael Tharp offerred a socket 939 CPU and compatible memory… oh the generousity…

We got it all assembled using the video card and disk that came with the board Paul donated. Seemed to work well… even got the first Foresight x86_64 install on it and left it to run over the weekend. Monday morning I can in and started to dive into testing things on it…. and got quite a surprise.

Let me start by explaining a little about the case I bought, it had a clear plastic side with a fan mounted in the middle of it. This both gave me a great view of the internals as well as venting right next to my chair.

Now for the surprise… I was suddenly surrounded with smoke, looked down and it was being blown right at me from that fan mounted on the side of the case. Behind that fancy clear plastic I saw flames! Yes… Foresight was so hot… it went up in smoke 🙂

Turns out the video card shorted which caused a small fire… below are some pictures.

For more good news… Michael Tharp might be donating a replacement socket 939 board… and someone else gave me a socket 754 board… so I almost have the makings for 2 x86_64 test boxes…. and even more great news… Brett Adam has ordered a brand new dell x86_64 test box as a donation to the Foresight Project… Thanks Brett!

Thanks to all that helped get 1.3 done, this release went very smoothly. We have quite a organization now, from developers and writers to translators. We have an official news letter, user guides, and proper release notes and our translators have really stepped it up and coordinated working with the writers to get everything translated on time.

Check out the release notes, news letter, and as always you can download it for yourself from rbuilder.

Now for the road to 2.0, this will likely be our last major release before 2.0. What will be different in 2.0? Few big changes, completely rebuilt with gcc 4.x, x86 and x86_64 versions, new release process, and quite a bit leaner (probably about 1GB smaller installed size. And quite a bit more… just stay tuned!

I have updated the live images for GNOME 2.18.2, they are available here. The LiveCD hasn’t been updated, I have hit what appears to be a unionfs issue… working on that now and hopefully will get that published soon.

There is now also an additional virtual image type, VMWare ESX Server.

I was playing around with a darker theme based on UbuntuStudio, . So far. the only thing I changed was the blue to the Foresight Green.

Very nice work by the UbuntuStudio guys, keep it up!

Of course I packaged it so Foresight users can enjoy it as well:

sudo conary update gtk-theme-foresight-studio


After enjoying the nice short links for gnome bugzilla created by the bugzilla plugin in tomboy, it started to annoy me that my links to jira issues are so long. After all… most issues I link in my notes comes from rPath’s or Foresight’s Jira.

So I created a new plugin based on the Bugzilla plugin for Jira. Using the plugin, when you drag links to a Jira issue into a note, the url will be shortened to just the issue ID and have a little bug icon next to it.

It is available at http://code.google.com/p/tomboy-plugin-jira/ and of course it is packaged for Foreisight, foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-contrib.

This was my first time really using svn for development in over a year now, and I have to say I don’t miss it. I wish Google Code offered mercurial 😀

I have been waiting for an app like conduit for quite sometime. Mostly because I live and breath based on Tomboy notes, and hate not really having a backup besides the rsync of my homedir from time to time.

Conduit can sync notes to backpackit.com, as well as sync other things too. I did hit a couple problems with 0.3.0, #99 and #100. I am looking forward to be able to use this on a regular bases, currently I can only successfully sync one note then it fails which definately isn’t optimal 🙂

Tonight I hope to play with gmail syncing, hope that works 🙂

I did package conduit 0.3.0 and it can be found on foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-contrib

I am trying out googlegroups for archiving foresight commit mail. Pretty cool service, nice web interface, and now I can have an rss feed for commits.

http://groups.google.com/group/foresight-linux-commits

http://groups.google.com/group/foresight-linux-commits/feed/atom_v1_0_topics.xml?num=50

Down side is I can’t seem to get the diff output in the rss feed. It is displayed properly via the web interface, just left out of the feed. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know.

The trick to properly archiving without actually subscribing the group to your mailing list is in the advanced settings for the group. Took me a little digging to find it, but once you get to that page it is obvious.

I just published an updated build of the GNOME LiveCD 2.18.1. I found a rather ugly mono problem on the previous one, specifically mono not playing well with unionfs. Fixed now, get it from the usual places.

Torrent
rBuilder

Here is how I came to this conclusion (courtesy of pscott).