ken’s blog

Drew turned 2 today, he is getting so big. However, we won’t be able to celebrate until tomorrow. Today our friends John and Kristen are getting hitched! Also very exciting. I am a groomsman and Ashlyn is the flower girl. So we have been involved with various wedding related activities. Golf and beer for the guys, lunch and a tea party at the Carolina Inn for the girls on Friday. Followed by rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, long day!

Today is the wedding and reception, so Sunday should be a good day to relax and enjoy some cake with the birthday boy.

I am considering adding disk-manager to the default Foresight install.

It is a pretty cool tool, at login it looks for unconfigured partitions and lets you configure them. There is also a nice gui for configuring them. Also lets you enable ntfs-3g, mount/umount partitions, etc. Please let me know what you think…

To try it out:

sudo conary update disk-manager=@fl:1-devel


And Xorg still works! All new xorg is built into foresight’s devel branch today, including xorg-server 1.3. I updated to it, removed my xorg.conf and restart X…. held my breath for a moment…. X started!

I don’t know how complete the support is without having the config file yet, but for my radeon based laptop it just worked. This definately warrents more investigation.

Great work by the folks working on Xorg! Keep it up.

As a distro maintainer nothing has frustrated me as much as this little application firstboot. Well, I am very pleased to say I have whacked it!

Foresight has replaced firstboot with a combination of autoconfig (modified from knoppix) and firstrun. Autoconfig configures Xorg on boot and firstrun creates the first user and adds them to the wheel group.

Downloads available in the usual places, http://www.foresightlinux.org/downloads/.

I was so pleased to see this post. Finally a way to create presentations in a real GNOME application. Now how about compatibility with presentations created in other tools. I think in the shorter term being able to open powerpoint and impress presentations and saving as abiword and pdf is fine. But longer term exporting to powerpoint and impress would be valuable.

I am pleased to add another image type to the live demos, check it out. The GNOME Live xen image, enables xdmcp for remote login. To try it out, here are some instructions, which assume you have a running Xen infrastructure already in place.


vi /etc/xen/gnome



bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub'
memory = 256
name = 'gnome'
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:00:03:45' ]
disk = [ 'tap:aio:/export/xen/gnome/foresight-2.18.1-x86.img,xvda,w' ]


If you are on the same network as your virtual machine, you can use broadcast to find your host.

Xephyr -host-cursor -terminate -broadcast :1 -screen 1024x768


Or, you can specify the IP or hostname to connect to.

Xephyr -host-cursor -terminate -query 192.168.0.253 :1 -screen 1024x768


Found a blog post from someone looking to run the live images in xen. I have planned on doing it, just didn’t get around to it yet.

I am cooking up a xen flavored version right now, should actually have an image ready for testing when I wake up in the morning.

Today I packaged up a svn snapshot of the Zimbra plugin for evolution. Of course being a evolution user, I really wanted to be able to view my mail and calendar natively in evolution. Now I can, it is definately beta quality, but I hope it gets more stable as more people use it. It is available in foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-contrib. Foresight users can grab it with:

sudo conary update evolution-zimbra

As with all GNOME releases, it is time for a Foresight release including the latest GNOME release. The Foresight Project is proud to announce it’s 1.2 release sporting GNOME 2.18.1, for information please check out the release notes at http://foresightlinux.com/news/

Check it out, you won’t be disappointed!

GNOME 2.18.1 images are now available for QEMU/Parrallels and VMware. I hope to have a new Live CD image real soon now.

You can get them from http://torrent.gnome.org or from rBuilder

Also note, I didn’t build the the Microsoft VHD Virtual Server images, they just aren’t very popular 😀