Have you noticed how Linux desktops are getting more and more beautiful? Foresight Linux is one of those pretty distributions. The developers of Foresight pride themselves in delivering a Linux desktop that is not only functional, but also includes the latest bells and whistles – both technical and visual. rPath based distro to keep an eye on.
Introducing Foresight Linux 1.0!
Foresight Linux is a desktop-focused Linux system that just works. Our mission is to provide a truely useful desktop system that is friendly for the novice user, as well as flexible for the power user. Foresight comes with the GNOME desktop, Banshee for your music, F-Spot for your photos, and Open Office for your office needs. Great attention has been paid to making things simple and integrated. For example, NetworkManager makes it simple to connect to wireless access points. Foresight System Manager handles keeping your system updated. You can even auto update if you wish, or get notifications when there are updates available and apply them yourself through an easy-to-use web interface.
I am also pleased to announce some enhancements to our website, specifically our new forum. Many people have requested a forum in the past. So lets all help make it a success. You can find it at http://www.foresightlinux.org/forum. We are also evaluating wiki systems, so stay tuned.
Foresight Linux is a community effort and has come a long way. We have been at it for nearly 2 years now and have some great folks helping out. It has been a blast, and we feel like it is mature and 1.0 quality. We are always looking for more contributers. If you have strong beliefs about what makes a good desktop distribution, we would love your help. You can find us via IRC #foresight on freenode, mailing lists and our forum all linked from the community page of the website.
The future! What does the future hold? Well, stay tuned. There are some exciting things down the road as we work towards 2.0. For example, x86_64 version, maybe a KDE version of Foresight, and more.
For a long time now I have been looking forward to a better way to deal with cd/dvd burning than just wrapping a GUI around cdrecord. There are people working on it, libburn, but for a while I feared the project dead. It has beed revitalized and recently released 0.3.0.
Not many applications are using libburn yet, but I have high hopes. Rumor has it that brasero (Default burning app in Foresight) will use libburn 0.3.0 in the next revision. In preparation, I have added libburn and libisofs to Foresight…
The libburn guys are even working on a cdrecord drop in replacement that uses libburn, “cdrskin”. Which replicates all the command line behavior of cdrecord.
Announcing the first version of the rBuilder package search/install plugin. It is still needs some UI work, but it works. To try it:
sudo conary update raa-plugin-search=raa.rpath.org@rpl:1
The plugin utilizes the new search terms that rBuilder just introduced. Specifically it searches by branch. The included configuration file sets the branch to search to “rpl:1”. This will search for a package in all projects on the “rpl:1” branch. This is probably desirable for rPath Linux 1 based systems. For Foresight, you will want to search on additional branches. Updating “raa-desktop” will bring in the appropriate overrides for Foresight. This will search using these branches: ‘fl:1-devel’, ‘fl:1-contrib’, ‘rpl:1’.
If you would like to override yourself, set the search.branches list in /etc/raa/custom.cfg
search.branches = ['fl:1-devel', 'fl:1-contrib', 'rpl:1']
So there is a very cool new packaging feature in conary, derived packages. Read all about it… We should be able to use it quite a bit in Foresight, which will make package maintenance a fair bit easier.
It is in conary tip now, and should make it in a release real soon.
For those interested in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the command line utilities for bundling images (I prefer to use rBuilder built xen images) are now packaged in contrib repository.
sudo conary update ec2-ami-tools=contrib.rpath.org@rpl:1
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
I am very please to announce the release of Foresight Linux 0.9.9. What is new in this release? Compiz is now included. Also included GnuCash, GnomeScan, and the synaptics driver.
There have been a number of version updates, here are a few of the highlights:
Download from here. If you are already using Foresight Linux, you can get the update using the Foresight System Manager. In the menu, open System->Administration->Foresight System Manager. Select the “System Updates” link on the left and click on the “Check Now” button. This will look for available updates, when it finds the update simply click on “Apply Update”.
Both of these releases are focused on the true appliance experience. You can now boot either of the following appliances and actually use them without the need for a command line.
PostgreSQL appliance: 8.1.4 Download
MySQL appliance: 5.0.24 Download
Now that compiz works with AIGLX, I have switched back to compiz from beryl. Beryl has been working well… but is a but buggy and has an aweful configuration tool. Compiz is amazingly stable and gnome-compiz-manager is a pretty simple configuration tool. It doesn’t give you an interface to configure a million and one effects like beryl-settings does. But it gives you what most people care about.
We will continue to maintain both in the foresight repository, compiz as stable and continuous bleeding versions of beryl from svn. So you can choose 🙂
Personally, I think I will stick with compiz. It is nice, and doesn’t get in the way.
