The great office suite debate

Posted on September 29, 2006 by kenvandine

For well over a year, Foresight shipped “GNOME Office” instead of Open Office. I got lots of grief about that…. literally hundreds of people have told me that I should ship Open Office instead. I have resisted, one of the goals of Foresight is to show off GNOME capabilities.

As of 0.9.8, we have replaced “GNOME Office” with Open Office (ok, I gave in… but I held out for a long time). So guess what, now people are telling me we should ship GNOME Office! Another important thing for us is to only include a single application per task. So, including both is out of the question.

What a decision…. we are gonna stick with Open Office. For one main reason, the lack of a suitable substitute for the presentation application. There are a couple GNOME initiatives for a presentation tool, but nothing usable yet.

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Ashlyn rode a horse!

Posted on September 22, 2006 by kenvandine

So today while I was at work, Laurie took the kids to Spence’s Farm. We have taken the kids their quite a few times, and it is always a big hit. Well today was a little different, Ashlyn was going to learn a little about riding a horse.

It sounds like they have a great perspective there. They started out by teacher her that she has to do something for the horse, before she can expect the horse to let her ride him. So, they taught her to brush him. Then they fed the horse a snack. Gave her some instruction on getting on and off the horse, etc… and even had her pick her own helmet. She was responsible for all the details involved in getting out there to ride. She is only 3 (well almost 4) years old, but she handled it well. She really had a great time.

After the ride, he offered to let her “help” him feed the chickens. Basically that was his next chore to do, and let her tag along. Showed her the real responsibility that is found on a farm. I wish I could have gone, I ended up having to watch it all on video.

Anyone that has children, I would highly recommend a visit to Spence’s Farm.

My lil' jockey

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Banshee 0.11, check it out!

Posted on September 20, 2006 by kenvandine

New banshee release… very nice!

sudo conary updateall

Need I say more?

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A big thanks!

Posted on September 19, 2006 by kenvandine

Since the Foresight project started, we have had quite a few people contribute. And I have really appreciated that! For this last release (0.9.8), we had an enormous amount of help from António Meireles (aka doniphon). Without him, we would have never gotten Xorg 7.1 into 0.9.8. It required lots of cooking, testing, and recipe hacking. He has also gotten Xgl/compiz working, and setup jira and confluence for us to use (will post links soon). So thanks to António!

I also have to thank the folks that hang out in around the clock and provide such great support to our new users. I am always hearing such great things about the quality and friendliness of our support. Thanks to all of you!

When the new (powered by django) website goes live, we will create a contributors page so people can get the proper credit.

Of course even with the great folks we have now, we could always use more help. If you want to join a friendly community, please stop by on freenode. We need testers, packagers, and people that are willing to help new users on irc, forums, and the mailing lists.

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xgl == pretty cool

Posted on September 17, 2006 by kenvandine

no idea why i resisted so long 😀

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Update from 0.9.5 to 0.9.8

Posted on September 11, 2006 by kenvandine

The update path from 0.9.5 and earlier to 0.9.8 is a little bumpy. We have smoothed it out a bit. It is more complicated than the average update for a couple of reasons. First the label change, going to our new release practice and changing that label to foresight.rpath.org@fl:1 means telling conary where to find the updates. And the filesytem layout changes that come along with the move from Xorg 6.9 to Xorg 7.1.

Here are the steps:


sudo conary update conary
sudo conary update distro-release=@fl:1 filesystem=@fl:1
sudo conary erase xorg-x11:devel xorg-x11-xfs chkfontpath xorg-x11-fonts
sudo conary erase tk:devel
sudo mknod /dev/inotify c 10 63
sudo conary update group-dist=@fl:1
sudo chkconfig xdm on
sudo grub-install hd0

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Announcing Foresight Linux 0.9.8

Posted on September 8, 2006 by kenvandine

Still on the path to Foresight Linux 1.0. We want to do some more testing, but what we have is pretty close to what 1.0 will be. We are now on a new label, foresight.rpath.org@fl:1. This move is in preparation for 1.0, along with a new release management process. Our bleeding edge stuff will be cooked onto foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-devel, and shadowed to @fl:1 when it is ready for wide spread consumption. We will always strive to stay incredibly current.

Where can you get it?
http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/foresight/releases

Here are a few of the highlights:

And lots of other version updates

Posted in Geek, General, Interesting | Comments Off on Announcing Foresight Linux 0.9.8

Junior members of the rPath marketing team

Posted on August 31, 2006 by kenvandine

Got a couple junior marketers 🙂

Little rPath

Little rPath

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Virtualization and Linux – Match made in heaven

Posted on August 29, 2006 by kenvandine

Jason Brooks provides some interesting commentary on some of the approaches different vendors are taking to unlocking the inherent power that virtualization + Linux will deliver.

read more | digg story

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Xorg 7 now works…

Posted on August 3, 2006 by kenvandine

We have now gotten all of xorg 7.0 cooked up with rMake in @fl:1-devel. And with much help from doniphon, we now have a functioning Xorg 7. We are now getting the rest of the foresight packages cooked with rMake.

For the brave folks, give it a try:
sudo conary update group-dist=foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-devel

Please stop by to report problems.

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