The bright future of Foresight Linux
Refining Foresight
Why
Foresight is what I use for almost a decade now (and that means almost the whole time since it was created by Ken Vandine).It was originally based on rPath Linux and Foresight 2.0 still is.
So rpath doesn't exist anymore (it was aquired by SAS a while ago) and our existing base is getting outdated to a point where maintenance is getting a burden.
How
There were several options to solve this issue.1) build foresight 3 from scratch
2) rebuild an existing distribution from source and use it as a base
3) base on an existing (vital) distribution
Which one
Actually we discussed all these, but given our manpower we chose to base our new shiny Foresight on Fedora as is, so that we can focus again on providing a stable modern rolling binary distribution.The Plan and Progress
So what we're doing is importing all! of Fedora20 into our own repositories using a tool called mirrorballIt will create Sourcepackages for conary containing the matching rpms and srpms and build conary packages from them.
I'm not going into the details here. You can look some up on our foresight-devel mailinglist
The initial import and built is already done and we're now in the process of creating conary groups from the information of the comps.xml
when that is done it should be possible already to adopt a fresh install of fedora20 for use with conary packagemanager.
Next step will be doing regular updates and imports of the fedora20 repository.
Then we will build foresight on top of this.
Creating groups like we want them, adding artwork and extras. Import rpmfusion repositories until we have a foresight that matches our needs.
And of course finding a way to easily install foresight and convert existing fedora installations.
Why not...
...just use fedora?Well first we all got to love foresight as a distribution and a community.
And we love conary. Conary is pretty strict when it comes to dependency resolution. We already found packaging issues of fedora20 just by importing and rebuilding it with conary. foresight is a rolling distribution and we hope that with the adopting of fedora we can make it possible to just roll from fedora20 to fedora21 painlessly. Conary has rollbacks since it's beginning and it's a great packagemanager that helped us maintaining a rolling binary distribution for almost 10 years now.
The bright future of Foresight Linux
Refining Foresight
Why
Foresight is what I use for almost a decade now (and that means almost the whole time since it was created by Ken Vandine).It was originally based on rPath Linux and Foresight 2.0 still is.
So rpath doesn't exist anymore (it was aquired by SAS a while ago) and our existing base is getting outdated to a point where maintenance is getting a burden.
How
There were several options to solve this issue.1) build foresight 3 from scratch
2) rebuild an existing distribution from source and use it as a base
3) base on an existing (vital) distribution
Which one
Actually we discussed all these, but given our manpower we chose to base our new shiny Foresight on Fedora as is, so that we can focus again on providing a stable modern rolling binary distribution.The Plan and Progress
So what we're doing is importing all! of Fedora20 into our own repositories using a tool called mirrorballIt will create Sourcepackages for conary containing the matching rpms and srpms and build conary packages from them.
I'm not going into the details here. You can look some up on our foresight-devel mailinglist
The initial import and built is already done and we're now in the process of creating conary groups from the information of the comps.xml
when that is done it should be possible already to adopt a fresh install of fedora20 for use with conary packagemanager.
Next step will be doing regular updates and imports of the fedora20 repository.
Then we will build foresight on top of this.
Creating groups like we want them, adding artwork and extras. Import rpmfusion repositories until we have a foresight that matches our needs.
And of course finding a way to easily install foresight and convert existing fedora installations.
Why not...
...just use fedora?Well first we all got to love foresight as a distribution and a community.
And we love conary. Conary is pretty strict when it comes to dependency resolution. We already found packaging issues of fedora20 just by importing and rebuilding it with conary. foresight is a rolling distribution and we hope that with the adopting of fedora we can make it possible to just roll from fedora20 to fedora21 painlessly. Conary has rollbacks since it's beginning and it's a great packagemanager that helped us maintaining a rolling binary distribution for almost 10 years now.
The bright future of Foresight Linux
Refining Foresight
Why
Foresight is what I use for almost a decade now (and that means almost the whole time since it was created by Ken Vandine).It was originally based on rPath Linux and Foresight 2.0 still is.
So rpath doesn't exist anymore (it was aquired by SAS a while ago) and our existing base is getting outdated to a point where maintenance is getting a burden.
How
There were several options to solve this issue.1) build foresight 3 from scratch
2) rebuild an existing distribution from source and use it as a base
3) base on an existing (vital) distribution
Which one
Actually we discussed all these, but given our manpower we chose to base our new shiny Foresight on Fedora as is, so that we can focus again on providing a stable modern rolling binary distribution.The Plan and Progress
So what we're doing is importing all! of Fedora20 into our own repositories using a tool called mirrorballIt will create Sourcepackages for conary containing the matching rpms and srpms and build conary packages from them.
I'm not going into the details here. You can look some up on our foresight-devel mailinglist
The initial import and built is already done and we're now in the process of creating conary groups from the information of the comps.xml
when that is done it should be possible already to adopt a fresh install of fedora20 for use with conary packagemanager.
Next step will be doing regular updates and imports of the fedora20 repository.
Then we will build foresight on top of this.
Creating groups like we want them, adding artwork and extras. Import rpmfusion repositories until we have a foresight that matches our needs.
And of course finding a way to easily install foresight and convert existing fedora installations.
Why not...
...just use fedora?Well first we all got to love foresight as a distribution and a community.
And we love conary. Conary is pretty strict when it comes to dependency resolution. We already found packaging issues of fedora20 just by importing and rebuilding it with conary. foresight is a rolling distribution and we hope that with the adopting of fedora we can make it possible to just roll from fedora20 to fedora21 painlessly. Conary has rollbacks since it's beginning and it's a great packagemanager that helped us maintaining a rolling binary distribution for almost 10 years now.
important strategic decisions
Posting our recent decisions for Foresight Linux as sent to the mailing list by doniphon:With the ongoing mess with the gtk2 -> gtk3 migration, followed by
the announcement of the gnome reschedule, and the gnome-shell/unity
rift, we do think our 2 major desktops gnome and xfce are rendered
unusable for the unforeseeable future. Same counts for kde as nokia
started to drop support for qt. Therefore we decided to focus our work
on getting in e19, a major enhancement to enlightements e17, using an
improved and hw accelerated curses library, done by us on a still
private bitbucket repository. This change also involves getting rid of
the much hated combination of pulseaudio/alsa in favour of the much more
modern and stable OSS 4.2, and entirely dropping Xorg and evolving to
Xfree2k. We're looking foreward to provide a superior user experience
soon with fl:3++. We'll shortly set the e19 repository to public, so you
all can benefit (and contribute) after signing our standard contribution
agreement that cedes all your present and future rights to Paris Hilton.
As a side note we'll be moving our default kernel to MinixNG too.
Have a nice day.
Porto, 1th April 2011
The Foresight Linux Council
get your foresight shirt
Finally after convincing spreadshirt legal department, that I'm a foresight developer,
there is foresight.spreadshirt.net. Maybe I will add a shop at spreadshirt.com for US based people later.
A new panel plugin
I eventually created my first xfce panel plugin. Since foresight started to use indicator-applet and notify-osd, I wanted to have a native plugin to avoid using indicator-applet with xfapplet.Today, I got it working. For now it's located at the Foresight Linux hg server.
 |  |
| indicate new messages | and show them |
It still needs some tweaking, like translating the only string that can be visible and do proper resizing of the icon.
But for now it works. It needs indicator-applet from 0.2 branch.
Concerning Foresight Xfce Edition. It's still on my list, I almost released a set of isos, but I had some issues with them, that need to be solved first. Expect them soonish (as always).
xfce trunk
Some of you may have recognized that xfce-4.6 alpha (aka pinkie) still isn't released.I just decided to pack xfce directly from trunk.
It's available at xfce.rpath.org@xfce:devel.
there are some minor problems when updating to group-xfce=xfce.rpath.org@xfce:devel, so that you probably need to remove some packages not needed anymore.
It's not build automaticly from trunk (yet) and I still use the xfce goodies from fl:2.
using trunk for xfce-goodies would be a next step though.
Here are 2 screnshots:
This is xfce with thunar and a "rolled in" Terminal
But thunar hides the mouse, so I closed it
Future of Foresight Linux – Xfce Edition
There haven't been much updates on Xfce Edition for a while, becauseI was busy with re{decorating,novating} my apartment, planning my upcoming wedding, my job and so on.
Here are some News, I have changed Plans for Xfce Edition a little bit. So read on.
When I had a look at the plans for Xfce 4.6, I realized, that Xfce 4.6 might be closer than I thought (there will probably be delay, as it is software (think of gnu/hurd or dnf)). Anyways here is the new plan. It's pretty simple: "Concentrate on 4.6. Go with the Milestones and have a final shortly after Xfce 4.6 is released".
Some development will take place on xfce.rpath.org, to not break all the Xfce 4.4 things wie already have on foresight.rpath.org. There is a mailinglist too. Helping hands are welcome.
Xfce Edition alpha1
We eventually put out the long promised alpha1 of Foresight Xfce Edition.It's not perfect (that's why we call it alpha1), but works for me since a long time.
We're still missing some applications, and xfce goodies.
Openoffice is replaced by abiword and gnumeric. And there is no compiz in the default install (that's a feature).
Get it here
Feedback and Comments (and helping hands) are welcome.
whaawmp 0.2.10
Jeff just released a bugfix release for whaawmp. It doesn't lockup anymore, if xvideo isn't available and it works with other imagesinks too now.I hope to put out an alpha of Foresight Linux Xfce Edition this week eventually.
We will see. Get latest whaawmp while waiting :-)
