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2007

Banshee 0.12.0 Released

Banshee 0.12.0 was released yesterday. This marks the start of the stable branch. The last few releases have focused on usability and bug fixes, and active development including new features should now start in the unstable 0.13.0 branch.

Banshee is by far my favorite music manager for Linux, and is the default music manager for Foresight Linux. Developed using Mono with an active community, try it out today. From Banshee’s home page:

Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee’s simple, powerful interface.

Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported.

Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

Conary Packaging System

Linux.com has a good article up with an overview of the Conary packaging system, developed by rPath and in use by Foresight Linux. The article covers a high level overview, managing packages with Conary, and it’s future prospects.

Conary relies upon a repository that is also a source control system, complete with branches and diff-like files called changesets that identify differences between the available versions of a package. Where the leading package systems identify packages only by version number, each name in a Conary repository is a unique identifier that includes such information as a package’s location in the repository, the upstream version number, the source revision, the number of the binary build, and the specific hardware architecture for which it is intended.

That might sound like a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, but what I’ve taken away from my brief time in the #foresight IRC channel on Freenode, is Conary is really about updating packages based on the new file changes – not having to compile from source the entire package to get to a binary, but just the changes needed to update that package or file.

Conary is the backbone behind rPath – and if you have an opportunity, poke around rPath and see how many different people are using it to create their own customized distributions and software deployment solutions (or as rPath calls them, appliances). From a NAS project to Foresight Linux to Wiki applications to LAMP, mail or VOIP servers, users, developers and companies are finding that rPath has made a toolset and packaging system to enable appliances everyone can use.

The article closes with a good summary, and a great shout out to Foresight Linux:

So far as rPath is concerned, Conary seems less an end in itself than a tool to help build the virtual appliances that are the company’s main business. Conary is used in rPath Linux, but because rPath Linux is primarily a tool that others can use to create customized distros, the best place to see Conary action is with one of the distributions built using rPath Linux and rBuilder Online, rPath’s tool that distros can use to manage the production of their versions. Of these distributions, one of the most advanced is Foresight, which specializes in providing bleeding-edge versions of GNOME.

New GNOME Journal, March 4th 2007

A new edition of the GNOME Journal is out now. Articles include a newcomer’s look at using the GTK+ toolkit; an overview of the Tango Project interview two of it’s most high profile contributors; and a look a company based on open source software, Fluendo.

There is also a letter from the editor, Jim Hodapp, inviting all of us who use GNOME to contribute articles.

I think I’ll start planning a contribution myself. With this month’s release of GNOME 2.18, the timing couldn’t be better.

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Switched to Foresight Linux

It’s official: I’ve switched to Foresight from Ubuntu on my main computer. As I posted a few days ago in my review of Foresight, I’ve been really impressed with the distribution and the community around Foresight. The community was what made the decision easy. I would have never believed even two weeks ago that I’d have a different distribution than Ubuntu on my computer, but here we are.

Installed the brand new 1.01 release this morning, installed and configured everything to my needs (Nvidia Drivers, Compiz, Bluefish, etc), restored my data, and I’m all set. Copying my music over and importing in to Banshee as we speak. I need to learn how to install a development package, Jokosher specifically, so I can get back to creating my first Podcast. (Audacity isn’t in the repos, as it isn’t a GNOME-ish application).

I’ve signed up for the mailing lists, created my Wiki and Bug Tracking accounts (and submitted my first bug report), and look forward to joining, and more importantly, contributing to the Foresight community.

Foresight Linux

As I mentioned in my last post, I installed Foresight Linux on my second box last week. (Don’t worry Ubuntu fans, I’m still running Feisty on my main machine). To set expectations, this post is part mini-review of Foresight, part comparison to Ubuntu, and just my opinions and thoughts on Foresight after using another distribution for almost 3 years.

Foresight’s website and IRC channel sum up Foresight well:

Foresight Linux is a Distribution which showcases some of the latest and greatest from GNOME. Ah! Some of the things that may not be mature enough for some of the other distros. Some of the more innovative things are included, like beagle , f-spot , avahi (zeroconf), and the latest hal . All of this plus some nice, clean default themes and artwork.

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And their IRC channel: “Your distro should be cool”. And that’s a great way to sum up the applications included on their CDs.

Installation

It was weird seeing an option to download more than 1 CD – Foresight comes on 2 CDs or one DVD image. I used bittorrent to spare rPath some bandwidth, and it was fast – 600k down, which makes me wonder how many folks are out there using this and sharing the ISO.

I burned the DVD on my Ubuntu box, popped it in to my second box, and was greeted with a blast from the past: the Anaconda installer. Prior to becoming an Ubuntu user, I mostly used Red Hat and later Fedora for almost 5 years. Going through Foresight’s installation GUI, while branded Foresight, is a re-branded Fedora install, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it worked great. My box is pretty standard hardware – P4 3.0ghz, Intel stock 865 board, Nvidia (BFG) 6800, 2 DVD drives, 2 IDE Hard drives, and 2 gigs of RAM.

Installation was quick, a reboot, a little more configuration, and I was presented with the Foresight desktop.

Visuals

It’s a nice clean look – it looks to be a custom theme, with Tango-ified icons everywhere. I’ve been using Ubuntu so long, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this is very close to a default GNOME install. The GNOME footsteps are in the upper left corner with the Applications menu – it’s been a while since I’ve seen those.

There were a couple new icons I haven’t seen before in my notification area in my panel – one is Glipper, a clipboard manager for GNOME, which I’m excited to see. GNOME’s lack of unified copy / paste is a constant minor annoyance, so that program is slick. The other icon was Desktop Drapes, a tool for managing your wallpapers. It’s a slick application, but I’m not sure the necessity of having it on my panel. The last was a window selector button on the far right of the panel that has uses the icon of the application in the foreground. Clicking on the window selector brings up a menu of all active applications to make it quicker to switch between them.

Customizing Foresight

Once installed, I need to feed my addiction to eye-candy. It was time to get my Nvidia drivers installed. Foresight uses a new package manager called Conary, which is developed by rPath to create their appliances. Conary is unlike any other package manager in that it keeps every version of a file every made, so you can just rollback if you encounter a problem. It also does incremental updates, and from I understand, when you’re updating a package, Conary is just pulling down the changed bits of the file – you don’t need a whole binary.

But back to the Nvidia drivers – I followed the wiki and added the binary drivers to my group:

<br /> sudo conary update group-dist=['!ati, nvidia']

And then I sat there at a terminal. It was probably about 5 minutes, but felt like about 15. I pinged some developers as I was lurking in the #foresight channel on Freenode, and sure enough, soon as I asked after a few minutes, it started. The delay was caused because my system needed to be updated as it was a fresh install. So all kinds of packages had updates available since the ISO I burned was built.

As part of the updates, the Nvidia drivers were installed, so I restarted X, got the Nvidia splash screen, was able to change my resolution from 800×600 to 1280×1024, and lo and behold, I had a new icon on my panel. It looked like some paint splattered – it was new to me. Compiz! Installed and able to run as soon as the binary drivers were installed – very slick. I enabled a GL desktop, and voila – there it was. I had a couple edits to make to my X.org file per the Foresight Wiki for Nvidia cards, applied those changes and had a fully enabled GL desktop running without really lifting a finger. I’ve been using Beryl pretty exclusively with my Edgy and Feisty desktops, but after using Compiz for the last few days here, I don’t see why I would go back to Beryl. This is what Ubuntu users have to look forward to with this week’s announcement of Compiz being installed by default in Feisty – same as this, just enable it and away you go.

Applications

I’ve installed a few other programs, including Bluefish and Mugshot. Foresight’s default choice for applications are perfect for me:

  • Banshee is the only music manager (no Rhythmbox, and even better it’s not the default like Ubuntu)
  • Xchat
  • Brasero for burning (haven’t used that yet, but looking forward to it as I’ve primarily used Gnomebaker up until now),
  • gDesklets
  • Epiphany and Firefox (I think Firefox is default, at least that’s what comes up when you start the Foresight System Manager which is a web-based app)
  • Last-exit for listening to Last.fm streams
  • F-spot, my favorite photo manager

These are applications I use every day, and every time I complete an Ubuntu installation, my first task is to add these. And they’re out of the box on Foresight.

I did try to install avant-window-navigator, and it’s in my menu, but it Segfaults when i run it. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m using Compiz instead of Beryl, a dependency issue, or something else I’ve done. AWN is also in an extremely early alpha stage, so it’s probably a bad example to even bring up. But my real point is wow! It’s a package that’s actually available for automagical installation, that’s cutting edge. It’s an advantage a smaller distro with active package maintainers can bring. Click here to browse Foresight’s available packages.

System Management

Foresight comes with the Foresight System Manager installed in your System menu on your panel as well in Applications under Foresight. It’s a web based app installed locally on your machine, that gives you some basic status information about y our machine. Accessing the Logs resulted in an “unrecoverable error” in my web browser, but everything else seemed to work. For users scared of the command line, probably the most useful tool is the ability to search for other packages and software, and install them right from your browser.

From the command line, adding and removing applications is a breeze – consistent with my experiences with Apt.

Other

Codecs appear to just work. I could play and rip MP3s, a couple different video files I tried just played. That’s a huge win for users. I understand some folk’s in the open source community’s feelings on the matter, but it’s a necessary evil. Just “making it work” is big.

Summary

Foresight has been around for about 2 years, and had their 1.0 release this past January. It appears to be a very active community, especially in their IRC channel, where folks are helpful, friendly and the conversation is always going. Their wiki is up to date with helpful howtos, and for what appears to be a small team of developers, the number of packages being maintained and able to install in Foresight is surpisingly large. The development team is working on a new release to sync up with the upcoming GNOME 2.18 release in March, and is also working on a LiveCD.

I’m really impressed – as a long time Ubuntu user, this is the first distro that really makes me consider switching. I want to get much more active in the Linux communities, and Foresight is one I could see myself helping out, as it has a great bunch of people working on it who were friendly to folks asking questions, and shared information about their distro even with newbies who knew nothing about Linux as I witnessed just a few hours ago tonight.

One of the advantages of using Linux is choice, and Foresight would make a great choice for a lot of users.

I’d like to thank a few folks hanging out in the IRC channel who shared information about Foresight I used in this article, including kenvandine, smithj, pscott and bertux.

Update: Here’s a screenshot of my current Foresight desktop, fairly vanilla from the installation, running Nvidia binary drivers and Compiz:

foresight-screenshot

Volunteering leads me to Foresight Linux

I’ve been trying to spend some time giving back to projects I believe in. I spent a weekend reading through Ubuntu wiki pages on everything from setting up a LoCo, to helping the documentation team, becoming an Ubuntu member, and a lot more. After being a little overwhelmed by some of Ubuntu’s processes (and I do understand why they have them considering the sheer number of users and folks involved), I volunteered to help write some copy for the new gnome.org website that will debut with the upcoming 2.18 release, take a crack at creating a GNOME 2.18 LiveCD, and am helping to try and get the TCLUG back up and running some regular meetings.

I spent a good chunk of last weekend trying to create a LiveCD, using scripts, a few different programs, and lots of research. I quickly realized I was just a bit, to put it mildly, over my head. I’ve been using Linux off and on for 8 years, a full time user for 2 years, but I’m a user, not a developer. I can barely compile my own packages, and even then I’m sure I’m not always doing it the “right” way.

In my travels in trying to build a LiveCD, I met a gentleman by the name of Ken Vandine on the gnome-marketing mailing list and in the #marketing IRC channel for GNOME, who has also stepped up to create a LiveCD for GNOME 2.18. Ken works for rPath, whose goal is “making software applications radically easier to create, deploy, and manage“. Coincidentally, at our last TCLUG installfest last summer, Dave from rPath demoed their technology for us, showing us a really innovative way to create your own software, including things as complex as your own Linux distribution using their toolset. But back to Ken – not only did Ken seem pretty cool and helpful, turns out Ken is one of, if not the lead developer for Foresight Linux.

Foresight is a GNOME-based distribution, that includes a lot of cutting edge software in the Linux community, including Banshee as the default music manager (and we know how much I love Banshee), F-spot, Beagle, among others. I think it’s safe to safe to say Foresight is a smaller Linux distribution when compared to leaders like Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo or Ubuntu.

I did something last Sunday I have done in almost 3 years – installed a different distribution of Linux that wasn’t Ubuntu. It was weird, but strangely comforting at the same time. I’ll post some thoughts on my experiences with Foresight later tonight in my next post.