Skip to content

Foresight

SCALE Part 2

I’ve been remiss in recapping SCALE – I really need to blog more.

In addition to all the great things I saw in the Linux community at SCALE, the best part is the face to face communication you get, especially within your own community, namely Foresight.

Spending time with Ken, Kevin and Stu, usually after the show while grabbing a beer, we had time to talk all things Foresight. Our discussions ranged from:

  • Alpha 3 blockers and next steps
  • Inclusion or exclusion of proprietary codecs. This was a pretty interesting conversation that ranged from helping a user make it “just work” to what it would take to code an application similar to Automatix for Ubuntu to help users get the codecs they need. Anyone up for coding an app?
  • Using JIRA as more than a bug tracker. There are so many features in JIRA, if we as Foresight developers can continue to add tasks to JIRA in addition to bugs, we can build a roadmap right from JIRA. Foresight continues to be a very IRC-centric community, and we don’t use the mailing lists often enough. Capturing workflows in JIRA will help both developers and users understand next steps in the development of Foresight.
  • Lots of great conversation with Kevin about the next steps for the Marketing team. From the new website development etank is rocking out on, to flyers we can pass out at upcoming shows, we talked about lots of ideas to share Foresight with new users. (And Kevin rocks more for filing these tasks in JIRA!)
  • Lots of Conary talk. Not only did Ken host a BoF session on Conary Sunday night, but I learned a ton of new things about how powerful Conary really is. I think Stu even learned something new too. 🙂

The best part of these in person discussions is how fired up and excited you get. The ideas are free flowing, and you really come back jazzed to get even more involved and make a difference. Foresight is still a relatively young project, and with so much to do, anyone can jump in and start helping on any number of tasks from web design or development, packaging, documentation writing or marketing. I continue to work on the Foresight Love project modeled after GNOME Love, and will add tasks that are easy for a new contributor to jump in and help with. I need to add some links to that page to within the wiki, and make it more specific. More to come soon.

SCALE Part 1

I spent last week working at my office in Los Angeles so I could also attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this past weekend. Along with Ken VanDine and Kevin Harriss, we hosted the Foresight booth on the show floor.

dsc02197.jpg

_

(L to R, myself, Kevin Harriss and Ken VanDine)_

We also hung out with Stu, who flew in with Ken and was manning the Bongo Project booth. Not only was Stu showing off the Bongo Project, which by itself is a cool mail and calendar server and web client, he was showing a demo of it as an rPath appliance.

Stu hosting the Bongo Project booth

(Picture taken by Kevin Harris under a CC Attribution-Share Alike license)

I attended Jono Bacon’s keynote, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Coming of the Linux Desktop which was a fantastic talk. Jono is right: it’s all about the community.

dsc02190.jpg

I later had the chance to catch up and chat with Jono, as well, as Ken, and we talked about the community, how we can work together, and Ken’s thoughts on helping the Patch Squad and making it easy for users to do more testing and bug triaging.

I met some folks at dinner Friday night, including Eric, Christian and Jeff, a couple of which were also at the GNOME booth next door to Foresight at the show. Chatted with Christian briefly on a new RSS reader he just started working on for GNOME, which looks awesome.

Saturday night Ken participated in the Weakest Geek competition (based on the TV show Weakest Link), and I’m proud to say he wasn’t one of the first two voted off. It was pretty darn funny, and other contestants included Ted Haeger (formerly of Novell), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Jeremy (Linuxquestions.org) and two others. The questions were hilarious, and some of the answers were even funnier.

Unfortunately, I missed Karen Sandler’s talk Sunday. Karen is an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy and gave a talk on Legal Organizational Issues for Free Software Projects. I’m really kicking myself for spacing this one and missing it.

I put up a handful of pictures in a Flickr set, and Kevin has even more.

32 bit Firefox on 64 bit Foresight

We’re still at SCALE, manning the Foresight booth and introducing Foresight to lots of new users. (I’ll need to check download statistics and see if we made an impact).

While here, Ken helped me get 32 bit Firefox running on my laptop, which is running 64 bit Foresight. (I missed having Flash).

There has been some discussion on the mailing list lately, and we are leaning towards including 32 bit Firefox by default, and leaving Epiphany at 64 bit for those users who want a 64 bit browser.

To get 32 bit Firefox installed, run the following commands:

sudo conary erase firefox

sudo conary update firefox['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86_64']

sudo conary update gtk-engines:lib['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86']

Reboot.

And voila, Firefox is now runnning 32 bit, and Flash should just work.

Thanks to Ken for walking me through it this morning.

This Week in Foresight

And now, the news:

  • Alpha 3 is out! Read the release notes, and remember this is an alpha – things will break, and it’s not quite ready for everyday use yet, but it’s close. Download here.
  • The Foresight mailing lists are down due to this weekend’s rBuilder maintenance. Something about the MX record being screwy. Hopefully will be back soon. Foresight users outside of the US should see speed improvements in Conary now that rBuilder is in a new data center.
  • No one replied to my thread on the Marketing mailing list about the website that I linked to last week, and what they like in a website and what they don’t. That makes me sad. That might be ok, because:
  • We have another website mockup! Thorsten, a relatively new Foresight user, submitted to the marketing list a potential mockup for the new foresightlinux.org. Combined with Nixternal’s recent mockups, I think we can have some discussion and pick one and start coding.
  • I created a new page on the wiki – Foresight Love. Modeled after GNOME-Love, which are bugs tasked in GNOME’s Bugzilla as “GNOME Love”, which means they’re easy to fix and good for beginners. The goal of this wiki page is similar to that and to the GNOME GHOP, where developers can add to an ever growing to-do list of things that are easy for a new contributor to jump in an do. The page is still a framework, I need to add lots more links within the wiki and tasks. If you are a Foresight developer, and know of some easy tasks someone new could try, add them! This was inspired by Ken updating a page on the wiki last week listing all the trivial bugs in JIRA.
  • Foresight will be at SCALE next month, and now Flourish in Chicago in April. Nice work Kevin.
  • I was introduced to Gobby over the weekend. Gobby is a real time collaborative text editor. While I don’t think it will work for the userguide since we’re already using Mercurial, I think it might work well for things like the release notes, new website copy, or even the newsletter once we start publishing that in a blog and not the wiki. (Writing the wiki markup in Gobby would be kind of a chore). More to come.
  • If you’re looking for me in IRC or on email this week, I’ll be back Friday. Off to a conference for work all week.

Foresight updates

My blog has been quiet lately (darn work making me travel!). Let’s see what’s been going on in the world of Foresight:

  • Work on the updated Userguide continues. A Foresight-Docs mailing list was created on Google Groups. Japanese translation is almost complete!
  • The marketing team has kicked off a discussion about the new Foresight website. What sites do you like? What do you not like? Add your thoughts, and join the discussion.
  • Planet Foresight has re-launched, leaving Django behind, and now using Venus, a fork of Planet. Smerp gives an overview of Venus, and how he used rBuilder to create the appliance and how it can be customized. (Anyone out there up for creating a Foresight theme?)
  • The first Focus meeting occurred. Focus is a Foresight steering committee. I created a wiki page for it and published the meeting minutes. Congratulations to Eric Lake and Will Farrington, the first to be formally approved through the new process.
  • The download page links are fixed. Oops!

  • PackageKit errors are much more verbose now. Have you noticed? Fedora interviews Richard Hughes, PackageKit’s maintainer, who gives a nice shout out to Foresight:

    Has their been interest from other distributions about incorporating this?

    RH: Much. PackageKit is shipped by default in Foresight Linux and the GNOME Developer Kit. There’s also interest from Ubuntu, openSUSE, openSolaris, Mandriva, OpenMOKO and a few more that we can’t announce yet.

  • There was a marketing meeting this past Wednesday, which I will be publishing the minutes of this weekend. More of a status update, we will be deploying more appliances, including Mercurial, and best of all, a new forum! Jive Software has provided us with a free unlimited license as an open source project, and we’ll also be deploying Crowd to manage single sign on between Jive, JIRA and Confluence. Cross your fingers, we should have it up mid to late February.

Rumor is, an Alpha 3 release should be on the way shortly too.

See you in Raleigh

The first Foresight Conference has been announced! From the announcement email:

We are tentatively scheduling the conference for the last weekend in March, March 29th and 30th in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. (This is the weekend following the Easter holiday).

The conference will consist of scheduled sessions, a number of unscheduled / BoF (Birds of a Feather) talks similar to a Barcamp or unconference, planning for the future, as well as social time.

In addition to Foresight users and developers, we would like to cordially other Linux users who would like to attend, including upstream maintainers and users and developers of other distributions.

More details to come soon!

I’ll see you there, and if you’re coming, add your name on the wiki!

Writing Foresight Docs: Part Six

It’s been a while since I’ve written (or written about) Foresight Documentation.

Work has resumed on getting the Userguide to 1.0, with commits happening on almost a nightly basis (except last night, as I reinstalled the Foresight alpha on my laptop, but I did work on screenshots).

The main focus is removing all mentions of the (now deprecated) Foresight System Manager and replacing them with information on how to use PackageKit.

The secondary goal is to close all outstanding bugs and tasks against the userguide. Once all bugs are complete, I will call the Userguide 1.0 and start work on 2.0. Unfortunately, I had always hoped to add more pages to the userguide, such as expanding how to burn an ISO and pages on X-Chat and Liferea, but those will probably only be in 2.0.

Userguide 2.0 will be created in a new Mercurial repository, and be set up to provide documentation for all editions, including GNOME, KDE and XFCE. (Alphabetical, not in order of personal preference, really!) In addition to the new pages mentioned above, I hope to have more timely updates, as well making it easy for people to add content, and maybe a whole section just devoted to development. Yup, it’s time to take it to the next level!

Docs can’t be a one person show, so help me make documentation on Foresight a thing of beauty. I’ve created a mailing list at Google Groups to discuss docs – I’d love to hear any thoughts anyone has on what documentation should be included, and would also love some more volunteers to truly make documentation something that lives and breathes with frequent updates.

Sign up today!

Subscribe to Foresight Linux Documentation [Visit this group][2]

A Look Back at 2007

One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to get more involved with GNOME and / or Ubuntu when the year started. Having used Ubuntu since it was first released, and Linux and GNOME specifically since 1999, I really wanted to give something back. After being utterly confused on where to even start with Ubuntu due to the number of volunteers and convoluted processes, I decided to start with GNOME.

I started the year strong, volunteering to help GNOME with the website revamp, including writing a few pages of content for the revamp, and editing a few more. (The new site still isn’t out so not sure if they’ll be using it or not).

I also volunteered to create a GNOME Live CD in January, and after a week or two of researching, was introduced to Ken VanDine who had also offered to help. Turns out Ken is the lead developer of Foresight Linux, and using the Conary and rPath tools, it was easy for him to create not just a Live CD, but other images including VMWare and QEMU as well.

In talking to Ken, and looking for more information on Foresight, I started hanging out in Foresight’s IRC channel on Freenode, and was impressed with the community, their communication and willingness to help others. See the June Foresight Newsletter for more.

And that began my journey in to Foresight. I installed Foresight shortly after, and just started helping out, first by answering questions in IRC (even when they were the wrong answer), and then really diving in, writing the monthly newsletter and then working on documentation. First developing the userguide on the wiki, and then teaching myself docbook and writing and publishing the userguide in Docbook to be included in Foresight.

Additionally with Foresight, I’m trying to help as a project manager, including keeping tabs on the different workstreams and communication within the group. I’ve been testing the first alpha of Foresight released in early November, and last but not least, continue to work on being a bugmaster and triage issues and tasks in JIRA.

I’m also happy with getting the Twin Cities Linux Usergroup meetings back off the ground after a two year hiatus, even though I haven’t had time to help out in the last few months in planning or organizing meetings.

The resolution I didn’t get to was creating my first podcast. I’ve had the songs picked out, but Jokosher didn’t work exactly as I hoped (as Audacity isn’t in our repos). I also wasn’t happy with my microphone quality. I’ll have to work on this one for next year.

Overall, a great year, and I’m very happy in being able to give back and help out, and looking to do more in 2008!

Foresight Newsletter #9

The last Foresight Newsletter of 2007 is out! This one I’m especially proud of, as I spent some time going back through the wiki, older newsletters and chatting with a few folks about all of of Foresight’s accomplishments this past year.

You’ll also get a look at X-Chat, a GNOME IRC Client, contributed by Eric Lake aka etank, updates on the next alpha, and documentation updates for deveopers.

You can subsribe to the newsletter in your favorite feed reader here, and don’t forget to Digg it!

Foresight 2.0 Bittorrent Client: Deluge

One of the criticisms Foresight 1.x and 2.0 have been dinged for is lack of a good bittorrent client included in the official repositories.

Yesterday Antonio (aka doniphon) officially committed Deluge to the Foresight 2.0 (still alpha!) repository. I am happy to report after a night of testing, it works wonderfully! Thank you Antonio!

Get it: sudo conary update deluge

pscott has maintained Deluge in his personal repository for 1.x (due to some Boost issues, I believe), which has also worked well for Foresight 1.x. (Thanks pscott!) If you’re using Foresight 1.4.2, you can install it via:

<br /> sudo conary update deluge=asylum.rpath.org@fl:1

Enjoy!