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Foresight

Foresight 2 (Alpha 1) Released!

The Foresight team released the first alpha of Foresight 2 last night.

I had installed a couple of test versions over the last week or two on my test machine, but now we believe Foresight 2 is ready for wider testing. Note I say testing – this isn’t necessarily ready to be your everyday desktop, unless you’re very, very daring.

I’m very daring.

**

The good:**

  • The installer is fast. 7 minutes or less to install on 3 different machines.
  • Main Desktop: Core 2 Duo (E6300), 2 gigs RAM, Nvidia 7950FGTOC
  • Test desktop: P4 3.0, 2 gigs RAM, ATI 800XT

  • Laptop: Toshiba A135-S4467, Centrino Duo, 1 gig RAM, Intel video, wireless and sound

  • x86 and our first x86_64 release

  • Compiz Fusion is installed by default, but you need to run fusion-icon manually at startup, or add it to your session. This includes Emerald as well.
  • Avant-Window-Navigator is installed in a default installation – just need to remove your bottom panel and run it from Applications -> Accessories. Very cool!
  • Package Kit is the default GUI for installing updates and packages
  • If you liked Foresight 1.x, you’ll like Foresight 2.0. Your favorite apps including Banshee, F-Spot, Brasero and more. Codecs like Divx and MP3 working out of the box.

**What needs to be worked on:

**

  • The Intel video card drivers don’t work with Compiz Fusion on my laptop. It loads the window manager, but depending on the program, I either can’t see it’s contents (You don’t see any text inside X-Chat) or you can’t see the text you type, such as in the GNOME Terminal. Switching to Metacity, you’ll see the text you typed you couldn’t in Compiz.
  • Why is sound muted after a default install? 1.x was like that too.
  • The Nvidia drivers aren’t available in the repo. Stop by #foresight and ask for them, and either doniphon or myself can email them to you.
  • Off kernel drivers aren’t included yet, such as the IPW3945 Intel wireless driver for notebooks. (I have a 25 foot ethernet cable going to behind my TV as I type this on my laptop).
  • GIMP is not included in the default install. Using PackageKit or a simple conary update gimp will add it, but there’s no menu icon for it yet. (Yes, I filed a bug report).
  • No sound on my laptop (Intel HDA sound card). I had sound in 1.3 with the 2.6.19 kernel, but the 2.6.22 kernel with 1.4 and 2.0 I don’t have sound.
  • No flash on x86_64 installed by default (haven’t tried to install it yet)
  • Lots of packages need to be re-packaged from 1.4 to 2.0. (Now is a great time to come join the community!)

Please, please, please file bug reports on issues you run into with Foresight 2.0. While it’s quite usable, I wouldn’t recommend it for everyday use, yet. Expect things to break and lots of updates to become available.

I copied my xorg.conf file from my old install, and have Twinview working perfectly, here is your obligatory screenshot of 3560×1200:

fl2-alpha1

A big congratulations to all my fellow developers, volunteers and contributors to getting this first alpha out.

And remember: Use Foresight. Because your desktop should be cool.

Experimental Support for Compiz-Fusion

It’s hard to tell from the following screenshot (unless you click through to the 1920×1200 version on Flickr), but yes, that’s experimental (note the key word, experimental) support for Compiz-Fusion on Foresight Linux 1.4.1. This includes a majority of the plugins, the Compiz-Fusion icon on the panel, and the Emerald theme manager among other things.

It seems flawless on my Nvidia card running the propietary drivers so far. ATI users using the Radeon driver have had a couple issues.

It’s been fun playing with it, I forgot how much stuff Beryl (and now Compiz-Fusion) has over just the vanilla Compiz.

A huge shout out to pscott for packaging this.

It’s not recommended for normal users (yet).

foresight-compiz

Quake Wars on Foresight Linux

The Enemy Territory:Quake Wars Linux client was released Friday by id. The 17mb client and installer is using Icculus‘ Mojo Setup for installation. This is a welcome change from the Doom3 and Quake IV installers which required you to manually copy the .pak files from the CD or DVDs over to your hard drive. With Mojo Setup, you just run the executable file you download from id, pop the DVD in and it installs the client, Punkbuster and copies the necessary files over from the DVD.

With both the demo and the client, I was running in to keyboard lockups when playing. It didn’t matter if I was playing in full screen or windowed, the game would continue, but my keyboard was totally non-responsive. I tested Compiz enabled and disabled, windowed and non-windowed, and dual monitor and single monitor. It turns out that Pidgin, X-Chat and Mugshot would cause it to lock up. Basically, if anything appeared in the notification section Quake Wars would free the keyboard. Alt-tabbing to different applications and coming back to Quake Wars didn’t help. Disabling those applications before running Quake Wars has stopped the keyboard lockups.

Playing in full screen mode is definitely more immersive, and Quake Wars supports a native 1920×1200 resolution. Playing windowed in dual monitors I was playing in 1680×1250. It’s a pain though to switch xorg.conf and restart GNOME just to play a game, so I haven’t made up my mind.

The Quake Wars FAQ recommends a low latency kernel configured with CONFIG_HZ_1000=y. Foresight’s kernel does not include that setting, and using the Nvidia drivers currently in the repo, 100.14.03, performance has been smooth as silk. I’m running a Core 2 Duo E6300, 2 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia (BFG) 7950GT.

I’m enjoying the full game much more than the early beta client I played in Windows. While the game is definitely faster than Battelfield 2, it’s not as fast as I first thought. I still have a ton to learn (like joining a squad or learning to fly the air vehicles), but it’s fun. 2 out of 3 maps played this afternoon, and I was top Soldier, top kills, and close in top EXP. The promotions and unlocks by campaign is better than I expected, as I wasn’t sure how tempoary unlocks would be, but they work well. I thought I had played on a ranked server today, but searching for my stats, I can’t find them. Guess I need to play some more!

Kudos again to id for releasing a Linux client. It’s nice to have a state of the art game to play on Linux. The next month or two should be great for the state of gaming on Linux, with the rumored Gears of War release, and the definite release of Unreal Tournament 3.

Foresight 1.4 / GNOME 2.20.1 Appearance Issues

If you did a recent updateall in Foresight in the last day or two, there was a bug in libgnome that has been fixed.

On some default installations or a conary updateall, users would not see icons in the GNOME menu, no desktop background, and when you tried to change your theme (System -> Preferences -> Appearance) it would crash. It looks like it was a Gconf setting error upstream in GNOME. It would have looked something like this:

firstboot

It was set as /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas.in and should have been /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas

A big shout out to Ken VanDine who tracked this down and fixed it, and is filing the bug and patch upstream as well.

The groups will be updated in Foresight tonight, but until then, do a sudo conary update libgnome and it should be fixed. For some odd reason restarting X didn’t fix it, but it was fixed on reboot.

This means 1.4.1 with PackageKit will be released in the next day or two.

A month with Quod Libet

For the last month I’ve been runnign Quod Libet instead of Banshee. I had run in to two critical problems with Banshee about a month ago:

  • Banshee was taking 80 minutes to start. (Since fixed, I think it was something with Foresight, as Banshee hasn’t had a release in a while).
  • Banshee’s Last.fm reporting plugin hasn’t reported songs correctly to Last.fm for a long time. This is a known bug in the plugin, without a known fix that I’m aware of.

Banshee’s Last.Fm integration may sound like something trivial, but I really enjoy browsing my profile to see what I’ve listened to. Unfortunately, my profile isn’t close to accurate as all the music I listen to at night via Banshee isn’t being reported. Between that, the old data that is still in my Last.fm profile from my wife listening to music via the Xbox (yes, the James Taylor in my profile isn’t from me listening to it), and the Last.fm radio streams, it’s not really an accurate reflection of my music tastes.

Quod Libet is a GTK+ music player, that also includes Ex Falso, a tag editor. Quod Libet is a favorite of a couple of Foresight users, so I thought I’d give that a try. A simple:

<br /> sudo conary update quodlibet

And it’s installed in Foresight!

My first impressions of Quod Libet, is that it comes across with a basic view, but once you start digging, it’s quite the powerful player. The default view includes a search box, People (artist) Album, and then the song list. Search is fast, feels a touch faster than Banshee.

Other views you can choose from include Playlists, Search, File System, Album, Internet Radio and Media Devices.

I tend to listen to full albums at a time, and not create playlists or listen to random songs, so Quod Libet has worked well for me. I’ve been impressed with it’s simplicity, and as I’ve dug deeper, even more impressed with the number of features and advanced funtionality it has. While it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Banshee, it just works, and that’s all I’ve asked it to do.

The only minor complaint I had, was that due to a DDOS attach, the Quod Libet team lost some it’s website, and the documentation on plugins is non-existent. While there is a nice list of plugins available, I had to get some help to figure out how to setup the sub-directories on where to put the plugins, and only one or two have worked out of the five or six I’ve attempted to install. Granted I haven’t spent that much time trying to configure the plugins, but it was just a small disappointment.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Rhythmbox or Banshee on a GNOME desktop, give Quod Libet a chance, the best thing I can say about it is that it “just works”. And works well.

Foresight Website Maintenance

The Foresight website, including the home page, wiki and issue tracker are under going some much needed maintenance this weekend. We are getting Confluence, our wiki, upgraded to handle more users and have the latest version among other things.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

A bug-hunting we will go

We had a really good Foresight developer meeting a few weeks ago, and one of the outcomes is to start scheduling week long sprints to accomplish some tasks.

First up, is Bug Hunting Week.

Foresight Bug Hunting Week

With 2.0 on the horizon, it’s time to get JIRA, our issue tracker, cleaned up, and tackle all the outstanding issues in 1.4 (and older) and make sure that if the issue hasn’t been resolved, it’s at least assigned to a developer.

Want to help? Join us in #foresight-qa on Freenode or visit the wiki pages to learn more.

Foresight Wiki

The Foresight wiki is unavailable for adding content for a few days. All wiki content is still viewable, but you can’t edit or add content until after we perform an upgrade, which will hopefully be completed by the end of the weekend.

Our apologies!

Rolling releases

Over the next month or two, you may hear a lot of news about upcoming releases of various Linux distributions.

But what if you could do things differently? What if you could have a Linux distribution that wasn’t tied to a specific date twice a year to update your packages and your distribution? What if you wanted access to the latest Banshee for example that will be out later this year and not wait until next spring? Why mess around with backports or unstable respositories just to gain access to the latest release of a package that features a bug fix you need?

Try a Linux distribution that features a rolling release. Try Foresight Linux. Yes, we have a “formal” release when GNOME releases every 6 months, but when a package has an update, it’s probably updated before you even notice, and just one conary updateall away from being included in your desktop. The latest packages will give you access to the latest features, and better yet, the latest bug fixes of any given package. With Foresight Linux 2.0 on the horizon, we will be adding a more formal QA process, so don’t let the “but we need months of testing” stop you from updating. Point releases come out every couple months, but mostly to update the downloadable media including install CDs / DVD and live media such as Live CDs or VMWare images. The magic of conary will keep all of your installed packages up to date.

Additionally, if something doesn’t work, Conary is an innovative package manager that features a rollback feature – from the command line type sudo conary rollback 1 and you’ll be right back to where you were before you installed that last package.

There can be better ways of doing things. And a rolling release is a better way.

Get Involved with Foresight Linux

Are you a Foresight Linux user, and want to give back and help out, but not sure how? Take it from someone who had the same concerns and doubts about how you can help out – I’ve been using Linux for years, and knew I wanted to give back, and after I switched to Foresight this past spring, I found a core group of developers who were open and friendly, and welcomed me with any help I wanted to offer.

With Foresight Linux 2.0 in development, now is a great time to get involved. We are having a Developer meeting in IRC next Wednesday, October 3rd at 1:00 p.m. EST.

We are looking for help in all kinds of areas, and talking about forming some teams to tackle some of the outstanding projects – including documentation writing, packaging, bug triaging, development and a website redesign.

Come and listen, and maybe something will be discussed that you think you’d be good at lending a hand with. More information on the foresight-developer mailing list and on the new Developer Meeting wiki page.

See you there!