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Anniversaries

A few anniversaries:

  • Last month was 5 years of blogging. Wow! From your basic blog / diary, to more tech and copyright oriented, to almost all Linux all the time, it’s been quite a journey. I’m sure my friends will give me even more crap about it now.
  • Last month marks 9 years since I first installed Red Hat 5.2 that I bought right after Christmas. (I still own the original box and CD). Next month will be my 3 year anniversary of being exclusive with Linux. Don’t miss Windows one bit. Get my gaming fix via Xbox 360 and Wii these days.
  • I’m a year older this Saturday. I’m now leaving the coveted 25-34 demographic. Sigh.

I’m off to Los Angeles first thing in the morning, and working out there this week. So if you don’t see me in IRC or blogging, now you know why. This weekend I will be at SCALE at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. You’ll be able to find in the bright green t-shirt. Someone buy me a drink on Saturday.

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.

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!

GNOME Developer's Kit

As someone who has for a long time wanted to get involved with an open source project, and specifically GNOME, the GNOME Developer Kit is a true blessing. (And more on my wanting to get involved in a different post in a week or so).

The GNOME Developer Kit is fully functional operating system with the latest (unstable) branch of GNOME. Available as an ISO you can install on your hard drive, or a VMWare image you can boot within your current OS, it has everything you need to start contributing back to GNOME. The GNOME Developer Kit is based on Foresight Linux, and uses Conary and PackageKit to stay updated with the latest commits from GNOME Subversion. Both the Dev Kit and Foresight were created by Ken VanDine, Foresight’s lead developer.

Og Maciel, a GNOME contributor, blogged about using the GNOME Developer Kit in assisting the translation teams. One comment in particular caught my attention, asking if translations were too hard of an area for someone new to contributing to start with.

With this in mind, what kind of documentation should be included with the GNOME Developer Kit, and where should it live? Getting started in open source can be daunting, and GNOME can sometimes come off as a bit of a clique, making it even harder for someone to start. Translations, bug triaging, and documentation are typically easy areas for someone new to start, but I’ve seen some challenges first hand trying to get involved. I don’t have any answers, but some of the questions that come to mind for me are:

  • Should documentation live on the image or on the wiki?
  • If on the wiki, should it link to other sections of the GNOME wiki (live.gnome.org or LGO for short)? (For example, the “Testing Patches” is linked on the GNOME Dev Kit’s LGO page to the Testing Patches LGO page.)
  • If on the image, should it be a docbook file similar to the Foresight User Guide, or just an HTML page?
  • What common tasks for developers should be documented? Think back to when you were just getting started with contributing, what questions came to mind?
  • What else?

Getting started with contributing back to an open source project takes determination and even a bit of courage. Tools like the GNOME Developer Kit help make that start even easier.

Software I'm excited about

A brief post as I’m still traveling for work. Here are a couple big and small packages in development that I’m excited about:

  • Flyback: A GUI wrapper for rsync and rsnapshot to make backup easier, that is often compared to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a python script that creates a GUI for the user and makes it simple to create and schedule backups of a user’s directories and files. Choose which directory, files, hidden files, and it sends the back up to a directory of your choosing. It’s still very early in development, and I didn’t see a way to send a backup to a network share that’s mounted in GNOME. But I believe most users don’t backup enough, and for a distribution like that Foresight, that “just works”, backup should be added to the list of things that just work for a user.
  • GNOME-DO: A Quicksilver-like application that is difficult to explain, but can increase your productivity ten fold by making it easy to quickly open applications, jump between open windows and more. See more at Download Squad including a video of GNOME-Do in action.
  • Publishr, a small one, but looks useful, Publishr adds a “publish” plug-in to GIMP to make it easy to send your images to Picasa or Flickr. Sure, F-Spot has had this feature forever, but there are a lot of times when I’m editing a screenshot that I want to send to Flickr that I won’t put in my F-Spot library, and this plugin will help skip a step by having to use Flickr’s web upload feature.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on these applications, and may add to my Foresight repository when I get some time.

Foresight KDE Edition

As a GNOME guy, I don’t use KDE.

As it was pointed out to me today (thanks Og!), without any intended ill intent, I left off any news of KDE in the Foresight Newsletter I’m working on.

One of the cool things coming with Foresight 2.0, is a KDE edition and a XFCE edition. The beauty of open source is choice – whether it’s a desktop environment, music player or your choice of web server.

The KDE edition is a little further along than the XFCE edition at this point, and one-ups the GNOME edition in the fact that it’s only 695 MB! One of these days we will get the GNOME edition to fit on a single CD. 🙂

Jtate and Int are leading the way in developing the KDE edition, which is also attracting new Foresight users such as Nixternal, whom you may know from such shows as Planet Ubuntu or Chicago LUG, and old Foresight users such as Og, who’s helping translate KDE to pt-br.

Now is a great time to get involved with Foresight – whether it’s helping polish the GNOME edition, help building the KDE or XFCE editions, or helping on any number of tasks in progress, such as documentation writing; bug triaging; building our next generation website or forums, or helping with marketing and attracting new users.

More information coming in this month’s newsletter!

Foresight Linux 2.0 Alpha Bugs wanted!

Yes, the title is right. Are you running the alpha of Foresight Linux 2.0? We want, no, need your bugs!

The alpha has been out for a couple of weeks now, and only ten bugs have been filed against the alpha, with two of them fixed. And I’d argue a couple more aren’t really bugs, but enhancements or tasks.

Please, please file bugs against the alpha. This way we know what needs to be fixed or needs improving. A new alpha release should be out sometime in the next week or two as well.

In other bug news, see me or Kevin if you’re interested in joining the QA team and want to help with bug hunting. We have 110 bugs assigned to Distro that need triaging! (Learn how to triage here.)

So please file bugs against the alpha, we want your desktop to be cool (and bug free).

Lawyers, Guns & Money

Unreal Tournament 3 was released Monday. But the Linux client demo never appeared, and the Linux retail server and client haven’t appeared yet either.

The UT3 mailing list has also been quiet recently, but last night Icculus sent a tweet out and the news hit the mailing list soon after: UT3’s Linux bits are hung up in legal. Somewhere along the way Epic licensed some middleware that can’t be included in the Linux version. Hopefully we’ll get some more news soon.

In related news, no Gears of War for Linux, only Mac. Something about the publisher who is based in Redmond squashing that idea. Damn them.

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