Skip to content

Blog

  • in Links
  • 1 min read

Foresight Year in Review

One of the things I’ll be working on this weekend as I try and finish up the December newsletter, is adding a “Year in Review” section for this months issue.

From our 1.0 release this past January to alpha 1 of 2.0 in December and everything in between, I’m looking to capture the highlights this year for Foresight, it’s users and developers.

Have an idea? Email me at pcutler at foresightlinux dot org or leave a comment below, and you can be part of the newsletter!

Paul

Planet Foresight is moving

Planet Foresight is moving!

Currently located at www.foresightlinux.org/planet you may have noticed that it now only updates once a day. The current planet uses Feedjack, a Django module, which was crashing our webserver for some unknown reason and we had to turn off updates and instead run a cron job.

Our resident Alaskan, smithj (with his own shiny new blog!), has been kind enough to set us up with our own Venus planet appliance, now at http://planet.foresightlinux.org.

If you subscribe to the current planet in a feedreader via RSS, please update your feed to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightplanet

We will be migrating the official feed in about a week.

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.

Stop the Spying

A big thank you to the EFF and Sen. Chris Dodd for helping to kill the Telecom Immunity bill yesterday in the Senate. The EFF has been at the forefront of this issue from day one, and Sen. Dodd’s leadership and bravery in taking a stand yesterday threatening to filibuster this bill until it died caused Sen. Reid to pull it at this point in time.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow sums it up well:

Here’s the thing: EFF and others are suing the telecoms for participating in the wiretapping program. These lawsuits are the best chance we have of getting the details of the program into the public, so we can finally find out what the NSA have been doing to us all these years. The reason the government wants to grant the telecoms immunity is to keep the dirty laundry in the closet — to keep us from finding out how they’ve been breaking the law.

Read more: