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2008

  • in Linux
  • 1 min read

Foresight Talk This Weekend

Just a reminder, I’ll be giving a talk on Foresight this Saturday in St. Paul at Penguins Unbound.

It will be more of an introduction to Foresight to existing Linux users (though I hope a few folks who don’t use Linux are there), and I’ll have some install discs to give out.

The meeting starts at 10:00 a.m., hit the link above for directions. See you there!

Welcome new Foresight members

In last week’s Focus meeting, the Focus council approved three new members to Foresight:

I’d like to welcome them as official members to the community, and add a few words:

  • Jordan is a relatively new user to Foresight, and has been involved with packaging. In addition to Eric Lake, Jordan has also participated in Foresight advocacy with his local LUG in Kentucky.
  • Lance Haig, a Bongo developer, got his start with Conary as the owner of the Bongo appliance on rBuilder. Lance has contributed packages to Foresight, notably virt-manager, a GUI for managing virtual machines with KVM.
  • Tomas aka Zinden, has been an active member of Foresight’s community in IRC and the forums, and has been an active advocate of Foresight in Sweden in helping Foresight gain new users, helping those users and managing a Swedish Foresight website.

What does it take to become an official Foresight member? Visit the wiki page for more, but we’re looking for contributors who have sustained participation within Foresight for a few months, whether it’s packaging, documentation, marketing or more. Benefits include a customized hostmask on Freenode IRC, @foresightlinux.org email address, and having your blog syndicated on Planet Foresight. But best of all, it’s about the recognition of having helped Foresight and it’s community.

Think you have what it takes? Apply here, and make sure your personal wiki page on the Foresight wiki is updated with a list of your contributions and what you would like to accomplish in the future.

Once you’re a member, you can apply to be a developer, and eventually gain commit access to the Foresight repositories.

Quality Assurance

I’ve kicked off a conversation on the Foresight development mailing list today to talk about Quality Assurance.

At a high level, the question is what is the processes we need to put in place for testing to provide user’s with the best, most stable Linux OS?

Our focus continues to remain on the user experience. That phrase can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at the core, it remains about being a desktop experience that “just works”. Users shouldn’t have to worry about updates breaking their system – ever.

The key to that is the beauty of Conary, and it’s ability to manage updates and dependencies for our users. Conary also lets us differentiate Foresight through rolling releases – we can update packages on the fly so users don’t have to wait on a 6 month release cycle. But that also means we have to have the ability to test Foresight, including new packages and the underlying infrastructure, before those updates are pushed to our users.

Do you have thoughts on how it should work? Want to get involved and help define that process or be a part of the QA team? Join the development mailing list and contribute to the discussion. Or join the QA team and test the latest and greatest version of Foresight.

More to come on how the QA process will work!

Google Gadgets on Foresight

With Google’s announcement this morning of Google Gadgets being available for Linux, Ken wasted no time in adding it to the QA branch tonight.

To install: sudo conary update google-gadgets (assuming you’re running the QA version of Foresight). If you’re running the standard version: sudo conary udpate google-gadgets=@fl:2-qa

Google Gadgets is meant to be run during an active session, so you won’t see a menu entry for them. Use GNOME-DO or Alt-F2 to run them, and type ggl-gtk, or add it to your sessions to automatically start on login in System -> Preferences -> Sessions (also by adding ggl-gtk).

Google Gadgets are the gadgets, such as stock quotes, clocks, calculators and more that are available on your iGoogle webpage, or desktop gadgets that Windows users can use, similar to widgets on a Mac OS X desktop, or similar in Vista.

They’re fun, but I don’t know if I’d keep them. When running, you’ll see the Google Gadgets icon in your panel (it’s the icon on the far left side):

goog-gadgets-panel

Just browsing through fairly quickly, I added some to my desktop to take a screenshot (click through to Flickr for bigger sizes):

google-gadgets

Running, left to right by row:

Row 1: Weather, Election News, Amazon Search, Youtube Search

Row 2: (Don’t remember)

Row 3: NASA Image of the Day, ESPN News, XBox Live Gamertag, Clock

Row 4: CPU Usage, Stock Ticker, Google Calendar

There are literally hundreds of different gadgets to choose from, including dozens of clocks, many different kinds of news tickers, and even games you can add right to your desktop, such as Pacman, Tetris or Bejeweled.

Thanks to Ken for quickly packaging. Eye candy is always fun.

Come help test some packages!

The Foresight Packaging Contest wrapped up last weekend, and the contest participants added almost 150 packages!

Now it’s time to test ’em! The packages live in the participant’s personal repositories, and we need to install them, make sure they work, have a menu entry, and then review which ones should be cloned to the Foresight repositories. We also will have some of the developers reviewing the recipes as well. Once we get this done, and we can start declaring some winners, and better yet, giving out some prizes!

We need help! Stop by on Freenode IRC in #foresight or #foresight-qa and look for me (pcutler) kenvandine, or pscott and lend a hand tomorrow, Wednesday, June 4th.

You might just find the next cool piece of software that you didn’t know was out there.

Foresight Focus Updates

The Foresight Council, aka Focus, which holds bi-weekly meetings on Fridays, is opening the meetings to all community members! This topic was discussed at yesterday’s Focus meeting, and all three council members were unanimous in supporting it.

Get a peek of what’s going on inside Foresight, from current development, future development, sub-teams goings on, and community updates.

Here are the meeting notes from yesterday’s meeting, and we’ll see you in #foresight-council on Freenode IRC at our next meeting on June 6th at 9 a.m. EST. For more information on the Foresight Council, see the Focus homepage on the Foresight wiki.

Welcome to the dd-wrt revolution

I updated my Linksys WRT-54GS (1.0) to dd-wrt last night, replacing Linksys’ firmware with the latest dd-wrt release, DD-WRT v24 (05/20/08) mega.

What a great experience. The documentation is complete, and has howto’s for all the different models that are compatible, and it was a snap following the step by step instructions.

I did a factory reset, uploaded the new firmware via Linksys’s web gui, another factory reset to load the firmware, and voila, open source firmware running on my Linksys router.

The admin pages for managing the router are well designed, in both layout and functionality. And the funtionality – wow! So much you can do, from QOS, SSH, to boosting the range, or enabling all kinds of WPA protection that weren’t available via Linkys’s firmware.

I’ve just started playing with it, but so far I’m very impressed. I welcome my new open-source dd-wrt masters.