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Foresight Week In Review

What a week last week turned out to be for Foresight!

In no particular order:

  • The first newletter in months came out, and we enter year two of the newsletter. Hopefully I’m back in the swing of things and will get that released on time every month.
  • Foresight 2.0.4 was released. And not just any release, a single CD install disc (the Foresight GNOME Lite Edition) is now available! It removes most languages, and is 32 bit only. No more 2 CD installs, and this one uses the tar based installer, so installation should be under 10 minutes. And it’s easy to upgrade to the full version!
  • Foresight officially joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. This is big for us – we now have the flexibility of being a non-profit organization. We can take donations, and use that money to help spread the word and market Foresight. It will help us get to more conferences, and create promotional material, whether that’s flyers or install discs to hand out. Donate today! (I did!)

One last note, this week’s Foresight Council meeting has been moved up a day, from Friday to Thursday at 9 a.m. EST in #foresight-council on Freenode IRC.

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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 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.

T61 Lockups Follow-up

Thanks to zdz for posting a comment on my T61 Lockups post.

He was absolutely right – it was an Intel / xorg driver issue causing the lockups.

A big shout out to doniphon for updating and testing Xorg at the 20/20 Conference last week. I’m running the latest Xorg on my T61, and the lock-ups are gone!

And I’m still loving the T61. Great Linux support, good form factor, and a great value. All I have left to do is figure out a bug with suspend.

GNOME Do Final Project Report

GNOME Do’s final project report has been released. GNOME Do was originally started as an academic project by a few students at the University of Pennsylvania.

I would like to direct you to page 13, where Foresight and Shuttle both receive mentions:

Our most recent release was 0.4.2., released on April 15, 2008. GNOME Do now has packages in every major GNU/Linux distribution, and is even installed by default in Foresight Linux and a few others. Shuttle, a boutique PC retailer, is now selling a line of loc-cost Linux PCs that have GNOME Do running on them by default.

Thank you to David and Douglass for all their hard work, and the mention!

Top 10 Commands

Jumping on the latest meme bandwagon, my top 10 commands:

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head<br /> 261 cd<br /> 122 cvc<br /> 120 ls<br /> 112 sudo<br /> 67 ./fixmissingfiles<br /> 62 yelp<br /> 51 hg<br /> 48 rmake<br /> 42 conary<br /> 27 geany<br />

Amusing

This may only amuse me, but the number of searches on my blog for “ubuntu banshee 0.98.2” has skyrocketed in the last day or two since Banshee’s recent release.

Just another reason to use Foresight! Conary’s ability to write a recipe to create a package is easier than almost every distribution out there. This gives us the ability not only to add packages quickly, but to maintain Foresight as a rolling distribution. After testing packages, we can keep our distribution up to date without having to have two major releases a year like most distributions do today. Think 0.98.2 will be in Ubuntu? Think again! (Not that I’m trying to start a flame war with Ubuntu, we each have our pros and cons).

Even Aaron Bockover, Banshee’s lead developer commented on his blog:

@trettle: First off, thanks! Ubuntu packages should be on their way, but itΒ’s really up to those in the Ubuntu community to contribute the packaging. The Foresight guys always have packages available minutes after an upstream release, for instance. It would be nice to see someone do the same for Ubuntu.

Try Foresight today!

Banshee 0.98.2

Banshee 0.98.2 is out! Read the release notes, and check out Planet Banshee for the developer’s comments on the new functionality.

What’s new? VIDEO. Yup, you read that right. Your favorite audio manager is now a full fledged media manager.

I’ve been using the Banshee Preview for a few weeks, and this latest release for almost a week, and it works great. Import your music or video, and watch it right in Banshee. And if you’re listening to music, click the Now Playing button for some great visualizations.

A big shout out to Will Farrington for writing the recipe, which I committed last night to the Foresight repositories. Search for banshee-1 in PackageKit, or install via sudo conary update banshee-1=@fl:2-qa Enjoy!

(And thanks to the Banshee devs for giving me credit for helping write the release notes, but I really didn’t deserve it. I started ’em with a copy / paste of 0.98.1, and some other minor edits, but didn’t get a chance to really finish it). Gotta love the Foresight mention right in the release notes though!

Lenovo Thinkpad T61

My uncle, who’s also my godfather, passed away recently, and unexpectedly gifted me with an inheritance. After a discussion with my wife, I decided to buy myself a new toy.

My current laptop (a Toshiba A135-S4467) is only a year old, but doesn’t support VT, and I wanted something slightly smaller and lighter. It’s had Foresight on it since day one, and I recently just upgraded it from 1 GB memory to 2GB, but resume and suspend has never worked on it. (Thanks Toshiba). My wife’s laptop is about 4 years old, and my old laptop will make a nice upgrade for her. Once I peel the stickers off…

I did a little shopping around, but a number of Foresight developers have Thinkpads, and they just work. I had a little guilt buying from a Chinese company, but let’s be honest. They’re all made in China anyways. What really decided it for me, was the ability to support a company that offers Linux pre-installed, specifically SUSE.

After a quick run to Best Buy to look at screen sizes, I decided to buy a 14.1″ T61online at Lenovo.com. Now it was time to place the order.

The buying experience was so-so. Finding the link on Lenovo’s Thinkpad page to the SUSE option was fairly well buried, and I finally found it on the bottom right of the page, way below the customization options for the different models prominently featured above. (Going back to their site this week, I don’t even see that link or any of the other information under the Special Offers).

To my disappointment, all of the processor options for the SUSE builds were a generation behind (T7400 – T7800). If I was going to buy a new laptop, I thought I might as well do it right, and get one of the new 45mm Penryn processors (T8100 – T9500). But no such luck, and I ended up having to customize one with Vista. I chose Vista Home Basic and as I’m going to immediately wipe it and put Foresight on it anyway. I also ordered less memory (1x1GB) and ordered 4GB (2x2GB) from Newegg, as it was much cheaper that way.

After purchasing it a week ago Sunday, Lenovo showed my ship date as Tuesday, April 8th. That was a little disappointing as their website said available in 1-2 weeks, and that was just over two weeks total. After a slight hiccup with my order being processed (Visa held it thinking it was fraud, more on that below), I got that fixed Monday, and on Tuesday Lenovo showed my status as starting to build the order. I was pleasantly surprised on Thursday, just 4 days later when I got the ship notice from Lenovo. So much for 1-2 weeks! Now that is under promising and over delivering. Of course, I chose the free ground shipping, so I still have a few days to go before it gets here. The waiting is killing me!

I ended up ordering:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo T9300
  • 14.1″ WXGA+ monitor
  • Intel GMA X3100 Video Card
  • 1 GB (1×1) PC5300 Memory (and 4GB from Newegg)
  • 100GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
  • PC Card Slot and Media Card Slot
  • Intel 4965 A/G/N Wireless
  • Integrated Bluetooth
  • 9 Cell Lithium-Ion Battery

I also ordered, in addition to the laptop and the memory, a Timbuk 2 messenger bag. After taking a few hours trying to decide and building my own, I went with the Blue Whimsy Limited Edition. (No wonder Visa thought there was some fraud going on, 3 quick purchases all online).

Good-bye Toshiba laptop, you’ve served me well. And thanks Uncle John, we’ll miss you.

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