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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.

Foresight Wiki

Over the last week I’ve spent some time implementing the new wiki structure and content discussed at Foresight 20/20.

All the spaces have been consolidated into 6 major spaces (plus the newsletter):

  • Community
  • Development
  • Documentation and Howtos
  • FAQ
  • Foresight 1.x
  • Getting Involved

Content was moved around to the correct spaces. This has resulted in relative links need to be updated on some pages, and the wiki links now reflect the move to the new space, but this is minor in the scheme of things.

Some very old and outdated information, especially on pages that only had one or two sentences, was removed or consolidated into one page.

The major to-dos remaining include updating the Get Involved sub-team pages with team members and outstanding tasks where missing, moving some 1.4 development specific information in to the 1.x space, and the Community space in providing more information on current members, developers, and how to join. Additionally, I want the Community space to be transparent in to the workings of Foresight. I also need to add some missing Focus meeting minutes, and make sure I update that information more often as needed.

The beauty of a wiki is anyone can edit it – so jump in and help out!

Foresight Forums

The Foresight Forums continue to grow!

Recently added were a number of forums supporting International users, including Forums for Portuguese, French, Spanish and German users.

Thanks to the moderators of these forums, doniphon and Og Maciel, Stef, Zodman, and Mark__T respectively.

One of the easiest ways to contribute to Foresight is to jump on the Forums and help answer user questions.

See you there!

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.

Foresight 20/20 Recap: Development Process

One of the first sessions on Saturday was a discussion on defining the development process for Foresight. (Unfortunately this was a session I missed, but it sounded fairly technical anyway!)

Most developers have been committing packages to the 2-devel label (rather than :devel) and the decision was made to stick to 2-devel. Additionally, one big change is the concept of creating a new repository outside of Foresight for true development and big changes that are tested in this sandbox beore moving to fl:2-devel. In my opinion, this is a great idea, as it’s fairly easy for users to install packages from the 2-devel label. (Epiphany is a great example – right now in 2-devel it’s based on Webkit – a few users have encountered errors based on the Webkit dependencies needed). This should make it better for users, as the chance to break their desktop will diminish.

Labels for these new sandboxes will be based on the JIRA issues that define what the work being done is.

For more details, see the JIRA issue discussing the new development process.