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Foresight stuff from around the web

I’ve been in Los Angeles for most of the two weeks. I hate traveling, as I feel out of the loop on stuff, so trying to get caught up. A few others have posted some similar links, but here’s what’s going on in the world of Foresight:

  • Shuttle’s KPC launched on Newegg a day or two ago. $209.99 with Foresight pre-installed.
  • Foresight 2.0’s GNOME edition was released 8 days ago featuring GNOME 2.22 and a complete re-design of Foresight’s base infrastructure. Amazingly fast installer, latest GNOME, and some new default settings. A few things left to tweak, but I’m so amazed by the progress Foresight has made in the last year since I started using it. Download it and / or read the release notes.
  • The Foresight Forums are live! I’m very impressed by the number of people who have created accounts already, and the number of discussions going on. Big shout out to Stef for launching the appliance.
  • I booked my flight for the Foresight User and Developer Conference. I’m very excited to see two of our UK devs coming over the pond to join us. Be there or be square!
  • Here’s a great interview with our fearless leader Ken VanDine at fsckin.com.
  • Here’s a nice review of Foresight 2.0. Love the User Guide shout out.
  • Here’s a mixed review of Foresight. The author liked the installation, User Guide, and had some valid concerns about PackageKit, Conary’s lack of metadata, and codec installation. Stuff I hope to work on this weekend. The author does not recommend Foresight at the end, and recommends Ubuntu to new users. I don’t have a problem with bad reviews – it’s good to maintain perspective and gives us developers goals to work towards to keep making Foresight better.
  • Tasque, formerly Tasky, is now available in the Foresight repositories instead of my personal repo. It’s still in 2-qa for testing. Rock!
  • The first alpha of the new Banshee is also available for testing in 2-qa, available as banshee-1.
  • Audacity is now available in 2-qa for the first time in Foresight. GTK-1 apps are a pain to build packages for, and Ken is the man for getting this in. Time to start learning how to podcast!
  • ATI’s proprietary driver, fglrx, is available for testing in 2-devel for the first time in Foresight 2.0. I’m going to install and test it this weekend on my test box. I still need to write the documentation for installing that in the User Guide.

Lots of stuff going on! We still have bugs to fix, packages to add, and updates to documentation that need to be written. If you’ve ever wanted to contribute, now’s a great time. For more information ping me in IRC, pcutler on Freenode in #foresight.

Codecs

A major change from Foresight 1.x to 2.0 (Beta) is the removal of proprietary codecs, which are no longer installed by default.

Depending on where you live and the legality of the codecs, users can install MP3 and DVD support via sudo conary update group-codecs.

You, of course, assume all legal responsibility. 🙂

Banshee Alpha

Will Farrington was kind enough to write a recipe for an early look at the next generation of Banshee, which is an early alpha. I’ve been able to get the recipe to cook locally, but not on rMake, so it’s not available in the repos yet, but we’re working on it.

With the exception of two visual quirks that come and go, it’s running great. Last.fm / audioscrobbling works 10 times better than Banshee 0.13.2, and the new UI gives you the ability to view the browser on top or on the left. (The screenshot below is with the browser on the left).

Best of all, searching overall is much faster. It still has support for Smart Playlists and DAPs, and I’m going to test the DAP functionality overnight. (update – I didn’t read the Alpha notice that pops up every time you start it well enough – no DAP support or plugins yet!) I don’t see plugin support yet, but all I need right now is Last.fm.

Well done Banshee developers!

Banshee alpha running on Foresight 2.0 Beta 1:

banshee-alpha