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Software I'm excited about

A brief post as I’m still traveling for work. Here are a couple big and small packages in development that I’m excited about:

  • Flyback: A GUI wrapper for rsync and rsnapshot to make backup easier, that is often compared to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a python script that creates a GUI for the user and makes it simple to create and schedule backups of a user’s directories and files. Choose which directory, files, hidden files, and it sends the back up to a directory of your choosing. It’s still very early in development, and I didn’t see a way to send a backup to a network share that’s mounted in GNOME. But I believe most users don’t backup enough, and for a distribution like that Foresight, that “just works”, backup should be added to the list of things that just work for a user.
  • GNOME-DO: A Quicksilver-like application that is difficult to explain, but can increase your productivity ten fold by making it easy to quickly open applications, jump between open windows and more. See more at Download Squad including a video of GNOME-Do in action.
  • Publishr, a small one, but looks useful, Publishr adds a “publish” plug-in to GIMP to make it easy to send your images to Picasa or Flickr. Sure, F-Spot has had this feature forever, but there are a lot of times when I’m editing a screenshot that I want to send to Flickr that I won’t put in my F-Spot library, and this plugin will help skip a step by having to use Flickr’s web upload feature.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on these applications, and may add to my Foresight repository when I get some time.

  • in movies
  • 1 min read

Bladerunner: The Final Cut

I headed to downtown Minneapolis Friday afternoon, and caught a screening of Bladerunner: The Final Cut.

It’s been 48 hours since I saw the film, and it touches me in a way few films do – I sit here and still struggle to put in to words the emotions Bladerunner evokes for me. From the themes of consumerism and humanism to the grim picture the film paints of the future, few science fiction films hold up as well as Bladerunner does after twenty-five years.

SFGate.com has an excellent review of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece as well.

Setting up a Foresight 2 build environment, Part 1

I don’t fancy myself a Linux developer, thought I aspire to be one someday. I can barely manage my own systems, and consider myself more of a power user.

One of the advantages of Foresight Linux though, is how easy it is to get started, both in creating and managing packages, and in how open the community is in welcoming you when you decide to start, and answering your (dumb) questions.

The upcoming 2.0 release of Foresight requires a slightly different setup and methodology for packaging. Here is a brief overview of how I set up my PC for creating packages on Foresight 2. (And if I’m doing something wrong, please leave a comment!)

[

Visit the Foresight 2.0 Developer page on the wiki.]1 (A big thanks to thilo and doniphon for the information on this page).

**

Step one**: Add the development packages to your system. From a terminal type:

sudo conary update group-devel

Step two: Create a .conaryrc file. Open Gedit (Applications -> Accessories -> Text Editor) and copy the .conaryrc example from the wiki link above and save it in your user’s home directory as .conaryc

Step three: Create a .rmakerc file. Open a new tab in Gedit and copy and paste the .rmakerc example from the above wiki page.

Step four: Edit your .bashrc file. In Gedit click Open, and hit Ctrl-H to show hidden files, and double click .bashrc. At the bottom of the file, copy and paste the .bashrc group cooks from the wiki page above.

Step five: Create the directories needed. From your user’s home directory:

mkdir conary

mkdir -p ~/conary/foresight.rpath.org ~/conary/builds ~/conary/cache

Step six: Create your context. In a terminal type:

cvc context fl:2-devel

And that’s it! I wouldn’t be surprised if there are quicker and / or easier ways to do this, but this is what worked for me, with pointers from Ken.

Next time: Checking out and updating a package.

Other sources:

[

Foresight 1.x build environment howto]2

Conary wiki

Foresight Linux Newsletter Volume I, Issue 8 Out

After a month off (due to wiki maintenance) the Foresight Newsletter is back! Volume I, Issue 8 highlights the latest security fixes, Foresight in the news and a look at the first alpha of Foresight Linux 2, including:

  • Alpha release highlights
  • Known bugs
  • New editions: KDE and XFCE!

Issue 9 will start planning soon, if you want to lend a hand and write a section, ping me in IRC!

Update: How could I forget to mention this? Go digg it! (Thanks to etank for submitting to digg)

Foresight KDE Edition

As a GNOME guy, I don’t use KDE.

As it was pointed out to me today (thanks Og!), without any intended ill intent, I left off any news of KDE in the Foresight Newsletter I’m working on.

One of the cool things coming with Foresight 2.0, is a KDE edition and a XFCE edition. The beauty of open source is choice – whether it’s a desktop environment, music player or your choice of web server.

The KDE edition is a little further along than the XFCE edition at this point, and one-ups the GNOME edition in the fact that it’s only 695 MB! One of these days we will get the GNOME edition to fit on a single CD. 🙂

Jtate and Int are leading the way in developing the KDE edition, which is also attracting new Foresight users such as Nixternal, whom you may know from such shows as Planet Ubuntu or Chicago LUG, and old Foresight users such as Og, who’s helping translate KDE to pt-br.

Now is a great time to get involved with Foresight – whether it’s helping polish the GNOME edition, help building the KDE or XFCE editions, or helping on any number of tasks in progress, such as documentation writing; bug triaging; building our next generation website or forums, or helping with marketing and attracting new users.

More information coming in this month’s newsletter!

  • in Links
  • 1 min read

Extreme

My favorite late 80’s / early 90’s rock band, Extreme, has announced their re-union, along with a new album and tour in 2008.

Say what you will about More than Words and Hole Hearted, but when Extreme came out in 1989 with their first album, and Pornograffiti in 1990, they had a refreshing twist on the hair metal bands of the day. Their blend of funk, with horns, and Nuno’s guitar playing put them head and shoulders above their contemporaries, such as Winger, Slaughter or Poison.

I saw them a number of times live, including headlining at the Eagle’s Club right after Pornograffitti was released, with Alice in Chains opening, before Alice in Chains broke big. One of the two times I saw Alice in Chains, and it was already clear that Layne Staley was in the throes of the heroin addiction that would later kill him, as Alice in Chains performance was awful, and they were booed off the stage.

Extreme live was a different story – Gary Cherone’s energy is infectious, and Nuno’s guitar playing is absolutely amazing. I’ve seen them in everything from a small club to an arena, and they always rocked the house. I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those old guys who goes to concerts of the bands he followed in high school, but I may have to make an exception for this one.

Growing the Foresight Community

Og’s latest blog post links to David Bolter’s blog with a post on “Transparency in Community Decisions”. David writes:

Transparency should be applied to how decisions can get made in FOSS communities. This can involve different layers; for example, transparency could apply to:

  1. Who gets to participate in decision making.

  2. How these people are selected.

  3. The process of decision making.

In FOSS communities I think transparency should apply to all three where reasonably possible. What do I mean by this? Let’s take a couple of examples:

A) Getting hired by a FOSS organization which is integral to the community.

B) Getting commit access to an svn repository.

C) Getting syndication of one’s blog onto a planet/aggregator.

The timing of this couldn’t be better. The Foresight Marketing Team is about to tackle some of these exact tasks, specifically on what it means to become a user and developer within Foresight. This includes perks, such as IRC hostmasks or foresightlinux.org email addresses, but more importantly how to get commit access.

We don’t have all of the answers yet, especially for 1-3 above (other than Ken gets veto power!). But David’s post highlights the need for transparency, not only in how we build these processes, but how we execute them going forward.

We will be having a Marketing meeting sometime in the next week or so, with details to come soon.

Foresight Linux 2.0 Alpha Bugs wanted!

Yes, the title is right. Are you running the alpha of Foresight Linux 2.0? We want, no, need your bugs!

The alpha has been out for a couple of weeks now, and only ten bugs have been filed against the alpha, with two of them fixed. And I’d argue a couple more aren’t really bugs, but enhancements or tasks.

Please, please file bugs against the alpha. This way we know what needs to be fixed or needs improving. A new alpha release should be out sometime in the next week or two as well.

In other bug news, see me or Kevin if you’re interested in joining the QA team and want to help with bug hunting. We have 110 bugs assigned to Distro that need triaging! (Learn how to triage here.)

So please file bugs against the alpha, we want your desktop to be cool (and bug free).