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Hello Planet Foresight!

First of all, thank you for inviting me to join the Planet crowd – I’m very flattered and honored to be part of the community.

Who am I? I’m a married father of 3 living just outside of Minneapolis, MN USA, and when the kids aren’t keeping me busy, trying to learn how to contribute and help out with various projects, including Banshee, GNOME and Foresight Linux. I’ve been using Linux for just over 8 years, a number of various distributions over that time, but was primarily a Red Hat Linux user, and then an Ubuntu user for the last couple of years before making the switch to Foresight about a month ago. This month marks the two year anniversary of using Linux as my only operating system on all my computers.

I am also an active believer and supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Some of the current areas I’m targeting to help out with are documentation, including a Getting Started guide for users new to Foresight Linux; documenting the LiveCD release for both Foresight and GNOME; and helping out with marketing once that’s gets going. And who can forget submitting and triaging bugs!

This feed is my Linux RSS feed – if you want more ramblings on anything from copyright to sports to books and movies, feel free to visit my blog, which I probably need to update more often. You can also find me on IRC on Gimpnet and Freenode as “silwenae”, Mugshot, Flickr and del.icio.us. My handle / alias “silwenae” was a randomly generated name from an online roleplaying game that has stuck with me these last 7 or 8 years.

Thank you to the Foresight community for being so welcoming, and I look forward to helping out.

GNOME 2.18 – T minus 1 Day

We are now one day away from the GNOME 2.18 release! If you didn’t download and test GNOME 2.18 yet (as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), Phoronix has posted some GNOME 2.18 screenshots from the GNOME / Foresight 2.18 LiveCD for your viewing pleasure.

Take a look at some screenshots, and get ready for the release.

In related GNOME news, the newly revamped GNOME website won’t be ready for 2.18 – but give us a month and we’ll have it ready for GNOME 2.18.1.

T minus 2 Days

GNOME 2.18 is 2 days from release – have you taken it for a test drive yet? Thanks to Ken Vandine and Foresight Linux, there is now more than just one way to take GNOME 2.18 for a spin. VMWare images, QEMU / Parallels, name your virtualization way and there’s probably an image, in addition to a LiveCD.

Visit the downloads page and pick your way to test out GNOME. Links will be updated once 2.18 goes final. Take some LiveCDs to your next LUG meeting or installfest, and show off GNOME 2.18 powered by Foresight.

Simply Beautiful.

Banshee 0.12.0 Released

Banshee 0.12.0 was released yesterday. This marks the start of the stable branch. The last few releases have focused on usability and bug fixes, and active development including new features should now start in the unstable 0.13.0 branch.

Banshee is by far my favorite music manager for Linux, and is the default music manager for Foresight Linux. Developed using Mono with an active community, try it out today. From Banshee’s home page:

Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee’s simple, powerful interface.

Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported.

Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

Conary Packaging System

Linux.com has a good article up with an overview of the Conary packaging system, developed by rPath and in use by Foresight Linux. The article covers a high level overview, managing packages with Conary, and it’s future prospects.

Conary relies upon a repository that is also a source control system, complete with branches and diff-like files called changesets that identify differences between the available versions of a package. Where the leading package systems identify packages only by version number, each name in a Conary repository is a unique identifier that includes such information as a package’s location in the repository, the upstream version number, the source revision, the number of the binary build, and the specific hardware architecture for which it is intended.

That might sound like a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, but what I’ve taken away from my brief time in the #foresight IRC channel on Freenode, is Conary is really about updating packages based on the new file changes – not having to compile from source the entire package to get to a binary, but just the changes needed to update that package or file.

Conary is the backbone behind rPath – and if you have an opportunity, poke around rPath and see how many different people are using it to create their own customized distributions and software deployment solutions (or as rPath calls them, appliances). From a NAS project to Foresight Linux to Wiki applications to LAMP, mail or VOIP servers, users, developers and companies are finding that rPath has made a toolset and packaging system to enable appliances everyone can use.

The article closes with a good summary, and a great shout out to Foresight Linux:

So far as rPath is concerned, Conary seems less an end in itself than a tool to help build the virtual appliances that are the company’s main business. Conary is used in rPath Linux, but because rPath Linux is primarily a tool that others can use to create customized distros, the best place to see Conary action is with one of the distributions built using rPath Linux and rBuilder Online, rPath’s tool that distros can use to manage the production of their versions. Of these distributions, one of the most advanced is Foresight, which specializes in providing bleeding-edge versions of GNOME.

New GNOME Journal, March 4th 2007

A new edition of the GNOME Journal is out now. Articles include a newcomer’s look at using the GTK+ toolkit; an overview of the Tango Project interview two of it’s most high profile contributors; and a look a company based on open source software, Fluendo.

There is also a letter from the editor, Jim Hodapp, inviting all of us who use GNOME to contribute articles.

I think I’ll start planning a contribution myself. With this month’s release of GNOME 2.18, the timing couldn’t be better.