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Foresight Desktop Linux

Submitted by kenvandine on Thu, 2005-03-10 06:54. GNOME
GNOME

Foresight Desktop Linux is a distribution which showcases some of the latest and greatest from GNOME. Some of the things that may not be mature enough for some of the other distros. Some of the more innovative things are included, like mono, beagle, f-spot, howl, and the latest hal. All of this plus some nice, clean default themes and artwork.

What's cool?
* GNOME -- Foresight comes with GNOME 2.10
* Mono -- Prepackaged Mono 1.1.4 and many mono apps; Beagle, f-spot, Tomboy, Monodevelop, etc...
* GNOME Office
* Howl
* Conary -- Foresight is built on the paradigm shifting conary package management system.
And more... try it, you'll like it..

Where to get it:
http://downloads.foresightlinux.com/

For a rather crude list of included packages and versions, check out the package list.

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Install takes ages

Submitted by eelco on Sun, 2005-03-13 12:18.

I'm installing Foresight as i write this. I was shocked to see '85 minutes left'. (Eighty-five!) It seems conary is taking its time to install a package.

Very interesting.

Submitted by mage.merlyn on Sat, 2005-03-12 04:49.

I consider myself fortunate to have a secondary 20 GB drive installed on my system. Ideal for checking new and interesting distros out, I'll certainly give this one a spin.

Clearlooks is certainly sexy. Howl, Conary, Beagle, Fspot are big drawcards, for me anyway:-).

With all due respects however to the Abiword, and Gnumeric people, (both are my apps of choice for their respective purposes), but "Gnome Office", can hardly be considered a true office suite, for example it lacks a presentation application.

What no KDE winners yet!! by Anonymous George
> KDE winnersLOL!Gnome by Anonymous George
KDE vs. Gnome by Anonymous George
KDE vs. Gnome by Anonymous George
not to mention by Anonymous George
what's about it? by Anonymous George

Who's behind it

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-03-11 09:55.

There are a few big names behind it...Erik Troan, basically the lead engineer of RPM and lots of other Red Hat pieces. He's started a company with Michael K. Johnson (who's used Linux since 0.02, and the former leader of the Fedora Project), and Matt Wilson, a long-time former engineer at Red Hat, and also a GNOME developer.

Basically it's not a big mess because of the way Conary respositories work. They're actually connected--Foresight's software repository is loosely connected to its parent distribution, Specifix Linux, and automaticall yreceives any patches and updates to the base operating system, while preserving Ken's changes to Foresight-specific packages.

It's a very neat system, a big leap forward from RPM/yum or dpkg/Apt-based systems. Basically, the repository system is designed and built as part of the package management system, instead of having two separate systems trying to work together. It solves a lot of problems like having to encode version numbers into package names (gstreamer08 version 0.8, for instance), epochs, and vendor-specific tags in version strings (libwnck16-ubuntu1). All of those bits are solved using conary's versioning and branching structure.

Some reading material:

Short white paper
Long (more technically-oriented) white paper

Where are the screenshots?

Submitted by waf on Fri, 2005-03-11 09:17.

They say it's supposed to look nice with clean default themes and artwork, yet there are no screenshots on the website.

Clearlooks theme

Submitted by kenvandine on Fri, 2005-03-11 09:31.

FDL includes the Clearlooks them, and uses it by default. Very nice theme, I hope it becomes the GNOME standard. There will be screenshots up soon.

Seconded

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-03-11 14:32.

Just in case anyone who really matters when it comes to decisions is watching, Clearlooks is absolutely gorgeous. I'd love to see it become default.

Clearlooks

Submitted by l___ on Fri, 2005-03-11 20:30.

Everything is "clear" and nice about the theme except the grab bar, at the left side of toolbars. It's not as subtle as the rest of the theme.

Clearlooks grab bars by Anonymous George
It might not be as clean as s by Anonymous George

Oh, it's clearlooks? That's a

Submitted by waf on Fri, 2005-03-11 09:35.

Oh, it's clearlooks? That's awesome, it's the GTK Theme I use, though I can't stand the metacity theme it includes, so I use bluecurve's metacity theme.

Is there a new icon set?

Well I'm a Foresight Linux an by Anonymous George