DVD authoring application with also Theora slideshow creation capabilities.
It’s still in heavy development, but you can still find it usefull. So install it from terminal:
sudo conary update mistelix –install-label foresight.rpath.org@fl:-devel
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mistelix
02/07/09 by:
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Council Meeting Minutes 2009-06-26
29/06/09 by:
Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.
Agenda:
- Announcements
- Proposed members/developers
- Proposed Topics
- Membership renewals
- Toolchain update
- FITS and workflow
- Tasks and roles
- Reschedule Council meetings
- Set up ISO mirrors
- Empathy vs Pidgin
- Infrastructure overview
- Next weeks agenda
Announcements:
- (Og Maciel) pscott has fixed the web frontend for our Mercurial repositories which can now be accessed via hg.foresightlinux.org as well as the secondary www.foresightlinux.org/hg address.
- pscott noted that he is keeping an eye out for 404 errors in the logs. - (Og Maciel) Hostmasks for all approved developers and members have been created.
- (Og Maciel) The new website based on Word Press is now published! I stumbled on a few permission issues initially due to the fact that (apparently) pages created by an admin cannot be edited by anyone else. I ended up creating an editor role account for me and assigned all but one existing pages to this user. I have created editor and admin accounts for the following users:
- Admins: OgMaciel, doniphon, pcutler and pscott
- Editors: afranke, ermo and TForsman
Everyone is encouraged to lend a hand with getting the new site vetted
- (Og Maciel) Minutes for last week’s Council meeting were published to the new web site as a blog post instead of placed in the wiki. This is the first time we do it this way and I’d be very interested in what people thing. I feel that people can send their comments or any corrections as a comment and we can edit. Also, as only people with accounts in the web site can edit posts, it will help us mantain the validity of official announcements.
- (Og Maciel) The process of getting the new web site up and running involved the migration (as in conary migrate) of the existing server to the Lamp Appliance repository, all blessed by doniphon who was around to advise me.
- Og Maciel had to setup MySQL with a password for the root user, which he will make available to the council later.
Proposed Topics:
- Membership renewals (TForsman)
- TForsman renewed as developer by quorum. (pcutler, doniphon, OgMaciel)
- (OgMaciel) Don’t we need a paragraph on renewal on either of:
http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Home
http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Becoming+a+Member
http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/community/Becoming+a+Developer - Links from website to wiki on membership needs to be checked
- The onus is on the Council to send out membership expiration notices
- Any (well behaved
member/developer who re-applies on their own is automatically accepted?
- Toolchain progress (doniphon)
- doniphon was happy to report that the latest toolchain build completed with no errors.
- Testing of the new toolchain still remains.
- Discuss toolchain and in particular the issue of how to build the x86 flavour (sse vs. sse2 re. Athlon XP) on list – see FL-1437
- FITS and workflow
- Ongoing, draft by doniphon sent to pscott
- Recommend that a draft be circulated on the -devel list for transparency?
- Tasks and roles
- Not started yet. The Council will get this going.
- pscott and doniphon suggested that this meshes with FITS and workflow
- Reschedule meetings (MarkT)
- MarkT cannot attend Council meetings on Fridays, which is inconvenient considering that he is a member of the Council
- The Council will work on finding a more suitable time for the meeting
- Next meeting is tentatively scheduled for July 14th
- Set up ISO mirrors (Ken)
- The monkey was thrown around and no resolution was made
- This needs to be done, preferrably yesterday. Any takers?
- Empathy vs. Pidgin (Ken)
- Ken will announce it on -devel when he’s got Empathy ready for testing
- Infrastructure documentation (ermo, IT-83)
- ermo has documented MLs and examined DNS records. He will update http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/display/teams/Foresight+Infrastructure as appropriate
- Discussion deferred to next meeting
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Pydance
27/06/09 by:
Site: http://icculus.org/pyddr/index.php
Pydance is fun dancing game for experience asian dance beat! Showing friends your hot move with big score!
Highly configurable, colorful animated arrow motion, limitless numbers of dance steps, 1 or 2 players, professionally written music, laughter provoking sound effects, and yes, even graphical transitions.
It depends on pydance-music, so the installation from terminal will be slightly different. Open Terminal and write:
sudo conary update {pydance,pydance-music}=@fl:2-devel
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gecko-mediaplayer
26/06/09 by:
Homepage: http://kdekorte.googlepages.com/gecko-mediaplayer
Gecko Media Player is a browser plugin that uses GNOME MPlayer to play media in a browser. It should work with all browsers on Unix-ish systems(Linux, BSD, Solaris) and use the NS4 API (Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, etc.).
To test it out, open Terminal and write:
sudo conary update gecko-mediaplayer=@fl:2-devel
Maybe you need to uninstall current browser plugin for your browser, or change in settings in your browser to use Gecko Media Player.
All comments about how/if it works are welcome.
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Aqualung – Music Player
20/06/09 by:
Aqualung is an advanced music player. It plays audio CDs, internet radio streams and podcasts as well as soundfiles in just about any audio format and has the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.
To install it, open Terminal and write:
sudo conary update aqualung=@fl:2-devel
At this moment, it doesnt got a menu entry. But will be added as soon as possible.
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Council Meeting Minutes 2009-06-19
20/06/09 by:
Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.
Topic: Future foresight version
- doniphon is not yet ready to announce 3.x – the ideas for workflow and creation of herds/teams for redundancy and parallel development need more time to coalesce. For now, the ball is in doniphon’s court.
- doniphon is still wrestling with the new gcc-4.4.0. It crossbuilds (x86 -> x86_64 and x86_64 -> x86) but it does not build ‘natively’ (x86 -> x86 or x86_64 -> x86_64).
- If anyone wants to try their hand at fixing the toolchain, they can get in touch with doniphon, who mentioned that the new toolchain is in a (non-public) repo at http://www.rpath.org/web/project/foreplay/. Access and rMake contexts will be granted to anyone willing to actually try to build and understand it. Recipes are well commented for a change.
Topic: Current Foresight version (2.1.x series)
- doniphon proposed that we focus on feature freeze and testing packages for the 2.1.2 release.
- doniphon needs volunteers to help clean up old/dead/broken packages and cross reference with groups so that packages move to -qa properly.
- Og Maciel and doniphon will work on a plan for how to cut this and announce sprints as appropriate.
- doniphon added that we should do our best to support current users, but that main efforts should go into enriching the developer base. This in particular includes developing documentation, so that new developers can jump in and get started in relatively short order.
Topic: Promote WP site to official site location
- It was agreed to promote the new WP site to the official site location. Og Maciel will handle this.
- The council will have admin rights to the site.
- Og Maciel volunteered to be editor and pcutler will assist him as time permits.
- ermo, afranke, TForsman and perhaps Stephanie ’stef’ Watson (we need to ask her) will help move content over.
Topic: Need to update Confluence
- Og Maciel talked to gxti in private about the benefits we will see by upgrading the Confluence wiki to a newer version and gxti will look at this over the weekend. We have two issues filed against the wiki – one by pcutler (IT-60) that involves a bug where pasting content drops the formatting and one (IT-77) where Confluence doesn’t handle Chinese characters.
- From the release notes alone, it appears that upgrading Confluence will both fix security issues, affect performance positively, improve the user experience and allow editing directly in OpenOffice via the office connector.
Topic: FITS system accounts and organization
- pscott, doniphon and ermo will work on this (IT-29). Additionally, ermo will be granted admin permissions in FITS.
- During the discussion, pcutler proposed a team lead type for QA work and that everyone should be responsible for triaging bugs. He also suggested regularly scheduled QA sessions. pscott mentioned that it could be helpful to have a group of users who had triage rights. Doniphon mentioned that he’d like to work on the group/workflow issue as well as it ties into his new workflow and metadata plans for 3.x.
- In particular, pcutler proposed that the above process should be given a fixed amount of time (on the order of 3-6 months) in terms of putting down a roadmap on how to grow the developer base of foresight.
- Og has talked to gxti in private, who has promised to look into updating JIRA (the FITS platform) to the newest version. ermo will help Og Maciel drive this.
Topic: Derive our Identity
- There was general consensus in the meeting that we need a little more time for this. pcutler suggested that we let it simmer on the ML for a little while yet, until around June 30th (setting a deadline primarily to drive it forward)
Topic: Who manages access to infrastructure?
- Currently, it’s been mostly the council (doniphon, ken, pcutler).
- Og Maciel would like to see a definition of roles – what is a member? A developer?
- doniphon would like to avoid too much red tape, but would still like to work on workflow tuning. It is clear that this needs some careful thought if on one hand we are to avoid bottlenecks and on the other avoid too many chefs in the kitchen.
- Discussion ensued, with pcutler noting that we need to figure out what we have, before we figure out what we want. He suggested that we need to document the infrastructure that Foresight currently has as well as who has access to it.
- ermo will drive the effort to document the current infrastructure. This will be documented in the open on the wiki to encourage accountability per doniphon’s sentiment.
- pcutler, doniphon and Og Maciel will have a chat about how to define tasks and roles. It should be noted that this ties into the FITS workflow issue discussed above. It will also be discussed who can grant access to resources.
Topic: Who do you talk to about getting issues on the council agenda?
- Current practice is for Og Maciel or Paul to send out an announcement on the ML and have a wiki page with the agenda and time+date for meeting.
Topic: Deferred agenda points
- The deferred agenda points from last weeks meeting primarily concern workflow improvements, which are adressed implicitly above.
- TForsman will drive a cleanup of current/retired Foresight developers and present his findings next week.
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Pidgin-musictracker
20/06/09 by:
pidgin-musictracker is a plugin for Pidgin which displays the media currently playing in the status message for any protocol Pidgin supports custom statuses on.
To install it, open Terminal and write:
sudo conary update pidgin-musictracker=@fl:2-devel
Will be in all repo as soon it gets promoted.
it supports:Amarok, Audacious†, Banshee, Exaile, Last.fm feed, Listen, MOC, MPD, Quod Libet, Rhythmbox, Songbird + DBusBird, SqueezeCenter, Vagalume, XMMS†, XMMS2 >=0.6
plus any player supporting the MPRIS DBus interface (Amarok2, BMPx, dragonplayer, QMMP >=0.3, VLC >0.9.0, etc.)Also you can have custom music lines for each account you got for msn, jabber and so on….
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Council Meeting Agenda 2009-06-19
19/06/09 by:
Topics to be discussed during the Council Meeting for June 19th, 2009.
Location: #foresight-council
Time: 13:00 UTCAgenda:
- Announcements
- Last meeting overview
- Proposed topics
- Proposed members/developers
- Next Week’s Agenda
Announcements:
- New hostmaks (cloaks) have been created for all new members and developers. OgMaciel
- Paul and I had a nice chat yesterday via Skype and have agreed on several topics related to how to organize and steer the community. More to come. OgMaciel
Last meeting overview:
- New members and developers elected:
- Developer: eMBee, jesse, smerp
- Member: ermo
- Council changes:
- Og Maciel was elected as the new Community Manager
- Paul Cutler will remain as a member of the Council and work with Og Maciel for a smoother transition and knowledge transfer
- Mark T has been elected as a member of the Council, bringing the total of members to 5
- The Council voted for moving the static website to the WP instance that Og Maciel set up, noting that we need something sooner rather than later, and as his theme looks good and that it will be simple to get going. Ken added that WP is on an upward trend, and that historically i18n has not been a forte of Foresight and hence not a requirement.
- Pending from last week:
- Foresight 2.1.x or 3.0?
- Who do you talk to about getting issues on the council agenda?
- Promoting packages – is using JIRA to notify Ken of packages ready for promotion a bottleneck?
- Tune JIRA workflow (sprint?)
- How do we organize Bug days/sprints/focus?
- Feature freeze – no new pkgs until the current ones are sane?
- Freshen up the infrastructure? (ermo is currently driving this)
- Close old and obsolete bugs! (sprint?)
- How do we instrument the development process?
- Create teams w/reduncancy?
Proposed topics:
- [Enter your topic here]:
- [Enter your brief description here] By [Enter your name here]
- Promote WP site to official site location
- Right now the word Press site and design are housed in a special VM that doniphon gave us. I’d like to propose that we immediately move the WP system to the same server where www.ForesightLinux.org is housed. I feel that when the WP system is up and running, we will be able to get more authors and editors to populate it and get it up to date. By OgMaciel
- Need to update Confluence
- ermo mentioned that gxti is in charge of updating our current Confluence system. I’d like to understand the reasoning behind this update. By OgMaciel
- FITS system accounts and organization
- Paul Cutler just made me an admin of our FITS system. I’d like to discuss how we want to handle the administration and organization of accounts and groups. For instance, during bug triage, who can effectively close an issue as representing the QA branch? By OgMaciel
- Derive our Identity
- This all started with my email to the list asking people to state what they thought about “who we are”. I feel that it is very important to determine who we are first and differentiate it from the other question, which is: “Who do we want to be?” The objective is to establish our identity and make it very clear to anyone who decides to join our community, as well as establish a base for future marketing campaigns. By OgMaciel
- Who manages access to infrastructure?
- How does a member/developer gain the trust necessary to be allowed access to infrastructure? By ermo
Proposed members/developers:
- [Enter your name here]:
- [Enter a short description of your involvement with the community and a link to a personal page]
Next Week’s Agenda:
- [Enter your topic here]:
- [Enter your brief description here] By [Enter your name here]
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Foresight 2.1.1 GNOME Edition Release Notes
15/05/09 by:
Foresight GNOME Edition is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date; a revolutionary package manager, Conary; the latest GNOME desktop environment and an innovative set of excellent, up to date software applications.We hope you enjoy using Foresight as much as we do. Because your desktop should be cool.Overview
- What’s new
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- GNOME 2.26.1
- Kernel 2.6.29
- Notification Area
- Xorg improvements
- Downloading and Installing
- Filing Issues and Bugs
- Getting Help
- Contribute to Foresight Linux
- More information
- Credits
- Testimonials
What’s new
Foresight 2.1.1, released May 6th, features the latest stable GNOME desktop, a new kernel, new notification area, and Xorg improvements.
GNOME 2.26
Foresight features the latest GNOME release, GNOME 2.26. GNOME 2.26 features improvements to file sharing, better support for multiple monitors and projectors, integration with fingerprint readers and many more updates. For more information, visit www.gnome.org.
Kernel 2.6.29
Foresight includes a new Linux kernel, 2.6.29.2, which add support for WiMAX, new wireless drivers such as Ralink rt2860/70, and other updates.
Notification Area
Foresight becomes one of the first distributions to include a revamped notification area, called notify-osd. Notifications are not only improved visually, but ntofiy-osd improves the way you interact with system notifications. A number of applications including Pidgin, Gwibber, Banshee and others support the new notification system.
Xorg Improvements
A revamped Xorg stack is included in Foresight 2.1.1. Users should find better support for video cards, monitors and Compiz. A special thanks to Antonio (aka doniphon) for all of his hard work in re-building Xorg.
Downloading and Installing
Foresight 2.1.1 GNOME Edition is available for download on one DVD at http://www.foresightlinux.org/gnome.html. A single CD, Foresight GNOME Lite, is available for download at http://www.foresightlinux.org/gnome-lite.html.
Reporting problems
Please report any issues or bugs you encounter while using Foresight 2.1.1. Foresight’s issue tracker, JIRA, is available at https://issues.foresightlinux.org.
Getting Help
Help is available in many forms, and you can choose what you’re most comfortable with.
IRC
Visit the Foresight IRC channel, #foresight on Freenode, and ask questions. We have one of the most friendly IRC channels you’ll come across with everyone from users to developers reaching out to help answer questions.
Forums
Our forums continue to grow, and are a good source of information to check if a specific problem or question has come up before.
Wiki
Documentation on the wiki is growing on a daily basis, with updates often to the Frequently Asked Questions and other how-to’s to get you going with Foresight Linux.
Mailing Lists
General List: Subscribe or view archives at http://lists.rpath.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-distro
Contribute to Foresight Linux
Foresight Linux has a vibrant and friendly community, ready to assist any level of user. Participation is also welcome and encouraged! There are several different ways to engage with the Foresight community:
- You can find us in #foresight on chat.freenode.net. Foresight users can click the X-Chat GNOME icon in Applications -> Internet menu to access IRC
- Contribute to the Foresight Wiki
- Package and maintain software. Visit the Developer Wiki at http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/DEV/Foresight+Linux+Development for more information
More Information
You can find more information about Foresight on our website at http://www.foresightlinux.org.
If you’re new to using Foresight, please check out the Getting Started with Foresight User Guide. Click on System -> User Guide. The User Guide contains information on installing software, adding MP3 and DVD support, and an overview of commonly used applications.
Ask live questions in IRC on the Freenode network in the #foresight channel.
Subscribe to the Foresight Linux Newsletter in your feed reader, such as Liferea, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter.
Credits
Thanks to Ken VanDine, Antonio Meireles and all the developers and users who contributed to and helped test this release. A special thank you to the GNOME release team for the GNOME release notes, upon much of these release notes are based. Please file any bugs you find!
Thank you for using Foresight. Because your desktop should be cool.
Testimonials
On the day of release users were heard to include comments in Foresight’s IRC, including:
- “This release rocks my socks!”
- “I love the new notifications!”
Social Stuff