Playing with Foresight Linux

I’ve started using Foresight Linux in my newly-resurrected Toshiba laptop with very good results. The very clean and unadulterated GNOME desktop, along with the new Conary software management tool were enough reasons to try it out and I could say its something I would use for a long time.

I’ve yet to dive deep into Conary, but it seems to be at par with APT in terms of simplicity and management, but this is only one part of rPath’s strategy in delivering software appliances via rPath Linux, in which Foresight is one of those projects that sprang out of rBuilder. For users more familiar with managing Debian packages, the Foresight Linux wiki has a good page entry that shows equivalent APT and dpkg commands in Conary.

Since one of the primary goals of Foresight is to showcase the latest and greatest that is Gnome, its no wonder that Foresight has become the choice for the Gnome Live CD. It currently runs Gnome 2.18 and there are already plans on releasing a new image to have Gnome 2.18.1 along with development snapshots for Gnome 2.19.

Installation of Foresight is a snap, thanks to the Anaconda installer. Red Hat and CentOS users should feel home. It could have been much better if the release notes were actually readable in Anaconda, but checking from the DVD, it didn’t include one. After 30 minutes, Foresight was ready to go. I checked how big was the default installation and it went around 3.4GB, but I had everything I needed to have a functional Linux desktop. Some notable applications that ran on default were:

1. Beagle
2. Banshee
3. Network Manager (which works great with Intel ProWireless)
4. Last-Exit
5. Brasero
6. Avahi
7. Hal – very new!
8. AbiWord and Gnumeric
9. Conary
10. Gnome Compiz Applet

For most users, the default desktop installation works, but installing new applications would be a problem for those not familiar with mucking up with the command line, much less with Conary, which is relatively new. The nice thing about it though, is that its well documented and the Foresight Linux wiki has loads of documentation included. There is a web-enabled tool called Foresight System Manager, but I haven’t gotten into using it because I am focusing on learning Conary first. Perhaps in another blog entry, I can write about this.

Since this Toshiba laptop has Nvidia graphics (pretty damn good one too), I’m setting it up for 3D. It’s nice to know that there is a wealth of user documentation available about this as well.

Am I switching? Not really…I just wanted to know what’s out there…but Foresight does have potential…and the green hues of Foresight on Clearlooks is refreshing to the eyes.