foresight linux users

[snarkout]

I am listening to the foresight interview right now, and am even more intrigued than I was when i heard the rpath interview last year - especially with with conary. I am KDE to the bone, though, and simply have no interest in running gnome. How difficult is it to install kde on foresight right now? Is it fairly painless, or would I just be better off waiting for the 2.0 release where, hopefully, there will be choices for more than a single desktop?

[mowestusa]

I am listening to the foresight interview right now, and am even more intrigued than I was when i heard the rpath interview last year - especially with with conary. I am KDE to the bone, though, and simply have no interest in running gnome. How difficult is it to install kde on foresight right now? Is it fairly painless, or would I just be better off waiting for the 2.0 release where, hopefully, there will be choices for more than a single desktop?

Knowing some of your past posts on different topics, I would suggest that you wait for the 2.0 version which is already in Alpha development, and they have been making good progress. If you want a really positive KDE experience, I would wait. They plan to give you a fully integrated and branded version of KDE (meaning the background and links to Foresight help will all be there).

I don't mind running Gnome, and the latest 2.20 is great. Epiphany is wonderful as well. Conary is incredible as well, with the "rollback" feature. This gives you the chance to easily undo an upgrade.

If you want to learn Conary and don't mind alpha and beta level software, go to the foresight channel on IRC and ask for the link to download the alpha KDE version.

Take care.

[snarkout]

Cool - I might just do that, though my irc skillz=0.

[mowestusa]

Cool - I might just do that, though my irc skillz=0.

That's funny, because as long as I have been using computers I still have never gotten into IRC, which shows.
- I don't know what those text messaging things mean half the time
- I have trouble figuring out what to put as server information, and channel information in the different irc clients.
- I also don't know how to talk in the irc shorthand that is used.

So I can relate, but they have been really cool to me in the irc channel. Here are the links that I got.

x86_64: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/f ... d?id=13207

x86: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/f ... d?id=13206

Notice one for 64bit and one for straight 36. Remember this is very alpha, and is not guarenteed to work. So do get to frustrated if it fails to install or fails to work after a conary updateall.

Let me know what you think, and how it goes during this testing.

[snarkout]

I guess I must really come of as a bitchy asshat. I have no problem with alpha software, and believe it or not I don't usually get very upset with non-fatal breakage when it comes from upstream, or whatever. Regression for no reason whatsoever does bug me though. When I'm running alpha or rc or whatever, I'm not surprised by breakage.

[mowestusa]

I guess I must really come of as a bitchy asshat. I have no problem with alpha software, and believe it or not I don't usually get very upset with non-fatal breakage when it comes from upstream, or whatever. Regression for no reason whatsoever does bug me though. When I'm running alpha or rc or whatever, I'm not surprised by breakage.

With your experience, and your love and experience with KDE especially, you could be a great help to the Foresight devs. They really want to produce a wonderful, stable, yet cutting edge distro. Personally, I believe that they have accomplished this with Foresight Gnome Edition. Now they want to do the same with KDE and XFCE. By issuing bug reports about the KDE version you could help make that edition just as great as the Gnome edition.

With the Gnome Edition, I'm running it as the family os which everyone uses, and I have had zero breakage after update (which are rolling, so once you install, never have to reinstall ever 6 months like other distros recommend after their releases.) The one time I did have breakage was not the fault of Foresight, but a bug in the maintainance version of Gnome (always have the latest Gnome means you always have the latest bugs too). I did a "sudo conary rollback 1" which is like an undo for the update process. Back at a fully working Gnome desktop in no time. Waited a couple of days, the bug was closed and then did an update, and no issues at all. Since then I have updated weekly for over 2 months without issue.

It is really something to have the latest Gnome and other programs, but a nice stable base with even an undo for bad upgrades.

The area where Foresight lacks is the lack of package selection. This is changing quickly though. However, when compared to Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu there are not lots of extra packages, but compared to Slackware, DSL, Puppy, or Wolvix, or others they are not doing half bad. When you consider that you can install from other rbuilder projects then you do have a good number of packages to choose from.

Have fun with the alpha release. If you can hop onto the IRC or post bug reports to let them know of problems.

[snarkout]

Cool - I am very excited by what I've read/heard about conary, and if it's really as easy to build packages as they say, I'm excited about that, too. While basically nothing is easier than checkinstall, Arch's MAKEPKG is a system I do like a lot - if it's anywhere near as easy to build packages for foresight, that will be a major plus IMO.

[snarkout]

Oh, yeah, and rolling release rocks.

[mowestusa]

Cool - I am very excited by what I've read/heard about conary, and if it's really as easy to build packages as they say, I'm excited about that, too. While basically nothing is easier than checkinstall, Arch's MAKEPKG is a system I do like a lot - if it's anywhere near as easy to build packages for foresight, that will be a major plus IMO.

This would be great if you became one of the package creators. They would love to have more package maintainers. I personally, have not learned the methods for building packages, but my understanding is that it is not any more difficult than the three step compile steps in Linux. In fact, they recommend that if you are going to compiles any apps to learn the package creation method, because you won't be adding much as far as effort is concerned.

Because of the major changes in 2.0, I know that if you want to build packages for the 2.0 version, but you are running 1.4.1 then you have to set up a build environment which is detailed in the wiki. However, I don't know if that applies if you are already running the alpha version, I would guess it doesn't.

Once again please give a report back on this thread of your experiences. I would love to hear how the 2.0 alpha KDE version is going. I might even consider doing an install of the XFCE version on an old laptop that I just got after Christmas, and helping out with that version. Although I will admit that I would like a lighter version than XFCE, like a Fluxbox version or even an Ion verson.

[snarkout]

First impressions:

Nice installer - very fast.

Nice splash screen - I dig the eye of Ra theme.

Boots very quickly - I didn't time it or do bootchart or anything like that, but it seems to boot as fast as arch. I haven't investigated much beyond verifying they use sysv and runlevels, but am wondering what sort of mojo they are using to get such fast boots.

Conary is kind of confusing. Obviously, I have a lot of jargon to learn, but it could use some help in the "obviousness" department. I find myself having to hit google a lot since I can't figure out what I need to do with man.

Conary is slow. This actually doesn't bother me - yum never bothered me, for instance - but it would be nice if they added some sort of progress indicator to it so you weren't just staring at "Preparing changeset request..." or whatever, wondering when it's actually going to "do something." Obviously, I understand things are happening - I verified this with tcpdump - but, again, it'd be nice to have more input (output?) from the app.

That's about it so far - I think most of the little issues I've run into so far are due to the alphaness rather than any shortcoming.

[mowestusa]

First impressions:

Nice installer - very fast.

Nice splash screen - I dig the eye of Ra theme.

Boots very quickly -

Conary is slow. This actually doesn't bother me - yum never bothered me, for instance - but it would be nice if they added some sort of progress indicator to it so you weren't just staring at "Preparing changeset request..." or whatever, wondering when it's actually going to "do something." Obviously, I understand things are happening - I verified this with tcpdump - but, again, it'd be nice to have more input (output?) from the app.

This is great news. You have noticed some of the things that they have been working hard on. They really do want a fast boot, and the fast install is something they have just developed for the 2.0 version.

You might see significant speed improvements as Conary runs. The first time it does an update, it is slow and can take several minutes, however the updates after that should be significantly faster.

Your comments about the progress bar and things are good ideas. I know that they are working hard on the GUI package kit as the front end to conary, but a better CLI experience is always a great thing in my opinion too.

I didn't know that they had the theme integrated with the alpha build of the KDE version, I thought this was something they were still working on. I have to admit that I love the look and polish of Foresight. Their logo beats all others hands down, although a close second is the Wolvix wolf howling at the full moon. That's cool too, but I don't think they have that plastered everywhere like Foresight does with theirs.

Thanks for the update.

[snarkout]

The only place I've seen the Eye is on the bootsplash - the rest of it, so far, is completely vanilla KDE.

Quick question you might know the answer to - how do you install packcages labled in the output of "conary rq" as packagename:source? I've tried installing a few of these, and conary does it's initial thing, and then bombs out with a message saying that I cannot install source packages. I'm guessing this is at least in part because gcc is what seems to be a broken state (there *is* no gcc executable, and all the gcc packages installed are listed as "~!non-core" or something like that), but figured I'd run it by you.

[mowestusa]

The only place I've seen the Eye is on the bootsplash - the rest of it, so far, is completely vanilla KDE.

Quick question you might know the answer to - how do you install packcages labled in the output of "conary rq" as packagename:source? I've tried installing a few of these, and conary does it's initial thing, and then bombs out with a message saying that I cannot install source packages. I'm guessing this is at least in part because gcc is what seems to be a broken state (there *is* no gcc executable, and all the gcc packages installed are listed as "~!non-core" or something like that), but figured I'd run it by you.

I would imagine that you would have to install the devel-group first, which I have not done. gcc and the other compile tools are in the devel-group.

[snarkout]

Yeah, that kicked out a ton of errors about broken deps, though - I'm gonna give it a few days and try again.

[snarkout]

Well, the KDE pre-alpha is definitely pre-alpha currently. I can't keep my system together long enough for it to be very interesting at this point, so I'm going to wait for the official KDE alpha release to mess with it again. However, 1.4.1 appears to have all of KDE and some of the more popular qt apps in the basic repo, so I'm going to work on getting a KDE system built using 1.4.1. I'll see where I end up after that.