HOT UPDATE! As you can see here (but no announcement!) and download from here, there is a hot (Dec. 14) Foresight 0.9.3!. It's not clear what's new and what changed, but I don't think I'll D/L and burn 900 MB w/o having a good reason...

P.S. (Dec. 16): Actually, 0.9.3 got announced and is supposed to fix the GRUB upon installation, maybe the Display config applet and it also has an updated Tango icon set.

Reading Ken's announcement on Foresight Linux 0.9.2 (released on Dec. 10) I thought this is the best chance to get used with a new GNOME-based distro, especially since Foresight 0.9.1 gave me a lot of trouble with xDSL connections, and I was just trying to fix'em.

Based on rPath (ex-Specifix) Linux and its known-by-nobody Conary package management system, Foresight seemed to be suited for curious people.

So, I've got the 2 ISOs from the Belgian mirror, and went on.

Foresight has a preference for "beagle, f-spot, howl, and the latest hal" which -- except for HAL -- looks so GNOME-ish!

Foresight 0.9.1	Foresight 0.9.2
kernel 2.6.12	kernel 2.6.14-3
GNOME 2.12.0 (Sept. 6, 2005)	GNOME 2.12.2 (Nov. 30, 2005)

— § —
0.9.1 had a very coarse granularity in the installer (anaconda): "Base: 448 MB, Everything: 2,448 MB".

Now, 0.9.2 comes with 14 categories (including laptop-tools)!
If you select all of them, you'll get: "Total: 2,046 MB".
If you select "Everything", you'll have 2,097 MB.
Funny thing, Everything is labeled as follows: "This group includes all the packages available. Note that there are substantially more packages than just the ones in all the other packages groups on this page." How about 51 MB being "substantially more"?

A first glitch: the installer is too slow. On my Celeron/850 laptop it uses a couple of minutes just to process the info on the packages (before displaying the list), and 4 minutes in "checking dependencies", even if I checked "Everything" (so nothing should have unsolved dependencies)!

After 100 minutes (0.9.1 took 95 minutes), from which 12 minutes spent in "running post-installation scripts", let's go reboot.

Knowing from 0.9.1 that installing GRUB in the MBR fails sometimes with Foresight, I tried to put it in the "First sector of boot partition" (worked in 0.9.1).

Nope: "Error 17" and frozen boot.

Back to CD #1, boot in rescue mode (linux rescue), get to the prompt, then
Now it works, with GRUB in the MBR.

— § —
The NEW Foresight 0.9.2:

The OLD Foresight 0.9.1:

0.9.2 still has the "click on the splash to make it go away" bug.

What's nice and new is the Tango icon theme (over Clearlooks). Not only the old icon theme "nuovoXT-1.5" was quite strange, but Tango is something I tend to add everywhere I can!

The Clearlooks theme was polished indeed to match the greenish Foresight look'n feel.

Notice the links on the desktop: Videos, Photos, Music, Documents. This "MEPIS-like" style is not what I'd like, even for a desktop box.

— § —
Now, a real bug. Exactly like in 0.9.1, the new 0.9.2 started in 800x600 pixels, this being the maximum resolution it knew about! If normally you should be able to go to Desktop -> Administration -> Display -> Configure -> Generic LCD Display, LCD Panel 1024x768, now the Display applet is just broken (it spits some Python error on stderr and dies).
I had to nano –w /etc/X11/xorg.conf (yes, it has nano!) and add to "Screen0" a new resolution of "1024x768".

— § —
Next bug, please. In 0.9.2, Conary GUI and Oversite are g-o-n-e!

The Administration Menu in 0.9.1 (left) and 0.9.2 (right):

You can only use /usr/bin/conary from the prompt.

— § —
Funny error when I open Disk Manager and one of the partitions is a Windows one:


(This also shows up in Ubuntu Breezy, it's about GNOME...)

— § —
Still annoying me (like in the previous version)...

• You don't have a "Run" menu entry! Nowhere. (Stick to CTRL+F2 for that one.)
• You don't have an "Open Terminal" entry added to the right-click (I don't care they have a "Search for files" one!).

— § —
The sound was incorrectly configured (also, like in the previous one...). The fix involved...

...selecting the right device (with OSS):

...enabling the sound server:

...and testing it (just to make sure):

— § —
Some good things in Foresight Linux:

• The Logical Volume Manager from RedHat (/usr/bin/system-config-lvm)
• The firewall:
       
• The Simple Backup Suite
• GNOME Simple Restore

— § —

The concept of "Office" in Foresight Linux is a little scarce:
Evolution + gnumeric + grisbi + AbiWord = Office.

Since 0.9.2 we also have Todo list (gToDo 0.14).

Some major changes over the previous version
Dropped software in 0.9.2:
— AppliWorks (was 0.3.99)
— Inkscape (was 0.42)
— Epiphany (was 1.6.4)
— GnomeMeeting
— GSynaptics -- it wasn't working anyway (xorg.conf used and still uses a PS/2 mouse driver for Synaptics! so, no scroll areas and no tapping unless you hack it):

— Bluefish Editor (was 1.0) and MonoDevelop (0.7) -- now, the "Programming" entries in the menu are: Bug Report Tool, Devhelp, Glade Interface Designer, Memory Profiler and... ViM! Where is the programming stuff, Ken?!
— GnomeBaker (was 0.4.2)
— Sudoku -- which didn't worked for me in 0.9.1, and I don't even know which sudoku was it anyway.

Evince is there (/usr/bin/evince), but it doesn't show up in the menu.

Now, not only there's no Epiphany on the Quick Launch, but it also crashes!


Added or upgraded software in 0.9.2:
— Firefox is 1.5
— AbiWord is 2.4.1
— GNUmeric is now 1.6.0 (was 1.4.3)
— Beagle went 0.1.3!

• The "Old" Beagle:
  
• The "New" Beagle:
  

NOTE: gnome-search-tool is still there.

Major switchback in 0.9.2:
In 0.9.1 you had tools for configuring the services and the network from RedHat (system-config-services, system-config-network, system-control-network). Now in 0.9.2, Foresight reverted to the original GNOME System Tools!

Network and services configuration in Foresight 0.9.1:


Network and services configuration in Foresight 0.9.2:


For this time only, I had to admit (even if I don't like Fedora!), that the tools from RedHat were better!

— § —
ADSL scripts still broken: no matter which graphical tools are used, Foresight Linux seems unable to configure a xDSL connection!

In 0.9.1, where adsl-setup is missing, trying to configure the ADSL like in Fedora was unsuccessful, with termination in:
Now in 0.9.2, where adsl-setup is kinda present...Configuring with the graphical tools is incomplete (or at least it's not working) if you need DHCP:(but it didn't worked, even if the private IP was got!)

— § —
More confusion... If you'll take a look into the Desktop -> Preferences menu, you'll see some changes:

Foresight 0.9.1:
    

Foresight 0.9.2:
    

What about "About Me" and "About Myself"? (I guess "About I" was too short to be added too.)
Dazzled? The first one is... like in Ubuntu Breezy, the second one is with info from /etc/passwd.

— § —
There are many, many changes from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2. Some of them suck, some are welcomed: Foresight now mounts USB Flash drives automatically (no need to add a fstab entry for /dev/sda1). Also, Nautilus doesn't default to Spatial anymore.

Please note that Totem and Banshee are vanilla: no wmv/avi/mov/mpg nor mp3 support in there! You might want to get vlc and/or MPlayer for restricted multimedia formats.

Conclusion: the best things in Foresight Linux 0.9.2 are

• its name
• it's GNOME (always the latest and greatest)
• it's Tango
• it's green!

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