I’ll be giving a talk on Foresight at the end of July at a relatively new LUG in the Twin Cities, Penguins Unbound.

I’ve met a few Foresight users in IRC that live in the Twin Cities over the next year. I hope you’ll come out and we can meet in person. Hope to see you there!

More information is available here.

In last week’s Focus meeting, the Focus council approved three new members to Foresight:

• Jordan Keyes (jkeyes0)
• Lance Haig (lancehaig)
• Tomas Forsman (Zinden)

I’d like to welcome them as official members to the community, and add a few words:

• Jordan is a relatively new user to Foresight, and has been involved with packaging. In addition to Eric Lake, Jordan has also participated in Foresight advocacy with his local LUG in Kentucky.
• Lance Haig, a Bongo developer, got his start with Conary as the owner of the Bongo appliance on rBuilder. Lance has contributed packages to Foresight, notably virt-manager, a GUI for managing virtual machines with KVM.
• Tomas aka Zinden, has been an active member of Foresight’s community in IRC and the forums, and has been an active advocate of Foresight in Sweden in helping Foresight gain new users, helping those users and managing a Swedish Foresight website.

What does it take to become an official Foresight member? Visit the wiki page for more, but we’re looking for contributors who have sustained participation within Foresight for a few months, whether it’s packaging, documentation, marketing or more. Benefits include a customized hostmask on Freenode IRC, @foresightlinux.org email address, and having your blog syndicated on Planet Foresight. But best of all, it’s about the recognition of having helped Foresight and it’s community.

Think you have what it takes? Apply here, and make sure your personal wiki page on the Foresight wiki is updated with a list of your contributions and what you would like to accomplish in the future.

Once you’re a member, you can apply to be a developer, and eventually gain commit access to the Foresight repositories.

I’ve kicked off a conversation on the Foresight development mailing list today to talk about Quality Assurance.

At a high level, the question is what is the processes we need to put in place for testing to provide user’s with the best, most stable Linux OS?

Our focus continues to remain on the user experience. That phrase can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at the core, it remains about being a desktop experience that “just works”. Users shouldn’t have to worry about updates breaking their system - ever.

The key to that is the beauty of Conary, and it’s ability to manage updates and dependencies for our users. Conary also lets us differentiate Foresight through rolling releases - we can update packages on the fly so users don’t have to wait on a 6 month release cycle. But that also means we have to have the ability to test Foresight, including new packages and the underlying infrastructure, before those updates are pushed to our users.

Do you have thoughts on how it should work? Want to get involved and help define that process or be a part of the QA team? Join the development mailing list and contribute to the discussion. Or join the QA team and test the latest and greatest version of Foresight.

More to come on how the QA process will work!

If you have 10 minutes during the day, and need a pick me up, I highly recommend browsing through Storm Troopin’, a Flickr set of Stormtrooper poses with commentary.

It’s guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

With Google’s announcement this morning of Google Gadgets being available for Linux, Ken wasted no time in adding it to the QA branch tonight.

To install: sudo conary update google-gadgets (assuming you’re running the QA version of Foresight). If you’re running the standard version: sudo conary udpate google-gadgets=@fl:2-qa

Google Gadgets is meant to be run during an active session, so you won’t see a menu entry for them. Use GNOME-DO or Alt-F2 to run them, and type ggl-gtk, or add it to your sessions to automatically start on login in System -> Preferences -> Sessions (also by adding ggl-gtk).

Google Gadgets are the gadgets, such as stock quotes, clocks, calculators and more that are available on your iGoogle webpage, or desktop gadgets that Windows users can use, similar to widgets on a Mac OS X desktop, or similar in Vista.

They’re fun, but I don’t know if I’d keep them. When running, you’ll see the Google Gadgets icon in your panel (it’s the icon on the far left side):

Just browsing through fairly quickly, I added some to my desktop to take a screenshot (click through to Flickr for bigger sizes):

Running, left to right by row:

Row 1: Weather, Election News, Amazon Search, Youtube Search
Row 2: (Don’t remember)
Row 3: NASA Image of the Day, ESPN News, XBox Live Gamertag, Clock
Row 4: CPU Usage, Stock Ticker, Google Calendar

There are literally hundreds of different gadgets to choose from, including dozens of clocks, many different kinds of news tickers, and even games you can add right to your desktop, such as Pacman, Tetris or Bejeweled.

Thanks to Ken for quickly packaging. Eye candy is always fun.

The Foresight Packaging Contest wrapped up last weekend, and the contest participants added almost 150 packages!

Now it’s time to test ‘em! The packages live in the participant’s personal repositories, and we need to install them, make sure they work, have a menu entry, and then review which ones should be cloned to the Foresight repositories. We also will have some of the developers reviewing the recipes as well. Once we get this done, and we can start declaring some winners, and better yet, giving out some prizes!

We need help! Stop by on Freenode IRC in #foresight or #foresight-qa and look for me (pcutler) kenvandine, or pscott and lend a hand tomorrow, Wednesday, June 4th.

You might just find the next cool piece of software that you didn’t know was out there.

The Foresight Council, aka Focus, which holds bi-weekly meetings on Fridays, is opening the meetings to all community members! This topic was discussed at yesterday’s Focus meeting, and all three council members were unanimous in supporting it.

Get a peek of what’s going on inside Foresight, from current development, future development, sub-teams goings on, and community updates.

Here are the meeting notes from yesterday’s meeting, and we’ll see you in #foresight-council on Freenode IRC at our next meeting on June 6th at 9 a.m. EST. For more information on the Foresight Council, see the Focus homepage on the Foresight wiki.

I updated my Linksys WRT-54GS (1.0) to dd-wrt last night, replacing Linksys’ firmware with the latest dd-wrt release, DD-WRT v24 (05/20/08) mega.

What a great experience. The documentation is complete, and has howto’s for all the different models that are compatible, and it was a snap following the step by step instructions.

I did a factory reset, uploaded the new firmware via Linksys’s web gui, another factory reset to load the firmware, and voila, open source firmware running on my Linksys router.

The admin pages for managing the router are well designed, in both layout and functionality. And the funtionality - wow! So much you can do, from QOS, SSH, to boosting the range, or enabling all kinds of WPA protection that weren’t available via Linkys’s firmware.

I’ve just started playing with it, but so far I’m very impressed. I welcome my new open-source dd-wrt masters.

Over the last week I’ve spent some time implementing the new wiki structure and content discussed at Foresight 20/20.

All the spaces have been consolidated into 6 major spaces (plus the newsletter):

• Community
• Development
• Documentation and Howtos
• FAQ
• Foresight 1.x
• Getting Involved

Content was moved around to the correct spaces. This has resulted in relative links need to be updated on some pages, and the wiki links now reflect the move to the new space, but this is minor in the scheme of things.

Some very old and outdated information, especially on pages that only had one or two sentences, was removed or consolidated into one page.

The major to-dos remaining include updating the Get Involved sub-team pages with team members and outstanding tasks where missing, moving some 1.4 development specific information in to the 1.x space, and the Community space in providing more information on current members, developers, and how to join. Additionally, I want the Community space to be transparent in to the workings of Foresight. I also need to add some missing Focus meeting minutes, and make sure I update that information more often as needed.

The beauty of a wiki is anyone can edit it - so jump in and help out!

The Foresight Forums continue to grow!

Recently added were a number of forums supporting International users, including Forums for Portuguese, French, Spanish and German users.

Thanks to the moderators of these forums, doniphon and Og Maciel, Stef, Zodman, and Mark__T respectively.

One of the easiest ways to contribute to Foresight is to jump on the Forums and help answer user questions.

See you there!

• The paradigm of the open organization « flors
  Quim Gil blogs about the requirements of running an open organization
  (tags: community)

Thanks to zdz for posting a comment on my T61 Lockups post.

He was absolutely right - it was an Intel / xorg driver issue causing the lockups.

A big shout out to doniphon for updating and testing Xorg at the 20/20 Conference last week. I’m running the latest Xorg on my T61, and the lock-ups are gone!

And I’m still loving the T61. Great Linux support, good form factor, and a great value. All I have left to do is figure out a bug with suspend.

One of the first sessions on Saturday was a discussion on defining the development process for Foresight. (Unfortunately this was a session I missed, but it sounded fairly technical anyway!)

Most developers have been committing packages to the 2-devel label (rather than :devel) and the decision was made to stick to 2-devel. Additionally, one big change is the concept of creating a new repository outside of Foresight for true development and big changes that are tested in this sandbox beore moving to fl:2-devel. In my opinion, this is a great idea, as it’s fairly easy for users to install packages from the 2-devel label. (Epiphany is a great example - right now in 2-devel it’s based on Webkit - a few users have encountered errors based on the Webkit dependencies needed). This should make it better for users, as the chance to break their desktop will diminish.

Labels for these new sandboxes will be based on the JIRA issues that define what the work being done is.

For more details, see the JIRA issue discussing the new development process.

• Lightbox 2
  A script to include images in a web page.
  (tags: webdesign)
• Penguins Unbound
  A new LUG in the Twin Cities (separate from the TCLUG)
  (tags: linux usergroup)

• What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris » Thoughts by Ted
  A few things Sun did wrong in trying to build the OpenSolaris community
  (tags: community)

One of Sunday’s sessions / hackfests, was a discussion on how to re-organize the wiki. As many wiki’s become over time, the Foresight wiki has many pages which are now out of date, especially due to the transition to Foresight 2.0.

One of the comments that was shared by Stef on Saturday as it related to documentation during the community session (more on that in another recap post), was the goal of each tool. Paraphrasing Stef, what I took away was:

• Foresight website: Permanent and official source of news and Foresight information
• IRC: Live help (especially to quick and easy questions)
• Foresight forums: More detailed help that can’t be done quickly in IRC, and user documentation such as tips and tricks and user generated help
• Foresight wiki: Knowledge base

Foresight uses Confluence for it’s wiki, which is quite powerful, but very different from MediaWiki, which many users are familiar with. Confluence uses the term “spaces” to divide different sections of the wiki. The landing page for the Foresight wiki lists the different spaces on the left, most recently edited pages on the upper right, and pages you follow (customizable by you) on the lower right hand side.

Today the landing page lists every space available. We agreed to display six spaces permanently on the landing page:

• Common Questions (FAQ)
• Using Foresight
• Get Involved
• Community
• Development
• Foresight 1.x

Common Questions
Common Questions will be the home to the FAQ, and other user generated information such as tips and tricks that migrates from the Forums to the wiki. The goal is to have a meeting / hackfest once a month to go through content that should migrate.

Using Foresight
Home to the User Guide, and other permanent documentation for users about using Foresight on a day to day basis.

Get Involved
One of the major changes to the wiki. Today there are spaces dedicated to Development, Docs, QA, etc. There is a lot of overlap that each of those spaces has information for the user, as well as how to join a specific sub-team. We will consolidate this information for the sub-teams in Get Involved, and the other spaces become reference material / knowledge base without cluttering it up between these two areas.

A second, important feature of Get Involved, is to document a list of tasks or ways to get involved. Derrick (aka Devnet) shared some great information in Saturday’s Community discussion around this. It’s easy to have users join a team, but to truly have them involved, you have to share with them the goals and tasks of what needs to be done.

Community
Here is the knowledge base for what the Foresight Community is about. Different than the Get Involved section, this space lists Community news and events, such as upcoming conferences, Focus meeting notes and upcoming meetings, and how to become an official Foresight member and developer.

Development
This space is for developer documentation, including how to set up a build environment, creating packages, or migrating to the QA environment. This space shares the Foresight roadmap.

Foresight 1.x
One of the most in-depth discussions was regarding what to do with all the content that is now considered out of date that relates to Foresight 1.x. We don’t want to just delete that content, both for users or developers, as a large part of our user base is probably still running Foresight 1.x. Here we will be migrating all the wiki content that relates to Foresight 1.x, and archive it. At some point in the (far) future we will have to make a decision on long we keep it, but for now it’s important to have this information available to users, but it does need to be separate from Foresight 2.0.

Other changes to the wiki include:

• Making other spaces that exist not display on the landing page, such as the Newsletter space
• Maintenance including removing dead links
• Deleting or consolidating information on older pages. (Our favorite example page of this is the Howto Save Energy page. We all got a good chuckle.)
• Applying tags to as many pages as possible to make it easy for users to find content.
• Updating older pages and creating pages that we need.

One thing I need to find is the Firefox searchlet devnet was talking about, to make it easy to search for content as well.

For a list of the full meeting notes (including pages marked for updating, deleting or creating), you can view the JIRA issue here. Thanks to everyone who attended the session, it was a great discussion with concrete next steps. Now it’s time to make it happen!

The Foresight 20/20 conference wrapped up today in Raleigh, North Carolina.

With 29 registered conference attendees, I would estimate 25 or 26 showed up over the course of two days, which is fantastic attendance. Conferences like these are not only great at building relationships as you finally meet people face to face you’ve spoken to forever in IRC, but also add an energy that only comes from being in the same room with your fellow project members.

Friday night was fairly informal as people arrived, all with different flight times. Most of the out of towners, including myself, had dinner at a Thai restaurant, then headed to the Flying Saucer in downtown Raleigh, just down the road from North Carolina State University. The Flying Saucer is a huge bar with a nice outdoor patio, and stocks over 100 different kinds of beer. You name it they probably have it (except for Pabst Blue Ribbon, which Ryan did try to order at one point). They also have a club you can join with a kiosk that helps you go on a journey of trying all the beers, with varying prizes the more you drink over time.

Saturday was the first day of the conference, and was kicked off by Ken VanDine giving his “State of the Vision” (his title!) address on the current state of Foresight, how we’re different, and where we’re headed. This was one of the few sessions actually recorded on a camcorder, so we’ll need to find a volunteer to edit and post the video. This was followed by Ken and Antonio sharing their goals for Foresight’s roadmap.

Saturday was the fairly structured day, with tracks including Community building, Development Process, Marketing, and QA Process. Each session was assigned a task in JIRA, and the meeting notes are available in JIRA. Over the next week, it’s my goal to write a post about each session, and recap what was discussed by project members.

Saturday evening we headed out for dinner as a large group, and back to the Flying Saucer for more beer.

Sunday was our unconference day, similar to a Barcamp. We kicked off the day with session recaps from Michael (Development Process), Paul Scott-Wilson (QA Process) and Kevin (Marketing). From there we quickly brainstormed what hackfests and sessions we’d like to see throughout the day, wrote them on a whiteboard and then each attendee put a tick mark next to the sessions he or she was interested in attending.

Over the course of the next week or so, it’s my goal to blog about the majority of the sessions and hackfests on Saturday and Sunday. These will include an overview of the session, goals, and action items to keep moving Foresight forward that were discussed. As mentioned above, each session was captured as an action item in JIRA, and I will link to the JIRA issue, and provide a recap.

Thanks again to everyone who came, the first Foresight 20/20 Conference was a blast, and I look forward to many more.

• A New User Guide to Linux Communities - Yet Another Linux Blog
  A great introduction to how Linux communities can work
  (tags: linux community)

• HOWTO/AudioDevices - BlueZ - Trac
  Get a Bluetooth headset working with PulseAudio
  (tags: linux hardware)

GNOME Do’s final project report has been released. GNOME Do was originally started as an academic project by a few students at the University of Pennsylvania.

I would like to direct you to page 13, where Foresight and Shuttle both receive mentions:

Our most recent release was 0.4.2., released on April 15, 2008. GNOME Do now has packages in every major GNU/Linux distribution, and is even installed by default in Foresight Linux and a few others. Shuttle, a boutique PC retailer, is now selling a line of loc-cost Linux PCs that have GNOME Do running on them by default.

Thank you to David and Douglass for all their hard work, and the mention!