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Foresight Linux 64 v2.5.2 (Xfce)

V.T. Eric Layton

By V.T. Eric Layton
in Bruno's All Things Linux

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V.T. Eric Layton

V.T. Eric Layton

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Tomas,

 

I have a working installation of Foresight on my system now... FINALLY! :) Installation went well. Give me some time to play around and then I'll write that review on my blog that I've been promising for so long. :)

 

Off I go...

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V.T. Eric Layton

V.T. Eric Layton

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I won't have time today to play with it, but maybe tomorrow for a bit. I already customized my Xfce the way I like it. I'll do the updates with conary and make a few other changes here and there, then I should be about ready to write the article.

 

Stay tuned...

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tforsman

tforsman

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Tomas, the links in your signature here need to be updated, I think. They're not working. :(

 

I know, im rewriting my homepage to be easier to maintain. Will work again later tonight. Just figuring out what to use.

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securitybreach

securitybreach

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I am downloading Foresight-2.5.2+2011.12.12-x86_64-dvd1.iso (Gnome) right now and I am going to install it on an extra partition(20gb) to check it out.

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V.T. Eric Layton

V.T. Eric Layton

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As I stated in the reply to your comment on my article, you'll probably like Foresight. It's simple and efficient. Conary is a robust package management system, similar to Pacman. It's GREEN! I like it. ;)

 

By the way... don't you have a terabyte plus of drive space on that monster? You only have a spare 20Gig partition for testing? ;)

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securitybreach

securitybreach

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As I stated in the reply to your comment on my article, you'll probably like Foresight. It's simple and efficient. Conary is a robust package management system, similar to Pacman. It's GREEN! I like it. ;)

 

By the way... don't you have a terabyte plus of drive space on that monster? You only have a spare 20Gig partition for testing? ;)

Yeah I have 5.5tb in total but I have a lot of media and I mirror one terabyte to another one using rsync:

╔═ comhack@Cerberus 10:13 PM 
╚═══ ~-> df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           47G   13G   32G  29% /
/dev            7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /dev
/run            7.9G  380K  7.9G   1% /run
/dev/sda2        47G   13G   32G  29% /
shm             7.9G  1.4M  7.9G   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1       912G  675G  192G  78% /backup
/dev/sdb2         8G   20G   12G  40% /other
/dev/sda3       812G  504G  269G  66% /home
/dev/sdc1       1.9T  1.4T  423G  77% /MEDIA
/dev/sda1        69G   47G   22G  69% /windows
/dev/sdd1       812G  504G  269G  66% /mirror

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securitybreach

securitybreach

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Yup. So anyway...

 

How'd your Foresight installation go?

Well it went ok but I still need to make an entry in my Archlinux grub. It did not list the partition as an option to install grub on so I chose to not install grub. I tried to point my Archlinux grub to sdb2 but it would not boot. I have not messed with it since last night:

╔═ comhack@Cerberus 03:28 PM 
╚═══ ~-> su
Password: 
[root@Cerberus comhack]# cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
# Config file for GRUB - The GNU GRand Unified Bootloader
# /boot/grub/menu.lst

# DEVICE NAME CONVERSIONS 
#
#  Linux           Grub
# -------------------------
#  /dev/fd0        (fd0)
#  /dev/sda        (hd0)
#  /dev/sdb2       (hd1,1)
#  /dev/sda3       (hd0,2)
#

#  FRAMEBUFFER RESOLUTION SETTINGS
#     +-------------------------------------------------+
#          | 640x480    800x600    1024x768   1280x1024
#      ----+--------------------------------------------
#      256 | 0x301=769  0x303=771  0x305=773   0x307=775
#      32K | 0x310=784  0x313=787  0x316=790   0x319=793
#      64K | 0x311=785  0x314=788  0x317=791   0x31A=794
#      16M | 0x312=786  0x315=789  0x318=792   0x31B=795
#     +-------------------------------------------------+
#  for more details and different resolutions see
#  http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#Framebuffer_Resolution 

# general configuration:
timeout   5
default   0
color light-blue/black light-cyan/blue

# boot sections follow
# each is implicitly numbered from 0 in the order of appearance below
#
# TIP: If you want a 1024x768 framebuffer, add "vga=773" to your kernel line.
#
#-*

# (0) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/ede3bd20-4177-4bca-b6ae-40b00d79dfd2 ro nomodeset vga=0x346
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

# (1) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux Fallback
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/ede3bd20-4177-4bca-b6ae-40b00d79dfd2 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img

# (2) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux BootChart
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/ede3bd20-4177-4bca-b6ae-40b00d79dfd2 ro nomodeset vga=0x346 init=/sbin/bootchartd
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

# (3) Windows
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

# (4) Foresight
title Foresight
root (hd1,1)
chainloader +1
[root@Cerberus comhack]#

 

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V.T. Eric Layton

V.T. Eric Layton

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Your post V.T Eric Layton was pretty nice, most of the Foresight devs has been reading it. They liked it.

 

I didn't go into technical details about FL. That wasn't the idea. I wanted my readers to be exposed to the distribution in a way that might spark their curiosity. Many Slackware and Arch users read my blog. I think FL would appeal to them for the same reasons they like Slack and Arch... simplicity, stability, support community, etc.

 

I hope the article attracts some new users to Foresight. I've always been impressed with that distribution. I wasn't kidding. I really did have a v1.0 version on one of my systems back in '06. I was impressed with it then. It's even more impressive these days. Keep up the great work, Tomas.

 

Regards,

 

~Eric

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V.T. Eric Layton

V.T. Eric Layton

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Yo, Josh ol' boy...

 

You cannot chainload a distribution unless you installed its GRUB on its own / partition. You did not, so you do not even have a /boot/grub directory in your new Foresight installation. You need to direct load it with your Arch GRUB.

 

# Config file for GRUB - The GNU GRand Unified Bootloader
# /boot/grub/menu.lst
#
# general configuration:
#
timeout   5
default   0
#
# pretty colors:
#
# color light-blue/black light-cyan/blue
# color cyan/blue white/blue
color white/black blue/black
# color white/black white/cyan
# color white/black black/white
# color light-blue/black white/blue
#
#
# bootable operating systems follow:
#
# IMPORTANT --> arch GRUB sees hard drives as /dev/sda=hd0, /dev/sbd=hd2, /dev/sdc=hd1 ~vtel57-042011
#
# (1) Slackware64-13.37
title  slackware
root   (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.gz
#
# (2) Arch64
title  arch
root   (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img

# (3) MS Windows XP/SP3
title windows
root (hd2,0)
map (hd0) (hd2)
map (hd2) (hd0)
chainloader +1

# (4) CentOS64 5.6
title    centos (t1)
root    (hd2,5)
kernel    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-274.17.1.el5 root=/dev/sdb6 ro
initrd    /boot/initrd-2.6.18-274.17.1.el5.img

# (5) Debian64 6.0.3
title debian (t2)
root   (hd2,7)
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 root=/dev/sdb8
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64

# (6) Foresight64 2.5.2
title foresight (t3)
root  (hd2,9)
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.42.3-1-foresight.x86_64 root=/dev/sdb10
initrd  /boot/initrd-2.6.42.3-1-foresight.x86_64.img

# (7) Salix64 13.37
title salix (t4)
root (hd2,11)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-2.6.37.6 root=/dev/sdb12
initrd /boot/initrd.gz


# (8) Shutdown
title  --> 0 <--
halt

 

*See item #6 above.

 

You'll need to mount your FL /partition from Arch to list the contents of its /boot directory to determine the vmlinuz/initrd data needed to create your menu.lst entry in Arch.

 

Have fun! :)

 

Also, note... If I remember correctly, FL uses disk labels in fstab instead of /dev/sd* nomenclature. You might need to modify FL's fstab to correct this before attempting to boot.

 

Foresight modified fstab:

 

tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb10              /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
/dev/sdb11              /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
/dev/sdb5               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

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ichase

ichase

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Great blog Eric. This question can go to you or Tomas. How hard or how easy is it to run straight Openbox in Foresight? As I am not a fan of Gnome, KDE, or XFCE.

You definitely sparked my interest. I realize that I would have to download one of the 3 available .iso files with the aforementioned DEs. Is one easier or harder to convert to a straight Openbox desktop environment? I don't want to run Openbox with Gnome just straight Openbox like I do now with Arch.

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tforsman

tforsman

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i say xfce might be easier to change from xfce to openbox. But same drill in any iso you choose to only run openbox.

 

never tested though to only run openbox in a FL box, but possible offcourse. Starting to look what might needed to get all stuff into place.

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securitybreach

securitybreach

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Well I finally got it installed and running but I ran into a couple of problems along the way. To begin with, after the installation I could not get X to start. All I had was blue lines across my monitors. I figured this was an issue with the radeon drivers not being installed (ATI RadeonHD 6790), so I searched and found Tomas' tutorial on getting it installed:

http://forum.foresightlinux.org/index.php?topic=54.0

 

I followed his tutorial just fine but when I started installing the group-devel package, it took forever and there was a huge variation in download speeds for the packages. Some would download at 27k/s and others would download at 2167k/s. I know there are variations in the download speed based upon package size and such but on a 22mbps connection, that was a bit much. Anyway after installing all the packages, I have X up and running but I am getting massive screen tearing when moving windows between the monitors. I tried setting the option in the Catalyst Control Center to Tear Free but it is not keeping for some reason after rebooting.

 

Also, the installation did not ask for a root password nor did it tell me that the user password would be for sudo as well. I ended up using sudo su to set a root password and will remove sudo permissions in a bit.

 

Here is my xorg.conf and my amd settings if you have any ideas:

 

Xorg: http://pastebin.com/7VwV8w5f

 

amdpcsdb: http://pastebin.com/McQ2UGD5

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tforsman

tforsman

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when installed something. (like xfce, gnome)

Then open /etc/conary/system-model

 

edit the line: update group-gnome-dist (or group-xfce-dist) to be: group-desktop-common

That will wipe out xfce and only most common packages will be available.

 

search 'group-world=foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel/2.5.2+2012.02.06-0.1-3[is: x86]'
search 'group-world=foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel/2.5.2+2012.02.06-0.1-3[is: x86(i486,i586,i686,sse,sse2) x86_64]'
install group-gnome-dist-devel
install filezilla teamviewer wine thunderbird

 

i would change: group-gnome-dist-devel to be group-desktop-common.

 

run: sudo conary sync to make sure it syncs that file and do all the changes. you can even add right away: install openbox

in that file, and run sync. will be installed right away. Why not add gdm too, just in case...

if you do that, you dont need to run command beolw.

 

Also install: sudo conary install openbox

 

and im not sure if you need to install gdm for login window. maybe: sudo conary update gdm just in case :)

 

 

 

argh, darn....sorry, maybe got clutterly. (is that a word?) if I suck in explaining, take out the hand slap me and tell me again to explain :hysterical:

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tforsman

tforsman

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To begin with, after the installation I could not get X to start. All I had was blue lines across my monitors.

That's not good. from scratch there is no xorg, might be a issue about radeon drivers not starting as it should. Already forward the issue.

 

will get back as soon i tested ati here too. got a laptop with fglrx. need to see if its a issue here too.

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