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What's going on with Foresight Linux?


tforsman

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It's been very quite about Foresight Linux for some time now. So wanted to fill you guys in what's happening at the moment.

 

 

 

Foresight Linux 3 is under development

 

We will start with making Foresight being built on Fedora. The first releases will be built with normal fedora desktop version.

Then we will probably move forward to only use Fedora server as base and build everything on our own from there.

 

 

What will be different from using Fedora instead of Foresight?

 

First of all, we will have conary as package manager. Will in that way keep the simplicity of building own packages and create packages from various sources. We will still have system-model available, to easily see what you have installed besides from the default packages and easily to clone, migrate and so on.....

 

You will be probably never hit issues with dependencies, as conary will handle that. We won't only grab packages from fedora and add them in Foresight, we are rebuilding every single package to let conary investigate them and create deps and so on....

We also already found various bugs in Fedora that we reported upstream, so some Fedora devs are keeping a close eye on the progress as they are also interested in this.

 

 

here is an example:

 

 

System closure.

We use it from an "app dev's" perspective to close out the application at the system level rather

than just the application level. What I mean by that is, suppose I am

building an app like JIRA say. I can set up my maven builds to close

(resolve deps) for the application, but it will also have system deps like

graphviz, httpd, tomcat etc..

We use Conary (encapsulated for RHEL5/6) to extend this 'closure' by

building out an appliance around our applications.

 

I have not discovered any other tool that can do this 'deep dependency'

resolution by introspection. The ability of Conary to find what fulfills

#!, .so deps etc is really really powerful.

 

 

We can easily add/remove packages that we think fits in a desktop that Fedora don't ship as default. We can also change settings that should be on/off as default too.

 

So we are not sure you can call it a Fedora remix, as we will have conary to handle all packages and so on. As usually the package manager tells a user if he will use it or not :)

 

Anyway, this is what's happening at the moment.

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Great news Tomas! Hope Fedora works well for Foresight Linux.

 

We always used some bits from Fedora and rhel, so Foresight is a bit familiar with it already :)

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V.T. Eric Layton

WOW!

 

Foresight + Fedora = Foredorasight? Fedsight? Forasight? ;)

 

Seriously, though...

 

Why the move away from rPath, Tomas? I'm kinda' surprised about that. Also, Conary is an outstanding package manager, but converting all Fedora's repos to Conary compatible is a helluva job, I would think.

 

By the way, has there been any changes in your dev team along with this change to Fedora-based Foresight?

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WOW!

 

Foresight + Fedora = Foredorasight? Fedsight? Forasight? ;)

 

Seriously, though...

 

Why the move away from rPath, Tomas? I'm kinda' surprised about that. Also, Conary is an outstanding package manager, but converting all Fedora's repos to Conary compatible is a helluva job, I would think.

 

By the way, has there been any changes in your dev team along with this change to Fedora-based Foresight?

 

Love the name suggestions you came up with :thumbup:

 

We used to follow rhel for some time, and we feel that some packages don't update as fast you want it to update. Some packages makes it impossible to update other packages and so on....that list grows on and on and on... chain reactor :)

 

rPath was bought by sas. Then all of the rPath got discontinued and so on. Sas instead opened up the source code for conary, rmake and made it possible to get more involved and improve conary. Sas also provided more resources for Foresight and even gave us some ppl from sas to help out with foresight.

 

And you are right, it's a pain to convert all fedora packages for conary. We are building 169 groups. One group has 65000 packages, other groups are smaller.

 

We have already taken all packages into a foresight repository. all of them has been built. The problem at the moment is to get the groups sane and tell conary not to be too smart sometimes.

 

The best part is that we can grab updates from fedora and add them in foresight and ship them to users within minutes they were in fedora. We can offcourse maintain own packages too, so we don't have same settings/builds as fedora has. As we might have codecs and so on in some packages that fedora doesn't ship at all.

Also will be alot easier to always have latest packages available from time to time. And we only need one guy to run a command to get it :) So everything will be alot easier there too.

 

We found a bug from where we only build all packages with conary. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1060338 and then we haven't done anything yet. But conary picked it up. That is also why fedora devs are interested in this project too.

 

Nothing really changed in the team, just devs waiting for having to do something ;) As we can't do much until we got the groups done, then we can start modifiying, change, build own packages and so on. And Foresight will offcourse has it own packages built from source. And we will have the whole fedora repo available to grab and install from. We will probably have rpm fusion available too. I assume we will easily be able to grab any rpm package and add it in repo without any issues at all.

 

 

Been looking at other package manager to play around with in meantime i'm waiting for Foresight do be done, but hard to find something similar like conary though :(

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Guest LilBambi

Sounds pretty exciting thought Tomas! Good luck on it all!

 

Have to let us know when it's ready so we can play around with it. Will try to use it in Virtualbox under Debian 64-bit.

 

It will be available in 64-bit right?

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V.T. Eric Layton

Ah! Well, that explains that, then. Thanks, Tomas, for giving us a little insider news and thoughts about what you guys have going on with Foresight these days.

 

I can understand you moving away from the dormant rPath. Fedora is a good stable option (CentOS would have been another) for an .rpm based distro to base Foresight on. Since rPath was a RHEL downline distro, it's only natural that you stay in that family.

 

I imagine it will require some regular tweaking to keep Conary as the package manager for Foresight, but it might be worth it. If you just started using some YUM variant instead, Foresight would end up being a just a plain clone of Fedora. With Fedora packages on a Foresight platform using Conary, you'll have something unique.

 

I may have to d-load and install a tester of the new Foresight/Fedora on my shop system and see how it looks. Need x86_64, though, with Xfce (or LXDE) of course. ;)

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securitybreach

BTW I am very glad to see you posting again Tomas. I was actually thinking about you the other day when I suggested Foresight to someone. Keep up the great work my friend B).

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securitybreach

One thing I was confused about Foresight... has it always been based on Fedora as I remember it being based on a different distro?

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V.T. Eric Layton

No. Foresight was an offshoot of rPath Linux originally. The Fedora changeover is something happening right now... brand new... v3.x. :)

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securitybreach

No. Foresight was an offshoot of rPath Linux originally. The Fedora changeover is something happening right now... brand new... v3.x. :)

 

Yup that is what I thought....

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Guest LilBambi

From Wikipedia on rPath:

 

Platform Support

 

rPath provides system automation for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2003 as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and CentOS. The solution is also available on-premise, as a dedicated hosted solution, and SaaS.

 

and

 

Conary

 

rPath developed Conary, an open source software package management and configuration software that forms the core of rBuilder.[11] It allows rollbacks, incremental ("changeset") updates, and distributed downloading which removes the need for programs such as apt or yum.

 

So based on what you are saying the rPath allowed Foresight Linux to use RPM pkgs from RHEL?

 

But now Foresight Linux is using Conary (also developed by rPath) for handing RPM pkgs but from yum-based Fedora now instead of RHEL?

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So based on what you are saying the rPath allowed Foresight Linux to use RPM pkgs from RHEL?

 

But now Foresight Linux is using Conary (also developed by rPath) for handing RPM pkgs but from yum-based Fedora now instead of RHEL?

 

Foresight has always used conary as package manager. We used srpm packages from RHEL as base (few bits from source instead, some from fedora), now we will only use packages from fedora and from source instead.

 

So the big change is that we will have fedora packages from start, specially when Foresight 3 is out. The unique is that it will have conary that handles everything instead.

 

 

When Fedora server is out and rolling, we are planning to use that as a base and build everything else on our own. Nothing is really definitely yet. But that's some stuff we talked about and so on....

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V.T. Eric Layton

Ah! I knew that name looked familiar. Martin Bähr recently viewed my Profile at LinkedIn; probably due to comments I made on one of your postings there, Tomas. :yes:

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V.T. Eric Layton

Maybe he wants to hire me. It would be a very long commute for me to go to work for him every morning, though. ;)

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yes. Bandwidth... it's a wonderful thing. :)

 

Unlike some folks....

 

Hmm... do I sense some bandwidth envy here? :hysterical:

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V.T. Eric Layton

By the way, the Rays/Red Sox game went 15 darn innings. The Rays finally won. That's why I didn't make it for the show. :yes:

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Guest LilBambi

By the way, the Rays/Red Sox game went 15 darn innings. The Rays finally won. That's why I didn't make it for the show. :yes:

 

Wondered what happened to ya. ;) Figured something had come up. Course the replay is up so you only missed the live chatting during the show which is also fun, but not totally necessary to listen to the show.

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  • 3 months later...

Have they got any ISOs to test yet? The only thing I can find are the March 2013 ones. I am a huge Xfce fan and would be glad to test a beta when they are ready.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Hmm... Tomas hasn't been by here in a while. It doesn't seem as though the v3.x Foresight has made an appearance just yet. Actually, everything looks a little dusty and disused over at their home page. :(

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I agree, busy with 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8......kids and one wife hehehe

 

Been very busy past few days though with Foresight. We are starting to get somewhere, still very, very early stage. Specially that you need to use fedora installation to get somewhere.

 

http://www.foresightlinux.org/uncategorized/how-to-install-foresight-3/

 

https://www.foresightlinux.se/

 

And a few post over at Google+

 

 

We haven't been modified any packages and made it more userfriendly yet. So you can say it's a Fedora running with conary as package manager for the moment.

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Guest LilBambi

Glad to hear you haven't give up on Foresight Linux and that it is moving forward.

 

It's a unique one with Fedora backing but Conary package manager.

 

 

Will be cool to see where it goes.

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I'm so in love with conary, so it's hard to use something else. All packages (approx 80000-86000, some apps has more than one package, like wine) has been converted to be able to use with conary. So the whole repository for Fedora + rpm fusion free one is done.

 

It's now it will start to take shape and decide what should be in and so on.....

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