After some delay and threatening over the last couple of weeks I’ve finally gotten around to typing up my review of Foresight Linux, if you don’t believe me you should do because you’re reading it right now hehe Foresight is a distro I’ve been interested in for quite some time, I knew it had a lot of cutting edge features but I was a little worried about the stability issues that might cause. Would my concerns prove to be unfounded? Read on to find out…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – rPath Linux (itself based on Red Hat)
Packaging – Conary Package Manager
Linux Kernel – 2.6.23
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.20.1

Background:
The philosophy of Foresight is to deliver the absolute newest versions of all software possible, this often means beta or even alpha releases and so it’s definitely a distro on the edge in my opinion. It tracks Gnome development very closely which interests me particularly, as regular readers will know I love Gnome. It also features the Conary package manager from rPath Linux which has been getting quite a bit of hype lately. I didn’t know much about Conary going into this, certainly not the workings of it anyway, so I was eager to find out more.

Installation:
I downloaded the install DVD for Foresight 1.4.2 and fired it up to be greeted by a variation of the well known Anaconda installer from Red Hat. I know a few people who have problems with Anaconda but it’s always worked flawlessly for me on my systems, it’s usually very efficient and it’s certainly well developed with the might of Red Hat behind it. I was then shown a splash screen of the Foresight logo along with the words “because your desktop should be freaking cool” which made me chuckle a little. A refreshingly non-corporate tag line I thought in these days of nauseating management speak. I went through all the usual steps to install the system, selecting locale, time zone, partitioning and root password. I partitioned my 200gb disk as I normally would using Disk Druid, setting a root partition of 12gb, swap of 3.5gb and the rest as /home. This worked fine and I was able to do it pretty quickly. I was then left twiddling my thumbs while the system installed.

I expected the install to take about 10-20mins, as most distros do but I found this took a lot longer, a hell of a lot longer. I waited half an hour and it was still nowhere near finished, I got to a stage where the screen read “running post installation scripts” which I watched patiently for 15 – 20 mins before deciding the installer must have crashed and aborting. I started the whole process again with the same results but this time I decided to just leave it and see what happened. Eventually after over 1hr 20mins I reached a screen which said “installation complete”, horray I was begining to lose the will to live. I’m not sure why the install was so slow and I tried it a couple more times (yes really) to confirm this wasn’t just a fluke. I can only assume the system was downloading a lot of updated software packages from a particularly slow mirror and that caused the delay. Either way it certainly wasn’t a quick install.

VIEW FULL INSTALLATION SLIDE SHOW

Configuring the system:
I booted up the system to find a pretty standard Gnome desktop, the screen resolution was set at 1280×1024 and I assumed I’d have to install the Nvidia drivers for my graphics card to fix this. I found an Add/Remove Software tool under the System / Administration menu of Gnome so I decided to fire it up and see what I could find. This is a GUI front end to the Conary packaging system and it feels a little like a very cut down version of Synaptic, I hear it’s still in development. I searched for Nvidia but didn’t really find anything of use so it was quickly onto Google to search for help. This led me to a guide on the Foresight Wiki for installing Nvidia/ATi drivers with Conary. I copied the commands pretty blindly into a terminal which is not something I normally like to do but I could see from the commands they were similar to the kind of thing you’d use with Apt-Get under Debian.

Using this guide I added the appropriate repository to Conary and installed the Nvidia binary drivers. I then ran the “nvidia-settings” command as root to fix the screen resolution to 1440×900, I’ve done this in many of my previous reviews so if you’d like full details take a look at my Vector Linux article. I found after restarting the X server that desktop effects were automatically turned on and the GLdesktop applet appeared in my system tray. I had wobbly windows, 3D cube and all the usual stuff working fine.

I then realized that the keyboard layout and input language was set to US English even though I’d selected UK at install and I had to fix this in the admin settings. I also had to set Firefox as the default web browser, the default as standard is Epiphany in Foresight and it’s not a favourite of mine but it wasn’t hard to change.

I then moved on to look at the software installed by default and see what I needed to add. I found all the usual stuff you would expect from a modern Linux distro: Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin, GIMP etc etc. I was also pleased to see Brasero installed as the default disc burning tool, I find it the best Gnome tool for this by far. K3B is great under KDE but Brasero rocks on Gnome for me. I then moved on to installing some of my favorite apps with the GUI to Conary again, I found that there was no browse feature and you had to search for everything manually. Not a major problem but it did seem a little strange coming from a Synaptic background. The repos seemed pretty deep and I was impressed by the amount of software on offer but the download servers seemed painfully slow, again shedding some light on the slow distro install I think. Foresight is a small distro without a wealth of server farms and so on, so this can be understood but retrieving packages took a long time. I installed Bluefish, Rhythmbox, VLC, Inkscape and a few other things very easily. It’s just a case of searching for and then selecting the packages you want, very simple… provided what you want is in the repo obviously.

I found that there were a few extra things I still couldn’t find and this is where the rBuilder website came in, it’s an online repo for rPath packages which you can search and install from pretty easily by copying the details into a terminal and using Conary like you would Apt-Get. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to use it but I worked things out by reading some of the documentation, which I must say is very clear and well written. I couldn’t seem to get Skype installed even though I found a package on rBuilder. I kept getting install errors with all the versions I tried and dependancy problems. Not a great experience, I then found installing pretty much anything with Conary became impossible. It seems my local database had become corupted or unwritable. I tried to install Skype using the static builds from the Skype website but these wouldn’t run due to unsatisfied dependancies. I spent a few hours trying different things and wrestlling with it but in the end I gave up and decided not to bother. I’m sure it could be done of course and my level of ineptitude does not necesserily reflect the experence you will have but prepare to be patient.

Multimedia seemed to be very well suported out of the box in Foresight, it uses Gstreamer as the main processing engine and it was happy to play Divx, Xvid and WMV videos for me without any trouble. Along with mp3 and other audio formats, this all worked with Totem, the default player. Banshee is the default music manager included and it’s not a favourite of mine, I found the Last.fm scrobbling was erratic and I just don’t like the general layout of your music so I switched to Rhytmbox and all was well. All the Firefox plugins you could need were also installed out of the box, Flash, Java and my favorite browser video handler Mplayer-plugin. All in all using Foresight as an everyday desktop was pretty simple and not too daunting but there were a lot of stability issues on my system which I will come to next.

The Name’s Conary…
So we come to the Conary package manager, a major feature of Foresight. The idea behind Conary according to the guys at rPath is to marry version control and package management into one. To achieve this Conary uses a relational database to keep track of installed packages on the local system, it then compares that to a remote database to manage updates and so on. It allows you to roll back your installs multiple times and can be very flexible in this regard. This seems like a great idea and it’s very innovative but I found some major stability issues with it. After the initial install I found that updates no longer worked, I kept getting a message on the desktop each time I logged in, you can see it to the right.

I searched around on the net and found this is a pretty common problem with Foresight, I couldn’t see any obvious fix sadly. It seems my local database had become corrupted and I couldn’t work out how to rebuild or repair it. This left me with a locked package manager it seemed, it reminded me a little of my experiences with Yum (shudder). I found when trying to run an update command in the terminal with Conary I got this message:

“Write permission denied on Conary database”

I’m not sure how much this reflects on Conary itself or just this Foresight implementation of it but it seemed a little flaky to me. I also found that the system would just hang when I tried to shut it down and I had to kill the power, far from ideal. Applications would often hang or just close with no warning. It’s fair to say that on my system at least Foresight turned out to be about as stable as Britany Spears on a bad day. It’s a shame and I will be interested to try version 2.0 of the distro when it’s released soon to see how these issues are fixed. Conary has a huge amont of potential and I’d like to see it do well in the future. If you’d like to read more about Conary and a far better explanation that I can offer please check out this article by Bruce Byfield on Linux.com

Conclusions:
Ease Of Installation & Use: 3/5
Stability: 1/5
Community & Documentation: 3/5
Features: 5/5

So after spending a good week or so with Foresight I felt that it was very much on the experimental end of the distro spectrum. It is consciously cutting edge and that’s an aim of the project so don’t be surprised. It succeeds well in delivering the latest software and if you are happy to brave some of the stability problems there’s a lot to be had from this distro. I’ve enjoyed using it but I don’t think I could run this day to day as my main desktop, I’m not afraid of living on the edge but when I need to get something done urgently I need to know my desktop isn’t going to crash and burn on me at an inconvenient moment.

I think Conary has a lot of potential as a package manager but I found it a little confusing to use at first. It can build software from source, manage multiple development branches and merge changes, all at a very granular level. That’s why it’s described as version control mixed with package management. For developers I can see how much of a major benefit this would be but on the average home desktop I’m not sure how relevant it is. I suspect it’s probably aimed at the business user or someone who manages a large number of projects and desktops. I have heard that some of the problems I experienced are to do with the particular implementation of Conary in this version of Foresight. I noticed that Foresight 2.0 is in beta now so it will be interesting to come back and give that a try once it’s out.

One major thing I can say for Foresight is at least it’s doing something different, pushing the boundries a little and that is a major plus in my eyes. While most of us probably dont want spend time debugging things while just trying to use our desktop, we should all be thankful that some people are prepared to do this for our benefit. What you see in Foresight today you will probably see in your own distro of choice tomorrow, that should be remembered. I guess that’s why they called it Foresight duh!! If you’re a Gnome fan like me then Foresight is definitely worth a look to get the latest and greatest Gnome version, it also has many other unique features that make it interesting but I wouldn’t advise putting it on a production desktop personally, it’s up to you of course. Check it out and see what you think, you can tell me how wrong I am in comments if you like, I’m always up for an informed discussion

If you would like to try Foresight Linux you can it here

Up next…
So what’s up next? Well, I’ve just got my Dell XPS m1330 laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed which you may have read about, so I’ll be doing a review of that. I’m typing this on the machine right now actually, I thought people might want to see how Dell have setup Ubuntu and what you get for your money if you’re thinking of buying a new laptop. After that I think I’ll plunge (maybe literally) into Arch Linux which is something people have been asking about for a while. Then… who knows? We’ll see

Hey folks, sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here lately, things are hectic at the moment and I’m still far from 100% fit. Anyway, just thought you’d like to know I got my new Ubuntu powered Dell XPS m1330 and it’s a lovely machine. I would highly recommend it as a powerful ultra-mobile Linux solution.

However, there is a problem with the one I’m currently typing this post on. It arrived with a faulty DVD/CD drive, arrggh!!! The motor on the slot-loading drive doesn’t work. Looks like I’ll be waiting a bit longer to move onto this system full-time then. I’ve emailed Dell but customer services are not open on the weekend, it will be a while before I get a reply. I’m really hoping they’ll ship me a replacement or send someone to fix this drive ASAP. It seems my luck is pretty bad at the moment with this and a few other things stacking up but I’m hanging in there and things can only improve right?

IMPORTANT EDIT: As of today 18/02/08 it appears that my dvd drive is working yippee!!! I managed to clear the blockage stopping the motor from working and I’ve been using it all day to test it out. It seems pretty stable and I think I fixed it. Eat your heart out MacGuyver Something got stuck in the drive before it arrived, maybe during transport it was knocked I dunno. As long as it doesn’t die again in the near future I will be keeping this machine and I’m very pleased about that

I was intending to do a full review of this system but there isn’t much point at the moment since this machine is faulty. I can report that it was installed with a custom Dell image of Ubuntu 7.10 which includes the dvd-css decoders and LinDVD for DVD playback. I was attempting to tryout this functionality when I realised the drive was broken, good job I did. Using this for a day so has confirmed what a nice machine it is though and I can’t wait to get the fully working one. In truth I don’t use the optical drive much at all but since I paid for it I’d like one that works. Worth checking out if you want a new Linux laptop though, your luck can’t be as bad as mine.

In other news: I’m currently running Foresight Linux on the desktop and I hope to have a review of that out before I have to travel for a few days next week. I’ll probably talk about it on Linux Outlaws as well, the weekly podcast I do with my friend Fab. We’re getting quite a few listeners now and it’s really nice to hear people’s feedback.

Check out my Fab’s review of his XPS m1330 here

So for now I await a response from Dell and possibly a new laptop or a new dvd drive at least. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m hoping it will be 3rd time lucky…

After a long delay due to illness I’m finally back with another review for you. I’m still not feeling too good but I’ve decided to plough on and I hope to have some more new reviews for you ASAP. This is the 3rd part or my trip through Slackware-based distros and today’s candidate is Wolvix 1.1.0 Hunter, I was intrigued to see how it would compare to Zenwalk and Vector which I tested recently. So here’s how I got on…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Slackware
Packaging – tar.gz (managed by Slapt-Get)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.21.5
Default Desktop – XFCE 4.4.1

Installation:
I downloaded the Wolvix CD and fired it up. I was greeted by the Wolvix boot menu, which was a familiar sight having seen the Slackware installer so much lately. I just clicked the enter key to boot and after a minute or two I was greeted with the Wolvix login screen. There was one slight problem though, I couldn’t see any username or password listed to login with. It just wasn’t there anywhere on the screen. I had to reboot the machine and then choose F1 for help from the boot menu. I quickly found in the help text some instructions to use the username “root” and the password “toor”, armed with this information I was able to boot the system again and crucially, log in this time. Now you could say that it’s my fault for not reading the instructions before diving in but as I’ve said previously in this series it’s always been my way and I can’t see what would be so hard about putting the login information somewhere on login screen, just for the Live CD log in I mean.

I would recommend following this guide to install Wolvix – http://wiki.wolvix.org/HardDriveInstall

Anyway, I got there in the end and my next challenge was finding out how to actually install the system. I couldn’t find any install shortcuts on the desktop or on the main menu. After a quick look on the Wolvix web site I read that it’s primerily designed to be a live distribution and installation is still experimental. Having said that it did tell my that the installer could be found under the Wolvix Contol Panel on the System menu. It seems to be quite well hidden away and maybe this is because of the experimental status of the installer, it could be made a lot easier to find though I think. I ran the installer which gave me a warning the software was in development but worked flawlessly I must say. Setting up the partitions was easy, the installer was very simple to use and completed in under 10mins.

VIEW THE INSTALLATION SLIDESHOW

Configuring The System:
One major thing that wasn’t taken care of during the install process was setting up a user account and changing the root password which seems like quite an oversight to me. I suppose if you take the Slackware approach then you expect to do everything yourself but I found both Zenwalk and Vector took care of this. This is probably a result of the fact that Wolvix is designed to be a live CD and they do say up front the installer is still in development. I hope this will be improved in the future as the installer is refined.

(adding a user account in the terminal)

I found a guide on the Wolvix website for setting up the system after install so I followed through the steps and logged into the system as root, after that I opened up a terminal and used the “passwd” command to reset the root password. I then used the “newuser” command and followed through the steps to set up an account for general use. It was easy enough to do following the guide from the website but I would’ve been a little lost if I hadn’t had another computer to surf the web for instructions during set up. This is not a criticism of Wolvix particularly as it’s happened with other distros, it’s a learning curve I suppose and now that I’ve done it once I could do it a lot quicker a second time. I say that but in truth next time I will l have forgotten all of this and have to look it up again doh!

One of my main problems with the initial setup was the screen resolution which was set at 1600×1200 and my monitor needs 1440×900, I decided to install the Nvidia drivers for my video card and then I could fix the resolution. I found the Nvidia driver was easy to install using Slapt-Get the package manager which comes with Wolvix. The GUI front end for Slapt is Gslapt and as I’ve mentioned in my Vector and Zenwalk reviews, it’s very similar to Synaptic in Debian and intuitive to use. I rebooted the X server with CRTL-ALT-BACKSPACE and logged into the system again. The new driver was working well but the screen resolution was still wrong. I had to follow the process I’ve mentioned in previous reviews of loading the Nvidia Settings tool as the root user and then setting the resolution I want, finally saving it to the Xorg.conf file. This worked fine and my next step was to look at installing Compiz Fusion.

(Gslapt package manager)

I searched in vain for guides on how to install Compiz under Wolvix and I discovered after some digging in forums that while it was possible, it required upgrading the version of Xorg and a few other things. I decided to leave it as I can live without 3D desktop effects.

One thing I noticed about Wolvix pretty quickly is there really is an amazing amount of software installed by default, almost everything I normally use was already there. Did they read my mind? For such a small distro it really is well stocked. The usual suspects are there like OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, The GIMP and so on but also things I would normally add later like Gpodder, Inkscape, Comix, gLabels and more. The amount of stuff on the Multimedia menu alone could have kept me happy for a few hours.

The default music manager and player is Exaile which has grown on me a lot lately but it’s still not quite Rhythmbox, that’s a personal preference. Most other media is handled by Mplayer which is not one of my favourite applications but definitely handles it’s job well. I also found Flash, Java and all the plugins I required were already installed in Firefox. This included Mplayer-plugin which is another personal favourite of mine for plaining Quicktime videos and the like.

I got my desktop setup with pretty much everything I needed but I did have a couple of problems with it. A minor one in that I couldn’t work out how to install my printer and a slightly bigger one in that I couldn’t get Skype to work even with the static archive from the Skype site. I probably could have got Skype up and running with a bit more battling and maybe some research though.

Conclusions:
Ease Of Installation & Use: 3/5
Stability: 5/5
Community & Documentation: 4/5
Features: 4/5

Overall I think almost everything you could want is here in Wolvix but there are a few rough edges I think they will iron out in time. It’s not a distro I would really recommend to Linux novices who want an easy introduction to the platform but it does have many stengths. Like all Slackware derivatives it’s stability and security are formidable, it can be challenging at times and as I’ve said before if you want to really learn about Linux it’s probably for you.

In comparison to Vector and Zenwalk I would say Wolvix was the most complete system out of the box for me. The choice of software included in a small disk image is really amazing. Maybe it just suited my tastes but I found it a really good cross-section of applications. Each of these 3 distros has strengths and weaknesses and while that might seem like a cop out I don’t think you can put any one above the others. I think all of them could do better and if you could only take the strengths of all 3 you would have one killer lightweight distro. I’m very demanding though and always think everything can be improved… except maybe Chuck Norris but that goes without saying.

I think Wolvix is developing really nicely and it’s very versatile I have to say, you can use it as a plain LiveCD, you can even embed some data on your disk and save stuff while still using it as a live CD, this works in a similar way to Puppy or Damn Small Linux. Finally, you can do a full hard drive install and I think this is the area where it will expand in the future. The installer is clearly marked as a work in progress and I can’t wait to see where they go with this. At the moment I think Wolvix is a little behind the more established Vector and Zenwalk in it’s development but of the 3 I like it’s direction the best. I’ll be keeping any eye on it for sure. If you want to check it out for yourself follow the link below, you know you want to really.

DOWNLOAD WOLVIX HERE

I should mention the fact that Zenwalk 5.0 came out recently and I reviewed 4.8 over Christmas. I will come back and look at 5.0 when I get chance. To sum up, any one of these distributions would excel on a low spec machine and they can all give you a good introduction to Slackware. It’s not something to take on lightly but if you put in the work you will recieve the rewards. Like all adventures you only get out what you put in.

Where to go next?
I’m not exactly sure which distro I’ll try out next. The health problems lately have thrown a spanner in the works but I will continue that’s for sure. I’ve still got some distributions on CD that I haven’t tried yet, notably Foresight Linux which I’m keen to try out. I also have a copy of Sidux which looks interesting. I’ll keep an eye out for new releases too. If you have any suggestions for distriutions I should try please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best. The adventure goes on… honest