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Foresight Linux brings yet another new take on package management to Linux. It uses’s rPath’s Conary system as its package management and administration interface. It aims to be an easy to use desktop system featuring the latest GNOME-based technologies.

What is Foresight Linux?

According to the Foresight Linux website:

Foresight Linux is a Distribution which showcases some of the latest and greatest from GNOME. Ah! Some of the things that may not be mature enough for some of the other distros. Some of the more innovative things are included, like beagle , f-spot , avahi (zeroconf), and the latest hal . All of this plus some nice, clean default themes and artwork.

Installation

Foresight Installer

Installation of Foresight Linux was a snap. Under VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro and on my Athlon 64 x2 system with GeForce 7800GT the installation was flawless. The graphical installer popped up cleanly on both and easily walked me through the installation process with minimal questions. The only slightly difficult part of the installer was the partitioner. On my desktop I have several drives all with multiple different partitions on it so that complicated matters. The partitioner had a lot of help text to explain how to use the graphical partition utility. Once I figured out which of my drives was the one I wanted to install it to, I went to the first screen of the partition utility, only selected that drive, and told Foresight to wipe the disk. The partition utility was very intuitive and the help information on the left side would be very useful to people who are not familiar with partitioning their drives.

The installer sets up your network settings, and gives you the option of using a firewall (it is enabled by default) and selecting which services you want to allow access to through the firewall (i.e. SSH).

Foresight Installer Firewall Configuration

After setting up the password for the root account, the installation proceeds to format your disk and install the packages. Foresight then sets up a non-root user for normal use after the packages are installed. There is no package selection screen so you have no choice to decide which packages get installed.

After you reboot, you have a few more screens to go through to finalize the setup. You first create your system user that will be the regular non-administrative account on the system. At that setup screen you can also configure your system to use NIS or Kerberos authentication as well.

Then you get to configure your monitor. It seems to auto-detect the capabilities of your system since under VMware it only allowed me to select 800×600 resolution. On my desktop it gave me far more options. I tried to select my monitor from the list, but my Samsung SyncMaster 940bw wasn’t listed, so I chose Generic LCD Display at 1440×900 instead. After this it restarted the display manager (gdm) and the proper monitor resolution (according to the monitor’s info display) was set and I logged in.

Foresight Linux Login Screen

First Impressions

Foresight Linux Desktop

The first thing you notice when you login is that Foresight is using GNOME (version 2.16.2) and it is very green looking. After a few minutes of playing around, I began to feel like some things weren’t right with my display resolution. The monitor was reporting being set at 1440×900 but things seemed stretched horizontally. When I took a full screen screenshot with The GIMP it was at 1024×768. Foresight was using the VESA driver that comes with Xorg and trying to change my resolution from the System Preferences and the GNOME Control Center were proving futile.

Other than the green theme, which isn’t pleasing to my eyes, the look and layout of the desktop will be familiar to anyone who has used GNOME before.

Foresight Linux comes standard with a variety of applications to get you started. It includes a photo manager (F-Spot), an image editor (GIMP), Firefox, Gaim, X-Chat, Evolution for email (which is strangely on the “Office” application menu rather than the “Internet” one), OpenOffice.org 2.0.3, GNUcash, a music playing application (Banshee), a CD/DVD burning utility (Brasero), and Totem movie player for playing videos. There are some other minor applications, but for most people they will want to have at minimum this amount of functionality out of a desktop system.

Being that Foresight is a GNOME-based desktop system, it only makes sense that the applications included would be GNOME-centric. However, there are definitely better options than Totem for video playing and Brasero for CD/DVD burning, and Banshee for managing and playing your music library, in my opinion.

Package Management

Since one of the main features of Foresight Linux is its package management system, called Conary, I decided to give it a whirl and see if I could install the nvidia drivers for my card using it. So I tried looking for the package management utility off the system menus. I found an option called “Foresight System Manager” off the System Administration menu. It opened Firefox to a locally hosted web-based application. I logged in and it brought me to a web-based user management utility, asking me to change the default password for the admin user, which I did.

Foresight System Manager

From this web-based system management utility you can do a bunch of different things, such as configure the networking and email of the system. As my main goal to begin with was to get the nvidia drivers installed, I went to the “Package Search” menu. I searched for “nvidia” and as you can see from the screenshot below, it did find some results. It wasn’t clear which one I should pick since there were 8 choices to pick. The top two choices (nvidia and nvidia-kernel) had what looked to be the highest version number, so I clicked on the top-most “nvidia”. It brought me to a System Updates page, and proceeded to check for updates. It found some and I told it to apply updates, when the following error occurred:

Error Installing Nvidia Driver

So after that I tried again with the same results. Then I decided to try selecting “nvidia-kernel” instead. So now nvidia and nvidia-kernel were selected to be installed. I told it to apply the changes, and it still failed.

Then I went through the complete System Updates process and it found a bunch of things to update, so I decided to see how that would go. It took awhile, but the system update was successful. Just to make sure everything updated cleanly, I rebooted the system, and it all came back properly. Unfortunately I was still unable to get the nvidia package installed through their package management system. I decided to put off getting my display properly configured so I could do some more testing of the package management system.

I decided since I prefer Mozilla Thunderbird to Evolution, I would try installing that. It installed without any problems and it became available off the Internet Applications menu.

Installing Thunderbird on Foresight Linux

Now I wanted to try installing a more complicated package: k3b. k3b is KDE’s CD/DVD burning software. On Linux it is my primary disc burning utility and since Foresight was a GNOME-centric distribution I wanted to see how it handled installing a KDE application. The first attempt failed with the error screen below:

Error Installing k3b on Foresight Linux on the First Attempt

Based on the message “linux64″ I was wondering if maybe it was trying to install the 64-bit version of the package. While the system I’m using is 64-bit capable, I was using the i686 compiled distribution. I selected the third k3b option on the list which didn’t have “linux64″ anywhere in the line on the list. This time it brought me a screen which showed the dependencies that also need to be installed. I clicked “Apply Now” and it began downloading and installing the packages. However, now a different error occurred:

Another error attempting to install k3b but it finally installed.

It appeared afterward to have possibly finished installing properly. It appeared on the Sound & Video Applications menu and ran fine when I tried it. I decided it wouldn’t be a valid test if I didn’t attempt to burn something, so I popped in a CD-RW and tried to burn the screen shots I had been taking. It worked without a problem, so that increased my faith in Conary by a lot after the failure to get the nvidia drivers installed, and after the error that occurred while installing k3b.

I wanted to erase the CD-RW but I couldn’t because Foresight automatically mounted the CD. Right-clicking on the disc in the file browser (Nautilus) only gave me the option to eject the disc. Clicking it popped the disc out but re-inserting it automatically mounted it again. I tried using the included Brasero burning application but instead of giving me an error it just hung and didn’t do anything. I had to kill the application to close it. Afterwards I couldn’t eject or unmount the CD. I opened a terminal and umounted it as root. I had to change the options in System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media to disable the automatic mounting in order to be able to erase the CD-RW, and even then it didn’t work in k3b due to cdrecord error. Brasero was able to erase the CD-RW, however.

Printer Installation

The next thing I wanted to do was get my Brother HL-5140 laser printer installed and running on Foresight. It’s a well supported printer in Linux and I have used it quite successfully in other distributions. Since most desktop systems would like to be able to print, it seemed like a good idea to get it working.

Using the GNOME Printer utility I attempted to add my printer. It successfully detected my printer:

Installing my Brother HL-5140 on Foresight

I selected the appropriate driver and everything seemed good to go. I tried a test print and I got the following error:

Error printing a test page

Since it didn’t work, I pretty much gave up at that point. The printer was online and ready to print, so whatever the problem is must be due to Foresight’s setup.

Final Thoughts on Foresight Linux

After reading Foresight’s website and running the installation program I had high hopes for this distribution. Despite not being much of a fan of GNOME, or green-themed UI’s, I still felt that it could have had something to offer. However, after using Foresight Linux for a few days, I didn’t really feel that it was anything special. Sure, it used rPath’s Conary for its management interface, and that does have some potential, but as a desktop Linux distribution I feel there are much better options. I didn’t feel any particular fondness for using a web browser to manage my system. Sure it has potential benefits for remote administration, as I did try messing with it remotely via my MacBook Pro, but most people who want remote administration are going to be systems administrators running a lot of systems, and for that they won’t be using a web-based system.

Accessing my Foresight System Manager remotely from my MacBook Pro

For desktop users I don’t feel there’s any particular reason to have a web-based interface for package and systems management.

There are some potential benefits to using rPath Conary, mainly being that it is a central system that others can build their own systems off of and have compatible packages for. But right now it’s very new and doesn’t have the range of packages and community support that Debian’s/Ubuntu’s APT, RedHat/Fedora’s RPM, and Gentoo’s portage do. Clearly it still has some rough edges based on the errors I got while using it. It did successfully update the system, however, so it’s not that it’s totally broken, just not refined enough for everyday users. Also it really needs to give more information about the packages themselves. When I searched for a package it gave me a fairly cryptic string alongside its name that wasn’t particularly useful.

Besides being managed via a browser, there’s nothing from a user standpoint that seems particularly innovative. Being that Foresight wants to incorporate up and coming software into its system that isn’t considered stable enough to be used by other distributions, I didn’t see anything in it particularly advanced. It includes support for 3D desktop and Compiz, but without support for my nvidia card I couldn’t test it.

Then, being a 1.0 release, there are the rough edges to consider. The problems being able to unmount CDs and erase them was annoying, as well as not being able to get my (widely supported) printer working. Not being able to get my video card drivers installed also sucked. (Though, admittedly, I could’ve done it manually, but then I could’ve done that on ANY Linux distro it’s not a true test of the distribution if I have to do it manually.)

The pre-installed applications were sub-par as well, in my opinion. OpenOffice.org was good, as well as the GIMP, but I had never even heard of Brasero before. Looking at the “About” dialogs of the included applications shows many of them to be pre-1.0 versions. My point in bringing this up is not to criticize the applications for being pre-1.0, as many of them are no doubt pretty stable, but their interfaces for the most part were pretty lame.

I feel that Foresight Linux could be a potential contender in the future, especially if Conary improves and they get simple things like my video card and printer working properly. However, at the time being, I don’t feel that it offers much over most of the other hundreds of Linux distributions out there and if you’re happy with your current distribution there is really no reason to switch to Foresight Linux.

I will keep an eye on it and check up on new releases to see if my opinion changes.

If you have any opinions about Foresight Linux, or my review, please feel free to share them.