For the past two days, I’ve been experimenting with Specifix/Foresightlinux.
I stumbled upon Foresightlinux on the GnomeLiveCd page on the Gnome Wiki. (I provide a mirror for the Gnome live cd right here.)
Foresight is a distribution based on Specifix, which is a distribution that builds on the Conary packaging system.
Conary seems like the baby of CVS and RPM. It allows you to customise your distribution, provide your own packages and tweaks, and remain in synch with the distribution on which it was based. So rather than creating a de-facto fork when customising a distribution, you can add a “customisation layer” above an existing distribution, in this case Specifix. The company behind it was founded by two ex-RedHat employees. (More on the company and Conary here and here.)
The reason for trying Foresight was not in the first place Conary, but their packaging of the latest Gnome 2.10 beta, Beagle, Tomboy and the likes.
For those of you who don’t know Beagle, check out the flash demos Nat Friedman of Ximian fame made of them. It will blow your socks off.
Currently I’m running Foresight under VMware 5 beta on my Fedora Core 3 laptop. It’s not really an optimal situation (although the new VMware is fantastic), so I’ll probably install it again on a spare box in a couple of days. I’m a bit hesitant to completely replace my FC3 install with it, as I want to keep a stable working environment to do my daily work.
Which brings me on another topic, the never ending “which distro” debate. (I’ve been running RedHat since Colgate, but I’m falling in love with Ubuntu.) But that’s for another post.
For now, I leave you with some further reading:
Planet conary, a collection of blogs from Conary developers.
BeagleWiki, all the info you need if you want to try out Beagle and see the future, today.
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