News from Mar 30, 2007

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Foresight Linux Newsletter!  Within each edition we will bring you a report about what's happening with Foresight Linux, including release news, security updates, tips and tricks you may not have known, Foresight in the press, and highlight one package in detail.  The newsletter is written by users and developers just like you, and if you're interested in helping contribute, we'd love to have you and more information is available at the end of the newsletter.

In this issue:

Letter from the Editor

• Introducing the Foresight Linux Newsletter

Foresight Linux News

• Foresight Linux 1.1 released
• GNOME 2.18 Live Media
• Package updates
• Documentation Updates

Security Updates

• Inkscape
• CUPS

• Firefox
• OpenOffice.org
• slocate

Development News

• Foresight 1.2, including GNOME 2.18.1
• New kernel delivery process
• New images
• Firstboot replacement 

Foresight in the press

• eWeek, Linux for Beginners
• Linux-user magazine

Tips & Tricks

• Notebook tips & tricks
• ATI Drivers

Package of the month

• Banshee, music management and playback for GNOME

Contributing to Foresight Linux

Downloading and Getting Help using Foresight Linux 

Letter from the Editor

Welcome to the first of many Foresight Linux Newsletters.  I'm very excited to recap the past month's activities of Foresight Linux.  I have only been a part of the Foresight community for a short while, but the friendliness and openness within the community has motivated me to want to share with a broader audience everything going on within Foresight, and this newsletter is one way of doing that.

This is our first issue, and things will continue to evolve.  We will continue to bring you the latest and greatest news, and we have plans to add new features over the next few issues.  The newsletter will be as successful as the participation from within the community.  Please feel free to add to the wikiwith features or articles you would like to see; submit articles, interviews, or highlight your favorite package for all to read.  If you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to email me and share your thoughts.

I would like to personally thank you for visiting, and I hope you enjoy this first edition.

Paul Cutler

pcutler@foresightlinux.org

Foresight Linux News

Foresight Linux 1.1 Released March 15th 

With the recent release of GNOME 2.18, Foresight Linux is proud to release Foresight Linux 1.1, the first distribution available with GNOME 2.18. New in Foresight Linux 1.1 is Epiphany as the default web browser.  Epiphany, based on the Gecko engine, is well integrated within the GNOME desktop and features plugins, extensions, and smart bookmarks for tagging your favorite websites. New also is Orca for the visually impaired.  Orca uses various combinations of speech synthesis, braille, and magnification to assist the visually impaired in using their computer.  Two new games, glChess and GnomeSudoku are also added this release.

Foresight Linux 1.1 continues to build on the success of Foresight 1.0, with updates to innovative programs such as Banshee for music management; F-spot for managing and tagging your photos; Tomboy for keeping track of notes on your desktop, with new formatting options now available in the notes; Seahorse for managing your passwords and keys; Evince for viewing PDFs and other files; Compiz for adding 3D effects to your desktop, and many more updates.  View the release notes here.

Foresight Linux 1.1 is available for download on 1 DVD, 2 CDs, or through a number of different virtualization images.  Visit the download page for more information.

GNOME 2.18 Live Media

Using the toolset behind the creation of Foresight Linux, rBuilder and Conary, Foresight developers were able to develop and release GNOME Live Media day and date with the GNOME 2.18 release.  Making it simple for users who want to test the latest GNOME release, four images are available for testing GNOME without having to install it directly on your hard drive.  These images include a LiveCD, VMWare image, QEMU image, and a Microsoft VHD image.  GNOME Live Media is available for download at http://torrent.gnome.org.

Package Updates

After the Foresight Linux 1.1 release on March 15th, the following major packages have been updated:

• Kernel updated to 2.6.20.4
• OpenOffice.org 2.2. In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has now been enabled by default. OpenOffice.org's unique pdf export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and support for user-definable export of form fields. See here full announcement.
• Epiphany has been updated to included to add three more extensions, including Greasemonkey, Tab States, and Push Scroll.

Documentation Updates

Foresight's Frequently Asked Questionscontinues to be updated regularly and is a great place to start when you have a question.  If you are just starting with Foresight, and are coming from a distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu that uses dpkg for package management, the Conary for Debian & Ubuntu Usersis a great page to learn the in's and out's of Conary after using dpkg.  Did you know Foresight has support for GLDesktop / Compiz out of the box on some video cards?  If you're running a Nvidia card, check out the wiki page for getting the Nvidia propietary driver installed.

Security Updates

Security updates are published reguarly to http://lwn.net/Alerts/Foresight. 

• Inkscape (major): Inkscape was vulnerable to attacks which would allow unauthorized system access at the permission level of the user running inkscape.
• Firefox (minor): Firefox was vulnerable to an information disclosure issue through how Firefox was handling PASV FTP connections.
• CUPS (minor): CUPS could be forced to hang via a client "partially negotiating" an ssl connection causing a denial of service.
• OpenOffice.org (moderate) : CVE-2007-0238: A stack overflow in the StarCalc parser could be used by remote attackers to potentially execute code by supplying a crafted document. CVE-2007-0239: A shell quoting problem when opening URLs was fixed which could be used by remote attackers to execute code by supplying a crafted document and making the user click on an embedded link.
• slocate (minor): Previous versions of the slocate package were vulnerable to an information-disclosure vulnerability. Slocate did not properly manage database entries that specify names of files in protected directories. Thus, for example, a user could see via slocate the names of files in a directory chmodded 711.

Development News

The next  release for Foresight Linux, 1.2, will be released on April 11th, the same day as the GNOME 2.18.1 release.  Currently in development for this release are:

• Bug fixes
• GNOME 2.18.1

• New images, including installation discs and and virtualization images with Foresight 1.2
• A replacement to "firstboot".  Firstboot is the process after a default installation, on your first boot up you are prompted to configure your display and create a user account.  Developers are hard at work on streamlining this process to make it easier for users to configure their display during installation.
• Improved hardware support.
• New kernel delivery process.  Foresight Linux is developing a new kernel that uses a single kernel package to provide all the non-mainline drivers needed with a new kernel.  This will make it easier for users with specific kernel modules needed to support specific hardware, such as wireless network drivers.  Included in this new kernel delivery package are wireless network drivers including the Intel IPW3945, Atheros and madwifi, Ndiswrapper for using Windows drivers and Realtek rt2500 based cards.

Foresight in the press

eWeek

eWeek's March 12th articleon getting started on Linux features Foresight among the top distributions for a user, new to Linux, to try, side by side with Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu.  From the article:

Foresight Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution that's focused on delivering an up-to-date GNOME-based desktop environment. What earns Foresight a spot in this shortlist of Linux distributions for consideration is the rPath Linux foundation on which it's built.

Linux-user

German magazine Linux-user included a Foresight 1.0 DVD with it's March issue. 

Tips & Tricks

This month's Tips & Tricks focus on laptops and notebooks, and a tip for those with ATI video cards and using Compiz. 

Notebook Computers

GNOME comes built in with some great tools to use with notebook computers to conserve battery power.

With Foresight 1.1, your panel should show the Battery Applet by default.  This applet will inform you when you are on AC power, and if on battery power, approximately how much power is left and how long.

Other applets are available, by left clicking on your top or bottom panel and choosing "Add to Panel".

The CPU Frequency Applet allows you to change the speed of your processor to save on battery power and reduce heat.  You can choose to manually set the speed of your processor, or set it to one of 3 options:

• Ondemand: CPU Performance will scale up and down depending on how much processor power you need at a given point in time.

• Performance: CPU Performance will be scaled to maximize the performance of your processor.

• Powersave: Your CPU will perform at the optimal speed to conserve battery power.

You can also choose to to set the appearance to display your processor speed by just a graphic, numerically, both, or as a percentage.

The Power Brightness Applet will allow you to determine the brightness of your screen in order to conserve battery power.

The Laptop Temperature Monitor will display the current temperature of your CPU from the convenience of your panel. 

ATI Video Cards & Compiz 

Did you know?  If you want to enable Compizon an ATI video card, do not install the proprietary ATI drivers, ATI's binary drivers do not work with Compiz due to not supporting the texture_from_pixmap OpenGL extension.  Use the open source ATI driver, "radeon" to enable Compiz.  If you want to play a 3D OpenGL game such as Doom3 or QuakeIV, then install the propietary ATI driver using the instructions on the wiki page.

Package of the month

Banshee, www.banshee-project.org, a music manager and player for GNOME is the featured package of the month.  Written in C# using Mono, Banshee's latest stable release, 0.12.0, is the default music player in Foresight Linux 1.1.  Banshee will manage your entire music collection on your computer and your digital audio player.

 
Banshee will rip your CDs, and import them in to Banshee for playback and transfer to your digital audio player.  You can sort your music by artist, song, album and more. When listening to music, Banshee allows you to rate songs, and you can then create Smart Playlists.  From the Banshee website:

Smart playlists help with finding and listening to only those tracks that match some user-defined criteria. For example, a smart playlist can contain tracks that were rated five stars, but that weren't listened to for more than half a year. Another example would be all tracks that were published in 1969 and are not of Jazz and Classical genres. Some predefined smart playlists are available in the expander near the bottom of the smart playlist editor.

On every change to the library, Banshee updates all smart playlists automatically. If you imported new songs, Banshee checks whether they match any of the available smart playlists. If you have just listened to a song or updated its metadata, Banshee updates smart playlists where applicable.

In order to create a new smart playlist, go to Music and choose New Smart Playlist.... Then define criteria to which tracks should match and click Save.

You can also create a new smart playlist from your current search. For example, if you searched for all tracks by Elvis, choosing Music and Create Smart Playlist from Search will create a smart playlist where all tracks by Elvis will be selected.

Banshee has support for more than just importing CDs, including subscribing to Podcasts, and listenting to internet radio stations including over 20 preset stations, and burning CDs.  Banshee's plugin system makes it easy to add additional functionality, including Last.fm tracking and reporting of the music you listen to, recommendations for similar artists, and the ability to share your music to other computers and devices using Avahi.

Banshee also has excellent support for digital audio players, especially Apple's iPods and Creative Nomad Jukeboxes.  Banshee will automatically transcode your music files from other formats such as FLAC or OGG, turning the files in to MP3s and transferring your music to your digital audio player.

To learn more about using Banshee, visit the Banshee User Guide on Banshee's homepage. 

Contributing to Foresight Linux

Contribute to Foresight Linux

Foresight Linux needs you!  Contributing is much easier than you think.  Help answer questions on the Foresight Linux forums or in our IRC channel (#foresight on Freenode).  You could also become a package maintainer, using the Conary and rBuilder toolsets. Contribute to the wiki, including:

• Joining the Marketing team
• Writing documentation
• Artwork
• Translating Foresight into other languages

Contributions make open source work, and the community is made up of people just like you.

Contribute to the Foresight Linux Newsletter

Have a package or piece of software you want to share in the monthly newsletter?   Send it in!  We are always looking for more writers or contributors, and building the newsletter is a collaborative process using the Foresight Linux Newsletter wiki.  We are also looking for volunteers to interview people in the Foresight and GNOME communities, links to news articles on the web or in print regarding Foresight Linux, and all the other content that makes up the newsletter.

Contributors to Issue #1:  Paul Cutler (editor), Ken Vandine, Thilo Pfennig, Kevin Harriss, António Meireles  

Downloading and Getting Help with Foresight Linux

Download and install Foresight Linux:

• CD Images
• DVD image

Live Media, including Live CD, VMWare image, Parallels image, and Microsoft VHD image

• Download page

Help is available in many forms, and you can choose what you're most comfortable with.

• IRC:  Visit the Foresight IRC channel, #foresighton Freenode, and ask questions.  We have one of the most friendly IRC channels you'll come across with everyone from users to developers reaching out to help answer questions.http://www.foresightlinux.org/forum/
• Forums: Our forums continue to grow, and can be a good source of information in seeing if a specific problem or question has come up before.Wiki: Documentation on the wiki is growing on a daily basis, with updates often to the Frequently Asked Questions and other how-to's to get you going with Foresight Linux.http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/foresight/mailingLists
• Mailing Lists:
  • General List: General discussion around Foresight Linux
  • Commits list:  (high traffic): All package commits are emailed to this list
  • Packagers List: Discuss packaging applications for Foresight using Conary and rBuilder
  • Developers List: Discuss topics related to Foresight development projects