[Foresight-distro] me and foresight

[Thilo Pfennig]

Hi,

I'd like to start here with telling something about me and why I use
Foresight. I live in Germany. I have used Amiga and Macs (1995) before I
switched to Linux 1998 (I think it was SuSE 5.2). Thern I switched to
Debian which was much easier and cleaner to handle. I then tried Red Hat
8/9 and then Gentoo. Since Fedora 1 or 2 I am  on the Fedora train and
was quite happy about it.  Having a nice an uptodate GNOME was always
the most important thing for me. Unfortunately Fedora has become very
bureaucratic so that I even had the idea of creating a community distro
out of this "community" distro. I would have liked to contribute but
neither wanted to sign a CLA (contributor license agreement) nor wanted
to become an ambassador.

I am also active at GNOME with some marketing activities and suggested
the creation of a Freedesktop.org marketing effort (
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/FreedesktopMarketing ). Although I am a
GNOME user I would like to see more common basis for all free desktops.
I don't think that just want desktop is here to stay and that nobody
besides the geeks really knows GNOME or KDE - at best Linux users know
that they use Linux and
also may know the distro.

I think there are many different viewpoints that one can take: For some
Linux is a workhorse and they need the one that does the job best. For
the desktop there are some common problems that mostly have to do with
the integration with the Windows world. From my experience as an IT
consultant I would think that making the total switch away from the
proprietary world should always be the better world. I think that
because nearly all problems I have experienced and could not be solved
where with integration of proprietary software or hardware with no free
drivers.

Why do I use Foresight now? Well as I said above Fedora did not allow me
to contribute with my attitude. Foresight  always has a new GNOME, I
also came along rBuilder and software appliance which I think is a nice
idea. Also I think the concepts of conary are much superior to anything
from the DEB/RPM world. Also I did some random testing of #IRC channels
and have found that foresight was helpful. Although Foresight is still a
small community and not a large company I think the quality of software
is relatively good. I think It could use some more developers. I am not
a developer - I can do many things and also write some code. I might
even be sucessful in contributing some packages to the rPath world as I
have managed to set up a working development environment thanks to
#conary channel.

What I would like to give is maybe some translations to german, help on
marketing, bug reports, some minor fixes and some ideas for the future
of Foresight. I see that Foresight is just one of possible many
distributions that use rPatch/conary technology and also that it is
quite possible to easily share packages between those. So I think this
is a very efficient way to reuse work. and thats why Foresight has a
good chance to make its way. Even if one could think: Yet another Linux
distro? ;-)

I think Foresight could play a role for giving GNOME an official live
medium (the last has been GNOME 2.12 with ubuntu). This would mean that
one should coordinate that for GNOME 2.20 goals. For GNOEM 2.18 I think
one could do this unofficially - I would suggest to use Foresight 1.0 as
a basis but allow different branding. Same could be done for KDE if the
KDE team at rBuilder is sucessfull.

I think the 1.0 release could be a good point for foresight to start a
new era (numbers are magic ). I think we should try to collect some
material that could help presenting Foresight also do more for
networking existing Foresight Linux users. As there are only a few this
is not easy - and if you use Ubuntu you much likely get a local support
in your language. And thats why many people will not choose Foresight
and this is understandable. So localisation is very important. I think
soemthing like rosetta project at Ubuntu (
https://launchpad.net/rosetta) can be very helpful - if he had something
similar to that? Right now Ubuntu has not yet released any source code. 
maybe one could use pootle
(http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/) instead?

Enough for now.

Thilo/Vinci
-- 
Thilo Pfennig
PfennigSolutions - Wiki-Systeme
http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/