Foresight - a word Mirriam-Webster Online defines as an act of looking forward, or a view forward. What they don't tell you (and maybe they should) is that Foresight is also a Linux distro designed primarily to deliver the latest and greatest GNOME software available... the bleeding edge if you will. Does Foresight Linux deliver the goods? Is it more than just a demo of the GNOME desktop environment?We're here to find out.
Today we're looking at Foresight Linux version 0.8.1 (ISO images dated 2005/06/01), which serves as their latest offering. The first thing the die hard users will realize is that this isn't necessarily the “bleeding edge” as it is. Foresight 0.8.1 runs on GNOME 2.10.1, and the current version is actually 2.10.2 according to the GNOME mirrors. Not a huge deal though, we'll let it slide because I get the idea that the developers of Foresight are not only trying to create a GNOME demo, but a full-fledged Linux distribution. For demoing purposes there's always the Ubuntu-based GNOME LiveCD, and Foresight was made to install to the hard drive. Much of the software packaged with this distro is up to date, but others such as gcc (currently at 4.0.1), HAL (currently at 0.5.2), and GAIM (currently at 1.4.0) are a bit behind. Is this really of any consequence? Probably not, unless you're hell bent on having the latest of everything... you masochist! For the rest of us, Foresight 0.8.1 is probably just up to date enough to keep us interested. Let's take a quick look at the highlights of this distro...
Features:
Linux kernel 2.6.11.7-3
gcc 3.3.3, glibc 2.3.2
X.org 6.8.2
GNOME 2.10.1 desktop
HAL 0.4.7 hardware abstraction layer
Novell Evolution 2.2.2 email client
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 email client
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4 web browser
Mozilla 1.7.8 web browser
Gaim 1.3.0 instant messenger
Gimp 2.2.7 image editor
Beagle 0.0.10 search companion
F-Spot 0.0.13 photo manager
Conary 0.60.4 package management
Installing Foresight Linux
For those of you who have installed any version of Red Hat or Fedora Linux, you are no doubt familiar with the Anaconda installer. Other Linux distributions such as VidaLinux (a Gentoo derivative) have also put Anaconda to good use, and why not? It's an excellent graphical installer by any modern standard, only rivaled in its class by the likes of Mandriva's installer or maybe even Novell/SUSE's YaST. This is not to say it has its fair share of issues, because it does. Take the Fedora volume labeling problem for instance. Anaconda jumbles the default fstab so bad that the system won't boot at all. It's necessary to perform a recovery boot, chroot into the system, and manually fix the file system entries to get the system to boot properly.
L to R: The Foresight installer
L to R: No ReiserFS support; Package selection needs attention
In the case of Foresight Linux, Anaconda works okay... save for two issues I found. First of all, it takes an exorbitant amount of time to install. The test system is a clone based on an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU with 1GB of DDR RAM. Installing Foresight took the better part of an hour to complete. Considering Foresight resides on a two disc set (sized at 635MB and 305MB respectively, and comprising a total install size of 2.3GB) I really don't think this is really an acceptable time frame. Almost every other distribution I've tested recently trumps Foresight on total install time. I checked the drive settings from a console while I installed and I/O was set to 32-bit, and the drive was using DMA. I saw no other reasons for such slow performance. Still, performance issues aside, it did install without any serious issues so this was only a setback.
The second issue I found with the installer was more of a blemish than a real problem. After most of the customizations are made to the install (i.e. date, time, drive partitioning, etc), you are taken to a package selection screen similar to that used by Red Hat. There are two options on this screen: Miscellaneous and Everything. You can only choose Everything. There isn't even a check box next to the Miscellaneous option... which is odd. Why not just gut this from Anaconda since it doesn't serve any real world purpose anyway? At least not that I can see anyway. Even if it were an actual option, I highly doubt Miscellaneous would be an appropriate title for it.
I'd like to mention one more thing about the installation before continuing on with the rest of the review, and it's regarding the file system choices you are given for disk setup. If you are a fan of ReiserFS, forget about using Foresight. Booting with the “reiserfs” flag doesn't even give you the option to use it for any of your file systems. You are, however, able to use XFS... but Foresight defaults to ext3 for all data partitions.
Net install option is available
If you'd prefer, Foresight can be installed completely via the Internet by downloading the 5MB boot.iso image from one of their mirrors. When you boot to this CD, enter linux askmethod at the prompt and it will ask you whether you'd like to use http or ftp. Then all you need to do is tell it where to grab the files from and you're ready to go (I've listed two choices below). The rest of the installation will take place completely over the network. Alternately you can choose to copy the files to a local server on your network and do completely diskless installs locally, rather than doing them over the Internet.
Internet install locations: (used for both ftp and http installations) server: ftp.belnet.be directory: /packages/foresightlinux/foresight/0.8.1/os/
