Linux distributions >

(on Wikipedia)
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Foresight
foresightlinux.se

• 2015-05-08 - Discontinued.

• Aligned with Red Hat?

2015-05-14 ∞

• https://web.archive.org/web/20150913011857/https://www.foresightlinux.se/getting-started/ has a link to a FAQ which doesn't exist.
• www.foresightlinux.se/downloads/ has white links on a light grey background. What in the fuck were they thinking?!
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160314072940/http://wiki.foresightlinux.se/ is not a publicly-editable wiki.
• LXDE is a two-dvd set?
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150512140357/http://wiki.foresightlinux.se/index.php?title=Installation talks about installing CentOS, which has Red Hat affiliation.

• https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=foresight says it's discontinued.

Failed.

2009-05-15 - lite-2.1.0 ∞

After some significant downtime from some very strange issues, I was able to get Foresight up and running.

2.1.1 was released 2009-05-15 so this review is a little earlier. I'll ignore my minor note that dated my comment "Nice!" at 2009-07-16.

It turns out that my previous experiences with a lot of distributions was largely the fault of LILO.  I have no idea how it's possible, but I did save some reference configs and I may be able to unravel the reason behind issues like a freezing keyboard, a monitor powering off and kernel issues where my network card would no longer exist.  It wasn't anything obvious, I really had to fart around to figure this all out.

Anyhow, Foresight Linux is impressive.  I like it a lot.  I installed Foresight Linux lite-2.1.0, which is a GNOME-based LiveCD.

• I was wrong about not being able to install it without wiping a drive.  I can install it the way I want.
• Odd that I have to authenticate as myself for some actions. I wasn't prompted to make a root account during install.
• The tty has the correct console resolution!!! Their bootloader is magical! They also have proper colour choices, so I don't have to deal with the dark blue text on a black background.
• sudo -i to log in as root. Then use passwd to set the password. Very non-obvious.  I had to look that one up.
• The console beeps! Boo! =( Even a terminal from within X beeps, and has to be disabled by the user.  Sigh.
• The raw console font is wrong for text apps and boxes, like links.
• GNOME is pretty good!
• Doesn't have gpm. =/
• Doesn't keep the standard /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd symlinks. I need to refer to the long convoluted full kernel/etc filenames.
• I don't seem to be able to easily use Lilo as a bootloader. It's not provided, and I can get it going from elsewhere, but it simply does not work. That sucks. When I fiddled enough, I had some subtle and bad issues.

• I don't know what 'user script' is, in the display manager, to select a different window manager. It would have to be researched.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the experience.

The reason I didn't stay with Foresight was because I had issues switching to another window manager.  Maybe I could troubleshoot that, but it was neither obvious, nor documented, nor discussed enough for me to find it with casual searching.

Slackware could do what I want, after I was able to figure out a proper xorg.conf.. which was only possible through some Unity Linux build 3.7 magic.  Go figure.

2009-04-16ish review ∞

• I see no way to select sda1. I don't want to nuke everything on my drive! FAIL.

Last updated 2020-01-12 at 00:22:13