eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Foresight Linux 1.0

The Compiz taskbar control applet that ships with Foresight enabled us to switch 3-D effects on and off without logging out of our desktop session.

The Get Live Help menu item launches an instance of the xchat-GNOME IRC client and drops you into the #foresight IRC room where we found unusually helpful help.

Foresights knack for providing rolling updates to the software with which it ships–as opposed to updating applications every six months or more–shortens the distance between you and the cool new features in your favorite apps.

When Foresight Linux 1.0 came out in late January, it shipped with version 2.0.3 of OpenOffice–it took us about 10 minutes to remake Foresights OOo recipe ourselves to step up to version 2.1. The projects official OOo build has also since stepped up

As a child of rPath Linux, Foresight inherits rPaths handy rAA web-based management console.

We like that Foresight Linux takes the Ubuntu approach to rights escalation, with sudo built in and preconfigured for that purpose.

Foresight ships with Red Hats display settings tool, unlike Ubuntu, which still lacks a configuration tool for tackling tricky display settings tasks like configuring multiple monitors.

Another perk of Foresights rPath lineage is the ease with which users may set up their own networked repositories at rpath.org. Heres where our up-to-date htop process viewer package lives.