Ken VanDine of Foresight Linux was kind enough to chat with SCALE about life with Open Source software in general, and Foresight Linux specifically. This is that interview.

SCALE: Why don't we start with you telling us a bit about yourself and how you got involved in the open source community.
Ken: Well, that's a very long story. I got started using Linux in early 1993, and really loved it right from the get go. I quickly got into a sysadmin gig managing mostly Linux boxes and have been fortune to have been able to work with Linux, not just as a hobby, since about 1994. As a sys admin, I learned about filing bug reports, etc., asking for help on IRC and mailing lists, feature requests via Bugzilla, etc. I just fell in love with the community dynamic of open source, the real feedback into the products I was using, and developers willing to implement features I was asking for. I mean really, how cool is that?

Ken: Over time I started do more than sys admin work, I was also customizing distributions for work, basically building "appliances" without the term for it.
SCALE: who were you working for at the time?
Ken: At that time, Eli Lilly. At the same time, I was also involved in GNOME marketing. I think I have been on the marketing team and writing for the GNOME Journal since 2001.

SCALE: How did you get involved with the GNOME marketing team?
Ken: Honestly I don't know. IRC I guess; it just happened. Several things all happened at just the right time. While at Lilly, doing all this rpm packaging work, figuring out how to manage thousands of these appliances, etc., I read the really great white paper written about Conary. That was in 2004, the first paper written about Conary. I read it, and couldn't get to IRC to hit #Conary fast enough. Conary was exactly what I needed to build these appliances and manage them more effectively. I just saw this vision of my life getting much better :)

SCALE: What was it that appealed to you about Conary?
Ken: The integration of source and binaries, and SCM concepts.
SCALE: SCM?
Ken: Source Code Management, like svn, hg, git, bzr, etc. Not only are the repositories managed, so is your system. Conary also had a concept of a group: a group is like a manifest that defines what goes into your appliance/distribution.

None of the packaging systems really have a concept like this. Conary was specifically designed from the beginning to handle creating distributions and derivations. In a regulated environment, like a pharmaceutical company, knowing exactly what is on your systems is a huge problem. So you define your appliance, or server, or whatever with a group and updates ensure only the contents of that group is installed on your system.

SCALE: How long after discovering Conary did you start Foresight?
Ken: Eight months maybe?
SCALE: So it's been around for awhile.. roughly 3-4 years.
Ken: Yeah, Feb 2005 was the first release.

SCALE: What prompted the development for Foresight Linux? Why another distribution?
Ken: Foresight came about because of lots of frustration. Two things were happening:

The Project Utopia stuff was really shaping up (udev, hal, dbus, etc.) but the distributions were slow to adopt that stuff. And the ones that did had very old versions, while that stuff was evolving very rapidly. So we had some cool desktop technology out there that wasn't integrated into a distribution yet.

And within GNOME marketing, it was rather frustrating for us, getting a new release of GNOME out, writing release notes, etc. We got a little buzz right away but users couldn't really try out the new version for a couple months without building GNOME from source. They had to wait for their distributions to ship a major release with it. I wanted a way to get those latest GNOME bits out there for people to be able to play around with it and see what all the buzz was about. I also wanted to see what the desktop would be like with all the cool new technology integrated.

So just for fun, I created Foresight. It took me a couple of weeks but then I had a full distribution built with the latest GNOME, by myself. The tools I had made it doable. Soon I had regular builds happening and was able to get all of GNOME built and released on GNOME release day. I can build everything on a development branch and promote it all to a release branch in one atomic operation. In our first release I had the latest udev and friends, great hardware support, and the latest GNOME, plus Mono, which neither Novell nor Suse had shipped yet.

SCALE: so Foresight is really designed around the latest available GNOME desktop, as well as some cool desktop related toys thrown in?
Ken: Yes.

SCALE: Is Foresight using the latest stable GNOME bits or do you ever include code that is considered development level or unstable?
Ken: It's a mix. We generally ship latest stable, but as we get into the GNOME release candidates we start integrating that. So our users will start to get "unstable" but somewhat tested GNOME stuff shortly before GNOME releases it as stable.

SCALE: Given that Foresight is heavily centered around GNOME, I assume other desktop environments are supported and available?
Ken: Yes, there is work being done on KDE and XFCE editions. They use the same philosophy.

Another key thing for us is rolling releases. You never have to wait for major releases to get version bumps. We continually deliver on the innovation.

SCALE: Have there been any spinoffs like Ubuntu has seen with Kubuntu and Xubuntu?
Ken: Yes, there have been a couple other projects. It's pretty easy to do. I think one of them is called ELinux. Considering we are built with tools designed for creating derivative works, I encourage people to do just that.

SCALE: Foresight Linux Version 2.0.3 was released very recently. What do you have planned for the future?
Ken: Oh, there's some exciting stuff coming. Until now we have focused very much on staying as close to upstream GNOME as possible. However, now that Shuttle is selling systems with Foresight pre-loaded on the very cheap KPC systems, we have gotten some very interesting feedback.

SCALE: How did that agreement with Shuttle come about?
Ken: They were looking for a distribution. Someone from on-disk.com I know knows one of the guys at Shuttle. He told them they should really meet with me. They had looked at a bunch of distributions but what I think what really sold them on Foresight was the ease of rebranding. I created a rebranded derivative of Foresight for them in one hour. That's not just changing stuff on a local system, but also packaging the changes into a repository and creating installable ISOs. I think that really won it for us. So that's an example of a Foresight derivative. (Shuttle is shipping a re-branded Foresight, but they are keeping the Foresight name plastered all over it :) )

SCALE: Incidentally, wasn't your meeting with Shuttle right before the last SCALE? :)
Ken: It was at SCALE :) Well, we had spoken a few times, but our face to face meeting was at SCALE.
SCALE: Nice.
Ken: The agreement worked well for us. They manage just their changes from Foresight and they inherit everything else from Foresight.

SCALE: Tell us a bit about the work you do for rPath. How is it similar to the work you do for Foresight?
Ken: About a year after I created Foresight I went to work for rPath, the company behind Conary, rBuilder, etc. I work on our management systems, and part of my work does include working on Foresight now, which is great.
SCALE: so rPath is paying you to work on Foresight?
Ken: Yes, part time.
SCALE: How did the name "Foresight" come about?
Ken: I give all the credit for that to my lovely wife, Laurie. I was looking for a name that reflected vision; vision of what the Linux desktop could be and would be.

SCALE: rPath has their own distributions, several thanks to Conary. Do any of them inherit anything from Foresight or vice-a-versa?
Ken: Foresight inherits from rPath. Things we don't want to maintain or have a need to maintain, we just get from rPath Linux. It's not designed to be a desktop,
but rather a platform for building appliances.

SCALE: so rPath could really be thought of as the development environment for Foresight?
Ken: yes.

Ken: Now that Shuttle is selling boxes with Foresight loaded on them to consumers that have never heard of Linux before we have gotten some very interesting feedback. For instance, the default panel layout in GNOME (having the workspace switcher applet on the panel by default) confuses them. If a user clicks on it they appear to lose all their windows. They don't understand workspaces. So I am evaluating making some UI changes.
SCALE: What's the solution?
Ken: Defaulting to a single bottom panel; not including the applet for workspace switching by default, and perhaps defaulting to slab (gnome-main-menu) which Novell wrote. I'm evaluating it, but I but really want some feedback.
SCALE: How will you get that feedback?
Ken: I plan to blog about it, mail the desktop-devel-list, etc. So watch my blog and comment :) It's clear it is time for a change if we want to really make this easy for new Linux users.

SCALE: But the users of those low-end shuttle boxes don't really read blogs. They think they're buying a computing appliance.
Ken: Right, but we can get that feedback via support channels.

SCALE: That leads to another question - who supports the software on those Shuttle boxes?
Ken: Shuttle does to an extent; that's a little unclear to me. They do support their customers who have questions, but we don't know how it will work if they have real bugs... what the escalation process would be, etc.
SCALE: How's their Linux expertise in their customer support area?
Ken: It's improving. They seem to be taking Linux on the desktop very seriously. They are also doing great things for the Foresight project, such as donating build hardware, and paying for some of our expenses for our booth at Linuxworld in San Francisco next month.
SCALE: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us!
Ken: Great, thank you! We'll be at SCALE again! We love SCALE. SCALE and OLF are my favorite events of the year
SCALE: And we love hearing that :-) Thanks, Ken.