From the website of Foresight,

“Foresight is a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software”

The question is, is this the case? Does it fulfill its goal? As it turns out, the July issue of Linux Format shipped with it a copy of Foresight Linux 2.0. On a whim, I tried that out, and very quickly got an unusable system. After being contacted by one of the developers in reply to a somewhat inflammatory tweet I made, I decided to give it a second shot with a more recent version.

My test hardware is as follows:

• Laptop model: HP Pavilion dv6000
• Processor: 1.7ghz AMD Athlon X2, 256kb L2 cache per core
• RAM: 2gb
• Video card: nVidia GeForce Go 6150
• Wireless: Linksys WUSB54GC USB stick, using the rt73usb driver integrated into mainline Linux since 2.6.24 (easier and more reliable than my internal Broadcom card)

For this trial, I used Foresight 2.0.2.1 GNOME edition compiled for x86_64. I appreciate the availability of an Xfce version very much, but given that it’s apparently still in a beta stage, I decided to pass on that.

Installation

The installation started out OK. Nothing special. A textual bootloader prompt with a reasonably attractive, if plain, background, appeared, to which I simply hit return. I was pleasantly surprised to note that I didn’t have to disable my APIC to get it to boot, as I have with some other distros and indeed Foresight 2.0. I should have stopped there; from then on, it went more or less downhill until the installation phase was over.

To begin with, the bootstrapping phase of the installer–Anaconda–was a ncurses TUI. There was no interaction required there, so I can forgive that, but it did look aged. And if it was non-interactive, what’s the point? After that, the installer successfully made the transition to GUI. The installation process was fairly linear and simple, with an attractive theme.  Possibly murrine, as it looked too shiny for Nodoka (both of which being very nice GTK+ themes that I highly recommend), but given the progress bar appearence, I would lay my bet squarely on humanlooks.

However, I am not happy with the partitioning system. For starters, it didn’t allow formatting a partition with ReiserFS, which I prefer to use over ext3. For another, it took too many liberties with what I wanted. It was impossible to specify which partition would go where on my hard drive, and it made a partition extended when a primary partition was all both I wanted and needed. Forcing it as primary simply shuffled my partitions around some more so another partition became extended.  Granted, it did appear to support LVM and software RAID, so it is at least powerful.

I also specified to use the GRUB bootloader instead of the default EXTLINUX. I’m more comfortable with GRUB, and I knew the EXTLINUX theme that Foresight used was somewhat… ambiguous as to the selection highlight color from my previous attempt.  I’m not sure what advantage EXTLINUX has over GRUB or LILO; fewer people know how to administrate it, it always looked more clunky to me, and any additional features are not immedietely obvious to me.

Now the actual installation phase, due to several complications that I shall now describe, took the better part of an afternoon. For this reason, and due to my stupidity in not taking notes, I have some mental fuzziness as to which installation failed where. So please bear with me, and allow some flexibility for my notoriously feeble memory.

During the file copying phase, the GUI elements were completely unresponsive, leading to a lockup of some variety when I attempted to view the release notes. I’m afraid I can’t figure out the reason for this; as the installer is probably I/O-bound, the O(1) scheduler in Linux should give shorter and more frequent timeslices, which should give a more responsive system. But this was not the case. Perhaps some cycles were being wasted somewhere and severely messing up the interactivity detection? Perhaps it was yielding its timeslices for some reason? I don’t have the knowledge to properly answer that question. Regardless, it was stuck to the best of my knowledge. Eventually I just used Alt+SysRq to force a reboot (I’m aware that I should have done an emergency disk sync first, but it just didn’t matter since the data was going to be corrupted anyway).

So I figured that I’d give it a second shot, without reading the release notes during the file copying stage. Same rigmarole as before. Installation went fine. Took a while (although not as long as OpenSUSE, I think), and I wasn’t happy with the lack of a progress indicator when it did post-installation configuration. It just finished the exact time that I decided to take a nap while it worked. The installation having been completed, I rebooted, and got, instead of a bootloader… “err3err4″. Huh? Pressing a key appended “No operating system found” to that cryptic message. Weird, no? So just to relieve my concern that something broke, I installed Slackware (and during which set up my partition table the way I wanted with cfdisk). After my fears had been proven unfounded, I tried the installation again. This time, I left the bootloader with EXTLINUX, and everything worked fine (except for the wrong boot option being chosen as the default).

Post-installation

I briefly had a sense of relief, as things appeared only gone uphill from there, especially compared to the nightmares that I endured with 2.0. I had a window manager after the installation (metacity), and the package manager was a little bit better in terms of telling me what’s going on. So, yeah. That illusion was partially shattered when I rebooted. It seemed to boot in a snap, but then GDM absolutely crawled when starting up. After everything got going, I tried typing. Yep, as I guessed, it was impractically slow.  A quick check with top confirmed my suspicious gathered from my first try with Foresight: my wireless driver was acting funny again and sucking up 100% of my processor, causing major performance problems.

Unfortunately, this made looking at the more interesting technical features, such as PulseAudio, PackageKit, and especially conary, impossible.  However, after my precursory look at PackageKit, I was inclined to think that it was a tad underpowered.

Also, while my wireless card worked fine as with most distros (although in sharp contrast to OpenSUSE, but that’s another review entirely), Foresight configured X.org with the vesa driver, and therefore required me to reconfigure my video card to use nv post-installation. This brought me back to when I first tried Linux on a GeForce 6150 several years ago; the only difference there was that nv didn’t work at all, while nv worked fine with Foresight.

Conclusion

I am pleasantly surprised at how much more usable Foresight 2.0.2.1 is compared to 2.0. I have a window manager post-installation, and the package manager is more informative and less unsettling. However, it still suffers from several issues that crippled it for me.  It does have a nice and well-rounded desktop environment, and given that all of my problems seemed hardware-related in nature, I suggest giving it a shot.  The improvements that have been made make it a better option in my eye.  Maybe it’ll work for you.  If it does, please do give your impressions in the comments.

The Bottom Line

A distro with interesting technical features, but that suffers from severe hardware-related bugs on my system.