Foresight Linux 2.5 review

Security: On a new installation of Foresight 2.5, the command line firewall application, IPTables, is not started. There is no graphical firewall application installed and none of the popular ones are available for installation. Mandatory access security modules like SELinux, AppArmor and Tomoyo are not loaded.

Final Thoughts and Suggestions: Foresight is a distribution I thought had “died” and gone to tux heaven. But it seems that the developers decided to bring it back to life. Given that, I hoped that the developers would have taken more time to bring every aspect of the distribution up to date. Since that did not happen, here are a few changes I will be looking forward to on the next release – major or minor:

The current installer needs more than a face lift. It is so out of date that ext4, the default journaling file system on virtually all Linux distributions, in not even supported. Features like one-click, full disk encryption option, LVM as the default disk partitioning scheme are already standard on the latest version of Anaconda, the system installer. What will it take to update Anaconda on Foresight?
Conary is just as easy to get used to on the command line as any other package manager, but a graphical interface installed out of the box will sure make it a lot easier to manage applications, especially for new users.
Desktop wallpapers mean very little, but sticking with the same one for way too many years show stagnation. For the next release I hope we will see a more modern desktop wallpaper out of the box.

Resources: 32-bit and 64-bit installation images for GNOME, KDE and Xfce editions are available for download here. All editions come with the latest stable release of their respective desktop environments.

Screenshots: Enjoy a few more screenshots from a test installation of Foresight 2.5 GNOME edition.

Sound and video applications on a new installation of Foresight 2.5 GNOME edition.