Foresight is a rolling-release distro with infrequently issued installation disks, which may explain why it’s little-known. It was based on rPath’s commercial Linux, but with the demise of the latter it’s now independent. It’s available with the Gnome, KDE, LXDE, and Xfce desktops. Although Gnome is the default, I chose Xfce, which I prefer, in the 32-bit version.

The disk is not live and the installer is a modified version of Red Hat’s Anaconda. Unfortunately the modification includes removing the option to encrypt /home. Installation is very fast, but with a rolling-release distro whose installation disk is a year old, there’s a lot of updating to be done afterwards. Foresight requires a wired internet connection, as wireless drivers have to be downloaded.

The installer ignored my request for a UK keyboard, and gave me a US locale as well, but that’s easily fixed. The software included Abiword, Gnumeric, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Ekiga, Claws-mail, both Parole and Gnome-mplayer, Pragha music player, and Gimp. Codecs and Firefox’s flash plugin were installed. Everything worked, and running from the CLI only gave a warning for Pragha.

There’s plenty of extra software available, but the problem was getting it. Foresight uses the conary package management system, which it claims is far superior to the rpm and deb ones, particularly for managing rolling-release systems. Unfortunately, it didn’t work at first, and it took a couple of experienced users at the forum to find a solution. PackageKit is available but, since conary doesn’t use metadata, there are no tags and everything is listed in one sequence. Moreover, with no metadata, there are no descriptions: you can search for ‘avidemux’ but not for ‘video editor’.

Comparing this to the other rolling-release distros, Sabayon is less stable; Arch, a pain to install; Fuduntu only has Gnome; and PCLinuxOS is only reliable with KDE. For a user-friendly rolling-release distro with KDE or Gnome, I’d choose PCLinuxOS or Fuduntu, but (particularly if you want LXDE or Xfce), Foresight’s worth trying.