The latest episode of LUGRadio contains a segment about rPath and their packaging system Conary. It sounded really neat: kind of what Canonical is trying to accomplish with Launchpad/Bazaar, but it's completely integrated into the packaging system and not some kind of extra layer. Also, if all you need to do to install an application from source, why do you need to go through like 2000 steps in order to create a package? Conary source packages are often 5-10 row python scripts that basicly say ./configure; make; make install.

Foresight is a distro that's using Conary (and the rest of the rPath goodness), and it also always the first distribution to release a version with the latest Gnome. It suited my needs great.

I realized that Macbook isn't supported - apparently, no developer has got one. The Disc Druid partitioner threw the GPT partition table away, and that's what the Macbook uses. Crap... After that, the installer installed GRUB, which isn't supported on a Macbook. Double crap!

Apparently, there's something in the EFI that thinks "Fuck - this crap is so incompatible, it Must be Windows. I'd better emulate BIOS/MBR right away!", and thus boots my hard drive. Also, I managed to install lilo from the rescue mode, and after that, Foresight booted!

So, I got into this sytem, but I wasn't done yet. Since the touchpad (normaly) only have one button, I need to use keyboard buttons to click, and to do that I need xkbset - I'm sure there are other options, but none that I know of. In any other system than Conary, I'd have downloaded xkbset and installed it, but this time, I tried to create a xkbset conary package. The result? When I hade read some documentation and worked on the package for a while (an hour or two), it worked great!

Next step: correct resolution. My LCD is 1280x800, but something about the intel graphics which I don't understand makes that impossible, unless you use the wonderful 915resolution application. That wasn't packaged either, and when packaging it, I found out that it needed a newer version of vbetool than what is avalible in the standard repositories. The solution? Package 915resolution, and create a "shadow" package from the upstream pm-utils (which contains vbetool) with the newer version of vbetool in it. All of it worked out Great, and my computer now works much better :D

I really like how packaging Just Works - that's the way it should be!

[b]Update:[/b] For those of you who actually wants to do this yourselves, check out http://issues.foresightlinux.org/confluence/display/docs/Install+Foresight+on+a+Macbook where I documented the process