The guys over at opensourcereleasefeed did an interview with me about the Kongoni release.
On rereading it, I have to admit… I should have checked my grammar better but I was answering mails at 1am so I think I’ll forgive myself, still I think I got the messages I wanted to spread across even if I took a bit of a ballistic approach to the location of commas and dashes.
The kongoni release has made some real headlines and our servers are working hard – plenty of downloads -more than I expected for a developers release actually. The buzz is still small, but significant and I expect it to grow as the releases get better – and we prove we’re in this for the long haul.
The biggest story seems to have been from tectonic which got fed round all over the place.
Interestingly also got picked up at tuxmachines, which stands out for adding my screenshots blog to the story.
Some big sites that occasionally feed from tectonic also chose it for their main pages, not least of which was IOL.
Distrowatch listed us distrowatch weekly – of about 6 new distro’s, we’re one of two to get a screenshot, the cool thing is it’s not one of mine, meaning they must have actually ran the thing to take their own 
So far the first individual blogger I’ve seen writing about it is this guy.
Muti and digg both have the announcement and the tectonic story, in both cases the tectonic link got more votes however but not a huge difference.
Also on that muti page you’ll find a link to this story posted on mybroadband by Alistair the editor of tectonic – but not the same story he posted on his own site. Yay Al, he must really like the idea to write two stories about it.
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Updates: 25th February:
The first nice one that’s new today is Techzine.nl who picked up and translated the Tectonic story into Dutch., this is probably the first non-English story about it. Looks like a human translation too, because I can read it.
A fellow named Glyn Moodie (whose name sounds very familiar) tweeted the So last year blog. not major press – but cool to see this kind of response. And another tweet here, with a very South African name.
While the big news sites is great for getting the word out, I’m excited to see tweets and blogs starting to appear -they can make or break a new distro.
Please keep an eye on this post as I’ll be updating it for the next few days when interesting press coverage appears. I’m particularly eager for our first real review.
Okay, bad puns aside – it’s true – there is a public release of kongoni you can try out !
I’ve let everyone know I can think off but please spread the word mmkay.
I paste the release anouncement below:
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Kongoni Linux 1.12.2 Baseline2 (Aristotle) Released.
The Kongoni Linux project has released the first public baseline of their GNU/Linux operating system, codenamed Aristotle. Kongoni is the Shona word for GNU the same animal that inspired the name of the GNU operating system – and thus literally translates as GNU Linux.
The idea of a baseline release is itself a Kongoni innovation, a way to establish a common working platform for the further development of the system. A previous baseline release was made available only to current developers of the system while this second baseline is being made available to the public at large. This will also be the last baseline release kongoni does and from it we will begin a traditional release method through alpha, beta and stable releases.
The baseline release is thus not intended for end-users except as a curiosity but rather for interested developers and GNU/Linux experts. It does not fully represent the ideas or unique features of kongoni, but instead a platform on which those ideas can be created. Because the baseline is already a fully installable system, developers from all over the world can work on a common platform with the full core setups in place, without the need for expensive virtualization infrastructures often used by other large distributions.
With this baseline release, our focus will shift towards rapidly growing the selection of software in our ports tree and stabilizing the software in the system as we work toward our first full release. Nevertheless the system is in a/etc/opt/samba/smb_map_update.sh usable state and several of the developers are already using it as their primary operating systems, it does however almost certainly contain significant unknown bugs and we ask that people who try it please report their experiences and any bugs found in the forums on our website (http://www.kongoni.co.za).
The name “kongoni” represents the spirit of the project reflecting both it’s African origins and it’s strict FSF compliance as Kongoni is a truly free distribution. FSF Chairman, Richard Stallman was involved in the discussions that led to the foundation of the project and his input sought on critical decisions to ensure the system really is free software. Although Kongoni originated in Africa it’s focus and development community is international and it aims to be easily usable across all locale’s. Kongoni is a pure community effort with no profit motive, done by developers to satisfy their own needs and desires in an operating system, and share the results of that work with others who have similar needs.
Technically Kongoni follows the design spirit of the BSD-Unix systems with a simple and elegant underlying design based on Slackware (the most BSD inspired Linux distribution) to which it adds a slick and powerful KDE4.2 desktop and a dependency tracked ports tree for package management. The system is designed to be very easy to remaster into custom versions so that users could easily build and replicate installations of various kinds with prebuilt custom setups and desktops.
Ports represent a powerful way to distribute software as a set of tools that automatically fetch the sources of the program and then compile it locally, this is more bandwidth friendly for users (source code is usually smaller than prebuilt packages). This benefit is particularly useful in Africa where bandwidth is expensive, and since Kongoni came from Africa this was a major concern. Ports also allow power-users to tweak the compilations and setups of
their systems to their liking while ensuring even normal users get the absolute best possible performance from their applications by automatically optimizing their software for their specific setup and to work with their own selection of other software already installed.A final advantage of ports is that they are inherently more portable than prebuilt packages allowing Kongoni to target multiple CPU architectures with only small sets of system specific changes in the ports rather than massive duplication of effort. Currently the operating system targets intel compatible architectures and has native versions for both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of these architectures which share a common ports tree.
The system is shipped as an installable and runtime modifiable live CD this allows users to test it’s compatibility with their hardware and try out the desktop and software prior to committing to an installation. Being runtime modifiable means that future versions could automatically check for patches online and allow users to trial such patches on the CD and then install a system with them already applied.
The version number 1.12.2 should be read as: Kongoni release 1 compatible with Slackware 12.2. The 64-bit version is built on Bluewhite64 which follows slackware versioning. Each release will be fully upstream compatible with the version of slackware/Bluewhite64 it is built against. This means that any correctly built slackware package should run on Kongoni, and any package built from a kongoni port should run on the same version of slackware (provided the
dependencies are manually resolved because slackware lacks kongoni’s dependency resolution). The 64-bit version also has 32-bit compatibility support built-in to allow the running of programs for which 64-bit versions are not obtainable.
Kongoni can be downloaded from our website at http://www.kongoni.co.za, various mirrors and from bittorrent. On our site you can also find other Kongoni community resources including forums for end-users, developer and announcement mailing lists, documentation and current project news.
We as the Kongoni development community would like to invite all interested people to download a copy, play with it and report their experiences -or if you like it, perhaps join our community and help us build something truly wondrous.
The release is available via http and ftp on the following URLs (these URLs are load-balanced across a number of mirrors):
http://download.kongoni.co.za/kongoni//iso/1.12.2baseline2/kongoni32.1_12_2_baseline2.iso (32-Bit native)
http://download.kongoni.co.za/kongoni//iso/1.12.2baseline2/kongoni64.1_12_2_baseline2.iso (64-Bit native)
And also via bittorrent through the torrent files at these URLs:
http://download.kongoni.co.za/tracker/torrents/kongoni32.1_12_2_baseline2.iso.torrent (32-Bit native)
http://download.kongoni.co.za/tracker/torrents/kongoni64.1_12_2_baseline2.iso.torrent (64-Bit native)
