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)
Kongoni’s second baseline release will be the first public release of the distribution. At this point in time it is extremely close to being released and you can expect it to be officially announced sometime in the next 48 hours (don’t hold me to this as a promise though – we are community project and we do not set or do deadlines).
But with that in mind, I felt I should give a taster of what Kongoni is like, so I did a screenshot tour from the ISO build that we will be releasing which shows of quite a bit of the system. It’s not very in depth into things like the ports tree (for that check out the kongoni website) because screenshots are highly unideal for showing things like that off. Instead it focuses on the visual aspects of the system as it will be encountered by a first time user, through a first install in the normal “launch installer from live” mode. The “just install” option is extremely similar but because it doesn’t use the desktop it is faster and works well on lower memory systems or for rapid deployments (such as perhaps if you remastered a disc with your needed add-ons for your environment and want to just clone your install around fast).
So without further ado: the first ever screenshots of kongoni:
(click here to view it in a new window instead)
So here’s an interesting one… since installing that latest NVidia driver on my desktop partition, all my movies started playing with their colors all wrong. At first I was blaming my kongoni baseline1 installation, adding codecs, rebuilding ports… and nothing helped. Then I started googling (why didn’t I do that in the first place) and got a few hits which made one thing clear, other people with similar problems had it when 3D video drivers were messing up the colourspace for some reason. This happened no matter what player I used, no matter the movie format… nothing made a difference.
Now this is not an NVidia first, I saw reports for the same issue on certain older ATI and Intel drivers. What annoys me is that NVidia did it with a release now – all those other reports were ancient. So ancient they all used the same solution which was to switch gstreamer to use plain X11 output. This didn’t work for me because gstreamer-properties doesn’t seem to exist anymore, but luckily I pretty much watch movies in mplayer anyway.
Mplayer had the issue with all the video drivers available except two: X11 and gl (which is opengl1 code only, gl2 had the same problem). X11 unfortunately does not do video scaling (since the X11 driver cannot do hardware scaling and software scaling has to be predefined in mplayer). But by setting gl as the default video player in my .mplayer/config I can now play my movies and at least the porn stars don’t all have blue skin (which is funny for about 3 seconds in total). :p
Of course the downside is, I’m now limited to playing movies from the command line – easy for me, not for many other people. Yet again NVidia has managed to upset me. They’ve now fixed most of their issues with compositing (and yes I did test with compositing disabled) that so plagued KDE4 users not long ago… and managed to break video playback… I mean… how ? It’s one of the most basic features on computers these days.
So if anybody else has the issue, the work-around until they fix it is this: use mplayer and tell it to use the vo=gl driver.
Talk about everything happening at once and not having time to blog about any of it ! What a couple of weeks it has been, I have permanently bloodshot eyes right now from lack of sleep. First I had two servers giving critical issues, one Solaris machine went completely bonkers and I ended up having to reinstall it. You don’t know how much you like technologies like CloneZilla until you work with unixes that don’t have them (jumpstart doesn’t come close).
The other is an HPUX box that just got really slow at one thing… suddenly and inexplicably – I’m still trying to figure out what’s wrong, and people who have had decades of HPUX experience are as stumped as me.
Meanwhile I’ve spent most of my evenings working on kongoni’s second baseline which will be the public one. We did an internal-only baseline which we kept among the contributors to work out the worst bugs in it and get the mirrors working right, and we’ll be releasing a second baseline within this week. It’s built – just need to get it uploaded in fact.
The differences between them while almost entirely non-structural are nevertheless huge from a user’s point of view.
At the same time we got the new kongoni website up, and while Hannes took most of the real effort there – I had my share sorting out the correction of the DNS, then adding some of the first new content (yay, we have a manual on kongoni ports !) and, here’s the big one – fixing every script we had that referred to kongoni.co.za to corrrectly talk to the download server instead (which is on a different ISP entirely – chosen for it’s big Canadian backbone pipe). The new site is plone based and I’m seriously impressed with it. I considered plone from the start since Hannes is our web-guru and he’s a plone specialist – but unfortunately plone is a bitch to install.
Turns out once it’s up though – it’s the coolest CMS I’ve ever worked with… you just manage the content … from within the content, no second admin interface needed. The wordpress/joomla/drupal style “here you work and here you view” idea is so well known that the idea that you could sensibly integrate admin with site-browsing just never occurred to me, yet it works. WIKI style content editing and layout management etc… done in the same layout your managing.
A bigger piece of work with this is related to the mirroring, the old drupal site actually sat on the download server. I wrote a really sweet load-balancing setup for that server which redirects any requests to a random mirror (while preserving the correct URL for the new mirror to get the right file if it’s a direct access to file thing) and lets you browse and lets you select a mirror by hand if you prefer. The non-interactive side uses pure http-302 redirects so it’s compatible even with low-level tools like CURL and wget. I’m quite proud, not that it’s a new idea or anything, I got the idea from download.kde.org but it was entirely my own reimplementation of it.
Trouble was… it all begins with .htaccess – the first step is to redirect the initial request to a php script, with full path if given regardless of how it came in, this step requires working at the apache level, hence the .htaccess, the php script then does the mirror shuffle and sends you elsewhere. That first step was the problem though, it clashed with drupal’s intense .htaccess requirements. This being a problem with the lamp-style CMS’s – they need to do heavy back-pulls to apache through .htaccess to do things like search-engine friendly URL’s (plone of course can do this out of the box because it does it’s own serving through zope).
So … until now, only the interactive side was up, when browsing to the site you got the mirror selection page with redirects if you click a browse link. When typing in a direct URL however, you still got back to the download server. I think it’s very important to keep the load on that server as low as possible because it’s where mirrors sync from and where ports come from and where we work on ports so this was definitely bad. Especially as it meant that dist downloads always went to the main server as well.
With drupal removed, I could implement the first step underneath, and it’s working almost perfectly.
The one catch is the ports, while git honored the redirects – git-on-http requires you to run update-server-info when it’s moved to a new server, which means that right now, if you point your kongoni sync at a mirror it fails to sync. Same thing if you redirect. One of the major reasons we chose git is that it is, in theory, quite easy to mirror since each copy is also a complete repo but that catch makes it harder, I will have to find me a real git expert to help me come up with a solution (or better yet, rewrite my sync-to-http scripts so they don’t suck and maybe solve this at the same time). It would be awesome if you automatically synced from a mirror without having to do any setups and if mirroring works at all, that will happen.
The next step on that script is going to be to get a country-by-country list of IP-ranges and make the redirect first filter the mirror list to mirrors near you and then select from them. This is more of an art than a science as it is (KDE for example still doesn’t recognize South African IP ranges) but it will help a bit. Since it needs to be low-level compatible you really cannot even try to do anything with request headers so you need to filter by IP range. Oh well, that’s a challenge for another day. Right now – I need to get baseline2 upstairs so we can prepare the final work for release.
Okay so here in one go is the four or so posts I haven’t been gotten round to for ages, if you’re expecting a kongoni post it’s because you already know the news about it and if you don’t it’s because you shouldn’t yet.
This post will be basically three small product reviews of purchases recently acquired:
1) The WII
Now this is about a year late as everybody’s already seen the wii but frankly it is awesome and I only bought one recently. If I can make a point about it that’s a downside it’s that game developers really aren’t taking proper advantage of it’s abilities yet. Half the games are cartoonish to the point of being painful (it is only a matter of time before Nintendo’s never ending quest for younger audiences have them making controllers that can be inserted into the womb).
Compare for example Spiderman Web of Shadows and Star Wars The Force Unleashed. SWTFU (Or would it be better accronymnd STFU ?) is a truly perfect game. Lightsaber wiimote – an idea that just absolutely works. Spiderman is a wonderfully acted, scripted and true-the-character game set in the wonders of new york… and somehow still sucks on the wii – not because the game is bad but because it makes no real use of the WII’mote. I’m playing Spiderman for crying out loud – I should not be hitting a button to webshoot (and making the webswing a DOWNWARD flick was just crazy), I should be aiming a hand and flicking either the nunchuk or the wiimote to shoot a web, yanking it back to swing etc.
Star Wars got it perfectly right – force pushing ? Just jam the nunchuck toward the screen, exactly the same motion you would have made if you were a real Jedi… spiderman has to remember key strokes, wii flicks are often used for atack combos in ways that bear no resemblence to the actions… it would in fact probably be better played on an X-box or even a PC since the programmers simply couldn’t get out of the old “Push button Y to do X” mentality – and if you aren’t going to that, stay away from the WII.
The yamaha BWS 100
Now here’s something I never expected to buy, but for reasons you either know or don’t want to know I no longer really have a car. So I needed point A-to-point-B human transfer device. Since current teleportation devices are even further from my budget than cars, I opted for a small bike or scooter.
I was still aiming in the line of a bike but I got a very good offer on this particular scooter which has the 125CC upgrade installed and is after all a yamaha. Now the bikes I could get for the same price range are simply crap. The cheaper scooters are also crap – I think I bought exactly what I needed. It’s just zippy enough to be fun, wide-wheeled enough to be fairly safe and of course – I just filled a near empty tank for under R30.
The Sanza Fuze
My previous ownership of music players have been basically limited to cheap little glorified memory sticks which usually only play WMA and MP3 and use AAA batteries. The decision to get a better one was controlled by my desire to get a portable with OGG support. My entire library is in OGG format and having to transcode every song when loading to a player is a pain in the ass that makes it all really slow.
I asked for recomendations on twitter about good players and got good replies on the Fuze and a few others but the fuze stood out for me. Once I started reading reviews I really liked what I read.
The fuze is essentially trying to compete with the ipod nano. It’s in the same size range with a similar interface and look. Unlike it’s bulky apple competitor though it has a wonderfully open design. The filesystem is a simple USB-stick from the computer’s approach with nevertheless good library-app support for things like amarok.
Ogg support is not in the shipped versions but getting it is as easy as a firmware upgrade. Now I know you’re baulking – doesn’t that usually mean some weird windows only program ? Well it does usually but not in this case, there is such a program out there if you insist on using it – but it’s really optional.
Upgrading the firmware was as simple as “download, unzip, copy to device, disconnect” – it upgraded, I switched it back on – and ogg played perfectly.
Thanks KMF for the recommendation- it’s exactly right
I haven’t updated recently, those of you who see my facebook profile know why. Today I just wanted to post something… so I opted for a song day which I haven’t done in a very long time, and chose a song that fits my current mood.
I’m not sick, I’m just a boy
Sifting through the newfound lie
And I’ll be crawling through these ashes and dissecting all these flies
Since the sun has died and it is still somewhat July
Is this all the world has to offer?
And I don’t know how much you thought I’d be
It turns to ashes on me
One more piece inside these lines
Deeper harms my disguise
And everyone is different so everyone is sly
And everything’s still horrible since everyone still dies
Is this all the world has to offer?
And I don’t know how much you thought I’d be
It turns to ashes on me
Is this all the world has to offer?
It turns to ashes on me
No one is safe
