Well, here we are for another Friday’s worth of weekly updates. The list is a bit shorter this week, largely because my efforts were slowed down by a hard-drive failure. The drive is still readable but not writeable and it’s my main data drive. I’m getting a new one today and I’m investing in a 1tb hard drive so there will be plenty of space to play around with 
Our first piece of news is from upstream, I contacted Bluewhite64 about the state of their ia32-emulation packages in the current tree. They assured me that these will be updated over this weekend – that means that we will be able to get a chromium test-case runnable on a kongoni system sync’d to current on 64-bit in future. All this is of course still very experimental stuff – but it’s a glimpse of our medium-term future.
A big impact on the work now, is the upcoming feature freeze for Sophocles. This means that from now until April 6th, I’ll be pushing in as many features as I can – ready for testing and fixing after the freeze.
I released P.I.G 0.0.3 this week and the port should be on most mirrors by now, this is a major release and marks the last feature-release prior to sophocles. From here on in any releases until Sophocles is out will be bugfixes only (there isn’t time before freeze to work on any of the major parts of the TODO list here). The new version does however have some pretty awesome stuff in it. The first is that autoporK is now fully integrated into it, the second is that port-sharing support has been added to the interface though it is disabled for now (it will be finished after harbourmaster is running). I fixed a few bugs from 0.0.2 and there is a lot of cleanups in some of the processes. This release has the longest changelog yet for the project in fact.
KISS has now got a skeleton in place as well as it’s first feature: switching off roaming networking (as per wicd) and configuring stationary networking using classic slackware scripts instead. The core design her was meant to be as flexible as possible, so kiss uses .desktop files to tell it what exists, and scripts to actually implement them. This means we can use existing tools with ease, grow the system without code-changes and present it in a whole bunch of cool ways – browse it with dolphin or konqueror or most other file managers, set up an admin menu based on kiss using a lancelot-part (I am tempted to do this on the default taskbar as the default way to use it).
I have quit a bit to do in line of getting a basic set of features into it but the work has begun. A big missing piece is the icon here but that is quick to plug in when one of our artist folks get around to it
Another new port this week done specifically with the freeze in mind is ksplasherX a nice gui tool to help artists design splash screens for Kongoni. Would anybody like to volunteer to do one for us ? Anastacia… you look bored 
The kongoni facebook group got a growth spurt this week with ten new members joining – I’m kind of to blame, it occurred for the first time to me to invite those among my friends list with an interest into the group – the group has the potential to be a nice marketing avenue for us so if we can hijack and evil website to a good purpose – why not ? Those of you on facebook who aren’t in the group – please do join it – and invite your GNU/Linux using/interested friends as well
Daniel has reported that we have a new mirror that came back, from Sweden this time, setups are in progress there so we’ll soon be able to add a European mirror to our list.
Talking of mirrors, our current loadbalancer is really rather basic, the php is simple but it could be a much nicer tool. For starters it should count requests for ISO’s (it already treats those special so just adding the code is easy – I can pull the initial value from the logs to start it off on) so we can have a truly accurate count of downloads – at least those downloads that didn’t go straight to a mirror. But a much nicer feature would be to split the mirror lists by country somehow instead of just by content like they are now, and make an effort to direct the user to one nearby him. So a request for a ports mirror from South Africa should automatically go to mirror.ac.za (which is in the ports mirrors list) but an ISO download from the user should randomly choose between mirror.ac.za and IS.
The current script is about 100 lines of php – would anybody like to volunteer to expand and maintain this ? It could be a fun little project that doesn’t require genius-level php skills but would be one less thing your brave and fearless dealer needs to find time for
That’s about it for this week.
Ciao