Sang to the melody of Metallica’s: Sanitarium

Welcome to a place where stars stand still
No one cares and no one will
Moon is full never seems to change
It drives you mentally deranged
Show the same show every night
Like a movie house that didn’t get it right
I wish I had gone to the bar
Instead I’m bored and it’s gone to far

Sleep my friend cos you will see
Stars look better in reality
My neck is cramped from looking up
Can’t they see they see it’s all screwed up ?

Planetarium, leave me be
Planetarium, just leave me at home.

Build my fear of what’s out there
Planets without any air
E.T. phone home, call airstrike
Independence-day tonight
The anal-probes are in their hands
subject of experimental plans…
Tie us up and explore us well
I feel like I’m in X-files hell…

No more will I stay in here
Bored fantasies make me fear
Droning on about Saturns rings
While I fear probes in my o-ring…

Planetarium, leave me be
Planetarium, just leave me at home.
Planetarium…

Just leave me at home !

I wanted to be an astronaut
If only space-ships could be bought
Space fantasies I’m cured of sure.
It’s a huge and empty vacuous bore.
A thousand light years for a view
I’d rather sit and look at you.
The voice is like the space they show
Neverending, sleepy hollow.

Planetarium, leave me be
Planetarium, just leave me at home.

*PS. I actually really LIKE planetariums – I just couldn’t resist such a perfect filk word :p

Every Friday I send a mail to the kongoni developers mailing list with the week’s updates, mostly in regard to my work but also mentioning major things from other developers. As of this week, I made a decision to also post these mails to this blog once a week, in order to help spread the news of things happening to more interested people.

So herewith, the first blog kongoni weekly updates mail:
————–
Hi everybody,
Time again for my weekly mail of updates that happened during the
week. It’s been quite a busy week in kongoni-land, so here are some of
the highlights.

*The first big news is a port for kernel 2.6.28.7, this kernel version
adds a huge amount of new drivers and support for some very cool
features such as console-on-braille-device. The kernel-sources port
builds a fully functional kernel and is much cleaner than the old one,
including creating a package out of the resulting kernel+modules so
that these are now properly tracked. I also moved the lilo artwork
files from the installer package to the resulting linux package -so it
won’t get uninstalled with the installer (which fixes an old bug with
updating lilo later).

*There is an update available for the OpenOffice.org port as build
number 4 for 3.0.1 – this build fixes a major bug which prevented the
64-bit version from starting, 32-bit users are not affected.

*A new version of pig is available with some important features and
bugfixes. The current version is 0.0.3 and is a highly recommended
upgrade. I am already working on 0.0.4 so expect some news on that
during next weeks mail. There’s one particularly major feature coming
called autopork which is a KDE guification for portpkg’s autoport
script.

*Autopork from above is also meant to integrate with a new tool I am
still finalizing the designs on called harbourmaster. Harbourmaster
will be a web-app for managing the ports tree with. It will accept
submissions of ports (hence the autopork integration) and keep them
for developers to look at. It will allow hacking on ports files,
manage the test cycle on ports and of course, ultimately let you
approve a port into the maintree or deny it (with the reason sent back
to the submitter). I want to make harbourmaster portable so that
people could run their own servers acting on their own ports trees,
opening the way for user-maintained ports trees (think ideas like
arch’s AUR or ubuntu’s launchpad here).
This is still in design phase and I’m still looking at good frameworks
to build on etc. I may well just write a pure php version that’s ultra
ugly as a proof of concept and then launch something real. If anybody
here is particularly good at LAMP development and would like to get
involved, please reply on that, perhaps in a separate thread.

*The games tree in ports have had a start with the first game going in
(freeciv). Marius is set up and ready to get going on growing this
part of the tree as well so expect some interesting stuff here :)

*When we had digikam and kipi-plugins available within an hour of the
release announcement that certainly got us some nice attention.

*A big thing I worked on this week was the first chromium-browser
port, it’s still very ugly but it can be made to work on 32-bit (at
pretty big risk). The current port is based on the ubuntu-ppa builds
and this is definitely not going to do. There is a mini-howto in the
forums on the site that covers installing it for those interested, but
consider it a testing-toy for now (it is also marked as broken). The
obvious conclusion is we have to build our own version from source,
the catch is – chromium has a source-tree of over 3 gigabytes ! Not
something I want to be doing via th ports tree then, the worse because
it has no 64-bit build support yet and to build 32-bit apps on a
64-bit system is a nightmare.
That really leaves only one option, to build a binary on 32-bit and
then create a pseudo-port for it which is multiplatform.

*For those actively using 64-bit, I created a nice little script
called ia32pkg which is in the ports tree, this one can grab a 32-bit
library package from slackware, convert it into an ia32-compatibility
package and install it for you. A great way to deal with 32-bit
binaries that lack one package you need.
For example if you cannot get NWN going because it needs 32-bit SDL ,
just run:sdl-1.2.13-i486-2.tgz
The script will fetch the package (if it’s not in the current
directory), convert it into ia32-sdl-1.2.13-x86_64-2.tgz and install
it for you in one simple step. For a list of libs which can be
autofetched run: ia32pkg -l
Please note though: this is new code and only tested by me, so if it
breaks anything, don’t cry :p

*Finally, a bit of a shout-out to another project for those who don’t
know about it yet. FLOSS.pro is a is a laconi.ca microblogging site
specifically for free and open-source professionals, started here in
South Africa. I’ve been using it to blurt my daily “what am I doing”on
kongoni stuff and that feed gets sent to the kongoni website (any of
you are welcome to blurt to #kongoni as well) and I can highly
recommend it. Right now I use the RSS feeds to keep up to date, and
ping.fm to update from jabber so it’s all quite smooth and I would
encourage you to try. Right now th kongoni group is the most active on
the site but if we want to keep it there I’ll need your help guys :)

So if I thought the route from baseline to alpha would be short… boy was I wrong, though baseline is surprizingly solid (I use it as my production OS on two machines) there is a lot to do to finish making it kongoni.

The first major milestone to breach was P.I.G which is now officially released. It can still get lot better but it certainly works well. Yesterday I finally tackled another: getting the kernel updated. There is now a solid and well working port for kernel 2.6.28.7 and it’s a marked improvement over its parent. FIrstly the port itself is much cleaner, secondly this one actually follows up the kernel-source install by creating a kernel-binary package and upgrading for you.
You can rebuild with our own configs but it’s all automated by default – and now your kernel files are actually in a trackable package. The port is still called kernel-sources (and likely to remain so at least for now) but it also installs a new version of the linux package.
Another thing that got changed is that the lilo boot-splash image is now fetched by the kernel-sources port and installed in the linux package – so it is no longer deleted when you remove kongoni_installer (a major bugfix). Finally there are now seperate configs for x86 and x86_64 rather than a shared one which just adjusts the CPU type. The reason is simple: there is a crapload of old hardware that never came out on 64-bit systems which you cannot compile the drivers for in a 64-bit kernel, so a config generated on 64-bit strips them out, and that makes them unavailable on 32-bit, there is a similar set of modules that can only be enabled on 64-bit as well.
The only choice: two separate configs, based on one another. The new kernel brings a lot of new features like console-on-braile support, wireless USB and of course stable ext4 support (to use it however you need to update to the ext2 userspace package from slackware/bluewhite64 current).

Since testing kernel build scripts take long at the best of times, I had a lot of idle time and I used this to do testing on a few other ports, managed to fix rather nasty bug in the 64-bit port for OpenOffice.org. Now my current activity is building a port for google’s chromium browser. The port will be based on the arch user repository build script which in turn is based on the ubuntu ppa daily builds. Keep in mind when it goes live though, this is an alpha port of an alpha tool built by a bot that is in alpha status… if it breaks, drowns your cat or sleeps with your spouse – don’t say you weren’t warned.