Hi everyone
Well, well, well folks, its Friday again and that means it’s time for the weekly Kongoni updates newsletter, and what a busy week it’s been.
After we froze Sophocles on Monday I began in earnest to work on the new ISO’s, step one of course was to get the build systems updated to the latest versions of all the ports. This was mostly done by Wednesday, and in the process a lot of small bugs in the tree got fixed (the kind that only occur if you are going all the way from Aristotle to Sophocles and never did an update before).
This left us however with the same-old same-old problem: how to fit it back onto a CD. I began investigating what could possibly be cut- my target on 64-bit was about 100mb – I managed to get 160mb by removing something really not that important. The ISO’s previously contained several dozen fonts packages of which only one is crucial… I cut this down to about 5 of the best, the rest are in the ports tree and are quick-and-easy installs if you want them, but I doubt anybody needs ALL of them – so this is probably an improvement anyway.
The put me ready by mid-Wednesday night to implement the new themes and start testing. By Thursday I published the first preview screenshots, and Sophocles was nearing a stable state. Since then I’ve made some minor changes to the installer and remastering system that greatly increase their stability (essentially I split the copy-process over several smaller process – this means that the risk of large-file-copy-crashes is almost zero now).
As I write this, the ISO’s are essentially stable and ready, there is however a few small things I want to do before uploading. For example, while cutting for size, I stripped out the spell-checking dictionaries for openoffice.org and moved them to rootcomplete, but there is really enough space to put those back. The CD-Bootsplash seems to be a bit… weirdly laid out all of a sudden but this could be a once-off build error so I’ll investigate it and fix it if needed.
Basically, we have every reason to expect Sophocles to be ready for upload by Monday. Thus far the comments on the screenshots have been hugely positive my favorite being a girl who simply said “wow… SEXY”. What better praise can an operating system get ?
Of course most of *that* credit goes to Hannes who did some major work on the design side for this release.
On the future side of things, we’re already identifying next places for improvement and new features. Design wise for example I made the suggest already that Beta should have a newer, sexier icon for the installer. Code-wise, I branched the kongoni_tools repository this week and began working on the next versions of our core tools. PIG 0.1.0 is in progress and already supports some nice new features, like being buildable with a qt4-native interface rather than the current GTK one. This version will also include integrated support for harbourmaster which was also started in this unstable branch. As and when these projects mature, they will be merged back into master – replacing the current master branch and become the future versions. PIG is getting several other features like a task-qeue so you can select a number of actions on ports and then do them with a single click, support for more of the underlying portpkg features and better process integration in this tree so it will be a nice update when it comes.
In the meantime the 0.0.x series is quite stable and mature (though it does still have the odd unexplained crash) and really usable. Not only does it make managing ports easier, it actually adds features that portpkg by itself doesn’t have, like very well-working mirror switching.
This means us Saffers can easily keep our ports tree’s sync’ed and our package completely up-to-date while only ever using local bandwidth.
So that’s roughly the week so far, little sleep but lots of fun 
In closing, a big congratulations to our esteemed friends at Canonical for the release of Jaunty Jackalope I won’t even make a joke about hitting a preset timed-release-date with only one unfixed release-critical bug … oh darn :p
Still, the screen shots look very nice, well done and good job guys
This is likely to be the last update before Sophocles is officially released so till next time then.
