As I write this – the 32-bit ISO have passed everything in the core test cycle and I’m busy with a test on 64-bit ISO – I’m quite confident that these are the final builds and we’ll head our release date next week with ease. This next version of Kongoni, is an alpha version for 1.12.2 – as such it really represents the first true kongoni release. Unlike the baseline Aristotle which merely established a working platform, this is where we began the work to turn it into what Kongoni is.
Sophocles was named for a very specifically chosen philosopher, it’s namesake has been called the father of modern thought and in a similar vein, this release represents the first of a new generation of distribution. Kongoni is truly an innovative operating system. It’s a GNU/Linux that tries to just work, be familiar but at the same time offer a truly fun and unique experience. Sophocles is the beginning of that vision.
It’s an alpha release because it’s jam-packed with features, but new bugs could appear at unexpected moments – especially on the ports tree side. As it matures through beta and stable now, we’ll start seeing a true production ready system appearing. Having said that, the ISO’s at least are remarkably stable and work very well – thus far, I have had no problems and I am using Sophocles for production work (mostly to produce itself I admit).
And as I reached this paragraph, the tests on 64-bit just passed, all of them. So that’s it, the final ISO’s are ready – and they’ll be available in a few days, we’re into the release-management part of the cycle.
The purpose of this post however, is to highlight what some of these features are. What has gone into Sophocles to make it unique and new ? Well here is a completely non-exhaustive highlights list.:
- PIG officially included
- Latest and greatest upstreams
- Shiny !!!!
- KISS
- Improved ports tree management
- Soft rolling-upgrades
This version ships with PIG included and running by default. PIG’s system-tray-run-as-user approach allows it to integrate beautifully into the OS, making software management a breeze (and people thought a ports tree meant it had to be harder). Even on the LIVEcd it’s already there – with a few clicks you can add a piece of software to use LIVE, and if you run the installer afterward, it will be installed with it. Update notification and management is therefore also, fully integrated and easy to use.
Sophocles will ship with KDE4.2.2 which was released literally just two days before we froze the system. It has the latest versions of Mozilla and OpenOffice.org included as well and the entire base system has the latest updates from upstream distributions already applied.
Sophocles looks sexy (and other people have similarly described it). Aristotle had shipped stock KDE themes barring only three small changes. Lancelot menu with a kongoni-logo icon, and a standard wallpaper. For Sophocles the arts team under Hannes’s leadership went all out however and ship with a truly beautiful theme-set for almost all the things on screen. The login-screen, most of the splash-screens and the desktop wallpaper are all blended together with gorgeous artwork. The early-preview screenshots I posted last week shows some of what’s coming but the final release includes a few pretty surprises that were not yet ready at the time. We’re making full use of KDE4.2.2′s abilities to create a truly beautiful working environment that is nevertheless consistent and easy to navigate.
New in this release is the Kongoni Integrated Setup System. While this is an early release that doesn’t have a lot of features it does cover the most requested features as based on our forum requests and bug reports. More importantly KISS provides a structure that’s easily expanded so new releases and even completely different ports can update it with more features allowing it to grow quickly and transparently.
Finally, the heart of any GNU/Linux distribution: software management. A nice GUI is no use if the underlying architecture isn’t solid. Portpkg provides us a very solid system, but this release sees numerous improvements to our plugins which combine to make the kongoni ports tree truly work better than ever before. Synchronization errors are almost non-existent now, the tree is cache-protected to prevent proxies from messing it up, the default configurations are enhanced for better multi-platform support and the entire thing just works better.
Finally, but certainly not least importantly, Kongoni aims at stable ISO’s roughly once per year to follow the slackware release schedule, but regular rolling-updates throughout. Making for a best of both worlds approach, with the flexibility and continuous life of a rolling release, along with the reliability of a regular release schedule. This release will include a brand new port called simply kongoni, which allows for easy and simple updates between ISO levels without downloading the ISO or reinstalling anything or affecting your current settings. For more information on this, see the upgrade howto in the User Guides section of kongoni.co.za.
In short, this is a very exciting release for us, it establishes kongoni as a truly innovative new distribution well worth a look. Over the next while we’ll be stabilizing it and I am confident that the final 1.12.2 release is going to rock.
