Slackware64-Current is made public…now what…

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May 202009
 
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Pat has finally done it, the first official slackware-port in years, slackware64-current is public as of today. This is of course great news for kongoni… although it’s going to mean that kongoni x.13.0 is going to be a lot more work than I thought.

The problem is this: the 64-bit version of slackware official follows the proper LHA standards which makes sense since the majority of the work was done by Eric Hameleers from slamd64 fame. This is a good thing, but there was a reason why kongon64 used Bluewhite64 as it’s upstream.
The reason is that to do what Eric does requires the slackbuild scripts to be rather heavilly modified, while the bluewhite64 version basically just needs the ARCH variable to be set right.
For the most part – it meant we could maintain a single ports tree, with only minor architecture specific fields in the slackbuild scripts.

The first question of course is: what will bluewhite64 do ? I posted a forum question about this, since bluewhite64 is more than the port and also has a very wonderful live-dvd project, I could see a future for the project focusing on that.

Now the upside is that post-13.0 release we can safely expect the major slackbuild sites like slackbuild.org to try and support this platform… but what about until then ? More importantly – how do we as kongoni move forward ?
The obvious answer is that we ought to move kongoni64 to slackware64 when we go to x.13.0 – after all, that will be the upstream maintained most closely to 32-bit and it is more standards compliant.
This does mean some work though, we will need to investigate the ports -many of them will need to be significantly hacked – and the bigger one… this may mean we need to, like slackware maintain two seperate trees, and can no longer get away with a single one that installs on either platform.

Not an impossible task – just double the work.
Now a lot of the work in there will be made redundant by slackware 13 anyway as KDE4 is now official and so is it’s dependencies so I have no intention of maintaining these post slackware 13 release. I’ll focus on our customizations.
Or does it…
Well… I know 32-bit slackbuilds won’t build on 64-bit slackware – but perhaps they will build the other way around, after all – the ports tree only kicks in for add-ons. So if we write them right… we may be able to build kongoni’s x.13.0 ports tree in such a way that our slackbuilds build correct regardless of platform, by following the structures in the 64-bit scripts.
At this stage, I’m not going to worry too much about it – just keep an eye on it, I suspect slackware13 official is a still a while away.
What is clear to me now is that the degree of change means that doing a kongoni 1.13.0 is out of the question- we will just about have 1.12.2 out of the door in a month or two. There is no way we can incorporate this level of change (good change) inside our stabilization cycle.
So the first likely 13.0 based kongoni will probably be 2.13.0 – and we can expect to start working on it very shortly after 1.12.2 is officially released.

I guess the pressure is on to get Nietsche out of the door as soon as possible eh. We got a nice big buglist to sort out before then though – so let’s get to it guys.

UPDATE: A look at the 32-bit sources had an interesting result- the slackbuilds there seem to be build according to the same standard now coming to 64-bit… so that would suggest we could still do a single ports-tree, would be good.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 4:04 am  Tagged with: ,

The difference between insanity and genius

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May 192009
 
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is measured only by success.
Though quoting lines from Die Hard as inspirational is probably on the wrong side of the divisor…

So there has been quite a bit of well-meaning comment on the fact that I started a relationship. Now let me start of by saying that as surprised as many of you were, none of you were as surprised as I was. This was the last thing I had been planning.
The comments from our families on both sides are basically based on the premise that we’ve lost our minds, two divorce’s whose divorces are not even final… completely and utterly crazy – except, it doesn’t feel crazy.
It is telling that those friends who know me best, the ones who have been with me through the harshest of recent times – and the best of them, whom I cried to and talked to… they don’t think we’re crazy, they think we’re a perfect fit.
Perhaps their insight will be of value to those who, caring as they are, are not getting it.

That’s just it though… we are a perfect fit. For the first time in my entire life, I’m with somebody who completely and utterly accepts me as I am, who has no desire to change anything whatsoever about me. Trusts my judgement about my own life, and wants me to live it: true to myself, and if there is one thing that’s becoming clear in our conversations, it’s that I am also the first person ever who have done this for her.

If the past four years taught me anything it’s that we only get one life, and we have a duty to live it true to our own souls. We cannot spend it living somebody else’s life. Who am I ? I’m a hopelessly romantic, geeky, flirtatious, soulful, poet with an excessive affinity for really bad puns.
That’s who I am – like it, and like me, dislike it – and we won’t get along, and that’s okay – I don’t need you to like me, enough people do.
I am happy now, in a way I haven’t been for as long as I can remember – because I’m spending my free time with somebody who appreciates that – all of that, thinks that those are good things.

Right now, we’re making each other happy. Will we be right for each other for a long time ? I don’t know, this is a crazy time in our lives where we met. But we do know we are right for each other right now, and will be for some time. We can’t give this up because we don’t know what the future will hold – that would be true insanity.
So to all those who care about us, I ask – let us enjoy this happiness, whatever it may turn out to be, for as long as it may turn out to be. There is a shortage in this world of people who are accepting and tolerant and free-spirited. They are just about the only people who actually make the world a better place in general (sorry no: conservatism doesn’t do good, it never has, never will and never can- it will always hurt somebody, and that will never be a good thing).
I went on a lunch date with a girl – and ended up in a happy, crazy, unexpected relationship – and it’s wonderful. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
In a shitty, horrible time in our lives, we nevertheless met at the perfect time – we know this is may be hard to understand but from where we’re standing, in a weird way it makes perfect sense… but then everybody knows we’re weirdo’s, always have been, we’re infamous for it. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea for a couple of weirdo’s to act weird… it’s the only way we can ever be happy, ever be ourselves.

So thank you all for your support and concern, whichever form it took… but as Anita so eloquently put it: we’re okay, we’re really okay.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 5:36 am  Tagged with: , ,

Next kongoni release named: Nietsche

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May 142009
 
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With Sophocles out of the door, the time has come to start work on the beta release, already the bug reports are flowing in and there is plenty of very good suggestions coming in as well. The download counters just keep climbing even though a small glitch had made us lose count several times and thus the numbers are way lower than reality.

So with work starting on the beta, the proposals were made, the votes counted – and it’s official: The next release of Kongoni GNU/Linux currently in development will be called after one of the great philosophers of the modern age: Nietsche.

As always, I will keep you all posted on progress as Nietsche develops.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 10:03 am  Tagged with:

Ten things you probably didn’t know about me

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May 132009
 
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I felt like writing something a little different and more personal, so here is: ten things you probably didn’t know about me.

  1. 1. I think chicken batteries are the cruelest thing humans do en-masse to animals, hence I only buy free-range chicken and eggs
  2. 2. I did gymnastics as a child and martial arts for most of my teenage years, I am still about 30 degrees more flexible on any given joint than the average adult male
  3. 3. I once played a game of darts where I scored not even one single point the entire match (twice I missed the board entirely) and then threw the winning tripple-bulls-eyes on the last hand of the game.
  4. 4. I only drink on average one drink per month
  5. 5. I am sufficiently clumsy to hit my head on something on average at least once every 24 hours
  6. 6. I can type close to 80 words per minute, but I make a lot of typos so I am usually correcting as fast as I type
  7. 7. The only musical instrument I have ever been able to play with any reasonable degree of success is the air-guitar
  8. 8. I don’t like strategy games, I don’t like realistic FPS games, and RPG’s I only like for a week before they bore me… I like games where I can blow shit up with ridiculously huge rockets
  9. 9. I’m multi-orgasmic (sometimes at least)
  10. 10. One entry on this list is a lie – and you can’t guess which one.
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 Posted by silentcoder at 11:54 am  Tagged with: ,

Slackware adds more compression types for packages

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May 112009
 
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Last week’s slackware-current changelog contains perhaps the most radical change in slackware’s entire history. So major it got a paragraph in distrowatch-weekly.
After years of compressing it’s packages with gzip in the wellknown tgz format, the pkgtools have been updated to support additional compression types. Bzip2 support was added, as well as lzma support – which is the new default. Such packages get a new extension: .txz
Most of the slackware-current tree is already built with the new formats and this is a great step forward, for a very small price in decompression time, the slackware DVD has shrunk by nearly 500mb – that’s space to put more into it.

This doesn’t impact kongoni just yet, but it will – since we use ports it has no major impact on our own trees and it doesn’t actually ever have to. After all, we build packages on demand -whether we build tgz or txz won’t make any real difference since the users aren’t downloading the compiled packages (granted it does mean a slightly smaller space requirement for your ports tree’s pkg folder).

But kongoni also provides the capacity to install upstream packages from portpkg/PIG – and this is affected as portpkg does not yet recognize txz. The package check phase and the package name-prediction code will both fail to recognize these, particularly in metapackages. Here it’s an important matter, txz packages being smaller will mean users have smaller downloads to maintain their systems and install crucial updates.

Of course none of this will have any impact whatsoever until we release kongoni foo.13.0 since these changes upstream won’t be stable prior to slackware 13 – but it is important to plan ahead.
Now I could hack portpkg myself to add this support – it’s hardly difficult work, but I don’t like to fork or patch upstream code unless I have to.

So with that in mind, I’ve chosen to instead submit a feature request to the portpkg team which will hopefully see the change happening from their side, then we merge it into our port – and our users get the support almost transparently through PIG.

The growth on slackware-current is amazing, and this is good for kongoni as that growth will ultimately trickle down to our users, combined with our own work it spells an exciting future for our distribution.

It will be interesting to see if in the near future, slackware will switch to eglibc like debian did – since that will be determine kongoni’s course of action as well – my money is on the suspicion that this will only happen if a lot of other distro’s follow debian’s lead first though.
The major drive is support for platforms which currently, slackware doesn’t support at all – so I don’t see kongoni being on them anytime soon. Of course this could all change at any moment – we’ll just need to see what happens upstream. No distribution is, after all, an island.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 10:05 am  Tagged with:

Kongoni download statistics

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May 112009
 
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The alpha release has made some waves on the news sites – though not as much as the initial baseline. This doesn’t actually surprise me all that much because an alpha release usually gets less attention than a brand-new or stable release. More interestingly is that it’s getting us more noticed by the tech sites out there, a second release puts us out of the “once-off then dissapeared” category. LinuxLinks.com for example mailed me last night to let me know that they featured kongoni.

Distrowatch gave us a nice paragraph in DW-weekly as we are now officially added to the database – with a nice screenshot to boot.

When I reset the download counter on Thursday, we were at 942 baseline downloads – not too bad overall, since then it’s climbed back up to 461 – it was 365 yesterday so that’s close to 100 downloads a day so
far. It basically gets updated by the loadbalancer everytime it gets a request to download an ISO. This is obviously not accounting for failed downloads and such – but then it excludes anybody who goes directly to a mirror so it should even out roughly.

Update: Just two hours later: the counter has gone up to 506, it seems to be picking up with the new week.

The torrents of course should be added on top of those numbers:
Aristotle had topped out at: 119 32-bit and 31 64-bit downloads – bringing the total known Aristotle downloads to just over 1000.

Already sophocles is boasting: 45 32-bit and 28 64-bit torrents – or nearly half as much in 5 days as Aristotle did in nearly 3 months. That puts our total known Sophocles downloads at: 535 (matching up
with my estimate of just over 100 a day).

Of course this is tiny compared to boys like Fedora and Ubuntu but still a pretty impressive figure for something that is still, after all, only An Alpha and meant for a more niche-market. I reckon we will see some interesting boosts once we hit stable.

During the following week, the time comes to start with the first set of updates post-release and begin laying the groundwork for a beta release, which will hopefully be quite a bit faster. The forums are buzzing right now with people posting hardware test results, suggestions on new features and bug reports – exactly what we hoped for :)

The next obvious question is: what shall we call the beta ? Anybody have a favorite philosopher you would like to suggest ? Just post it in the comments and I’ll pass those along as suggestions to the developer list where the ultimate vote will happen.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 6:28 am  Tagged with:

Kongoni 1.12.2-alpha (Sophocles) released. — Kongoni

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May 072009
 
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Kongoni 1.12.2-alpha (Sophocles) released. — Kongoni.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 2:34 pm  Tagged with:

The things a unix admin sometimes has to say to users

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May 052009
 
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Now as you may know, in my dayjob, I’m a unix system administrator. The users who use my servers are not secretaries, in fact they are unix programmers… you would imagine a rather high level of unix competence among them… wouldn’t you?

Well… never ever assume competence among professionals I guess… here are the top 5 funniest responses I have had to give to them:

  • *Please explain to me why you need a 5 terrabyte of space to hold “Sample test data” ?
  • *If you save your work in /tmp, I’m afraid you cannot blame me if it gets deleted.
  • *Why exactly would you check out a project from the source repository, onto a network drive… and leave it there ?

    • What’s worse: that was a plural “you”.

  • *I’m sorry, I cannot install the software you requested, because it doesn’t exist

    • I’m not making this up.

  • *Next time you wish to kill my server, do me a favor, use a forkbomb. An endless loop that allocates 5gb of disk-space to random data on every run, in a server sitting on a VM with a growable drive is just too cruel…

    • No, I’m still not making this up.

Sigh… and the last one, today, while I’m sick and wishing I was in bed.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 9:31 am  Tagged with: ,
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