Well, as I’ve started getting better and work became slightly less hazardous, I’ve begun to ease back into Kongoni work. So far, new code has not been a major feature of the work done, instead, I began by updating the most important ports to their latest versions (meaning a released port of KDE 4.3.3 and Amarok 2.2.1 for example) as well as adding some new and interesting things.
I’ve also started playing around with the new chromium builds and this is going well, more work will need to follow over some time to get a fully working version there however. Quite a lot of bugs were fixed as well – PyQT for example can finally build as a normal port.
So without working too hard, things are moving along. One nice new port is ibdriver – which provides a kernel module for the USB modems used by iBurst wireless, I would very much like to ship Cicero with this driver included. IBurst is a major network in South Africa and we’re a South African distro, supporting it would be a good thing. Right now the module builds just fine – but since I am not an iBurst customer and don’t own the hardware – I cannot test it.
If anybody would volunteer to either do the testing for me (it should build fine on Nietzsche) or alternatively to loan me their equipment/account for a few days that would be wonderful.
Of course, if iBurst themselves could make a loaner available to me to get this done – that would be a nice and awesome bit of corporate assistance to their own customers with due public recognition.
I’ll give updates on this as/when I have something.
In the meantime, I’m thinking my way through a few things, most crucially is that I have basically decided to drop the soft-upgrade-to-cicero option, the differences are just too big at this time – especially on 64-bit platforms. I’ll write up a howto as usual with as many options as possible for upgrades and try to make it as flexible as can be to meet as many people’s needs as we can, but the simple reality is that trying to upgrade to Cicero using nothing but ports will involve way too many variables I cannot predict.
