Kongoni Nietzsche released

 It is my pleasure to announce that Kongoni version 1.12.2 codenamed Nietzsche has been officially released. This marks the first official and stable release of the Kongoni GNU/Linux distribution after several development releases. Kongoni is a fully free African GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware with significant inspiration from the BSD-Unix architectures. The operating system is primarily designed for desktop power users and aims to provide a powerful, customizable system that puts the user in control of his own environment while nonetheless being easy to work with and not get in your way.

 The most significant Kongoni feature is its source base software installation system (known as a ports tree), a feature that originated in the BSD-Unix world and remains a popular power-users tool on present day BSD-Unixes, Apple(tm)'s MacOS(R) and source based GNU/Linux distributions. Kongoni, however, is not a source-based distribution. The distribution itself is shipped as binaries which work out of the box. The ports tree is used only for installing additional software. This is the same approach taken by the BSD Unix system but relatively unique for a GNU/Linux system.

 Kongoni Nietzsche ships with version 2.6.29.4 of the Linux-Libre kernel, a version of the Linux kernel containing only free drivers and firmware and created by the Latin American Free Software Foundation. Other notable software included is version 3.1 of OpenOffice.org, GNUzilla IceCat (a fully free fork of Mozilla Firefox) version 3.5, Amarok 2.1 and KDE 4.2.4 with our unique African Sunset theme as the default desktop. As of this version all standard media codecs for which free software libraries are available as well as full DVD support is included in the core operating system. Since Kongoni is developed in South Africa, we are subject to neither the DMCA nor Software Patent laws and are therefore able to offer our users these codecs which other distributions are often forced to exclude for fear of legal action. Kongoni 1.12.2 is fully binary compatible with slackware and bluewhite64 version 12.2. This means that Kongoni users can install packages developed for those systems and users of those systems can use packages built for Kongoni. 

Apart from these included packages Kongoni also features a number of programs developed specifically for it as part of the distribution.

Most notable among these are:

1. Kongoni_installer - an easy to use installation wizard for installing the live system to your hard-drive,
2. Kongoni-Instant-Setup-System (KISS, also an acronymn for Keep-It-Sweet-and-Simple) - a set of simple, modular wizards for common customization tasks a user may need to perform,
3. Ports Installation GUI (PIG) - a graphical front-end for easily installing, updating and removing software using the ports tree, and
4. Kongoni_remaster - a complete and simple tool that allows people to build their own customized Kongoni based live CD's from a running system. Kongoni_remaster is the same tool used to create the officially released Kongoni ISO images and is shipped with the system allowing the easy creation of customized versions of the system, or, simply, a convenient way to clone or backup installations to CD or DVD.

Kongoni is the Shona word for the Gnu (also known as a Wildebeest, the animal after which Richard Stallman named his GNU operating system) and this name conveys the spirit and origins of Kongoni, a fully free GNU operating system, developed in Africa. With this release we can proudly state that we have achieved our goal to be fully free as far as we are able to verify, having replaced the last few non-free pieces with free replacements. We will be submitting this version to the Free Software Foundation for review to be listed as a fully free GNU/Linux distribution. The African spirit of the distribution does not end with its artwork, but also extends to technical decisions. For example, the choice to use a ports tree rather than traditional binary package trees was partly motivated by the fact that the source code is usually smaller than binary packages and, in Africa, bandwidth is an expensive commodity. The version number consists of two parts: "1" indicates that it's the first Kongoni release while "12.2" indicates the slackware version with which it is compatible.

 

The operating system itself is shipped as a downloadable ISO image with versions available to run natively on either 32-Bit or 64-Bit Intel x86 compatible processors. Users who already have an earlier version can safely upgrade to Nietzsche using the ports tree without needing to download the ISO's. A step-by-step "How-To" on this process is available at http://www.kongoni.co.za. The ISO images are both under 700mb in size and can be burned onto a normal CD-Rom or converted into live-USB images using the included tools. The system can be downloaded from these URL's:

32-bit version

64-bit version

Or via bittorrent from http://download.kongoni.co.za/tracker

The vast majority of changes from the developer releases have been bug fixes in order to reach a stable state but the system also gained a number of important new features. Most notable among these is native support for installing onto the ext4, reiserfs, JFS and XFS filesystems (any of which can now safely be used as the OS root filesystem), a brand new interface to the installer which can now also be used in plain-text mode for users who prefer that or for installing on low-memory systems, support for installer translations, improved hardware detection, integrated support for the avahi network mapping protocol and a number of performance improvements making Nietzsche the fastest Kongoni yet.

 We hope that users will enjoy working and playing with this production-use ready version of Kongoni. It is now nearly 8 months since we first announced the launch of the project and in that period a great deal of exciting work has been done to bring us to this point. Our developer pool has grown to a steady group of regular contributors and our user-base have tested and tried Kongoni on any number of devices and documented their successes on our forums at http://www.kongoni.co.za. Kongoni is a completely community developed operating system with no profit motive. It was created for the joy of creating and that joy has been great, so we are happy to celebrate this release. Creating Kongoni was hard work of professional quality and without financial reward, but it is a labour or love. We hope that our passion and commitment to its success and the ideals of free software shines through when it is used.

 

Yours Truly

A.J. Venter

Lead Developer: The Kongoni GNU/Linux team.