Text 12458, 141 rader
Skriven 2009-03-01 07:30:59 av Russell Tiedt (5:7105/1)
Ärende: Kongoni Linux
=====================
Hi,

Maurice, this might appeal to more than most ... :-)

Have not yet replied to your post earlier, been distracted, and the power 
supply on my "play" box suddenly started running extremely hot, think I caught 
it in time, i.e. before it took out any other bits of the system, can only 
replace at end this month :-((

Though it might not go as far as your preferances ... <VVBG>

The Kongoni Linux project has released the first public baseline of
their GNU/Linux operating system, codenamed Aristotle. Kongoni is the
Shona word for GNU the same animal that inspired the name of the GNU
operating system - and thus literally translates as GNU Linux.

The idea of a baseline release is itself a Kongoni innovation, a way
to establish a common working platform for the further development of
the system. A previous baseline release was made available only to
current developers of the system while this second baseline is being
made available to the public at large. This will also be the last
baseline release kongoni does and from it we will begin a traditional
release method through alpha, beta and stable releases.

The baseline release is thus not intended for end-users except as a
curiosity but rather for interested developers and GNU/Linux experts.
It does not fully represent the ideas or unique features of kongoni,
but instead a platform on which those ideas can be created. Because
the baseline is already a fully installable system, developers from
all over the world can work on a common platform with the full core
setups in place, without the need for expensive virtualization
infrastructures often used by other large distributions.

With this baseline release, our focus will shift towards rapidly
growing the selection of software in our ports tree and stabilizing
the software in the system as we work toward our first full release.
Nevertheless the system is in a/etc/opt/samba/smb_map_update.sh usable
state and several of the developers are already using it as their
primary operating systems, it does however almost certainly contain
significant unknown bugs and we ask that people who try it please
report their experiences and any bugs found in the forums on our
website (http://www.kongoni.co.za).

The name "kongoni" represents the spirit of the project reflecting
both it's African origins and it's strict FSF compliance as Kongoni is
a truly free distribution. FSF Chairman, Richard Stallman was involved
in the discussions that led to the foundation of the project and his
input sought on critical decisions to ensure the system really is free
software.  Although Kongoni originated in Africa it's focus and
development community is international and it aims to be easily usable
across all locale's. Kongoni is a pure community effort with no profit
motive, done by developers to satisfy their own needs and desires in
an operating system, and share the results of that work with others
who have similar needs.

Technically Kongoni  follows the design spirit of the BSD-Unix systems
with a simple and elegant underlying design based on Slackware (the
most BSD inspired Linux distribution) to which it adds a slick and
powerful KDE4.2 desktop and a dependency tracked ports tree for
package management. The system is designed to be very easy to remaster
into custom versions so that users could easily build and replicate
installations of various kinds with prebuilt custom setups and
desktops.

Ports represent a powerful way to distribute software as a set of
tools that automatically fetch the sources of the program and then
compile it locally, this is more bandwidth friendly for users (source
code is usually smaller than prebuilt packages). This benefit is
particularly useful in Africa where bandwidth is expensive, and since
Kongoni came from Africa this was a major concern. Ports also allow
power-users to tweak the compilations and setups of
their systems to their liking while ensuring even normal users get the
absolute best possible performance from their applications by
automatically optimizing their software for their specific setup and
to work with their own selection of other software already installed.A
final advantage of ports is that they are inherently more portable
than prebuilt packages allowing Kongoni to target multiple CPU
architectures with only small sets of system specific changes in the
ports rather than massive duplication of effort. Currently the
operating system targets intel compatible architectures and has native
versions for both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of these architectures
which share a common ports tree.

The system is shipped as an installable and runtime modifiable live CD
this allows users to test it's compatibility with their hardware and
try out the desktop and software prior to committing to an
installation. Being runtime modifiable means that future versions
could automatically check for patches online and allow users to trial
such patches on the CD and then install a system with them already
applied.

The version number 1.12.2 should be read as: Kongoni release 1
compatible with Slackware 12.2. The 64-bit version is built on
Bluewhite64 which follows slackware versioning. Each release will be
fully upstream compatible with the version of slackware/Bluewhite64 it
is built against. This means that any correctly built slackware
package should run on Kongoni, and any package built from a kongoni
port should run on the same version of slackware (provided the
dependencies are manually resolved because slackware lacks kongoni's
dependency resolution). The 64-bit version also has 32-bit
compatibility support built-in to allow the running of programs for
which 64-bit versions are not obtainable.

Kongoni can be downloaded from our website at
http://www.kongoni.co.za, various mirrors and from bittorrent. On our
site you can also find other Kongoni community resources including
forums for end-users, developer and announcement mailing lists,
documentation and current project news.

We as the Kongoni development community would like to invite all
interested people to download a copy, play with it and report their
experiences -or if you like it, perhaps join our community and help us
build something truly wondrous.

The release is available via http and ftp on the following URLs (these
URLs are load-balanced across a number of mirrors):
http://download.kongoni.co.za/kongoni//iso/1.12.2baseline2/kongoni32.1_12_2_bas
 eline2.iso
(32-Bit native)
http://download.kongoni.co.za/kongoni//iso/1.12.2baseline2/kongoni64.1_12_2_bas
 eline2.iso
(64-Bit native)
And also via bittorrent through the torrent files at these URLs:
http://download.kongoni.co.za/tracker/torrents/kongoni32.1_12_2_baseline2.iso.t
 orrent
(32-Bit native)
http://download.kongoni.co.za/tracker/torrents/kongoni64.1_12_2_baseline2.iso.t
 orrent
(64-Bit native)

-- A.J. Venter Tel.: +27 21 554 5059 Fax: +27 11 252 9197 Outkast Solutions IT 
www.outkastsolutions.co.za A division of Global Pact Trading Pty Ltd. 
www.silentcoder.co.za - Blog scartoonz.silentcoder.co.za - ScarToonz webcomic 
_______________________________________________ Kongoni-announce mailing list 
Kongoni-announce@lists.kongoni.co.za 
http://lists.kongoni.co.za/mailman/listinfo/kongoni-announce

Russell

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5
 * Origin: Rusty's BBS - Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa (5:7105/1)