Kongoni: A new Linux distro from Africa
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 02/23/2009 - 19:37
We’ve had Ubuntu and Impi, now there is a new African-named Linux distribution. South African developers today announced the first cut of a new Linux distro which they are calling Kongoni. Named after the Shona word for the GNU, Kongoni has a strong BSD-Unix influence and includes a ports-like package management system. The underlying code is, however, based on Slackware and the makers are promising to keep the distribution free of proprietary software.
The initial “baseline” release of Kongoni is codenamed Aristotle and is more a base for future developments than an end-user-focused release. Lead developer AJ Venter says that the idea behind the baseline release “is 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.”
He says that from this point on Kongoni will follow a more traditional release pattern with alpha, beta and stable releases.
Just before anybody else
Yes, the A.J. Venter there is me, I've contributed some stories to this site before - and you may remember me from my years heading up the OpenLab distro project. If there is a crucial difference between the two projects though it is this: OpenLab was a commercial project, Kongoni is a pure community project, so it has none of the pressures on a commercial project. It doesn't need to make money, it doesn't need to be on time- it just needs to be good and fun to work on.
Why not another review by AJ ? Kongoni on grub ?
We are pushing Linux distros on grub. Installer must be able to add a partition and install as the next boot candidate?
This makes a multiboot buffet of Linux distro possible for newbies, and you do not have to be competing on a limited flavour. Also, you might get some revenue to be preinstalled on netbooks or sold on the shelves of computer stores?
Do a review on your new venture here, Venter? Good Luck on world wide sales potential?
Re: Why not another review by AJ ? Kongoni on grub ?
This makes a multiboot buffet of Linux distro possible for newbies, and you do not have to be competing on a limited flavour. Also, you might get some revenue to be preinstalled on netbooks or sold on the shelves of computer stores?
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Well, technically this is doable, just select the root partition as the lilo host, and add the partition as an OS boot into grub later - but the latter isn't in the installer and probably couldn't fit sensibly into it. It's a one-line setup command to set up though.
Kongoni being based on slackware would not be easy to migrate to grub - but we'll look into the possibility of it being added as an alternatve in future versions.
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Just load it if you want to
I'm not concerned about revenue, like I said, this is a community project, we're doing it for love. As for a review, I wouldn't mind doing it... but I don't want to be the first to do so... so if you do one - I'll do one .. deal ?
Kongoni to grub ? Kongoni iso for livecd ? cp iso into grub ?
Have fun and do the review, don't wait for Susan? She is on membership drives, maybe attract some African visitors to contibute as members.
We are pushing hardware to USB only, single bus architecture on many computer form factors. Linux can sell to newbies only if group approach(best of breed) on grub can do it. Revenue per preinstall is very small(pennies) on millions of netbooks and netphones manufactured.
We need your help to make things happen?
Footnote:
Grub v0.97, v1.96, or future v2.0 can boot upto 145 operating systems. It depends on what factories use which Grub version. But Linux has 500+ distros.
re: Kongoni
Oh goodie, another distro.
Lets see, thats 1,2,3,4,5.....9 bazillion and one now.