Kongoni CD ISO Image rebuild due to a bug!

Published: July 19, 2011Posted in: Home, News

Due to a bug (http://bugs.kongoni.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=2) in the Live CD, the Kongoni ISO image had to be rebuild. The problem was that the users couldn’t properly boot Kongoni from a USB bootable disk. Kongoni would fail when trying to switch to new root, due to old fashion “root switching” in initramfs (only when booting from USB).

Thanks to some guys who reported this issue on http://bugs.kongoni.org, this has been fixed and now the users can use Kongoni from a USB bootable disks, not just CD/DVD drivers. If you downloaded the ISO image yesterday or before, then please download it again, otherwise the fix is not included.

Anyway, I like to remind everyone to report any issue found in Kongoni, this way I can make sure that every single thing is fixed and taking care of.

UPDATED: Download Kongoni 2011 (Firefly):
kongoni-2011-i486-stable-firefly.iso
kongoni-2011-i486-stable-firefly.iso.md5sum
kongoni-2011-i486-stable-firefly.iso.sha1sum

Kongoni GNU/Linux 2011 (Firefly) released.

Published: July 15, 2011Posted in: Home, News

I’m very happy to announce the stable release of Kongoni 2011 (codename Firefly). Most bugs and glitches have been removed and we can say now that Kongoni is ready for the stable release.

Some extensive work has went into the Live CD and initrd. We have moved to initramfs for the Live CD, udev is used now and there is no limitation in space when creating the initramfs as we dropped dd and mkfs.ext2 in favor of cpio. This also should make the Live CD a bit faster and much more reliable.

KDE has been updated to version 4.6.5 due to some bug fixes, Icecat updated to version 5.0, Gnash updated to version 0.8.10-dev, BackInTime 1.0.8 added as a default backup tool and LibreOffice 3.4.1 is now available in the repository.

Some tests have been done on physical systems, Kongoni has been running on several laptops/desktops differing in hardware specs and most parts functioned out of the box. Now there are some issues with some hardware which require non-free firmware, but Kongoni is a fully free distro which means, non-free firmware wont be available and normally the hardware wont work.

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Kongoni 2011 (Firefly) RC2 released (major bug fix in KSI)

Published: May 22, 2011Posted in: Home, News

Due to a major bug in the installer (KSI) RC2 had to be released. Thanks to a couple of bug reports regarding the impossibility of installing Kongoni 2011 RC release and some investigation in this matter, it turned out that KSI had a mistype, making KSI totally useless. This usually doesn’t happen, but for some reason RC (my fault) went out with a unusable installer.

The error/mistype has be corrected in KSI and also the partitioning/formating of disks was improved. Now KSI, uses by default partitionmanager, or gparted and in the last case cfdisk to partition the disks. Formating the partitions now is optional, the user can format the partitions the second time, if for some reason it wasn’t done with partitionmanager or gparted or cfdisk.

Partitionmanager replaces gparted as a default partition manager, because it has a better integration with KDE and also it doesn’t need root privileges to start. Gparted on the other hand has been patched to start with root privileges by default using su-to-root, fixing the non-start issues with Gparted.

Login Manager (KDM) also has been patched due to the authentication issues and now when the user opens System Settings and then Login Manager, it will be open with root privileges by default, not polkit authentication as it was before.

System-config-printer has been upgraded to version 1.3.2 and it has been migrated to Kongoni repositories. The version coming from Slackware hasn’t been test properly in Kongoni and it turned out that it wasn’t really work.

In rest the system is the same, nothing has been change, maybe just some nice clean-up here and there, but mainly this release is to fix the major KSI bug.

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Kongoni 2011 (Firefly) RC released!

Published: May 16, 2011Posted in: Home, News

I’m very happy to announce the RC release of Kongoni 2011 (Firefly). Since Beta2 a lot of bugs fixes were done to this Release Candidate, a lot of packages were migrated from Slackware and also brand new packages were added.

There is a better accessibility support in KDE, speech-dispatcher and espeak are installed by default in the LiveCD and also they were build against kdeaccessibility. KDE was updated to version 4.6.3 due to some bugs in the core of KDE and in some applications coming with KDE.

Chromium was fully removed from the LiveCD and repository, apparently I didn’t check if Chromium is FSF compliant and it turns out is not. So now, the default web browser in Kongoni is Icecat which was upgraded to version 4.0.1 and its delivered with two default extensions: Adblock Plus and SQLite Manager, which in theory should help the users to block unwanted ads and maybe improve the SQLite db’s used by Icecat.

In rest, most packages got some need it TLC, the booting scripts and shutdown scripts were clean-up and improved. Functional tests were done on a real system to check if stand-by and hibernate works and Kongoni passed them. In the past 2-3 weeks Kongoni has been successfully running on a Lenovo T410 without any problems.

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Second beta of Kongoni GNU/Linux 2011 (Firefly) is out!

Published: April 11, 2011Posted in: News

After a couple of weeks of working in improving and resolving some important bugs, updating most package, Firefly is ready for the second beta and hopefully for the last beta of this release.

KDE was updated to version 4.6.2 as also the kernel was moved to version 2.6.37.6-libre. For the moment, Kongoni will stick with the 2.6.37 kernel branch, as it seems very stable and fast. I don’t know for sure when Kongoni will move to a newer branch, but sometimes it’s better just to wait a while and stick with something that works.

Like I said before, KDE was updated to version 4.6.2 and the reason for this were some bugs found by the KDE development team. I could have taken only the patches from KDE, but didn’t seems to have much of a point, as most of the packages coming with KDE would have been updated anyway.

Besides KDE and the kernel, there was a bug found when using udisks. The problem was that no external USB disks were mounted by udisks, even if udisks and udev found them. This issue got fixed in beta2 and now everything works at it should.

Also due to some mails received that addressed some issues regarding rekonq, I’ve decided to move to Chromium as the default browser. Some of the people reported that rekonq is kind of slow and doesn’t work so well. To be honest, in some of my tests I didn’t notice any issues, but it’s true that rekonq didn’t work very well with Gnash and a lot of Youtube videos don’t work, but the same videos work with Chromium and Gnash.

Another important fix and update happened to openjdk and now in the repository the users can find the binary version and source version of openjdk 1.6.0_22, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone to try to build openjdk from source as it can take a while :) .

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