Today I posed this message to several of the LUG’s in South Africa. I am reposting it here without edits.
Hi Everybody,
Sorry for the cross-post, I promise it’s a once-off but this is a bit of a special circumstance.
In the grand tradition of GNU and later the Linux kernel, I am beginning with a mail to announce
my intentions, and a request for anybody who shares my vision to help out.
The interest in my CLUG talk about distribution creation some time ago left me thinking that
perhaps there are enough people out there (particularly here in South Africa) who may feel up to
the fun and work of helping to create something special. Having spent 5 years creating a
successful commercial distribution, I believe I have the skills for such a project to be workable, though this one is meant to be very different as you’ll see.
Starting in the next weeks I want to create a GNU/Linux distribution called kongoni. Kongoni is the
Shona word for a gnu (wildebeest) and this represents the origins of the system: firstly it is African,
secondly it is meant to be a truly free distribution of the GNU operating system.
The name in other words translates literally as: GNU Linux 
(I rather like the wordplay as well).
Fundamental to the design will be an absolute commitment to free software only. That means we will not
include in the installer, nor in the ports tree or any other officially distributed packages any piece of
software that is not under an FSF approved license.
Some degree of the workload can be shared by utilising (and contributing back to) Gnewsense’s list (and blacklist).
Development releases will have a kernel compiled with the no-taint flag – not allowing any non-free drivers to load,
which will be very useful for auditing purposes, where possible we will provide free alternate drivers.
UPDATE: I should have been more clear here. I mean ONLY development releases will have notaint, official releases will not restrict what users can or cannot load.
Where possible I want the system to actively contribute to high-priority free software projects like GNASH and Nouveau,
not least by providing automated scripts in the packages to allow even non-technical users to file automated
bug reports to the projects with usefully information for their needs. Thus possibly increasing the number of testers
exponentially, the improvements that arise will in turn benefit all free software users and developers.
The system will never be commercial, I have no problem with commercial free software (in fact I run a commercial free
software company) but this project would best benefit from being a true community project. If the need arises to
formalize structures, I pledge that it will be done by registering a charity organisation, or joining an existing one
– not by starting a company. If people some day want to start companies that sell services related to the system however
more power to them.
Now on to the initial technical details. First off, I don’t think there is any room in the market for yet another Ubuntu
respin. Ubuntu is a nice system in many ways, but the need is met – and Gnewsense already provides a fully free alternative
to fans of Ubuntu. Instead I believe there is room for new ideas and new thinking.
To this end I want to start with a slackware/bluewhite64 baseline initially targeting x86_32 and x86_64 platforms.
Slackware has many advantages as a baseline and offers enormous power of (easy) customization to give the system a real
unique identity while staying true to standards.
The biggest catch is addressing slackware’s number one shortcoming for desktop users: the limited package manager.
To address this, and also minimise the workload of multiple platforms, I intend to use portpkg to provide a ports tree
that is fully tracked for dependencies. Among my first coding tasks will be a full graphical frontend for portpkg as well
as a series of patches to portpkg itself to allow us to maintain our own ports trees as default. These will consist
of license-audited and dependency-mapped clones of the slackware/bluewhite64 repositories for upstream, and source-only
ports for 3rd-party packages. It is important to maintain our own ports tree since unfortunately all the default ports
available in portpkg include non-free software in their package lists. While we cannot (and should not) prevent users
adding those repositories and installing such proprietary packages – we should not give this action any official support.
The initial default desktop will be KDE4 with intention of including KDE4.2 (due in February) in the first stable release
if possible. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is on the standard packages list, and if the promised GNU/Linux port of Chromium is available by
release time it will be the default browser, otherwise one of the free firefox forks.
An absolute must is a powerful and complete system administration and configuration tool,
utilising things like darkstarlinux’s ALICE suite to complement a full kit for user-admin,
setting up advanced Xorg settings (like multiheads) and other common admin tasks. To ensure
seamless wireless and wired network roaming, wicd will be a default package (and madwifi with the new free ath5k hal for older cards and the newly GPL’d hal from Atheros as well).
It is quite possible that if we have enough volunteers and resources future releases could include parallel versions for
Gnome,xfce,enlightenment etc. and I am happy to include these in the ports tree if somebody helps create the ports.
In terms of project admin I wish to set up a suite of easy-to-use web-apps for contributing, auditing and approving
of ports (the first should be open to all, the latter two to trusted testers only). Designed to make the task
of contributing in this manner not only as simple as possible but to minimize the time needed as far as possible so
that those who choose to contribute their spare time to it can spend as much of that time as possible doing fun stuff
and as little as possible doing drudge work.
The focus of the project is home and desktop users, there are other distro’s aiming at this market but precious few
with a stated mission to be completely free, in both senses of the word.
After freedom, our second most important design principle should be one of “it just works”.
Now of course, as I type this Kongoni is vapourware, the first line of code has yet to be written (though I’ve done
significant amounts of research to make the decisions above, and I have written an installer).
Normally, it isn’t my style to announce something until the first pieces are written but in this case I
find it crucial to the very concept that other people be involved from the start. I have proposed a vision
(not an uneditable one technically) and I want to see who shares my vision and would like to contribute to it’s
realisation. I will be happy to fund hosting for the project and contribute much of my free time to it’s realisation
but I would like to have as many people helping as possible so that this is not just my vision, but our vision.
People who can suggest ideas and improvements, people who can help realise those ideas and help with the
large workload ahead.
If just a few people say “I’m in” – then that’s a go-ahead as far as I’m concerned.
The most useful skills right now will be:
*Web-app programming and web-design
*Ports builders and co-maintainers of the tree
*Graphic design
*Testers
These will likely get official lieutenants appointed on a first-come, first-serve basis.
There is much more to do so if you feel that you can contribute something please feel free to speak up.
If any of the mirror maintainers would be willing to host local mirrors of the ports tree and ISO’s when
we get to release time, please let me know as I have learned from hard experience how even a small distro
release can hit a server.
May I request that those who wish to contribute also reply to me directly as I do not want any
names to get lost in the noise as people discuss the idea.
Finally, I would like to suggest that those who are in Cape Town (once we have a list) meet up
for a face-to-face planning session. Perhaps over coffee on Saturday somewhere in Rondebosch ?
Thank you for reading this far
I hope to hear from you.
Ciao
A.J.
