Kwort 3.2 is finally here
David B. Cortarello
rolling out a new release of our system. There's nothing new that you
should be aware of if you already know the system. This is a major
upgrade of almost every software included in Kwort 3.14 except the
toolchain.
Perhaps the most noticeable changes might be the move from OpenOffice
to LibreOffice, a new shiny 3 kernel series, Firefox 7.0.1 (not
installed by default but you can install it from the iso image) and
the latest version of Chromium.
Other than what's noticeable, there are tons of improvements under the
hood, like the inclusion of lvm2 and mdadm for logical volume
management and raid support, the ext4 filesystem supported in the
installation and some nice improvements in kpkg. Also the installation
system was improved allowing you to install from usb devices and some
bugs from our previous release were fixed.
More features had been added, and as always, the system remains light
and clean as Kwort users like it.
As always, I would like to thank the people who helped making Kwort as
good as it is, some in more ways than others:
* Andreas Schipplock as always for maintaining the website, building
packages and testing beta releases.
* Our infrastructure providers, the people from PGHosting and Ricardo
Brisighelli for the package mirror in the UNR.
* As usual, a big thanks to the CRUX people for developing it, as it
is the system Kwort is based on.
* Testers: Frédéric Bassaler, Emiliano Dalla Verde Marcozzi. They did
an amazing job in this release so you all can have a pleasant
experience.
* All the people in the mailing list who reported bugs and also to
those who requested more features (without you, Kwort would have never
improved).
* And of course, the people who develop every project Kwort makes use
of. THANK YOU.
I really encourage you all to join Kwort's mailing list to ask
questions, request features, make suggestions or help other users:
http://groups.google.com/group/kwort-linux
You can also jump in our IRC channel to talk about anything you want
and stay in touch with the people behind Kwort:
irc://irc.oftc.net/Kwort
You can get the latest Kwort from here:
* ISO image: http://kwort.org/downloads/kwort-3.2.iso
* MD5 checksum: http://kwort.org/downloads/kwort-3.2.iso.md5
* SHA1 checksum: http://kwort.org/downloads/kwort-3.2.iso.sha1
* OFFICIAL MIRROR KDB: http://europa.fapyd.unr.edu.ar/pub/kwort/3.2/europa.kdb
Regards.
--
David B. Cortarello
Weblog: http://nomius.blogspot.com
Kwort Linux: http://www.kwort.org
Andreas Schipplock
it's the first time I comment on one of your release messages and I'd
like to say that I still enjoy kwort. I like its simplicity and the
way it handles packages. My honest opinion about the desktop
environment and about the visual style is that I dislike it but as
long as kwort is easily extendable it's no matter for me. I put
something else on it and that's it...but you know me...the last
several years I only used kwort on the server so I care even less and
as far as I got your idea, kwort isn't meant for the easy-peasy user.
One thing I would like to note:
Whenever you start to develop a new version of kwort I always get
remembered of the times when we were still with the minislack aka
zenwalk team and tried to help build a better linux for the average
joe.
I know the times were "strange" sometimes and in the end we both left
the zenwalk team but things turned out very well I believe. I learned
a lot from the simple system kwort provided and I just want to say
thank you for a system that's simple and modern at the same time.
Apart from simple I'd also like to mention the install scripts in the
initrd image. You know that I put my hands on it some years ago (the
gnx.in time (2006 or so)) and I'm pretty sure it's in a similar state
now :). The first task in 2005 or 2006 was to clean volkerdings
install scripts so the user wasn't forced to click 100 dialogs like in
old slackware versions. However, the old shell scripts are still there
I think and they are some things to do. I always feel to re-do that
but I know it's a proven system and hard to re-do.
However, I hope I can contribute more in the future.
Kind regards,
Andreas Schipplock.
David B. Cortarello
Kinda weird to see you write something rather than talking to you :-)
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Andreas Schipplock
<and...@schipplock.de> wrote:
> Hi David,
> it's the first time I comment on one of your release messages and I'd
> like to say that I still enjoy kwort. I like its simplicity and the
> way it handles packages. My honest opinion about the desktop
> environment and about the visual style is that I dislike it but as
> long as kwort is easily extendable it's no matter for me. I put
> something else on it and that's it...but you know me...the last
> several years I only used kwort on the server so I care even less and
> as far as I got your idea, kwort isn't meant for the easy-peasy user.
>
> One thing I would like to note:
> Whenever you start to develop a new version of kwort I always get
> remembered of the times when we were still with the minislack aka
> zenwalk team and tried to help build a better linux for the average
> joe.
> I know the times were "strange" sometimes and in the end we both left
> the zenwalk team but things turned out very well I believe. I learned
> a lot from the simple system kwort provided and I just want to say
> thank you for a system that's simple and modern at the same time.
I know, I know, but desktops are kinda "huge" these days, and it looks
like the freedesktop people doesn't like to stick to something and
they are always "re-writing" their stuff, so desktop environments have
to play the "catch-up"... Is easy to for desktop developers like gnome
and kde as they have "enough" people to do it, but for desktops like
Xfce or lxde is a huge deal as they have less than 5 "full-time"
developers. And for distribution maintainers it's always a pita as we
have to learn how to deliver everything thing they re-write with every
distribution release.
Because of that, we have always a huge mess, always unstable end-base
system, and some times, duplicated backends, so once hal got mature,
we moved to upowerd+udisksd, and they keep making it more "gnome
dependent", and don't get me wrong, I have anything against the gnome
people, but gnome became pretty heavy and bloated these days, with all
kind of processes talking each other, making a huge use of the dbus
architecture, pretty Policykit dependent too, and kinda Ubuntu-ish, is
like Gnome people is focusing the desktop to that kind of user base,
which is not the Kwort user base.
So, to provide a "simple" desktop environment installation we could
lose a lot of the desktop flexibility itself, and supporting
everything would make our system a real mess and hard to
upgrade/maintain.
Also, we should keep in mind the "simple" user idea: "Hey, this distro
include a nice and polished gnome desktop, it might be easy to use"...
So tons of users would try it and they would find out that the package
system is command line, that they have to set up their network
manually, and as suspected with every desktop environment that it is
in the chubby side. That will make this mailing list into a catharsis
place where people would come up here, rant a little, some might get
help, some not, and we would get a lot of bad reviews from
inexperienced users.
So, instead of that, Kwort is pointed to a specific user base just
from the beginning not including a desktop environment but an easy to
use system where you open up a the most used desktop apps by advanced
users with single keyboard shortcuts: the terminal with alt-z and the
browser with ctrl-x.
Kwort doesn't have a lot of developers, I can't even use a plural word
to say it, as it is only me, and I don't get paid for this (don't read
this as if I'm ranting, everybody knows I love doing Kwort), so what
I'm meaning with this is that I have to work and develop Kwort in my
spare time, which lately is not a lot, like before. Some people (like
you) contribute building packages and I'm really happy of it, but as
supposed they start after Kwort gets released. And releasing a desktop
environment from the beginning needs a lot of time, set up, and even
more testing.
Finally, let me be a little selfish and say that "I use Kwort the way
it is", and almost every package in the mirror is software that I use.
:-)
Anyways, from this release, there's an "easy way" to build your
desired desktop at your own taste (like saying "I'm building gnome
with automount for external devices disabled" or like "I'm not gonna
use policykit so I'm not building it") with the ports, looking at the
crux ports database, any user could go to http://crux.nu/portdb, get
your port repo and start building.
> Apart from simple I'd also like to mention the install scripts in the
> initrd image. You know that I put my hands on it some years ago (the
> gnx.in time (2006 or so)) and I'm pretty sure it's in a similar state
> now :). The first task in 2005 or 2006 was to clean volkerdings
> install scripts so the user wasn't forced to click 100 dialogs like in
> old slackware versions. However, the old shell scripts are still there
> I think and they are some things to do. I always feel to re-do that
> but I know it's a proven system and hard to re-do.
Kwort's installation system remains pretty similar, it get a little
cleaned up with every release, but it really needs a full re-write and
rebuild; it's on my todo list, and as Greg Kroah-Hartman posted today
on Google+:
I have a TODO item that says:
- create TODO list
So you can figure :-)
> However, I hope I can contribute more in the future.
>
> Kind regards,
> Andreas Schipplock.
>
Sorry for reading my rambling thoughts for like 10 minutes :-P