Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Kwort 3... The big change

Hello everybody. This is just a flashlight of what Kwort 3 will be.
Kwort 3 brings a whole new era of Kwort Linux, Kwort public might change now, I'm not focusing anymore in inexperienced users, but on intermediate-advanced users and up.
Why is that?
Well, kinda I'm forced to that. Kwort's most important problem was always the kernel, not because Linux is bad, but because some drivers are.
For example, wireless drivers tend to suck... I mean, WTH is that closed source microcode needed for most drivers? That's just plain wrong. I'm not talking here about making it free software, but open source would help everybody to make better drivers. Also there are tons of wireless cards out there unsupported (or half supported) because companies not releasing specifications, we are not even talking about open source anything here. COME ON!
I'm not going to take this to the free software vs. open source vs. closed software, people who know me, knows that I hate those topics and I leave those to politicians and software philosophers.

Despite of that, some other things are not easy (as it should be) to support, and inexperienced users tend to not know what they want (first they want a desktop, then they want to be able to configure a web server with a GUI (that I'm not going to write) for some php scripting , then they want to create a RAID or LVM). Kwort was always meant to be for the desktop, and the desktop only, not a web server not a redundant file server, etc.
And the funny part is: If you don't provide packages for what they want, they get pissed off and I've also got insults because of this. People, what is going on here? It's not like you're paying me (and if you would, that doesn't even give you the right to insult me), you can ask for something. I develop Kwort in my free time.
So, advanced users tend to know a lot more, from the work that takes to do something like Kwort, to how to check logs and write or hack some script to do what they want (for example a network configuration script).

So... Kwort 3 is now based on CRUX which will make it more advanced. I'm not changing it to CRUX because I want it to be hard and for truly advanced users, but because Slackware has become a really multi-purpose distribution, and strip out all the "unneeded" stuff for Kwort would take me a lot of time.
Also the init system has changed and the way it is configured too. Don't worry about all this, it is already well documented in the new website (this new one is really cool, with tons of information as it always should be but never was). There's no more wizards tools like knm (Kwort network manager) and kum (Kwort user manager), but a console and the chosen editor. Despite of that kum and knm will still be maintained and developed.

Anyways, Kwort 3 is almost ready be released. There's a beta release already that everyone can test (there are some testers already doing a great job that helped me a lot).

Sorry for not having you all up to date related to Kwort, but I've been working a lot and in my free time I try to develop Kwort. For example, now, I'm in my lunch time, and I passed out lunch in order to write something for you about the new direction of this project.

Cheers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey! great news! And if your are programming, don't forget to eat! ;)
Cheers.