South Africa’s newest Linux distribution, Kongoni, is planning a major online and offline hackfest on October 3. Kongoni founder and lead developer, AJ Venter, says that the the purpose of the hackfest code sprint is “to modify the kongoni_current ports tree to be compatible with the new FHS-compliant slackware64 structures so that we can migrate to it as an upstream for kongoni Cicero”.

Kongoni is one of just nine totally free Linux distributions recognised by the Free Software Foundation.

Venter says that the code work “is quite simple and even beginner programmers can join in. We will explain everything that needs to be done in detail and senior developers will be ready to help out with any questions”.

All that hackfest-ers need is a running version of Kongoni Nietzsche (Live CD, virtual machine or a full install) and the Kongoni team will provide the rest. There will be both online and offline events throughout the day.

More details of the hackfest can be found on the Facebook group or on the Kongoni website.

AJ Venter has announced the release of Kongoni version 1.12.2. Codenamed Nietzsche, this is the first official and stable release of the Kongoni GNU/Linux distribution after several development releases. Kongoni is a fully free African GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware with significant inspiration from the BSD-Unix architectures. The operating system is primarily designed for desktop power users and aims to provide a powerful, customizable system that puts the user in control of his own environment while nonetheless being easy to work with and not get in your way.