Another Linux distro comes out of South Africa

Kongoni, a Slackware based distro from South Africa announced their first stable release yesterday.

Kongoni is the Shona word for the Gnu (also known as a Wildebeest, the animal after which Richard Stallman named his GNU operating system) and this name conveys the spirit and origins of Kongoni, a fully free GNU operating system, developed in Africa. With this release we can proudly state that we have achieved our goal to be fully free as far as we are able to verify, having replaced the last few non-free pieces with free replacements. We will be submitting this version to the Free Software Foundation for review to be listed as a fully free GNU/Linux distribution. The African spirit of the distribution does not end with its artwork, but also extends to technical decisions. For example, the choice to use a ports tree rather than traditional binary package trees was partly motivated by the fact that the source code is usually smaller than binary packages and, in Africa, bandwidth is an expensive commodity. 

This distro is significant, not only because it’s an African product, but because the architecture was designed with low-bandwidth African users in mind. It includes several applications specially written for the distro, including an easy to use installer, a simplified customization system, and a graphical front end for software installation. Kongoni also includes a tool for users to build customized Kongoni-based live CDs.