Learning to Slack with Kongoni!

Some days ago, I had said that I was bored since my multi-boot systems were working perfectly. I also said that I wanted to try Kongoni GNU/Linux.

Since booting the live CD wasn't enough, my quest for knowledge led me to actually installing this Slackware-based distro. Three were my main motivations to add yet another head to my hepta-boot desktop computer:

1. I have not tried a purely Libre distro.

2. I've always wanted to try Slackware, but I feel I'm not yet up to it.

3. I felt it was about time for me to see if I could do well with a text-based installation.

Thus, last night I took up the challenge, encouraged by a rainy night during which sleep had eluded me.

Kongoni's text installation did not bite me. Actually, I could understand quite well most of the questions (I'm not going to get into details here, but they asked about partitions, locales, the clock and such). My only problem was when I reached the part in which the installation asked me about the mounting points for my multiple partitions. Being careless as I am, I had forgotten to take note of that beforehand, so I said "What the heck! Let's live life dangerously!" and chose "ignore" for all the mounting points. After all, being Slackware an OS that encourages people to build their own systems, it must have some way to mount those things later, whatever they were! :P

After some time of file-copying, Kongoni's installer gave me good news: My system had been installed successfully! (I couldn't help feeling proud of myself because that meant that I could actually install a GNU/Linux distro without the help of any GUI).

Next was rebooting to meet my brand new Kongoni OS! Yay!

Kongoni's Grub greeted me with many (and I mean it) entries to boot. It seemed that all my previous Grub entries (functional or not) came to a dance and waited for me to pick them. Incredibly enough, my tortured brain was able to remember vaguely which OS was on which partition...and there were many in that Grub that simply didn't correspond to my OSs.

I let them alone and picked Kongoni, of course. I braced myself for chaos and despair, but in a matter of seconds I was happily navigating Kongoni's KDE desktop.

Again, although there were some desktop effects, I couldn't get the cube to work. Oh well, being a humble Mepis 8 user with no Compiz, I can live without it, hehehe!

The second test: music and video. They had not worked during my live session. Did they work now?

No. Amarok and Dragon Player worked, but very silently. That's bad if you actually want them to give you some sound, right? Moreover, Dragon Player crashed again...



While I'm aware that such problem can be corrected somehow, I'm just beginning my Kongoni-Slacking experience, so I opted for an easier approach. How about installing VLC?

How does Kongoni manage the packages? Oh, I had to meet PIG and got familiar with the concept of "ports".



Apparently, PIG took something and compiled it along with its libraries and dependencies. I didn't understand much what was happening, but hope to learn more in time. It showed me the whole process...I wish I knew what all that meant! Whatever PIG did, it did it well because after waiting for some time, I could find VLC in the application launcher:



So, did I get sound this time? Yes! Perfect! I tried different kinds of videos and audio files from my different partitions (no problem accessing them, by the way) and VLC played all.



The downsides of this experience? First, when trying the Grub options, I made a mistake with Mandriva (which had previously stood several of my destructive attacks and was a bit unstable) and rendered it unusable. Even though it tried to repair itself later, it didn't work out this time.

Also, since I didn't like that Grub, I used Mepis System Assistant to repair it and later I manually edited the file "menu.lst" to enable Pardus, that was absent.

Now I have to reinstall my Mandriva system...but I guess I'll wait for the brand new Mandriva to arrive. Meanwhile, I'll be trying to learn more about Kongoni and will start my slacking!