Status of KNOS 9 for 2012 and our beta test cycle

[Kevin McAleavey]

It's that time of year once again and folks have been wondering whether or not there's going to be another beta and release cycle this year as in previous years. Indeed, we've been quite busy here developing the 2012 version of KNOS. However, this year we've had numerous challenges that have made the next version more of an adventure than in any previous years, and that's delayed our release cycle substantially.

First was hurricanes Irene and Lee which forced us to relocate from Voorheesville to nearby Glenmont to rebuild our operation from scratch under severe financial constraints. During the transition to our new facilities and the moves and regroupings required, we only had time to deal with existing customers via email while reconstructing everything. In addition, delays on the BSD side of the world delayed early code releases of BSD 9 on which the next KNOS will be built with a number of substantial changes which rendered many of our existing designs in KNOS 8 not only obsolete, but completely unworkable. This of course required substantial changes to our code infrastructure in order to work with all the changes made to BSD for our next major release, all disrupting our usual annual timing.

So here's where we are right now ... I've just finished our first successful alpha version of our 32 bit KNOS 9 and we'll begin testing it in-house and among our own associates later today. The common code base for the 32 bit release is used to build our 64 bit version, but the 64 bit version requires additional code and building and we plan to start that next week while we test the 32 bit build. Once the 64 bit builds are done and tested internally and we're satisfied that both 32 and 64 bit KNOS 9 are actually working PROPERLY and ready for beta testing, we will let everyone know and begin the public testing of KNOS 9.

Those who have been involved in our previous beta cycles can expect an email from us announcing the availability of the beta testing versions once they've been uploaded, and we'll also ask others to join in here. So fear not, we're making good progress towards KNOS 9 even if we're a bit late this year and as always we don't invite others to join in the testing until we're satisfied that the beta versions are good enough to use as they are. We're not quite there as yet tho'.

Here's what to look forward to as new features though in the meantime, based on customer requests:

1. TOR is now fully integrated into KNOS for those who wish to make use of TOR. KNOS 9 includes the "real deal" and not clones such as "tork." Tor proxy configuration will be available to those who wish to "turn it on" by means of either hard proxy settings in KNOS' configuration settings or through browser plugins such as "FoxyProxy" or through using "privoxy" which will also be included in KNOS. It will require manual enabling, but there has been great demand overseas among those concerned about privacy and thus we're building that into our infrastructure to satisfy that need.

2. CHROMIUM, the open source version of "Chrome" without google's intrusions will be the third browser option along with Firefox 7 (or whatever version is current at the time of release) and our Webkit/HTML5-based "Epiphany" browser.

3. THUNDERBIRD for email and newsgroups has been added to our existing Evolution email owing to way too many bugs in the Gnome Evolution mail and calendar client. We will continue to distribute Evolution in KNOS however because many corporate customers require "MS Outlook" compatibility. This adds to the existing offerings.

4. New SKYPE (without Microsoft code) with video/chat support replaces the old BSD/Linux based version which was highly limited. Our new SKYPE build as well as our new PIDGIN chat client permit direct SMS sends and receives from within KNOS to cell phones.

5. New Transmission P2P/Bittorrent client adds additional anonymity features as well including NAT/PMP routing and privacy options.

6. LibreOffice from the OpenDocument foundation replaces OpenOffice which is no longer supported as a result of Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems.

7. IcedTea Java support replaces Sun Java which has not been adequately secured or maintained by Oracle.

8. Anjuta KNOS SDK introduced to permit creation of apps specifically for KNOS. Anjuta provides a complete coding environment and tools.

9. Calibre full service book reader and format converter introduced to allow conversion of ebook formats and reading of all electronic publishing formats and conversions between.

10. Gtkpod introduced to allow syncing and use of iPods and iPads with KNOS without needing iTunes. You can play music and videos in KNOS and sync your device.

11. Greatly improved KDEnlive video and audio editor. Codecs for ALL formats are included and useful when playing movies in KNOS. DVD Play support is also added.

12. Cairo Dock allows you to replace the existing desktop with one that looks like OSX and is far more functional.

13. Under the hood, numerous improvements including USB3 support and many more hardware devices and systems. And there's plenty more inside beyond what I can remember off the top of my head right now too.

Sadly, we've not seen much progress with broadcom wifi, but many other issues have been resolved. Thus, there's plenty for people to test on different machines out there before we can call KNOS 9 "ready to go" but we're quite excited with all the new stuff we've added for KNOS 9. And owing to the timing, those who have bought KNOS 8 this past year will get their KNOS 9 at no charge as part of their subscription, including custom versions built for government and corporate customers as well at no charge. Anticipated release date is around Christmas, hopefully earlier or thereabouts. Once we see how well what we've built works, we'll have a better idea as to the formal release.

We'll let everybody know once we're ready for beta-level testing ... we're almost there!

[Kevin McAleavey]

WIRESHARK has now also been added to the upcoming KNOS 9 code base from our custom system administrator builds for corporate users. This feature permits monitoring of traffic on your local subnet and is a useful antimalware investigation tool.

[Kevin McAleavey]

We are pleased to announce that we've finally worked out the bugs with BSD 9.0 which affected KNOS, and anticipate releasing our first beta in 7 to 10 days. For those who participated in our KNOS 8 version testing, we will send an email to your last known address once it's available and will of course post its availability here as well.

In addition to the features mentioned previously, we've also added the VLC media player as requested in addition to our existing Totem media player, and have included the QT development kit for programmers interested in creating applications for future versions of KNOS in addition to the Anjuta SDK already planned for our 9 version. For geeks, this allows the creation of QT/Python applications as well as the GTK applications that Anjuta provides. For those who aren't programmers, don't worry about these new features, the purpose of including them is merely to demonstrate to potential application developers how they can create applications for KNOS. Since there's been quite a bit of interest in this, along with our future plans, we're including them in the betas so that developers can get a running start.

We're also pleased to announce full webcam support for most webcams for Skype and Flash. A customer of ours was gracious enough to send us an old Labtec webcam and unfortunately, the manufacturer no longer supports it, but drivers for many others have been made available and work fine now. We're still seeing a few anomolies with automounting of some USB sticks, but we've finally been able to work around some serious deficiencies which caused none to work at all ... that was one of the major holdups in our KNOS 9 release. We're glad to have finally solved that "impossible" according to BSD which claims that automounting is no longer possible at all.

Now our attention turns to a means of allowing our larger kernel space to be "upgraded" to existing hard drives and USB stick installations of KNOS 9 since we don't want to harm the existing user space on KNOS 8.2 drives and sticks larger than 8GB owing to the need for the kernel partition needing to be larger than before. In fact, we're planning to make some "personal space" available on 8GB sticks and that's the final hurdle for us to complete in our design whereupon we'll be ready to release to our loyal testers to ensure that we've got it all right for our formal product release early in 2012.

Just wanted to let everyone know where things are since so many bugs in BSD 9 took much longer than we had anticipated to fix as BSD doesn't have the level of support for us developers as it had in previous years when the economy was better and there were more people working on various BSD projects. We've also had our own limitations on this end owing to lack of investment and support for the KNOS Project itself. But we're finally almost there with a rather impressive new KNOS for 2012 despite all the obstacles!

[Kevin McAleavey]

We'd like to apologize for the delay in the release of our KNOS9 public beta. This time around, we've been doing exhaustive testing on the code, and each additional modification performed by FreeBSD to the kernel code leading up to their own release has introduced major changes which have unfortunately turned up bugs in our own code which sent us back to the drawing board.

For the past three weeks, all of the elements of our code has now been stabilized with the RC3 release of BSD and the only thing holding us up now is finalizing the cosmetic changes to the "new look" for KNOS9 revolving around major changes in the GTK GUI system which has moved from GTK2 to GTK3. That in turn has broken most of the graphical themes which have been part of KNOS since the beginning. Once we get our new look finished and cleaned up, we will release.

I'm optimistically hoping we can be done with it by the end of this week, finish testing, and release next week. Once again, apologies for the delay but those of you who are using KNOS or have taken part in our previous public betas already know what sticklers we are for getting it right the first time. Once we're done, you will NOT be disappointed!

[Kevin McAleavey]

We're pleased to announce that release of our public beta of KNOS 9 is imminent. Testing has been completed and now it's just a matter getting the 32 and 64 bit releases uploaded and some background functions completed.

We expect to release by Monday. While everyone's waiting, here's a tease of what's to come. I had planned on uploading an animated GIF showing all of the features, but alas it's too large to post here. We will formally announce here when it's available, as well as note it on your KNOS home page. Those who are still on our notify list should expect to receive an email from us once everything is in place and ready for you.

Attachments:

[Nancy McAleavey]

KNOS9 beta is now available. If you didn't get the email(it's HTML,please send us an email where it won't be blocked) and would like to download a copy, email [e-mail] and we'll send you the links.