On March 25 Geekcorps Mali announced the release of Kunnafonix 0.1. This is the first release of a GNU/Linux distribution adapted to Malian needs.
The distribution is based on the Morphix LiveCD and Debian GNU/Linux, and entirely consists of free, open source software. Kunnafoni means information in Bambara, which is the most spoken language in Mali.

Geekcorps Mali (http://mali.geekcorps.org/) is a USAID funded project to bring technology solutions to community radio stations in Mali, to increase the quality of information they have at their disposal, and to encourage sharing of information and programs between the radio stations. Kunnafonix is developed with this goal in mind. It comes with Audacity for digital audio editing and K3b for burning and grabbing CD’s. Besides this, Kunnafonix comes with the light-weight XFCE4 desktop, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org.

Kunnafonix also contains text versions of the French and English Wiktionaries and of the French Wikipedia, the award-winning free encyclopedia, so that this huge source of knowledge can be accessed from computers without internet access.

Kunnafonix 0.1 is a LiveCD, which means that it can be used without installing anything on the computer. There is however an option to install the system to the computer’s harddrive. Version 0.1 right now simply takes over the computer’s harddrive, which is okay for older computer systems coming from the US or Europe. It provides a simple way to upgrade existing systems, while keeping specific settings and user data.

More information about Kunnafonix:

http://mali.geekcorps.org/mediawiki/index.php/Kunnafonix

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