Bongani Hlope is a man of few words over the phone, but get him fired up over a kernel bug and you’re likely to find him mixing it with the best of them.
That was the case last year when Hlope got Linux founder Linus Torvalds and kernel programmer Andrew Morton to help him track down a bug in the Linux kernel haunting his AMD64 processor.
“Andrew Morton was the first to pick up my bug report, then Linus got involved later on,” says Hlope. “We [first] thought it was a software problem, but we figured out that the memory controller for the AMD64 had a bug, so it ended up being a hardware failure instead of a software failure.”
Torvalds eventually coded a patch that solved the problem. “He’s a nice guy,” chuckles Hlope.
By day, he’s a Java developer at health-insurance giant Discovery Health, where he’s happy to report geeks aren’t locked away in the basement. “We have nice cubicles, hey … and close to windows.” By night, at his home in Pimville, Soweto, his hobby is bug hunting, mainly in the Linux desktop environment KDE.
So why does squashing bugs thrill Hlope? “That’s how I learn the system. I’ll try to add my features later,” he says.
As a member of the newly formed Kasi Open-Source Society (Koss), which launched with the Soweto Open-Source Centre in May this year, Hlope hopes to give back some of his knowledge to the community. “I’d like to get the awareness across first, on how you can improve your technical skills by working on open-source software.”
He says Koss may embark on a translation effort soon to create an OpenOffice version for arguably South Africa’s most popular “unofficial” language — the township lingo tsotsitaal, which is a mixture of Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Afrikaans, English and other local languages.
The idea is to take the Zulu translation of OpenOffice created by Translate.org.za and drop the register a bit for people in his area. “The Zulu they use is too strict for guys from Soweto,” he says. “We saw a lot of words in Zulu, and most of us couldn’t understand them, so that’s why we decided: let’s tone it down a bit.”
“It’s a huge project,” he adds. “I think I’ll need help.”
Hlope says the Soweto open-source community is growing. “I get calls from a lot of people who used to use Windows asking me to help them install Linux,” he says, and adds that there are a few Sowetan “lurkers” on the LUG mailing lists.
“Some are just lurking there … seeing how things are done,” he says, adding that some send him private mails but don’t participate in the discussions yet. “I hope some guys will ask questions soon.” — Tectonic