moved to blog.grml.org

For various reasons the Grml team decided to move the development blog from supersized.org to a self hosted solution. We would like to thank our old host for their service.

The full content has been migrated and grml.supersized.org is NO LONGER being maintained. Old content will stay as it is for now so we don't force any broken URLs but we won't provide any further news here.

If you have grml.supersized.org inside your RSS reader please consider switching to the new blog instead. It's available at:

The most important available feeds are:

• RSS 2.0 Feed: http://blog.grml.org/feeds/index.rss2
• Atom Feed: http://blog.grml.org/feeds/atom10.xml
• Comments Feeds: http://blog.grml.org/feeds/comments.rss2

Find further information at the new blog at blog.grml.org - see you there!

daily.grml.org includes ISOs for the upcoming Debian release with codename "wheezy" (being Debian/testing nowadays). All daily ISOs starting with 18th of march also provide the brand new kernel 2.6.38-grml.

The workflow for grml-live distribution to the build server has been improved as well: once a day, right before the daily ISOs are being built, the build server automatically builds a Debian package based on the git tree of grml-live. This means all changes to grml-live.git end up on the daily ISOs on the next day without any manual intervention. The autobuilt packages are available at http://amd64.grml.org/grml-live-daily/.

Only two days after Linus released Kernel 2.6.38 we already have it in the grml-testing repository! Besides the usual AUFS support it also features mainline's squashfs XZ support, meaning no extra squashfs patch needed anymore to get support for LZMA (now known as XZ). Our build tool grml-live(8) already supports this kernel version and uses XZ compression with squashfs-tools >=1:4.2-1 by default.

Please note: If you want to use current grml-live version (>=0.13.1) with older kernel versions than 2.6.38 don't forget to point SQUASHFS_BINARY to the according mksquashfs binary and set SQUASHFS_OPTIONS accordingly. If you want to build older versions without any hassles you can still use old grml-live versions of course (as provided and shipped with each Grml release).

Bottom line, XZ support in mainline (kernel >=2.6.38 and squashfs-tools >=4.2) will provide a better upgrade cycle for grml-live and the grml environment.

We just released the new stable version 2010.12 with Codename 'Gebrüder Grml', available as all the different flavours: grml, grml64, grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small. The new features and changes are documented in the official release notes. You can download the ISO(s) from grml.org/download.

Happy new year from the Grml team!

The hackathon for next Grml release took place on 4th and 5th november 2010 in the fantastic hackerspace Metalab in Vienna/Austria.

Some highlights of this amazing event:

• formorer started to work on the new Grml Homepage and it looks great so far. Maybe it is finished for the new release
• ch organized the location and social event and closed many bugs
• jimmy implemented a special update-grub feature for integrating Grml ISOs in usual hd installations during the meeting and debugged several issues
• gebi designed and started to develop a framework for non free tools like Raid controller or truecrypt (yes truecrypt is non-free!)
• rhonda started to use Zsh and will be looking for fast mirrors outside of Europe.
• mika was just amazed about the donations and what was achieved during these two days. Thank you!

Find more details about the meeting in the Minutes of the Grml Developer Meeting 2010.

Due to a server migration at our provider the grml.org website and a few services will experience an expected downtime, from:

until:

The affected services will be:

• http://grml.org/
• http://ml.grml.org/
• http://deb.grml.org/
• http://bts.grml.org/
• http://git.grml.org/
• http://paste.grml.org/
• jabber://jabber.grml.org

Please note that mails sent to any grml.org mailaddress will be delayed.

Not affected are the grml user mailinglist and the following services:

• http://wiki.grml.org/
• http://grml.supersized.org/
• http://twitter.grml.org/
• http://twitter.com/grmlproject
• http://identi.ca/grml
• http://daily.grml.org/
• http://planet.grml.org/
• #grml IRC channel on freenode

Please notice that a mirror of the main website grml.org is available at http://grml.deb.at/grml-www/ and a mirror of the repository (http://deb.grml.org/) is available at http://debian.netcologne.de/www.grml.org/deb.grml.org/.

If the downtime will be longer than expected we'll be providing updated information through the available channels (grml user mailinglist, twitter/identi.ca and IRC being #grml on freenode).

Thanks to excellent work by Gebi the squashfs-lzma issue for the new kernel could be solved. Now I'm proud to be able to announce a full-featured kernel 2.6.35-grml[64] which is available from the Grml grml-testing repository.

grml-live 0.11.0 is available as well, featuring support for kernel 2.6.35-grml. The new squashfs-lzma patches in kernel 2.6.35 aren't using the openwrt style format any longer but instead use the official on disk layout from mainline. That's why a new squashfs-tools package is required to properly support kernel 2.6.35-grml[64]. This package is available as squashfs-lzma-tools4. All you've to do to get a kernel 2.6.35-grml[64] based live system is upgrading to grml-live >=0.11.0, install squashfs-lzma-tools4 and grml-live will take care of the rest automatically for you. For further details regarding the current state of squashfs-lzma in Grml please have a look at the official grml-live documentation.

BTW: The current daily ISOs feature the new kernel version already, so give it a shot while it's hot! :)