grml development blog

Hurray, we have a new develrelease! grml 0.8-2 is available for beta-testers and grml-developers.

Quoting the main changelog:

  * Features brand new kernel 2.6.18-grml

    Notice: the fglrx and nvidia modules are available at
    http://dufo.tugraz.at/~prokop/grml-kernel/2.6.18-grml/

    Notice2: not all modules are available yet; the missing ones are:
    reiser4 (not yet in kernel), acx100, adp94xx, bcm5700, dazuko,
    drbd8, lufs, nozomi, spca5xx, qc-usb, sl-modem, thinkpad,
    truecrypt

  * grml2hd checks whether you're installing to something like
    /dev/hdb3 and if /dev/[sh]da are harddisks, the lilo-dialog
    provides the possibility to install lilo into MBR of /dev/[sh]da
    instead of /dev/hdb3 or /dev/hdb. (Thanks for idea and code-base
    goes to Alexander Bernauer!)

  * Unicode support!
    http://grml.supersized.org/archives/185-basic-unicode-support-for-grml.html

    What does this mean? You can use something like 'grml
    lang=at-utf8' to set environment variable for unicode.
    Just use "lang=$YOURLANGUAGE-utf8" to use this feature.
    The script grml-setlang allows to configure environment
    variables through /etc/default/locale. (Some more documentation
    will be available as soon as I upload the packages to the
    grml-repos.)

  * Split grml-etc into grml-etc-core: this provides the possibility
    to use grml-etc-core (which ships only some core config files
    for zsh, vim,...) on *plain* Debian (stable/testing/unstable)
    systems without interference.

  * Support truecrypt in our reboot/shutdown scripts (make sure no
    mapped volumes are left behind).

  * Check whether a swap partition is in use already and display
    info message during boot process (instead of an error message).

  * When running pump finished (which happens in background during
    bootup) it writes "finished_running_pump" into
    /etc/network/status/$DEVICE so you/we can check for it.

  * Bugfixes, improvements in rebuildfstab and other grml-packages...

  * Fixed the "Booting from external devices (SCSI/USB/Firewire)
    does not work" issue.

Get it as long as it's fresh and hot! :-)

I wrote a buildsystem for grml-kerneladdons which allows me to build the appropriate package for every single kernel version of grml much faster now. So you can grab grml-kerneladdons for the first release of 2.6.18-grml already. Notice that the package is named grml-kerneladdons-2.6.18. This provides the possibility to install several kernelpackages at the same time without any conflicts. The package includes tpm-emulator and ipw3945 as well now.

Today I completely rewrote the language stuff in grml-autoconfig. After designing a much more capabable and cleaner system I rewrote the code (e.g. removed the functions config_environment and config_keyboard which are integrated more smoothly in config_language now) and added support for Unicode/UTF-8. Now you just have to boot using 'grml lang=$LANG-utf8' and all the environment stuff is adjusted without any further manual input for you! Thanks to a new shellscript named grml-setlang it's also possible to adjust language related environment variables when booting your harddisk installation. grml-setlang also allows you to *interactive* configure your language stuff on grml. After running lots of tests I couldn't notice any problems so far - the new code should be completely backwards compatible. But I've to do some more regression testing and test X-related stuff before the new packages are going into the grml-repos (including some documentation). Expect to find the new features in the next grml develrelease (and of course in grml 0.9 afterwards ;-)).