grml development blog

I had to clone a server to another server (1:1 copy using dd+netcat) but didn't want to stay at the customer's place until the task finished. So I executed 'Start ssh; passwd' to be able to login remotely. But how to reboot the server and get rid of the CD so the harddisk system boots instead of the grml-CD without manual interaction at customer's place? Server systems usually don't move in/re-insert an ejected CD on reboot - that's nice for what we need. So all I had to do was:

eject &>/dev/null
umount -l /cdrom
eject /dev/cdrom
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

Thanks to the infrastructure provided by IBM's x305 server donation and Jimmy's work I just finished a first prototype setup of an autobuild system for building grml-ISOs using grml-live. Currently I've a working system for building "grml-medium" ISOs based on etch/stable and sid/unstable on a daily base. Normal/full grml ISOs (the ~700MB version) of etch/stable and sid/unstable will follow soon. I plan to provide new develreleases as soon as I finished the autobuild setup. Hopefully we'll find ressources for a 64bit environment (so we can provide autobuilded ISOs of grml64) as well.

Time for an update on the grml-live front. I just uploaded the first public version of grml-live to the grml-repos.

Lots of development took place. New features include support for local mirrors (thanks to Michael Schmitt for providing test infrastructure), new command line options and unified classes. Oh, and you ever wanted to use grub as bootloader instead of isolinux on your grml ISO? Now it's as trivial as setting BOOT_METHOD=grub in /etc/grml/grml-live.conf before running grml-live itself, giving you something like:

grub as bootloader for grml

So what are you waiting for? Grab grml-live, build your very own grml version and send me your feedback, feature requests and bugreports. :-)

Ever wanted to build your very own grml-ISO without having to deal with all the remastering details? Want to include your very own kernel? Want to change configuration of some files? Then grml-live might be what you ever dreamed of. :)

Check out the grml-live documentation to get an idea what I'm talking about. As you might notice grml-live is based on FAI (Fully Automatic Installation), this will provide us the possibility to deploy grml even faster, better and more customized than we already do (using grml2hd, grml-debootstrap and grml-terminalserver).

Want to get an idea how fast you can build an ISO using grml-live? Check out:

So all I did was invoking 'grml-live'. Not even 7 minutes later I've a working grml live-CD which is based on Debian-stable, providing kernel 2.6.22-grml and all the basic grml features:

Stay tuned for an official release of grml-live. We are working on reducing the todo list - like porting it to other architectures, providing different flavours, some more customisation hooks and finally providing a full-grml-built using grml-live.

After the Froscon event took place we have a new develrelease. Quoting the main changelog for the new develreleases:

  * several updated configuration files, bugfixes and
    up2date Debian packages as of 20070905

  * atl2 kernel driver added

  * grml2hd: display '***' in password box so user gets feedback when
    typing the password

  * ctrl-alt-del triggers reboot instead of powerdown now

  * use of live-initramfs: the biggest change inside 1.0-3 and the
    one which will break everything. ;-) But: as a long-term
    side-effect it will dramatically simplify customizing grml and
    provide new options like including firmware for booting.
    'ls -la /' looks completely different now as you will notice.
    We have a new unionfs overlay layout. Let's see whether it's
    working for us.

    So please: test all the grml bootoptions and let us know what's
    broken!