general

Just a short note regarding our infrastructure: wiki.grml.org just moved (from host with IP 80.237.145.9) to a new system (new IP: 87.230.9.1). The TTL in DNS was set accordingly for the last few days so you shouldn't notice any noteworthy downtimes.

JFYI: Sorry to the ones of you asking questions in the grml develblog and not getting any answer. Due to a misconfiguration I never received any notifications about new, added comments. I found a workaround for the misconfiguration of supersized.org's mail notification so this issue should be fixed and I won't overlook any comments from now on. Sorry again, wasn't my intention.

We have new stable releases: grml 1.1, grml64 0.2, grml-medium 0.1 and grml64-medium 0.1

We have a new release stopper, see issue 400 in grml's BTS. Current grml release candidate doesn't boot on older hardware. We are investigating on that issue, please read the according thread on the syslinux mailinglist for further details. If you you have an affected system as well ("my box does not boot with grml 1.1-rcX but does with grml 1.0") please let us know!

Update: Thanks to Andrea Mayr and Wernfried Haas for testing lots of ISOs we could locate the problem finally. Read my mail on syslinux mailinglist for details. Now we are working on finalizing the ISOs and do some last regression tests. If murphy does not catch us again we will release the stable version this weekend.

Finally it's done - we have new release candidates:

• grml 1.1-rc1 - Codename Skunk
• grml64 0.2-rc1 - Codename Schwammerlklauber
• grml-medium 0.1-rc1- Codename Pfuh
• grml64-medium 0.1-rc1 - Codename Pfuh

Summarizing the development of more than 7 month of development for the release notes was a pretty tough job. 7 month you might ask? Yes, for the first time we have a longer delay than the usual ~3 month between two stable releases. The reason is simple: we wrote a new build framework named grml-live and reworked the build process therefore. Thanks to grml-live we are able to autobuild grml-ISOs in several different flavours and on different architectures without the need for any further manual interaction. This allows us to provide automatically generated daily snapshots of grml to the public (as you might know already). Now we have the first releases of grml being based on the work of grml-live. Enjoy!

The webpage of daily.grml.org has been reworked - thanks to the ideas and feedback by Henning Sprang. The page is more clearly arranged now so hopefully you'll find the according ISO even faster. :) If you have any further ideas how to improve the webpage please let me know! Disclaimer: the daily builds are not really up2date right now because we are pretty close to a new stable release now... anyway, I'll provide updated builds soon again...

Some news from the development front: I'm busy working on the new stable releases. Hopefully I'll be able to provide release candidates really soon now and the final stable releases should be available within the next 1-2 weeks as well. The are only a few last release stoppers left...

I just made some benchmarks between ZLIB and LZMA compression at squashfs, thanks to grml-live (which provides a commandline option and config option for switching) that's a trivial task now:

• grml flavour: grml-medium
• using LZMA: 164MB ISO, build time 725 seconds
• using ZLIB: 183MB ISO, build time 254 seconds

So whereas the build time increases the benefit is a smaller ISO, which is quite important for live systems that want to ship as many useful tools as possible. :-)

No, we aren't in holidays, instead we are busy working on a new stable release. Lots of development took place at the grml-live framework front, we have a big kernel upgrade (see grml-kernel repository for details or just grab the Debian packages from the grml-testing repository) which involves support for speakup (thanks to feadora's speakupmodified.org). We also have support for lzma within squashfs in our toolchain now. A first release candidate of a new stable release of grml will be available soon....

In the last few weeks I've been busy working on grml-live (the build framework based on FAI for generating a grml and Debian based Linux Live system). As generating a new grml-ISO using grml-live can be done with one single command(!) we could finally build an autobuild system which generates daily snapshots of grml. Thanks to hosting by formorer and jimmy we can provide a wide range of different flavours of grml now:

• grml-small: as usual that's the smallest version of grml; due to growing packages the ISO size is ~110MB currently - we are trying to reduce the ISO size further....
• grml-medium: a new grml flavour with the purpose of closing the gap between grml-small and normal/large/full grml. Currently it's pending at about 140MB ISO, we want to keep the ISO size at a maximum of 200MB
• grml: as usual, the big, normal, large, full version of grml with a maximum ISO size of 700MB, providing all the grml features

That's not all. We provide all these versions in a 32bit version (grml) as well as in a 64bit version (grml64). But stop! We even provide all the versions in a Debian/stable based and a Debian/unstable based version.

So you can choose your favourite grml-ISO from a total of 3x2x2 = 12 different ISOs. They are available from daily.grml.org and are built full automatic on a daily base. This should help us in tracking down possible problems in Debian packages as well as keeping the truck factor in our team as low as possible and improve quality management furthermore. On the other side users can get brand new software for testing, or if they need a special feature (like a brand new kernel version) they can get it without the need for waiting for a new devel-/stable-release. So just grab the current snapshot for testing from daily.grml.org, or if you want to build your own Linux live-cd based on Debian and grml consider the use of grml-live.

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.

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!

Lots of development took place in the last weeks, finally we have a new develrelease. Quoting the main changelog for the new develreleases:

  * featuring new stable kernel 2.6.22
    See http://bts.grml.org/grml/issue216 for details regarding
    development and progress.

  * *no* further speakup patch inside the kernel, see
    http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2007-June/043478.html
    for the reason

  * update to libc 2.6; packages from Debian pool by 2007-07-13

  * grml-x with multihead support using Xinerama ->

      % grml-x -xinerama ...

    Notice: this is limited to two monitors currently and I can test
    it only on my intel based Samsung X20 laptop. Please report
    feedback if you give it a try! Patches are welcome as well. :)

  * some small improvements in bootsequence when running inside
    VirtualBox

  * grml2hd supports installation on LVM devices through
    'LVM=/dev/mapper/target grml2hd'

  * added bootoption startup=$script to startup the provided
    $script/application instead of grml-quickconfig

  * support LVM (logical volumes) in boot sequence:
    - bootoption 'lvm' activates them
    - no special bootoption just runs 'lvdisplay' and if something
      can be found the user gets a hint to execute 'Start lvm2' to
      set it up
    - bootoption 'nolvm' completely disables the lvm code/checks

  * Due to the emacs21 to emacs22 migration the following packages are not
    yet available:

      auctex:      http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=432206
      python-mode: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=424973

    Whereas the other removed packages "gnus gnus-bonus-el w3-el-e21
    w3-url-e21" shouldn't be necessary with the new emacs version
    AFAICS.

  * the fluxbox theme (~/.fluxbox/styles/Sn33z) is broken with the
    current version. Just delete it manually or choose another theme
    from the fluxbox menu. Would be great if someone could take a
    closer look at fixing this issue!

  * the windows/ directory on the ISO has been renamed (currently
    only for now) due to space problems....

  * several bugfixes, updated configuration files,...

I continued work on shortening our bugreports, wish- and todolist in the last few weeks. New features include:

• bootoption startup for starting a script when booting finished, usage example: 'grml startup=netcardconfig'
• LVM (logical volumes) support in the booting process, providing bootoption 'lvm' now
• grml2hd supports installation on LVM devices also in interactive mode, all you have to do is set up LVM is you want it to and then invoke 'LVM=/dev/mapper/$target grml2hd'
• support dvorak keyboard layout via bootoption lang=dvorak and lang=dvorak-iso as well as keyboard=dvorak and xkeyboard=dvorak

More to come in the next few days... going back to development now...