grml development blog

grml release 2008.11 available

grml version 2008.11 (all grml flavours) - codename Schluchtenscheisser - has been released and is currently being uploaded to the mirrors. The official release announcements providing all the relevant news are available:

Issues regarding the releases can be found in the grml-wiki.

As usual you can get the ISO(s) via bittorrent, http and/or ftp from the mirrors listed at grml.org/download. Have fun and enjoy the new release! Your feedback is highly appreciated.

grml release candidate 2 of version 2008.11

Release candidate 2 of grml 2008.11 is available via debian.netcologne.de/www.grml.org/devel/. Main changes from rc1 to rc2:

Updated Debian packages by 2008-11-20
Implemented isofrom and tohd bootoptions.
Disabled NOPERSISTENT='Yes' in live-initramfs configuration
Removed CONFIG_SECURITY_SMACK from kernel, fixes issue568
Major update of grml-debootstrap (version 0.23)
Some minor updates and fixes in grml related scripts and configurations.
Updated documentation.

The stable release is expected to be released on this weekend (end of november), so please grab rc2 and give it a try.

grml release candidate 1 of version 2008.11

I'm proud to be able to present release candidate 1 of the upcoming stable release 2008.11 - available in all the different grml flavours. New features? Tons of new features! Including an update of grml-small - and we even provide a 64bit version of grml-small now! Release Notes for grml 2008.11[-rc1] - codename "Schluchtenscheisser" are available online. The following flavours are available from the devel directory of grml's mirrors:

  grml_2008.11-rc1.iso           667M
  grml-medium_2008.11-rc1.iso    178M
  grml-small_2008.11-rc1.iso      75M
  grml64_2008.11-rc1.iso         687M
  grml64-medium_2008.11-rc1.iso  187M
  grml64-small_2008.11-rc1.iso    77M

Known issues of 2008.11-rc1 can be found in the grml-wiki. Please report any bug you notice so we can provide stable releases to you soon! Have fun with grml.

new develreleases: version 2008.10.26

The new develreleases I just released contain several small updates, fixes and a kernel based on 2.6.26.7. I expect this to be last the devel release before releasing rc1 of version 2008.11. Working on release-notes, docs and testing.

Migration from Mercurial to Git

Over the last few weeks the grml team evaluated the distributed version controll system Git. Git is an open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Read the wikipedia article on Git to get an (not so short) overview.

Grml used to work with the distributed version controll system Mercurial and officially announced its use on October 18th, 2006. The way Mercurial worked was great for us and at that time it definitely was the best solution for our needs. We provided detailed documentation for our setup (see grml.org/mercurial/) and developed our own utils for working with Mercurial and Debian packaging (grml-mercurial-utils). Special thanks to the Mercurial developers - we highly appreciate all your help!

But we had to re-evaluate the situation as time passed:

in Debian Mercurial is not used for many packages (http://hg.debian.org), while Git is used a lot (git.debian.org) and there's visible progress on the Git front (for example git-buildpackage, topgit and vcs-pkg.org)
situation of Git improved (like better documentation, tools for Debian packaging,...)
Git provides better branching, rebasing which is great especially when you want to put essential software under your own control without having to fork it from upstream
Git provides a low-level interface and all the important features as part of the Git suite. Mercurial provides some important features just as extension (which might not work on upgrades or don't play together with other extensions).
more and more software we have to deal with is available in Git repositories

So whereas Mercurial used to work just fine for us in most cases Git provides the better approach for us nowadays.

Current state

Thanks to our hg-to-git tools the migration itself took less than 1 hour and all repositories have been migrated from hg.grml.org to git.grml.org.

By today (1st of october 2008) the grml mercurial repositories are deprecated and the official place for grml's sources is git.grml.org. The mercurial hosting will be deactivated within the next few weeks.

All the documentation and scripts of grml are being updated to reflect the changes and updated URLs but it has not been finished yet. So if you find something still mentioning hg.grml.org instead of git.grml.org please let us know, thanks!

As usual we provide documentation about our setup and tools: grml.org/git/

We highly appreciate any help, corrections and further feedback.

Special thanks to Michael Gebetsroither for his work and help on migrating.

new devel releases: 2008.09.28

After a long delay we finally have new develreleases (yeah!): grml / grml-medium / grml64 / grml64-medium, version 2008.09.28.

Quoting the main changelog: kernel 2.6.26-grml (based on 2.6.26.5 with additional patches) using a new version schema: as we want to improve tracking of all the different flavours and releases of grml we decided to use "$flavour-devel YYYY.MM.DD" for the develreleases and "$flavour $YYYY.MM" for the stable releases. No further confusing "grml 1.1 vs. grml64 0.2". ;) several new packages, tons of updates, bugfixes, configuration improvements,... - Sorry for not being more verbose but I've an influenza and don't have the mind for working on a detailed changelog, more information will follow.

version controll information inside grml's zsh prompt

Thanks to the work of Frank 'ft' Terbeck we have a zsh prompt featuring useful information about different version control systems found inside the current working directory. That's what it looks like on my developer system:

The according zsh configuration can be found in the hg repository, standalone or as Debian package grml-etc-core version >=0.3.52 in the grml-testing repository as well.

the way grml kernels are being developed

In news from the grml development front a grml user named Dave asked some questions regarding the grml kernel. As this seems to be not clear enough yet I'll write some sentences about the way the grml developers work on the grml kernel.

Daily grml builds (see daily.grml.org) use a recent grml kernel version from the grml-testing repository. As the daily ISOs are being built automatically we have the need for a known-to-work kernel. grml wouldn't work in live mode without kernel modules like aufs and squashfs. Finally grml users are used to get some additional kernel modules as well.

We could wait for a stable kernel 2.6.x.y with y being a stable patch/release with a version number >=10. But then we would have the problem that our kernel might be pretty out of date when we release a new grml version. grml users expect to get good hardware support - to acchieve that we need recent kernel versions. On the other side we don't want to upload a completely fresh and untested kernel to the grml repository even though it's "just" grml-testing. grml-testing is the place where we put stuff that will be available as a stable release once we consider it rocking solid. Of course there MIGHT be any issues left even though it's called a stable release, but thanks to our release cycle we have a pretty good test parcoure and try to identify and solve any possible breakages which shouldn't happen on any productive boxes outside the test world.

During our initial tests, configuration checks and verifying the upgrade path we also build external modules and in the meanwhile new stable updates (the y in the 2.6.x.y) appear which we can integrate into our kernel then. Therefor when releasing a new stable grml version we can provide an up2date kernel without forgetting about "rocking solid". HTH.

Current state of grml-live with squashfs-tools and kernel

I was busy working on getting grml-live in a good shape together with squashfs-tools, live-initramfs and the new kernel version 2.6.26-grml. A new squashfs-tools package is available as well as an updated live-initramfs package. It does not support LZMA compression (yet) but it's working fine with ZLIB compression so far. Right now I'm building an updated 2.6.26-grml kernel, 2.6.26-grml64 will follow.

As soon as the new kernels are ready-to-go I will upload them together with grml-live 0.9 to the grml-testing repository. Updating our daily.grml.org buildhost will provide daily ISOs featuring 2.6.26-grml . New development versions of grml will follow so we can provide a new stable release in the near future.

See the "Current state of grml-live with squashfs-tools and kernel" section if you are interested in further details.

initial version of kernel 2.6.26-grml

A first version of kernel 2.6.26-grml is ready to go:

% uname -a
Linux okely-dokely 2.6.26-grml #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jul 27 00:10:16 CEST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

Now work on external modules will start, if you want to follow progress of work on kernel 2.6.26-grml check out our grml-kernel mercurial repository. If you want to get the kernel using Debian's package management even before it's available through grml's repository add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list and install linux-image-2.6.26-grml then:

deb http://grml.org/2.6.26 ./

Please notice that we are testing migration to libata with this kernel so if you use root=/dev/hd.. in your bootloader config make sure to switch to root=/dev/sd.. or even better use root=UUID=... (see stable root device aka UUID for more details) instead.

starting work on kernel 2.6.26-grml

Gebi started to work on kernel 2.6.26-grml already, I'll follow soon (currently I'm working on stuff around grml-live and a boot chain problem), so stay tuned - we are working towards a new develrelease.

news from the grml development front

First of all sorry for the long time without any news in the grml develblog. Busy weeks, sorry.

In the last few weeks main work besides some bugfixing was providing a stable daily-grml service. Now we are waiting for the soon to be released stable version of the 2.6.26 linux kernel. Our plan is to provide a new development release featuring kernel 2.6.26 as soon as possible. New stable versions of grml should be available in august then.

BTW: On 23rd and 24th of august some grml developers will visit FrOSCon, a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time in Sankt Augustin/Germany. We plan to make a grml booth as well as a coming-together-hacking-event. Hope to see you there!

grml at Grazer LinuxDay 2008 (Austria)

Several grml developers met at the Grazer LinuxDay (Austria) on 19th of april 2008. Alexander held a talk about Nagios3, Jimmy talked about Backups, Gebi held a talk about "Lockless Multithreading using Erlang" and I (Mika) was talking about "Systemadministration++ - What really helps". Check out the gallery to get an idea of the event. Oh, and at the grml-booth we had a Lenovo X300, running grml of course. :)

grml 1.1 in LinuxUser 05/2008

The media edition 05/2008 of the german LinuxUser magazine provides grml 1.1. You'll even find a german article I wrote about grml inside the magazine as well. So get it as long it's hot off the press and available! :-)

bug #475783 - mounting loopback device fails in initrd

Using current versions of busybox (1:1.9.2-2) fails with kernel 2.6.23-grml and grml-live, see my bugreport #475783 for more details. I've just uploaded an older version of busybox (1:1.1.3-5) to the grml-live repository for use with grml-live which brings back a working setup.