Entries by Michael Prokop

Recently two Grml developers sadly left our development team. Christian Hofstaedtler and Gerfried Fuchs, we wish you all the best - thanks for all your work within the Grml community!

Now you might be wondering how you could become a Grml developer. We're happy to announce grml.github.com, a place which should get interested people ready to contribute without much headaches. Please help us making Grml an even better kick ass solution!

We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2011.12, code-named "Knecht Rootrecht"!

For detailed information about the changes between 2011.05 and 2011.12 have a look at the official release announcement .

This release brings a downsizing and cleanup: one flavour, two architectures. The new, smaller flavour has a 350MB ISO size target, while still delivering over 1.1GB of open source software relevant for system administrators!

Give it a try and download grml 2011.12-rc and report back to us.

Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and report back, so we can complete the stable release soon. If no major problems come up, the next iteration will be the stable release, which is scheduled for end of December.

Grml 2011.05 with codename "Just Mari", available in flavours grml, grml-medium and grml-small and all of them as 32bit and 64bit version has been released. The official release announcements providing all the relevant news are available at grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-2011.05. Issues regarding the releases can be found in the grml-wiki. Grab the ISOs from grml.org/download/.

We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution. Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce a really unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity.

Canterbury will be as technologically simple as Arch, as stable as Debian, malleable as Gentoo, have a solid Live framework as Grml, and be as open minded as openSUSE.

Joining the the Canterbury Project Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz explained: "Arch Linux has always been about keeping its technology as simple as possible. Combining efforts into one single distribution will dramatically reduce complexity for developers, users and of course upstream projects. Canterbury will be the next evolutionary step of Linux distributions."

Gerfried Fuchs, who gave a talk about Debian at last year's openSUSE conference, said "While DEX (Debian Derivatives Exchange) might have been a good idea in principle, its point of view is too limited. We need to reach out further for true success."

Robin H. Johnson, lead of the Gentoo Infrastructure team, in a panel of core Gentoo developers at SCALE9x: "I really hate compiling-induced downtime. I've been looking forward to installing packages with just a couple of keystrokes. By building on the efforts of other successful distributions, we can take the drudgery out of system maintenance."

Michael Prokop, founder of the Grml live CD, can be quoted on the effort that "we managed to create a universal live build framework with grml-live. Our vision was always that it will be universally usable to further the spreading of Free Software."

Last year's openSUSE conference had the topic of "Collaboration Across Borders". Klaas Freitag, a respected member of the community, mentioned that "the conference motto was set intentional and actually this is what I had in mind as a positive outcome for the conference."

Please be notified that this announce is just the starting point, the necessary changes will happen in the upcoming days. You can use the #cbproject hashtag to give us your feedback on twitter or identi.ca.

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.