20 Years of Grml Releases
On 22nd and 23rd of October 2004, an open source event called “OS04” took place in Graz, Austria. Jon “Maddog” Hall gave the keynote speech; and the first release of Grml was published. Now, 20 years later, Grml is still around!
We would like to celebrate this milestone with our users from all around the world! The team would like to collect postcards from Grml users everywhere and create a “Grml wall”. So if you are a Grml user, we would love to receive a postcard from where you live!
Our mailing address is:
Grml Solutions
Weblinger Strasse 75d
8054 Graz
Austria
Feel free to share your feedback with your postcard! Where are you from? Why are you using Grml? Maybe you have any special wishes for an upcoming Grml release? Do you have anything else you always wanted to tell us?
We’d love to hear from you!
Sunsetting grml32 releases
Since 2007 Grml is available for two different architectures for PCs: grml32 (“i386”, 32-bit) and grml64 (“amd64”, 64-bit). The grml64 releases, and the underlying Debian “amd64” were introduced for PCs with more than 4GB of memory, and the then “upcoming” new CPUs, spear-headed by AMD.
In the meantime the PC landscape changed a lot. Intel jumped on the “amd64” train, and abandoned their own ia64 (“Itanium”) design. Modern PCs often do not properly support the old 32-bit architecture anymore. Even PCs manufactured ten years ago can boot grml32 and grml64. No new 32-bit only CPUs are manufactured, and no new features got added. Testing grml32 became a lot harder, and testing on a “real 32-bit only” hardware is now impossible for us.
Linux kernel upstream also is losing interest and time to support the 32-bit architecture (just called “x86”) there. The Debian kernel team decided to stop building Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 6.11.
As Grml releases are dependent on Debian kernel packages, this decision also ends the line for grml32.
Users who really need grml32 due to lack of 64-bit support on their hardware can still use Grml 2024.02, which will be the last release with a grml32 build. However, we encourage users to migrate to more modern, possibly used, hardware instead.
Only one thing left to say, to the classic Intel 32-bit x86, “i386”, or whatever you want to call it architecture:
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Infrastructure overhaul: web, paste + blog
We’re reworking, updating and migrating our infrastructure. We try to not break too much of it, but if you should notice any problems please let us know.
We no longer host our own paste service (which used to be available at paste.grml.org). This paste.pl service was written and thankfully maintained for a long time by alumni Grml developer Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt, and served us well for many years (seems to have be >14 years!). We no longer want to maintain the service ourself though and therefore decided to retire it. If you’re looking for a similar web service, paste.debian.net provides the same paste.pl service and API, and is also run by Alexander.
We also migrated our mirror infrastructure, as well as our download and main web presence. All those changes should not really affect nor be visible to anyone in the public though.
Finally, we also migrated our blog system, which is serving what you’re reading here. :) Back in 2011 we switched from the hosted supersized.org service to our self hosted Serendipity. Also serendipity (AKA s9y) served us well for the last 13 years, but we don’t want to host yet another PHP/MySQL service any longer. We decided to migrate to hugo, being a static blog engine.
IMPORTANT: The RSS feed at https://blog.grml.org/feeds/index.rss2 should work as it used to work. But comments are gone, so also the previous comments feeds (formerly known as blog.grml.org/feeds/comments.rss2) is gone as well. We had troubles with getting the Atom feed working with hugo, but decided to not put further work into that, as most users seem to be using the RSS2 feed anyways. So at least for now our Atom feed is gone! If you are subscribed to our atom feed at blog.grml.org/feeds/atom.xml, please switch to https://blog.grml.org/feeds/index.rss2 instead, to be able to receive further updates from our Grml blog. This also will be the last blog entry that’s shipped via Atom feed.
Migrated Git and Wiki services
For the last 16 years (since 2008!) we hosted our own Git infrastructure and had a mirror of our Git repositories at GitHub.com.
While running your own infrastructure clearly has its benefits, it also requires maintenance efforts, for which we no longer really have the workforce nor enjoyment we used to have. We also appreciate the social effects you get from platforms like GitHub. We therefor decided to switch to GitHub as our primary Git hosting place. Over the last days, we migrated from git.grml.org to github.com by putting according URL rewrites into place.
We also used to host our own DokuWiki for more than 19(!) years. In the last few years we didn’t have any actual wiki changes, so we decided to also migrate this over to GitHub, and also there put according URL rewrites into action.
Now all our Grml Git repositories can be found at github.com/grml, and our Wiki is available at github.com/grml/grml/wiki/. If you should notice any problems with any of our services, please reach out.
Grml - new stable release 2024.02 available
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian trixie. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.
More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2024.02.
Grab the latest Grml ISO(s) and spread the word!
Thanks to everyone contributing to Grml and this release, stay healthy and happy Grml-ing!
First Release Candidate of Grml version 2024.02 available
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2024.02, code-named ‘Glumpad’!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian trixie. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2022.11 and 2024.02(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, 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 February 2024.
20 years of grml.org
Wow, how time flies! 20 years ago grml.org was registered by Mika, and in 2004 we had our first public Grml release. 🥳
We’re glad about such a wonderful community and are celebrating this with a small Easter egg in our Grml daily ISOs! 😜
And now for another 20 years? 🤓
Grml - new stable release 2022.11 available
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bookworm. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.
More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2022.11.
Grab the latest Grml ISO(s) and spread the word!
Thanks to everyone contributing to Grml and this release, stay healthy and happy Grml-ing!
First Release Candidate of Grml version 2022.11 available
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2022.11, code-named ‘MalGuckes’!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bookworm. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2021.07 and 2022.11(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, 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 November 2022.
Grml 2021.07 shipped on DVD of german Linux User magazine 10/2021
Grml 2021.07 is included in the DVD of edition 10/2021 of the german Linux User magazine.
Grml - new stable release 2021.07 available
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bullseye. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.
More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2021.07.
Grab the latest Grml ISO(s) and spread the word!
Thanks to everyone contributing to Grml and this release, stay healthy and happy Grml-ing!
First Release Candidate of Grml version 2021.07 available
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2021.07, code-named ‘JauKerl’!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bullseye. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2020.06 and 2021.07(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, 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 July 2021.
Grml IRC channel moving to OFTC
You might have heard about the Freenode IRC drama, and after more than 17 years of #grml on Freenode, it’s time to say goodbye.
We decided to move our IRC to irc.oftc.net, so please join us at #grml over there.
Thanks for the many years of great service to Freenode, thanks OFTC for hosting us!
Grml - new stable release 2020.06 available
Long time no see, but there we are - we just released Grml 2020.06 - Ausgehfuahangl!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian testing (AKA bullseye). As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2020.06.
Grab the latest Grml ISO(s) and spread the word!
Thanks everyone, stay healthy and happy Grml-ing!
First Release Candidate of Grml version 2020.06 available
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2020.06, code-named ‘Ausgehfuahangl’!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian testing (AKA bullseye). As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2018.12 and 2020.06(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, 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 June 2020.