version control 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 But then we would have the problem that our kernel might be pretty out of date when we release a new grml version.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 https://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.
infrastructure: migration of wiki.grml.org
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.
grml related links
- Brad Cable: My Awesome Secure and Portable System
- Marc ‘Zugschlus’ Haber: Universal boot stick for Debian, grml and the Debian installer
You have a similar project/idea/website? Please let us know!
JFYI: comments in the develblog
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.
grml @ Google Summer of Code 2008
grml wants to take part in the Google Summer of Code 2008 and therefor we are collecting ideas for our proposal. If you have a great idea for a project please consider putting it to the gsoc08 page of the grml-wiki. Your contribution is highly welcome.
new stable releases: grml 1.1, grml64 0.2, grml-medium 0.1 and grml64-medium 0.1
We have new stable releases: grml 1.1, grml64 0.2, grml-medium 0.1 and grml64-medium 0.1
grml at Chemnitzer Linuxdays 2008
Several grml developers will be at the Chemnitzer linuxdays 2008 on the following weekend (1st and 2nd of march). We would highly appreciate to meet grml users at the grml booth. We will present the new stable releases (CDs are being printed right now!), will sell grml-on-USB pens, a demo system and will have a developer meeting. If you have any questions, feature requests or feedback please meet us at the grml booth!