Grml Blog

Debian based Linux Live system

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

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!

JFYI: release stopper for grml 1.1 [fixed]

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.

kernel 2.6.23-grml addressing CVE-2008-0009/10 available

Kernel 2.6.23-grml.06 is available in the grml repository. It includes latest stable patch 2.6.23.16 which addresses the well known root exploits from CVE-2008-0009/10 and CVE-2008-0600 (see bugzilla #9924 and debian BTS #464953 and dsd’s detailed explanation for further information). Kernel 2.6.23-grml64 will be available within the next few hours as well.

new stable release work in progress...

Just to keep you informed: we planned to release the new stable grml versions during this weekend. Due to local root exploits in the Linux kernel we decided to work on an updated kernel version. So please stay tuned a little bit further, we expect to be able to provide the final stable release within the next few days. Sorry for the delays, but hopefully we can provide a rocking stable release really soon now.

new release candidates: grml 1.1-rc1, grml64 0.2-rc1, grml[64]-medium 0.1-rc1

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

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!

update of daily.grml.org and development news

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…

grml-paste: command line interface for paste.grml.org

Thanks to Nico we have a command line interface for paste.grml.org now: grml-paste :-)