Grml Blog

Debian based Linux Live system

grml develrelease 0.7-5

Last wednesday I uploaded the new grml develrelease 0.7-5. Quoting the changelog:

* 2.6.17-grml:
  http://blog.grml.org/archives/163-2.6.17-grml.html
  - reiser4 is *not* part of the kernel. Anyone out there missing it?
  - ipw3495 is part of the kernel, the daemon is missing though
[...]
  - I'm thinking about integration of swsusp2 - any votes?
  TODO-list for 2.6.17-grml:
  http://dufo.tugraz.at/~prokop/grml-kernel/2.6.17-grml/TODO
* integrated fvwm-crystal-minimal (packaged by myself, you can find
  it in the grml-repos; replaces fvwm-crystal for space-reasons)
* dropped gcc/g++ 4.0, providing 4.1 instead as the kernel is
  compiled with 4.1
* vi points to vim instead of elvis (thanks, Wolfgang Karall)
* updated packages to debian-pool by 2006-06-21

Now I’ve finished work on the ipw3495 stuff: ipw3945-ucode and ipw3945d are available in the grml repository. The ipw3495 module works out-of-the-box on grml now.

Running some more tests with different kernel configurations showed that swsusp2 very probably won’t find its way to the grml-kernel. On the other hand the tests with SMP were very good, so we might have SMP-support in grml 0.8. Stay tuned. :-)

The TODO list for the the current build of 2.6.17-grml is also very short now: only ivtv and linux-wlan-ng are missing. I’ll package truecrypt, tpm-emulator and grml-kerneladdons for 2.6.17-grml as soon as the final build of 2.6.17-grml is available.

2.6.17-grml

Being back from Robocup 2006 I’ve been working on 2.6.17-grml:

% uname -a
Linux grml 2.6.17-grml #1 PREEMPT Tue Jun 20 19:39:46 CEST 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

The first public build of 2.6.17-grml including some additional modules is available online now.

The current patch-list (extracted from the README):

  • 1000_2.6.17.1.patch
  • 2200_acpi-nsxfeval-flood.patch
  • 2300_usb-insufficient-power.patch
  • 4000_ipw3945-1.0.5-for-2.6.17.patch
  • 4100_dm-bbr.patch
  • 4110_promise-pdc2037x.patch
  • 4120_iteraid.patch
  • 4130_libata-acpi.patch
  • 4300_squashfs-3.0.patch
  • 4400_speakup-20060618.patch
  • 5000_grml-version.patch
  • 5001_grml_logo.patch
  • 5002_linux-2.6.17-commandline.patch

Notes:

  • the kernel has been built using gcc 4.1.2. So make sure you have debian packages gcc-4.1 and g++-4.1 on your box if you plan to compile additional modules
  • reiser4: is not yet part of the grml-kernel; anyone out there needing a reiser4 enabled kernel?
  • VMware-users: 2.6.17-grml works using vmware-any-any-update101

Do you think a patch should find its way to the grml-kernel? Please let us know so we can put the patch to our review list.

grml @ Robocup 2006

I’ve been in Bremen at Robocup 2006 for the last 8 days as member of the ROBOCUP ‘Mostly Harmless’ team (Graz University of Technology, Austria). I was responsible for all the IT-stuff. Of course our roboters were powered by grml. Take a look at the webgallery to see our grml-powered roboters in action.

grml on linuxdays vienna 2006

mika at his grml talk, picture by sven guckesSome days ago I visited “Linuxwochen Wien”. Of course I held a lecture about grml (including a presentation of the great Zsh): ‘grml - Linux Live-CD für Sysadmins und Geeks’, see the picture on the left (thanks go to Sven Guckes for the shot). On the second day of the event I had a talk about ‘Erfolgreiche OpenSource Projekt-Maintenance’. I was pretty amazed that so many people attended my talks, even though I had the first slot in the morning for the grml-talk and the last slot in the evening for my opensource project maintenance talk. Some people even had to stand because they didn’t get a seat. Nice. :-) If you’re interested in the slides of my talks you can get them now:* grml (2.3MB, pdf)

  • opensource project maintenance (358kb, pdf) I also met several people for the first time in reallife, to name some of them: Klaus ‘koki’ Ita, Markus ‘markus23’ Raab, Pablo ‘redtux’ Hoertner, David ‘DavidS’ Schmitt, Fabian ’lefant’ Linzberger, Christian ‘Greek0’ Aichinger. And of course I met Alfie (AKA Rhonda). I really enjoyed meeting all of you! We had a grml-booth too. It was fun to share the booths of grml and debian. Usually the grml-booth had to answer debian related questions and people behind the debian-booth had to provide grml-support. ;-) I was *really* amazed how many people already use grml. Because of the presence at the grml-booth I visited only few talks. Some interesting stuff:
  • Versionskontrolle mit svk: nice to see how svk works, you can bypass some limitations of svn
  • WIENUX - und was die Stadt Wien noch mit Linux und Open Source tut: very nice talk, very interesting to see how much open source software is being used in Vienna’s government
  • socat - Verkehr mit Sockets aller Art: socat is a multipurpose relay you might consider as netcat++, definitely worth a look!
  • Bildbearbeitung per Shell: nothing new for me, but a nice presentation by Sven Guckes of all the tools available on grml (convert, identify of the imagemagick suite, iimage, jhead,…) :) Stuff I learned at the event:
  • sudoedit rocks (thanks, DavidS)
  • xscreensaver has a nice ‘switch user’ feature for gdm-users (thanks, koki)
  • Decr_Console and Incr_Console work out-of-the-box on Debian and grml: just press alt-cursor-left and alt-cursor-right to switch between plain consoles (thanks for the hint, Sepp)
  • SubMaster rocks. Clifford showed me how it’s used at RockLinux and I’m really impressed.
  • ice-spray and grml can rescue harddisks (thanks to anonym, please contact me if you read this line)
  • Maschu-maschu really has the ‘best Falafel in town’ (at least it tastes like that ;)) If you want to browse some pics, thank Sven Guckes for his online gallery of linuxdays vienna:
  • first day (wednesday)
  • second day (thursday)
  • third day (friday) I really enjoyed the event. The only bad news: I got ill in the night to friday, seems like a small burn-out hit me. :-(

ATI 8.25.18 driver for 2.6.16-grml

Thanks to Thomas Ulz, we have debian packages for the brand new ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version 8.25.18 compiled against 2.6.16-grml. As usual they are available through the grml repository.

grml on linuxdays graz

Grazer Linuxday on 20th of may was fun. I was giving two talks, one about ‘successful opensource project maintenance’ and the other one about grml of course. Someone showed me his really small and cute gadget where he successfully installed grml. I really enjoyed playing with it. :-) We had a grml booth too (Jimmy on the left, Rebekka in the middle and my girlfriend on the right side): I met several “grml-related” people like Maximilian ‘maxs’ Attems, Thomas ’thomerz’ Ulz, Michael ‘memorial’ Taschner and Bernhard ‘skywire’ Hoedl for the first time in reallife. Nice to meet you! :-) And as mentioned in the the Gentoo Linux Newsletter we had a tricky setup of the booths: From left to the right: amne, grully, roger jimmy, mika, maks More pics available in the GLT06 webgallery.

grml in the german LinuxUser magazine (update)

A special release of grml named Bootenschnitzl@LU is shipped with the german LinuxUser magazine. You will also find an article about grml inside the magazine, so get your own copy! If you need more than one grml-CD for a computerlab, your Linux User Group or $INSERT_ANOTHER_GOOD_REASON please let us know so we can send you some! Update: the article is available online as well. Enjoy.

Planet grml available

planet.grml.org is a weblog aggregation containing blog articles written by the developers of the grml Live CD. Subscribe to its rss feed if you are interested in computer related blog articles by the grml developers.

lots of package updates

In the last two days I stepped through the complete grml repository and updated most packages: updated to latest upstream version, some cleanups and finally I removed some packages (apachetoolbox, ccdv, ftester, mwcollect, shunit) which are deprecated nowadays (either not necessary at all or replaced by another package). Run ‘apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade’ on your grml-box and see the changelog for more details.

grml CDs

As written in my personal blog I’ve got some grml-CDs: grml utils - photoThe grml-CDs will be available with the upcoming german LinuxUser magazine 06/2006. If you join the linuxday graz on 20th of may you can get one of them! If you are holding a lecture or workshop using grml on the computers or plan to do so please let me know so I can ship you grml-CDs!

new develrelease grml 0.7-2

We have a new develrelease. A lot of work took place. Quoting main changelog of my mail to betatesters and grml developers :

  • added new packages (excluding xserver* and lib* stuff):
    aircrack-ng cdck cedet-common classpath classpath-common cpuid debian-goodies fvwm fvwm-crystal grep-dctrl habak jamvm jikes mktemp mysql-client-5.0 ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.7 openafs-modules-2.6.16-grml pktstat pymacs python-minimal python-mode remind trayer tzdata unionfs-tools wpagui wyrd
  • updated to X.org 7.0
  • new default font (Lat15-Terminus16) on plain console* fixed problems mentioned @ grml-wiki grml 0.7
  • removed kaffe, added jikes and jamvm instead
  • added scripts blacklist + unblacklist: [un]blacklist a specific kernelmodule during runtime via /etc/modprobe.d/grml
  • grml-network: big update (see yourself :))
  • grml-postfix: reworked, now executing ‘dpkg-reconfigure postfix’
  • grml-autoconfig interface: read in already set values so the current configuration is visible to the user
  • grml2hd: added support for setting hostname through script ‘grml-hostname’
  • reworked grml2hd-utils
  • grml-x completion: check for present window-managers and don’t use a static list
  • added window manager fvwm-crystal: we have to tune it a little bit (reduce size, adjust wallpaper, keybindings), but it definitely rocks! Give it a try and also take a look at the keyboard bindings

reworked grml2hd-utils, improved grml2hd

grml2hd-utils seems to be quite unknown as it isn’t visible in any interfaces by default. Now I’ve reworked it for better integration within grml2hd. You might know remove-packages-server already, the script which removes packages you probably don’t want on your grml harddisk system. The new ‘install-packages-useful’ script is similar to Ubuntu’s ‘Easy Ubuntu’ and provides very simple installation of some useful packages (guess why the name ;-)). install-packages-office allows you to install OpenOffice, Gimp and some other packages useful at offices. grml2hd-fix fixes some small issues from the grml Live-CD, nothing serious to worry about - it’s just for getting debsums running without warnings. ;-) Finally: grml2hd allows you to set hostname, as too many people don’t know how to manage this using Debian’s available mechanism. The features will be shipped with the next develrelease which will be available soon for betatesters.

fglrx drivers for X.org 6.9 and 7.0

Thanks to Thomas Ulz for providing Debian packages of the ATI-drivers for kernel 2.6.16-grml with X.org 6.9 and 7.0! They are available in the grml-repos. Run ‘apt-get update ; apt-get install fglrx-driver fglrx-kernel-2.6.16-grml’ to get them.

packaged TrueCrypt 4.2 and cdck

I’ve packaged cdck (CD/DVD check tools) and updated the TrueCrypt package to the new version 4.2. As usual they are available through the grml-repository.

Xorg 7.0 running with grml

Finally I’m running grml with Xorg 7.0. I’ve been busy working on finding bugfixes for some common problems. Now grml-x is Xorg 7.0 ready as well. See my mail on grml-user mailinglist for more details about some common problems… and please notice my other mail regarding Xorg updates on your box as well.

Reminder: If you are using grml in a productive environment and/or use a grml2hd installation we strongly recommend to subscribe to the grml-user mailinglist!