Grml Blog

Debian based Linux Live system

grml running on JFS

And finally we also have support for JFS in grml2hd:

mika@grml ~ % mount | grep jfs
/dev/hda5 on / type jfs (rw)

grml running on reiserfs

Today I added support for reiserfs to grml2hd:

mika@grml ~ % mount | grep reiser
/dev/hda5 on / type reiserfs (rw)

grml running on XFS

I extended the grml-installer grml2hd and just installed grml running on XFS:

mika@grml ~ % mount | grep xfs  
/dev/root on / type xfs (rw)

developing grml on grml

The box where I’m working on the grml-kernel is a grml-system and is running since grml 0.2 without any problems. It has been installed using one of the earliest versions of grml2hd (the program for installing grml to harddisk). Now it was time to install grml on my main developing machine: my laptop. That’s the box where I’m doing my main work on grml.

Steps:

  • booting grml (currently grml 0.3-4a)
  • grml2hd /dev/hda2 -mbr /dev/hda
  • adjusted /etc/fstab and /etc/passwd (I took over my old /home and of course /Grml)
  • rebooting

That’s it. It took not even 30 minutes to get a running and working Linux.

packaged git-pasky

I just packaged git-pasky. git is the tool Linus developed in the absence of BitKeeper, a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager.

Petr Baudis maintains a git-pasky branch of the content manager which he describes as, “my set of scripts upon Linus Torvald’s git, which aims to provide a humanly usable interface, to a degree similar to a SCM tool.”

Now grml-users should be able to stay up2date at Linux kernel development. :-)

packaged detox

I just packaged detox, a utility designed to clean up filenames.

grml zsh refcard

The grml-zsh-refcard (PDF, 24k) is available on grml.org/zsh/.

This file documents aliases, functions and settings of zsh on the grml system.

Thanks a lot to Julius Plenz for writing it!

grml devel release 0.3-4

grml.superRelease 0.3-4 is available for grml developers and beta-testers. All the work of the last two weeks has been integrated. Two brand new features are:

  • Bootoption small: start with just a few consoles (should save RAM)
  • xsay: run grml-x wmi, select some text via mouse and press ‘ctrl-alt-v’ - you will hear the text as sound. (German speaking people can get more information via my personal blog).

BTW:

% grml-version  
0.2 Release Codename Satura [2005-01-10]  
% uptime  
 14:15:24 up 100 days, 22:12,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

packaged s10sh and shadowfs

While being on Linzer Linuxday 2005 in the last few days I packaged s10sh (USB/serial userspace driver for the Canon PowerShot digital cameras).

Today I packaged latest trunk-version of Clifford Wolf’s shadowfs (collection of various LD_PRELOAD wrappers for adding fancy filesystem features).

I also updated grml-scripts and grml-etc (several small improvements and fixes), next develrelease is getting closer.

grml demo video

Today I created a short video which demonstrates current status of grml. It’s available online (9.1 MB).

firefox extensions

I just added some useful extensions to grml’s Mozilla Firefox:

grml@grml ~ % grep -h "em:name" ~/.mozilla/firefox/nzkecf60.default/extensions/*  
                    em:name="Flashblock"  
                    em:name="All-in-One Gestures"  
                    em:name="Adblock"  
                    em:name="Conkeror"  
                    em:name="Web Developer"

rootsh packaged

I packaged rootsh and added it to the grml-chroot.

Rootsh is a wrapper for shells which logs all echoed keystrokes and terminal output to a file and/or to syslog. It’s main purpose is the auditing of users who need a shell with root privileges. They start rootsh through the sudo mechanism.

several updates, packaged sfind

Yesterday I updated all my packages to latest upstream source (md5deep-1.5, mg-5.0.1.3, ptunnel-0.55, sitar-0.9.0, spl-0.0.svn+r301, trapdoor2-1.2, weplab-0.1.4,…). I also added manpages to some packages which don’t bring one out of the box (aesutil, apachetoolbox, bashburn, bkhive, ccdv, edictionary, httpf,…).

Thanks to Gebi, now we have a clean patch against upstream/debian sysvinit for grml-sysvinit-0.3.

A few weeks ago one user reported feedback about iteraid.patch for 2.6.11. I/O was quite slow but worked in general. Today another user reported problems with his setup (two disks on the ITE-RAID). As the patch isn’t supported neither by Gigabyte nor by kernelupstream I’m thinking about dropping the patch for release 0.4. Feedback welcome.

Today I packaged sfind (Jörg Schilling’s find-implementation). I also added smake (Schily make) to the grml-chroot.

Isn't there even a text based Linux (grml)?

Jörg Schilling mentions grml in his blog-entry Work on SchilliX, the fiest OpenSolaris based UNIX is underway.

change language defaults on grml

sed -i 's#init=/etc/init lang=us#init=/etc/init lang=de#' grml_0.3.iso

That’s all you have to do if you don’t want to manually set bootoption ‘grml lang=de’. :-) Notice: Please verify md5sum of ISO (not just the ISO itself but also the CD-ROM via booting with ‘grml testcd’) before modifiying the ISO because the modification breaks the md5sum of course. ;-)