Event: Grml at Linuxdays Graz 2011
Several Grml team members will be present at Linuxdays in Graz on Saturday, April 9th 2011. If you ever had any questions - this is the time to contact us in real life! :-)
Grml developer Christian Hofstaedtler will give a talk about Bare-metal deployment with Grml, as deployment is nowadays still an issue even in virtualized environments. Michael Prokop, project leader and founder of Grml, will give a talk about Opensource project management with some insights and hands on-stories about Open-source development and how to make a good Open-source project. Gerfried Fuchs, also a Grml developer, will talk about the Resources of Debian and provides an overview about several services for users of Debian as well as for users of other Distributions. Grml developer Ulrich Dangel will talk about DevOps, the DevOps movement, tools for DevOps and how Developer and Admins fit together .
Make sure to visit us, grab special Grml USB pens and Grml cups, and share your experience with Grml. We would really like to get in contact with you.
If you ever wanted to to get in contact with team members and users of Grml, learn something about console tools, simply meet interesting people or just listen to informative talks visit us and the other projects at Linuxdays in Graz and have a good time.
Grml kernels can't be installed with dpkg 1.16.0
dpkg 1.16.0 has entered Debian/unstable yesterday, and contains a change which currently prevents installation of Grml kernel packages. Quoting the changelog from dpkg version 1.16.0:
Do not allow versions starting with non-digit when doing strict parsing, warn otherwise.
We have opened a bug against dpkg (#620566) as we believe that the new behavior in dpkg is more strict than the current Debian policy.
Also, we are currently working on updated Grml kernel 2.6.38 packages providing a version number that won’t cause problems with dpkg 1.16.0 in the meanwhile.
Update: Updated kernel packages which work around the dpkg bug have been uploaded to the grml-testing repository.
The Canterbury Project
We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution. Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce a really unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity.
Canterbury will be as technologically simple as Arch, as stable as Debian, malleable as Gentoo, have a solid Live framework as Grml, and be as open minded as openSUSE.
Joining the the Canterbury Project Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz explained: “Arch Linux has always been about keeping its technology as simple as possible. Combining efforts into one single distribution will dramatically reduce complexity for developers, users and of course upstream projects. Canterbury will be the next evolutionary step of Linux distributions.”
Gerfried Fuchs, who gave a talk about Debian at last year’s openSUSE conference, said “While DEX (Debian Derivatives Exchange) might have been a good idea in principle, its point of view is too limited. We need to reach out further for true success.”
Robin H. Johnson, lead of the Gentoo Infrastructure team, in a panel of core Gentoo developers at SCALE9x: “I really hate compiling-induced downtime. I’ve been looking forward to installing packages with just a couple of keystrokes. By building on the efforts of other successful distributions, we can take the drudgery out of system maintenance.”
Michael Prokop, founder of the Grml live CD, can be quoted on the effort that “we managed to create a universal live build framework with grml-live. Our vision was always that it will be universally usable to further the spreading of Free Software.”
Last year’s openSUSE conference had the topic of “Collaboration Across Borders”. Klaas Freitag, a respected member of the community, mentioned that “the conference motto was set intentional and actually this is what I had in mind as a positive outcome for the conference.”
Please be notified that this announce is just the starting point, the necessary changes will happen in the upcoming days. You can use the #cbproject hashtag to give us your feedback on twitter or identi.ca.
Howto: Install Debian with an encrypted /home (German)
Ever wanted to install Debian with an encrypted home directory but you didn’t get along with the Debian installer? Grml to the rescue! Oliver Herold of F!XMBR wrote a nice article (in German) about using Grml to install Debian.
A new home
Welcome to blog.grml.org, the new home for the Grml development blog.
For various reasons we have moved away from our old blog hosting on supersized.org.
While old URLs continue to work, content on the old site won’t be updated and may cease to work at some point.
If you have subscribed our blog feed, please switch to this new feed:
- RSS 2.0 Feed: http://blog.grml.org/feeds/index.rss2
Also consider subscribing to Planet Grml, an aggregator of all individual Grml developer blogs, which also includes the Grml development blog.
Improved autobuilder support, daily ISOs for wheezy and kernel 2.6.38
daily.grml.org includes ISOs for the upcoming Debian release with codename “wheezy” (being Debian/testing nowadays). All daily ISOs starting with 18th of march also provide the brand new kernel 2.6.38-grml. The workflow for grml-live distribution to the build server has been improved as well: once a day, right before the daily ISOs are being built, the build server automatically builds a Debian package based on the git tree of grml-live. This means all changes to grml-live.git end up on the daily ISOs on the next day without any manual intervention. The autobuilt packages are available at http://amd64.grml.org/grml-live-daily/.
Kernel 2.6.38-grml available
Only two days after Linus released Kernel 2.6.38 we already have it in the grml-testing repository! Besides the usual AUFS support it also features mainline’s squashfs XZ support, meaning no extra squashfs patch needed anymore to get support for LZMA (now known as XZ). Our build tool grml-live(8) already supports this kernel version and uses XZ compression with squashfs-tools >=1:4.2-1 by default. Please note: If you want to use current grml-live version (>=0.13.1) with older kernel versions than 2.6.38 don’t forget to point SQUASHFS_BINARY to the according mksquashfs binary and set SQUASHFS_OPTIONS accordingly. If you want to build older versions without any hassles you can still use old grml-live versions of course (as provided and shipped with each Grml release). Bottom line, XZ support in mainline (kernel >=2.6.38 and squashfs-tools >=4.2) will provide a better upgrade cycle for grml-live and the grml environment.
Results of Grml user survey 2011 available
The results of the Grml user survey are available. Thanks to everyone taking part in our survey!
Grml in c't extra Netzwerke 01/2011
The well known german c’t magazine features a special edition of Grml 2010.12 in c’t extra Netzwerke 01/2011.
Grml in DELUG edition of Linux Magazine 03/11
German Linux Magazine 03/11 features Grml 2010.12 on DVD (DELUG version)!
Grml User Survey 2011: Help make Grml better
As a result of our Grml developer meeting (see meeting minutes for details) we created a user survey to get more information about our users and their needs. Please take part in our survey and help us to improve and enhance Grml!
Grml 2010.12 released
We just released the new stable version 2010.12 with Codename ‘Gebrüder Grml’, available as all the different flavours: grml, grml64, grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small. The new features and changes are documented in the official release notes. You can download the ISO(s) from grml.org/download. Happy new year from the Grml team!
Grml 2010.12-rc0 available
Release candidate 0 of Release 2010.12 is available. Find all the details in the release notes, known issues are documented in the grml-wiki. Grab the ISOs from grml.org/download/prerelease. The Grml team is looking forward to your feedback!
Results of Grml developer meeting 2010 available
The hackathon for next Grml release took place on 4th and 5th november 2010 in the fantastic hackerspace Metalab in Vienna/Austria. Some highlights of this amazing event:
- formorer started to work on the new Grml Homepage and it looks great so far. Maybe it is finished for the new release
- ch organized the location and social event and closed many bugs
- jimmy implemented a special update-grub feature for integrating Grml ISOs in usual hd installations during the meeting and debugged several issues
- gebi designed and started to develop a framework for non free tools like Raid controller or truecrypt (yes truecrypt is non-free!)
- rhonda started to use Zsh and will be looking for fast mirrors outside of Europe.
- mika was just amazed about the donations and what was achieved during these two days. Thank you! Find more details about the meeting in the Minutes of the Grml Developer Meeting 2010.
New Grml developer: Christian Hofstaedtler
Christian Hofstaedtler officially joined the Grml team as developer.