December 2011 - Grml-devel

About the new grml direction
by Alexander Wirt 02 Jan '12

02 Jan '12

Hi folks, as announced on IRC some thoughts about the new grml direction. For me grml was always an all purpose live cd for text users and zsh addicts. I always knew I could just load a grml a I would have a more or less complete working environment afterwards. On the other hand I was able to just use grml-small if I needed a live cd just for booting and chrooting into the usual environment (i.e. for restoring the bootloader) or use -small as a base for my own customisations. Unfortunatly these assumptions aren't valid anymore. IMHO it is not a good idea to focus on rescue environments. GRML was known for two things: the great collection of well prepared text tools and their release names. I don't think focussing on release names as the only unique feature is a good idea. There are rescue systems like ten a penny. Also wasting 350 mb of space on a cd is a (imho) stupid thing. I want my old grml-small and -full back. And as it seems I am not alone. It is not my style to just whine. So what do I have to do to get my old grml back? Yeah my time is limited, but anyhow I have to try. I don't want to lose my beloved grml tool. Alex P.S. When was the decision of dropping all flavours but this 350 meg flavour done? I didn't mentioned it until the release.

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Reminder: Next Wednesday IRC Meeting @ 2012-01-04 - 21:00
by Ulrich Dangel 30 Dec '11

30 Dec '11

First of all if you are part of the Grml project please announce beforhand (if possible) if you can't make it to the meeting. A message to mika in #grml is enough. Now to the fun part: Just a small reminder for everyone. Next Wednesday is our next IRC Meeting at 21:00 (Vienna local time / CET). For the list of upcoming topics please have a look at https://grml.titanpad.com/2012-01-04-irc Feel free to change/remove/reorganize/add your own items. Srsly please add your own items to the list. The process to get your stuff on this document is quite simple: Just write into the document! Please also remove items from https://grml.titanpad.com/2012-01-04-irc which do not make any sense. This is just a preliminary list to get started. The meeting minutes from last meeting are availabe under https://grml.titanpad.com/2011-12-07-irc cheers, Ulrich

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Statement regarding the Grml "reset" with 2011.12 release
by Michael Prokop 29 Dec '11

29 Dec '11

Dear Grml users and developers, you might have noticed the rumble in the Grml community about the new "install & rescue" mission of Grml and the dropped grml-small and 700MB ISOs.[1] Be assured that we take all the raised concerns serious. I for my own not only because I'm the project inventor, but also since it's one of my main projects which I'm maintaining for more than 7 years (the seven-year itch?) and personally do *really* care about. So I'd like to give some backgrounds of what's going on, all of that being from *my* personal POV. Christian - being the other release manager in the Grml project - did an outstanding job for this release and was a driving force to get this release done at all. To get a common starting point I'd like you to read Christian's blog article describing his POV of the 2011.12 release: http://zeha.at/blog/2011/12/grml-pissed-off.html To quote Christian: | Sure, it's hard to swallow and most people can just ignore the | alternative: no release at all. And that's the reason why the reset button had to be pressed for this Grml release. The download stats show that the Grml project is serving several thousand users. To quote Christoph Biedl: | Rest assured Grml has a very pleased user base, perhaps a bit too | quiet, and as always more taking than giving. A "Keep Grml just the | way it is, it's almost perfect" might be boring but it's actually a | compliment about the things you've achieved in the past seven-ish | years. -- http://ml.grml.org/pipermail/grml-devel/2011-December/000217.html And that's exactly our issue: we can't keep the "more taking than giving" project any longer that way. Even though our *users* are happy, the *developers* aren't happy any longer. To quote Frank, another Grml developer: | But it is equally important, that everyone understands, that the few | people who do the major work on rolling out releases (and I am not one | of them by a long shot) on a fairly regular schedule only have 24 | hours in a day, just like everyone else. The workload needed to be | contained at a doable level. | [...] | That aside, I don't see the changes as being damaging, but rather as a | chance. I agree that there are some packages that are missing. But it's | only *now* that we get to know what these packages were. It is a well | deserved cleanup of our list of packages, because we now get to see | which packages deserve attention and which do not. -- http://ml.grml.org/pipermail/grml/2011-December/011295.html Since we've a real life as well (earning money, having family, sleeping,... - you know) we have to keep the project at level at which we can manage it in our spare time. This was no longer true for the large set of packages rolling with 2x 700MB ISOs, 2x ~230MB ISOs and 2x ~120MB ISOs. Instead we declared "install & rescue" as our main mission to focus on a specific target. We created a new Grml flavour, known as the new GRML_FULL in grml-live and resulting in grml32 and grml64 ISOs with ~350MB. grml96 (being a multiboot ISO of grml64 and grml32) is new as well - though since it's basically just the result of "grml2iso -o grml96_${release}.iso grml64_*.iso grml32_*.iso" we're not yet 100% certain about its future. At the same time all the previous flavours still ARE there in grml-live: GRML_SMALL and GRML_MEDIUM as it used to be, the old GRML_FULL (700MB) just got renamed to GRML_XL. So if you want to create your own grml-small/grml-medium/grml-xl just use grml-live (http://grml.org/grml-live/). Remastering became once again simplier with this release: http://blog.grml.org/archives/364-Remastering-Grml-2011.12-will-be-as-easy-… But it's NOT as simple as just maintaining a software list in a textfile inside grml-live.git. It's *also* about testing (some kind of regularly for the daily ISOs and more extensive testing of release candidates), fixing failing builds (daily ISOs as well as Git-triggered ones), integration in Grml tools (grml-quickconfig, grml-x,...) as well as providing sane default configurations and giving user support ("why doesn't foo work?"). So we need help not only at maintaining the flavours (as in main development/coding), but also at: * testing, testing, testing * documentation * website ( https://github.com/grml/grml.org ) * bug fixing ( http://bts.grml.org/grml/ ) * user support (IRC, mailing lists,...) * marketing (spreading the word, blogging, twitter/identi.ca,...) * press stuff While the 2011.12 release might not be perfect we worked a *lot* to make the "one button click release" dream come true. The release process became much more streamlined so we even consider providing a 2012.01 release which addresses known bugs and re-adds some software packages. We also put a lot of work into our infrastructure (Jenkins, mirror, github,...) which is serving not only developers but also our users. If you care about Grml and would like to see grml-small, grml-xl,... come back again or want to see a texttool flavour, a development flavour, a pen testing flavour, or $YOU_NAME_IT then please don't just send flames (which is nothing else than pissing in our face and further demotivating us) but step up and help us *NOW*! You can find us on #grml on freenode, the user mailing list (http://ml.grml.org/mailman/listinfo/grml), the development mailing list ( http://ml.grml.org/mailman/listinfo/grml-devel) and patch/fork/pull-request our stuff at https://github.com/grml/ Be assured: The Grml team will do whatever is necessary to make contributions as easy and pleasant as possible. But please join our community NOW if you really care about it. regards, -mika- [1] [Grml-devel] About the new grml direction http://ml.grml.org/pipermail/grml-devel/2011-December/000213.html [Grml] Grml 2011.12 trolling^W comments from disappointed user(s) http://ml.grml.org/pipermail/grml/2011-December/011283.html

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Grml 2011.12 - Knecht Rootrecht released
by Ulrich Dangel 24 Dec '11

24 Dec '11

Just in time for the holidays we released today, Dec. 23th, Grml 2011.12 - Knecht Rootrecht. The codename is a play on the term 'Knecht Ruprecht' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_ruprecht#Knecht_Ruprecht - http://xkcd.com/838/ For the changes between 2011.12-rc1 and the final release please have a look at out blog - http://blog.grml.org/archives/368-Grml-new-stable-release-2011.12-available… For detailed information about the changes between 2011.05 and 2011.12 have a look at the official release announcement: http://bit.ly/sgpIz5 This release brings a downsizing and cleanup: one flavour, two architectures three options. The new, smaller flavour has a 350MB ISO size target, while still delivering over 1.1GB of open source software relevant for system administrators As a special treat we created grml96, an ISO image containg both grml32 and grml64. This ISO image will also boot on UEFI systems and lets you fix basically all PCs :) Download Grml 2011.12 directly from http://bit.ly/rKYb4K ! Please get in touch with us and share your opinion about Grml and spread the word. Thanks for testing the RC1, happy holidays and enjoy the new Grml 2011.12. Ulrich

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Elantech Touchpad Bug in Kernel 3.1
by Brad Cable 23 Dec '11

23 Dec '11

Hello, There is a bug with the Elantech touchpad driver in linux 3.1 that has been fixed in 3.2, but it sounds like 3.2 is going to be released too late to make it into grml. I have tracked down the exact patches that get this working, compiled 3.1.5 against those patches, and I'm currently running it with the driver working correctly. I was told that I can request for certain patches to be applied to the kernel for stable grml, so here is the list of patches that gets this working. This adds support for a ton of new hardware touchpads. If you check here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master/drivers/input/mouse The last 14 commits make this work. The MacBook commit appears to have been applied to 3.1.5 already, so really it's only the 13 there that support the newer hardware. As I said, I'm currently running this kernel so if there is anything you want me to test or if you have stability concerns, I can test whatever on this kernel pretty easily. Here are the hashes of the commits I patched against: 1155961946f2c6ac0f2db2bc6318ec01c79fb3fa 461a791765da501f73e3d5957788267101e800d2 230282a77bcec97f4d0a54e50a44caab5eb39d5c 8a360d09b14514139b883d970cd3a1b0b63e6717 7894f21b109848130be7547448af89dc33d0f268 3c8bbb951ab23dc1192473ccad76cde89c172d27 28f49616113f3a1fbef789319bfd2122d0c3663f 1dc6edec127e1fdb89d246189c232fe635d2f921 84a90b610a1473d732818ec5d041ab18eae77f14 4af61e90270e35bafa9e99a3c48fb3f363da592d 26e56eb2bfccdd6bcec0c298d40e12e3daea0188 b5d21704361eefe337a36ebbb57a1d9927132511 3940d6185a982a970ff562e085caccbdd62f40bb Thanks! -Brad

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Reminder: Tomorrow IRC Meeting @ 2011-12-32 - 21:00
by Ulrich Dangel 20 Dec '11

20 Dec '11

First of all if you are part of the Grml project please announce beforhand (if possible) if you can't make it to the meeting. A message to mika in #grml is enough. Now to the fun part: Just a small reminder for everyone. This Wednesday is our next IRC Meeting at 21:00 (Vienna local time / CET). For the list of upcoming topics please have a look at https://grml.titanpad.com/2011-12-21-irc Feel free to change/remove/reorganize/add your own items. Srsly please add your own items to the list. The process to get your stuff on this document is quite simple: Just write into the document! The meeting minutes from last meeting are availabe under https://grml.titanpad.com/2011-12-07-irc Ulrich -- twitter: @mr_ud | identica: @mru IRCNet: mru | freenode: mrud

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Re: [Grml-devel] [Grml] Grml 2011.12 Release Candidate 1 available
by Ulrich Dangel 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

* John Heim wrote [14.12.11 20:32]: Hi, > 1. Waited for the tone, pressed q, typed in 'modprobe speakup_ltlk' > and got speech. > 2. Waited for the tone, pressed q, typed in 'brltty' and got braille > on my braille display. That is really great. Thanks for your feedback. > Problems: > > 1. Could not get the ssh server to start. Has the ssh=<password> > cheat code been removed? No. I just tested it with an little bit older build and it works without a problem. Maybe you didn't have a network connection? > 2. Could not load speakup kernel module for my synth at the boot > prompt. I understand that the grml cheat codes for loading speakup > have been removed. But I thought there was a way to load kernel > modules at boot. The grml documentation references this document on > kernel.org: > > http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt > > If I read that correctly, I should be able to type 'grml modprobe > speakup_ltlk' at the boot prompt. No. This document specifies how you can specify module parameters. One way is to specify the parameters after providing the name on the modprobe command like: modprobe modulename moduleparameter=value The other solution is to specify modulename.moduleparameter=value at the boot commandline. Ulrich -- twitter: @mr_ud | identica: @mru IRCNet: mru | freenode: mrud

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Grml 2011.12 Release Candidate 1: testing needed
by Christian Hofstaedtler 12 Dec '11

12 Dec '11

Hi, you've probably seen the release announcement: Grml 2011.12-rc1 is available for download. Now is the time to test! Areas that need most testing: * accessibility (speakup, brltty, startup sound) * (U)EFI boot * Z-Shell configuration Thanks, -ch -- Grml Live Linux

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Reminder: IRC Meeting @ 2011-12-07 - 21:00
by Ulrich Dangel 05 Dec '11

05 Dec '11

Hi, Just a small reminder for everyone. This Wednesday is our next IRC Meeting at 21:00 (Vienna local time / CET). For a list of topics/issues see https://grml.titanpad.com/2011-12-07-irc Feel free to extend the list. Btw. do you want a reminder with an link to the upcoming topics or is it just annyoing? cheers, Ulrich -- twitter: @mr_ud | identica: @mru IRCNet: mru | freenode: mrud

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