December 2011 - Grml - lists.mur.at

A New Year and a big thank you.
by Charles Alan Hewson 31 Dec '11

31 Dec '11

Hi All, First, I want to thank the developers, testers and contributors. I have used GRML for years as an on the road work environment. I have customized with grml-live since it was introduced. Think firmware and cross-platform encryption that can not be redistributed. We all use the best tool for the need if it is rescue, recovery, repair, privacy or security. After 40 years in the business I appreciate what these fine people are doing as we all should. Second, I am resolved to contribute more to this project and the community in 2012. I can test what I use more thoroughly and check the upstream for the feature or bug. The developers use 64 bit boxes. If we expect to use a 32 bit GRML for 2 more years we need to test it. This was not intended to start a rant just to be a reminder. Charles

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mirror grml
by John Heim 30 Dec '11

30 Dec '11

I would like to set up a grml mirror site. How do I do that?

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grml as host system
by Philippe Delavalade 30 Dec '11

30 Dec '11

Hi. I have already complain about the removal of the brltty boot option in the new release. Now, I realise that the new grml is nomore suitable as host system to build linuxfromscratch ; previously I recommanded it as livecd for this purpous but now, important packages are missing... It's sad. -- Ph. Delavalade

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Let me reframe the question, then I'll go join the devel list...
by Tom {Tomcat} Oehser 28 Dec '11

28 Dec '11

So, I will take the suggestion to go participate on the devel list... And I understand the reluctance to just keep stuff that isn't tested... And, it even makes sense to see what people scream about, after all, there is an old saying, if you don't wear it for a year, throw it away... But, I think it is fair to re-frame the question, in a _rescue_ context. For rescue, one often finds oneself suddenly with _only_ one's rescue media. Having the latest kernel isn't so important, but being able to quickly and easily do something-or-other *at all* is important. So the question is, we've been talking about what 11.12 removes. For _rescue_, what does it _add_ over 11.5? EFI boot support is a candidate for something that would matter, but cleanup, mDNS, auto-startups, build stuff for grml, zsh config, terminal fonts, etc . - doesn't really matter. For me personally, I use grml for rescue and reformats and recoveries. Often I boot virtual machines with it, also, to do something-or-other to a copy of a running machine. I'm not kidding that the most common thing I do boils down to chains of netcat/tar/cpio/lzop/gzip/buffer/nc to move around disk images or virtual machines, and having both buffer and lzop even considered for removal gives me pause that maybe this tool is going in a direction different than what my uses and needs are. So, for me, the question is really simple - 2011.05 is a pefect fit for my current needs - should I just take that as the gold-standard final- release and not look back? 2011.05 is working _fine_ for me - even a couple of hours to learn how to build a -full myself, never mind the hours to become active, is more driven by idle curiosity and a desire to support the tool than it is by common sense. Common sense for me would be, 2011.05 ain't broke and I'm unlikely to have hardware in the next 5 years that cares for newer kernels. Common sense would be to slide the write protect tab on a few USB sticks and figure you've painted your masterpiece and it is done. The question is, what reasons are there to upgrade? Aside from it being smaller and advantages arising directly from it being smaller? -Tom -- "Let us do our duty in our shop or our kitchen, the market, the street, the office, the school, the home, just as faithfully as if we stood in the front rank of some great battle, and we knew that victory for mankind depended upon our bravery, strength, and skill. When we do that the humblest of us will be serving in that great army which achieves the welfare of the world." --Theodore Parker The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it -- and that's all. It is thus that we should love. -- DeGourmont

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Statement regarding the Grml "reset" with 2011.12 release
by Michael Prokop 28 Dec '11

28 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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removal of "buffer" command? alternatives?
by Tom {Tomcat} Oehser 28 Dec '11

28 Dec '11

Hi- Up until this release, the 'buffer' command was included. I use this all the time. Things like: nc -l 12345 | buffer -z256k -p75 -m10m -o /dev/sda Gone? :( Is there an alternative? -Tom -- "Let us do our duty in our shop or our kitchen, the market, the street, the office, the school, the home, just as faithfully as if we stood in the front rank of some great battle, and we knew that victory for mankind depended upon our bravery, strength, and skill. When we do that the humblest of us will be serving in that great army which achieves the welfare of the world." --Theodore Parker The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it -- and that's all. It is thus that we should love. -- DeGourmont

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Wrong link adress for Grml96 ISO signature file
by Christian Ziemski 25 Dec '11

25 Dec '11

Hi! The link to the signature file for the Grml96 ISO at http://grml.org/download/ is wrong. It is the same as for Grml64: http://download.grml.org/grml64_2011.12.iso.sha1.asc but it need to be http://download.grml.org/grml96_2011.12.iso.sha1.asc The file itself is correctly reachable under the latter address. BTW: Merry Christmas to all Grml users and the complete team! Regards Christian

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Grml 2011.12 trolling^W comments from disappointed user(s)
by Paweł azhag Sadkowski 24 Dec '11

24 Dec '11

Hello, first: congratulations with the new release. However I want to share with you some thoughts about new Grml. Up to Grml 2011.05 you were providing excelent set of tools for everything, I'm not sure if there was a single job one couldn't do with Grml (besides playing with wobbly windows or OOo/LO stuff, but thats not what admins usualy do ;-)). From my point of view Grml was livecd one of the kind. I did lots of advocating, had lots of conversations like "I prefer XYZ", "Look at all that tools in Grml, you can do all stuff you do in XYZ and many more", "Oh, it really looks nice". My personal motto of Grml was "What can't you do?". And then comes 2011.12. Many apps, many tools were removed. Now I can't tell the difference between Grml and SystemRescueCD, PLD Rescue CD, Repair Is Possible and others. Grml for me lost it's identity, just another rescue live cd. I already twice faced question "Why should I use Grml not SystemRescueCD? SRCD has some tools I need, Grml doesn't". Those tools were already (re-)added by mrud (one in rc1, so it's in final release), but the damage has been done -- one user replied "I better stick to distro that already have what I need without asking", other won't use Grml until next release. Another person actually listed $LONG_LONG_LONG_LIST_OF_REMOVED_TOOLS and asked "What can you do with Grml (except grml-debootstrap)?!". I couldn't find the answer. Is there any chance that since next release you will change your priorities back to <=2011.05 state? Or at least can you add -extended verison of Grml, similar to good old -full? Probably I can help with that, if you need some. Kind regards, Paweł azhag Sadkowski

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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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sound appears to be muted
by John G. Heim 20 Dec '11

20 Dec '11

I can't get any sound out of my PC when booted into grml latest release candidate. I scp'ed a sound file (my dog barking) to the machine and used aplay to play it. But I didn't hear anything. Sound works when booted into linux off the hard disk. grml@grml ~ % aplay rufus.wav Playing WAVE 'rufus.wav' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 22050 Hz, Mono I also tried loading the speakup_soft module and running espeak. No error messages appear. Nothing abnormal in the syslog either. That's why I think sound is muted. What I really need is a command for unmuting a sound card. I don't know how to do that at the command line. I guess that's technically a linux question, not a grml question.

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