Release Notes: Grml 2011.05 - Codename Just Mari

About

Grml is a bootable live system (Live-CD) based on Debian. It includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators and users of texttools. Grml provides automatic hardware detection. Grml is the perfect rescue system, but you can also use it for analyzing systems/networks or as a working environment. It is not necessary to install anything to a harddisk; you don't even need a harddisk to run it. Due to on-the-fly decompression Grml includes about 2 GB of software and documentation on the live system.

New features

• New Linux kernel version based on 2.6.38.7
• Initramfs is now XZ compressed (smaller)
• /run has been introduced

Special new features:

• dns= bootoption allows for specifying static nameservers.
• grml-feedback, a commandline application for providing feedback to the Grml Team via feedback.grml.org.
• Easier syntax for grml-quickconfig menu files, existing menu files are still valid.
• grml2iso small ISOs: grml2iso can now output small ISOs (~ 20MB) with only kernel and initrd. These are meant to be used with fetch=.

Important Changes

• iPXE has replaced gPXE.
• Core scripts previously found in grml-scripts are now shipped as grml-scripts-core to facilitate reuse on plain Debian systems.
• Due to popular demand, the ratpoison window manager is included once again.
• grml-debootstrap adds the security repository for stable and testing installations.
• grml-quickconfig will be executed on grml-small.
• More complicated disk configurations (LVM and SW-RAID, though not stacked on each other) are supported when booting Grml via grml-rescueboot or with the findiso= and live-media= bootoptions.

Kernel

Based on vanilla kernel 2.6.38.7 including several patches and additional modules:

aufs iscsitarget ndiswrapper openafs speakup sysprof
tp-smapi virtualbox-ose-guest xtables-addons

Visit grml.org/kernel/ for more details regarding Grml's kernel. (Note that lzma and squashfs are now part of the mainline kernel.)

Bugfixes

Fixed several bugs and issues reported in the bug tracking system.

Packages / Software

Details about shipped packages and their versions on Grml are available at the Debian section. Visit dpkg_get_selections for a main package listing and dpkg_list for a detailed list of packages shipped with Grml 2011.05.

Updates

Updated all packages to Debian Unstable branch by 15th of May 2011 (plus some further selected updates).

Removed 80 packages (excluding lib* and *2.6.36-grml*) - please notice that some of them are available under different names/in different packages:

*2.6.36-grml* lib*

3270-common asn1c backuppc c3270 cdda2wav cedet-common
cfengine2 console-terminus cpp-4.4 csstidy ctrlproxy
detachtty dired doxygen eieio ekeyd g++-4.4 gcc-4.2-base
gcc-4.4 glipper-nognome hal hal-info iamerican ispell
libafterimage0 libaudio-scrobbler-perl log2mail lua5.1
modconf mp3c muscletools nilfs2-tools noshell opie-client
orpheus perl-suid portmap postfix-ldap pperl prismstumbler
python-openssl pytris qprof rc s3switch samba-common-bin
sbm spell spellutils spicctrl tasksel tasksel-data tetradraw
tiny tn5250 unrar-free user-setup viewglob weechat
weechat-core weechat-curses weechat-plugins weechat-scripts
xcardii xfaces xmms2 xmms2-client-cli xmss2-core xmms2-icon
xmms2-plugin-alsa xmms2-plugin-id3v2 xmms2-plugin-jack
xmms2-plugin-mad xmms2-plugin-vorbis xserver-xorg-input-wacom
xserver-xorg-video-geode xserver-xorg-video-nv
xtables-addons-common yatm zec

Added 27 new packages (exluding lib* and *2.6.38-grml*):

clipit console-setup-linux cpp-4.6 etherboot-qemu
firmware-realtek g++-4.6 gcc-4.6 gcc-4.6-base gir1.2-glib-2.0
git-man grml-feedback grml-scripts-core gs-cjk-resource
nginx-common nginx-full nvidia-common openafs-client
qemu-keymaps qemu-utils ratpoison rdfind rpcbind rs
ruby-ncurses seabios snmp v4l-utils

Major news since release 2010.12

• Grml development blog moved to a new home - now available at blog.grml.org.
• Results of the Grml user survey have been published.
• German magazine c't extra Netzwerke 01/2011 featured a special edition of Grml 2010.12.
• German Linux Magazine 03/11 featured Grml 2010.12 on DVD (DELUG version).

Known issues

Take a look at the known bugs list. Please report problems using information on grml.org/bugs/.

Download Grml 2011.05

Grml 2011.05 can be downloaded from grml.org/download/.

Feedback

Your comments, bug reports, patches, and suggestions will help fixing bugs and improving future releases. If you find a problem with the release please check the known bugs list and report problems using information on grml.org/bugs/. Please send your feedback and feature requests to the Grml team!

• grml.org/contact/
• #grml on irc.freenode.org

Thanks

The Grml team specially wants to thank Marianne, you know who you are!

Many thanks in this release go to (alphabetically) Andreas Korsten, Axel Beckert. Bernhard Tittelbach, Bert Schulze, Christoph Biedl, Dennis Hoppe, Faheem Mitha, Joerg Mueller, Johann Felix Soden, Jordi Funollet, Jordan Uggla, K. Wulff, Lukas Prokop, Martin Scharm, Matthias Kopfermann, Michael Renner, Martha Augsburger, Richard Hartmann, Roger Leigh, Sebastian Boehm, Sedat Dilek, Thomas Koehler, Thorsten Glaser, Vsevolod Kozlov, for their contributions.

We also would like to thank everyone who filled out the Grml user survey 2011.

More Information

You can find out more about grml on our website, IRC channel, and wiki.

To sign up for future Grml announcements, please subscribe to Grml's announcement list.

If you are interested in development releases grab the daily ISOs from daily.grml.org.

Further Questions?

Please feel free to contact us.