Release Notes: Grml 2011.12-rc1 - Codename Knecht Rootrecht

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About

This release brings a downsizing and cleanup: one flavour, two architectures. The new, smaller flavour has a 350MB ISO size target, while still delivering over 1.1GB of open source software relevant for system administrators!

New features

• EFI Boot support from CD-ROM and USB keys (amd64 only)
• mDNS support (try ping grml.local with libnss-mdns and avahi-daemon or similar enabled on your host)
• NFS Client support and d-bus start automatically
• grml-debootstrap, the tool of choice to install Debian, can now directly build virtual machine images.
• grml-live, our build tool, was enhanced with new features to better integrate with Jenkins. This release, as well as the current daily images are built from within Jenkins!

Important Changes

• Z-Shell configuration has been cleaned up. Quite a few functions have been removed from the default configuration.
• X11 environment has been downsized as well. The window manager is now fluxbox. idesk has been removed, all available software is now reachable from the fluxbox menu.
• The accessibility support now consists of shipping standard speakup and enabling sound during boot. A new beep sequence (4 tones) is sounded just before the quickconfig menu starts. (The boot options have been removed.)
• xterm now uses the Terminus font, like the VT consoles.
• Virtual Machines automatically get the "noprompt" behaviour.
• Ancient config files and examples have been removed from grml-etc(-core).
• Ancient scripts have been removed from grml-scripts(-core).


• Anonymous stats are collected during boot up. This includes: Grml release name, boot media type (local or remote), a random string, used boot option keys (no values) and if your CPU is 64bit-capable. You can turn this off with the nostats boot option.

Bits & bolts

• Modem support has been removed from grml-network
• VT consoles are driven by grml-runtty, our homegrown login and getty replacement for Live CDs.
• Netboot scenarios should no longer use the "nodhcp" boot option.
• grml2hd is no longer in PATH to discourage its use even further. The related boot options have been removed.
• grml2usb: compat for releases < 2009.05, grub1 and lilo support have been removed.
• Release builds are now built from Debian's testing distribution, instead of unstable.
• Linux kernel is based on 3.1.4. No additional modules are shipped.
• Fixed several bugs from the bug tracking system.

Packages

Details about shipped packages and their versions on Grml are available at the Debian section. Visit dpkg_list for a detailed list of packages shipped with Grml 2011.12-rc1.

Updates

Packages are taken from Debian testing, 11th of December 2011. 1745 packages have been removed, and these new packages have been added (plus dependencies):

afflib-tools aoetool atftp bacula-sd efibootmgr
grub-efi-amd64-bin ia32-libs imvirt ipxe mcollective
mtx multiarch-support netcat-openbsd python2.7 sipcalc
vblade

These Grml packages have been removed/replaced:

grml-debugtools grml-docs grml-files grml-files64
grml-firefox grml-laptop grml-pylib grml-rebuildfstab
grml-rescueboot grml-sectools grml-templates grml-usleep
grml-vpn grml grml64

Known issues

iSCSI Target support is currently in limbo, as the user land tools for the new in-kernel iSCSI target are not yet in Debian unstable/testing and shipping the old iscsitarget modules in binary form appears to be almost impossible with the new DKMS packaging. As a workaround you may consider using Ata Over Ethernet with vblade.

dns bootoption does not work as expected. See issue1099 for details.

Download Grml 2011.12-rc1

Grml 2011.12-rc1 can be downloaded from grml.org/download/prerelease/.

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!

More Information

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

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