Release Notes: Grml 2024.12 - codename Adventgrenze

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About

Grml is a Debian based live system focusing on the needs of system administrators. The 2024.12 release provides fresh software packages from Debian trixie. As usual it also incorporates up to date hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.

About the codename.

NOTE: 20 Years of Grml Releases, please join us in celebrating!

Important changes

• We are proud to announce our first release supporting 64-bit ARM CPUs (Architecture arm64).
• Please be aware that we cannot support 32-bit x86 PCs anymore, and no i386 ISO images have been produced.
• New Grml flavour naming schema: now that the i386 flavour grml32 is gone, also grml96 no longer exists as such (grml96 was known as combination of grml64 + grml32 in one single ISO). Instead we gained the new architecture known as arm64. Due to this our new naming convention now is grml-$FLAVOUR-$VERSION-$ARCH. Example: grml-full-2024.12-amd64 is the grml-full flavour in version 2024.12 for architecture amd64.
• The Grml amd64 flavour now supports UEFI 32-bit boot
• Refreshed our Grml theme within the GRUB bootloader (UEFI boot)

New features

Highlighting the most relevant changes only:

• grml-lang: support language settings for UK/GB
• grml-vnet: replace tunctl + brctl with ip(8)
• grml-paste: the Grml paste service is gone, the script uses paste.debian.net now
• cpu-screen: replace C source implementation with implementation in Perl (to get arch all packages) + hide [ cpufreq n/a ]
• grml2usb: introduce automatic bootloader selection, use nasm to assemble mbr, add smoke test, loosen dependency on grub2, copy bootaa64.efi if available and make blockdev --rereadpt optional
• Moved Git repositories and Grml wiki to GitHub.com
• Refreshed all Debian packages to follow current best practices
• Reworked our services and build release infrastructure

grml-hwinfo - collect hardware information:

• Collect output in JSON format of several tools like losetup, findmnt, lscpu + lsblk in the json sub directory
• Retrieve generic information about NVMe disks
• lsblk: improve output, also for it JSON output
• Retrieve ZFS related data
• Update inxi output
• Reduce execution time by ~60% by dropping dpkg call to get kernel information
• Misc improvements to stderr handling

grml-live - build system for creating Grml (based) Linux live systems:

• Always print requested configuration during grml-live runs
• docs: update usage instructions for setting up Grml repository
• Do not add /dev to squashfs
• Drop deborphan from GRMLBASE, no longer present since Debian/trixie
• Drop several boot addons
• Drop support for all boot methods other than isolinux + GRUB
• Ensure files are copied with fcopy into chroot with expected permissions
• etc/fstab/GRMLBASE: use reserved IP following RFC5737
• Generate source package tarball when using SOURCES class
• get-sources: run apt-get source parallelized
• GRMLBASE/15-initsetup: mask ldconfig.service
• grml-live: introduce hasclass helper function
• GRUB templates: move non-addon entries out of addons.cfg
• GRUB templates: replaced GRUB boot theme
• Improved support for usage inside containers
• Initialize zsh caches so first startup on Live CD is faster
• Introduce architecture specific boot addon templates
• Misc software related changes in GRMLBASE, GRML_SMALL + GRML_FULL classes
• netboot package: use ISO_NAME-netboot.tar as output name (without .iso)
• New build-driver for CI integration in release pipeline
• Removed several deprecated workarounds for old Debian releases
• Remove grml-live-db and support for writing into it
• Rework wallpaper handling
• Strip xattrs in squashfs
• Support UEFI 32-bit boot on amd64
• The grml_sources directory is no longer bind-mounted into the chroot (to support unprivileged container usage)
• Update codebase to make it shellcheck clean

grml-zshrc - Zsh configuration:

• zshrc: set HISTSIZE + SAVEHIST only if not yet set or being set to Zsh upstream default
• zshenv: add ~/.local/bin to default PATH
• zlogout is gone with the grml-etc-core package (to remove the feature clearing the terminal screen)

grml-debootstrap - wrapper around debootstrap for installing pure Debian:

• Switch default debootstrap tool to mmdebstrap
• Drop support for cdebootstrap
• Disable ext4 feature orphan_file for older releases
• interactive mode: ignore failures when identifying file system fails
• mkfs: avoid blockdev failing to re-read partition table
• Implement clean_chroot to avoid host environment variables like TMP to leak into the chroot
• Implemented GitHub workflow + actions for automated test runs

Bits & bolts

• Linux kernel 6.11
• Fixed several bugs reported in the issue tracker.

Packages

Details about shipped packages and their versions in Grml are available in the Debian section.

Updates

Packages are taken from Debian trixie/testing as of December 19, 2024.

The following 8 relevant packages have been added (excluding e.g. lib*, fonts*, *-{base,bin,common,core,data}, {gcc,cpp}-*, perl*, python*, ruby* and kernel image):

• dracut-install
• grub-efi-amd64-unsigned + grub-efi-ia32-unsigned
• linux-sysctl-defaults
• login.defs
• openssh-client-ssh1
• openssl-provider-legacy
• scdaemon

The following 17 Debian packages have been removed/replaced (excluding lib*, fonts*, *-{base,bin,common,core,data}, {gcc,cpp}-*, perl*, python*, ruby* and kernel image):

• deborphan
• genisoimage
• gnupg-utils
• gpg-wks-client + gpg-wks-server
• haveged
• hfsutils
• isc-dhcp-client
• lrzsz
• mksh
• policykit-1
• reiser4progs
• reiserfsprogs
• systemd-dev
• tdb-tools
• uml-utilities
• usr-is-merged

Known issues

Please visit the known bugs web page.

Download Grml 2024.12

Grml 2024.12 can be downloaded from the download page.

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/. We also welcome feature requests and any kind of constructive feedback. If you want to reach out to the Grml team, please visit our contact webpage.

The next stable Grml release is scheduled for early 2025.

The Grml team is available also for commercial support and services. If you are interested in our consulting services, need a special feature in Grml or a custom branded Grml version with your company logo, please reach out to business (at) grml.org

Thanks

Many thanks in this release go to (alphabetically) András Korn, Antoine Beaupré, Christopher Bock, pasja, Patrick Schleizer and unknowndevQwQ for their contributions.

We would like to thank netcup for their financial contribution for implementing arm64 support.

More Information

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

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