Release Notes: Grml 2025.05 - codename Nudlaug

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About

Grml is a Debian based live system focusing on the needs of system administrators. The 2025.05 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.

Important changes

• This release is based on Debian/trixie as of May 2025
• Uploaded to Debian: grml-hwinfo, grml-keyring + grml-paste are available starting with Debian/trixie
• We use a new signing key for the deb.grml.org repositories
• The grml-live build system no longer uses FAI underneath and grml-policyrcd is gone
• Booting with boot option ssh=... on grml-full automatically announces the SSH service with Avahi (discover it via avahi-browse -d local _ssh._tcp --resolve -t)

New features

Highlighting the most relevant changes only:

grml-autoconfig - main bootup process of a Grml (based) system:

• Several performance improvements for faster boot
• Drop support for non-systemd systems
• Stop managing rsyslog
• Rework timezone + localtime handling, TZ defaults to UTC and the RTC defaults to be set to UTC

grml-hwinfo - collect hardware information:

• Collect output of smartctl in JSON format in “json/smartctl”
• Uploaded to Debian: grml-hwinfo is available starting with Debian/trixie
• Remove dconf + xresprobe from Recommends
• Remove mcelog invocations, package was removed from Debian

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

• Replace FAI with our own implementation known as minifai
• Move /etc/grml/fai/config into /usr/share/grml-live/config
• Adopt new layout for files/, class/, hooks/ (e.g. files// becomes files//)
• Provide migration script /usr/share/grml-live/scripts/migrate-to-minifai
• Divert update-initramfs for performance
• Setup apt sources in deb822 format
• Announce SSH service with Avahi
• GRMLBASE/15-initsetup: init journald catalog cache at build time
• GRMLBASE/26-console-setup: console-setup: create setupcon cache
• GRMLBASE/95-package-information: get non-free info without aptitude
• /etc/cruft/filters/grml-live: add cruft-ng filter
• /etc/fstab: drop examples handled by systemd
• Fix missing isolinux files
• Fix timezone and RTC setup
• Follow rename of grml-debian-keyring to grml-keyring
• Use isohybrid MBR from chroot
• GRUB: hide ipxe + nonfunctional boot entries if files are absent
• GRUB: remove nonfunctional memtest86 bios-mode selection
• isolinux: deduplicate {chain,mboot,hdt,menu}.c32
• isolinux: drop deprecated bootoption “gmt”
• Install /etc/sudoers.d/user-nopasswd instead of /etc/sudoers
• Introduce config/bootstrap-keyring to set keyring for mmdebstrap
• Reduce size of nonfree-licenses.txt by gzip-compressing it
• Remove chainloading of grub from isolinux
• Remove deprecated workarounds (for bug in udev + nfs-utils, version detection of old resolvconf,…)
• Remove vestigal apt-list{bugs,changes} support
• Require package repositories to be signed by default
• Support Debian/trixie (adapt ssh.service, support ipxe >= 1.21.1+git20220113.fbbdc3926+dfsg-3,…)
• Stop installing memdisk
• Stop providing /dev/MAKEDEV
• Switch from ftp.debian.org to deb.debian.org
• grml-cheatcodes.txt: document kernel parameter dis_ucode_ldr
• Improve grml-live zsh completion
• ZFS: derive linux package names from primary Debian architecture + mount /proc for minifai and other /proc-less environments
• Misc updates to software selection for GRMLBASE, GRML_SMALL + GRML_FULL
• Misc cleanups (Debian packaging, docs, deprecated configuration files, file-rc + FAI leftovers,…)

grml-zshrc - Zsh configuration:

• etc/skel/.zshrc: add global alias TZ` for timestamp/ts(1)
• tmux: status-right: show IP addresses (similar to our GNU/screen configuration)
• zsh: drop hg completion
• zsh: drop Solaris support
• zshenv: drop live-cd only hacks
• zshenv: stop setting HOSTNAME
• zshrc: add alias llblk for lsblk with useful columns
• zshrc: add alias afl for apt-file list
• zshrc: add aliases afs for apt-file search
• zshrc: deprecate xunfunction
• zshrc: drop several deprecated workarounds for aterm, centericq, mrxvt
• zshrc: drop sv support from init.d functions (Start/Restart/Stop/Reload/Force-Reload/Status)
• zshrc: remove 855resolution, cdrecord, zurl functions
• zshrc: remove copy of add-zsh-hook which is included in zsh since v4.3.7
• zshrc: remove fink init on macOS
• zshrc: remove hbp alias
• zshrc: require zsh version 5.1 or newer
• zshrc: stop setting CLICOLOR
• zshrc: use $HOST instead of forking to uname -n
• zshrc: use path_helper on macOS

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

• Set default release to Debian/trixie (v13)
• Drop support for Debian’s “i386” port
• Drop support for Debian releases jessie + stretch
• Improve hybrid bootloader and arm64 UEFI support
• Mark packages as automatically installed
• Update /etc/timezone only if it exists
• Align interfaces(5) defaults with ifupdown
• Drop support for --iso option
• Use LC_ALL=C instead of LANG=C
• Use mmdebstrap as our only debootstrap implementation
• Stop installing separate packages file for arm64
• Stop installing acpi-support-base by default
• Packages: replace dbus with libpam-systemd and bzip2 with zstd
• Support https mirrors
• Fix skipping initrd creation using INITRD=no
• Set root partition type UUIDs for VM images according to the Discoverable Partition Specification
• Verify that GRUB configuration points to valid block device

Unsorted:

• grml2usb: Fix updating bootid for isolinux installs
• grml-tips: Add some tips for a Lenovo X1 notebook

Bits & bolts

• Linux kernel 6.12
• 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 May 14, 2025.

The following 6 relevant packages have been added (excluding e.g. lib*, fonts*, *-{base,bin,common,core,data}, {gcc,cpp}-*, perl*, python*, ruby* and kernel image):

• ipxe
• iwd
• links
• lrzsz
• sopv-gpgv
• sqv

The following 16 Debian packages have been removed/replaced (excluding lib*, fonts*, *-{base,bin,common,core,data}, {gcc,cpp}-*, perl*, python*, ruby* and kernel image):

• acpi-support
• acpi-support-base
• acpid
• apt-utils
• cdebootstrap
• cron
• cron-daemon-common
• crosshurd
• debconf-i18n
• debconf-utils
• dnsutils (replaced by bind9-dnsutils)
• fai-client
• init
• nftables
• rsyslog
• vim-tiny

Known issues

Please visit the known bugs web page.

Download Grml 2025.05

Grml 2025.05 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 summer 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) Aaron Rainbolt, Antoine Beaupré, Christopher Bock, Evgeni Golov, Guillem Jover, lars18th and Patrick Schleizer for their contributions. ❤️

Once again netcup contributed financially, this time specifically to this release. Thank you, netcup ❤️

We also want to thank our individual sponsors donating through GitHub. If you like what we are doing, please join in!

New sponsors for this release are: pyratebeard and wise0tamas ❤️

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Grml and this release, stay healthy and happy Grml-ing! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

More Information

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

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