This Week in SMGL (Dec. 11th 2007)

Christmas will be here very soon and the mages are busy in the workshop. Stable Grimoire 0.16 is being worked on. Pol "public" Vinogradov is shepherding this one. Please go to the official page to read the details.

Another busy project is the migrating from xorg/xfree86* monolithic to xorg-modular. You can find out more information about xorg modular in a previous post on Mage Power.

Source Mage GNU/Linux and the Mage Power interview with Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall was recently mentioned in DistroWatch Weekly. If you haven't been reading DW Weekly, Ladislav Bodnar does a great job of writing an issue every week, so be sure to check it out.

There has been an exciting buzz around the cauldron about a new Source Mage GNU/Linux ISO. Cauldron Lead Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann and Justin "Flux_control" Boffemmyer have been working on a brand new ISO! I had some questions about the new ISO, so I asked Flux to elaborate on the effort.

"The present status of the ISO is as follows.

It is marked as devel both for lack of testing as well as lack of end-user installation interface features. The present interface is much simpler than in previous ISOs. It simply drops the user into a shell after booting the cd and printing a general information/help message. Each step in the installation process is done completely manually by the user.

However, there is a list of steps to cover, as well as a way to track which step you are on, go to the next step, and display some information/help for what is to be done for the present step and how to go about doing it.

Insofar as the current installation procedure is not meant for users who are unfamiliar with SMGL, it works fairly well, except that the configuration step (setting up fstab, lilo.conf, etc.) is pretty sparse and needs to get filled in.

Pretty much everything else is looking good so far, and the ISO has produced some working systems already.

There is a minor issue with NIC drivers missing from the ISO, but I have fixed that in a newer version of the devel ISO (which hasn't yet been released into the wild).

The devel ISO has the following features: lvm2, raid, 2.6.22 kernel, udev+coldplug to autodetect hardware, both lilo and grub, IDE, SCSI, and SATA disks are all supported (pretty much any kind of hardware which is not extremely experimental for the 2.6.22 kernel should be supported, aside from the glitch with the NIC drivers as I mentioned above), and it was built using basesystem-0.13.tar.bz2 (which is already a little out-dated, but this will be updated in the future).

The installation procedure needs to be worked on a bit more, but after that it should be somewhat "stable". Then I plan on reducing the size of the ISO (possibly using busybox to replace a lot of the binaries on the ISO?).

Also, we could use more testers I think, since I only know of 2 people who tested it besides myself and BearPerson. Other than that, just general tightening down of the ISO and install system so that it only includes the bare essentials and nothing else, and general bug-squashing, along with bringing everything up-to-date with the current stable grimoire.

Oh, and all of this is presently only for the i486 ISO. Other platforms will be coming in the future. I think that's about all that I have to report so far."

The devel ISO is residing on BearPerson's server at the moment. If you are a developer and would like to test it, please let me, BearPerson or Flux know and we can provide you with the link.

I think everyone agrees that it will be really nice to have a new stable ISO. Mage Power will keep you posted on the progress.