This Week in SMGL (Feb. 8th 2008)

There is a lot of things happening, so I didn't want to wait until next week to post a new "This Week in SMGL". One improvement I have recently made to Mage Power is a redirect on the domain name that enables everyone to get to the site by either http://www.magepower.org or http://magepower.org. This should have been done a long time ago, but I wasn't experienced with GoDaddy's DNS tools. So anyway, enjoy!

Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall has announced a new stable branch that needs to be tested. This is version Stable-0.18 and can be found at it's own wiki page.

Eric Sandall has also recently tested the new GCC version 4.2.3. The new GCC was released on Feb. 1st. He stated he was finished with testing and almost ready to release it.

We have three new developers! Yes, I said three! Ivan Lezhnjov, Jr. (a.k.a. ilj) has volunteered to join the Grimoire team as a General Developer. Also joining the Grimoire team is Dale E. Edmons aka Linuxfan! A lost developer has returned to us this year. You have probably seen his commits lately as coming from Lubomir Blaha, otherwise heard from as Tritol. Welcome to Source Mage new developers!

The SMGL Cauldron has been bubbling with activity lately! Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer has been mixing up a mean stew. Flux was nice enough to send me a preview of what is new in the next release of the ISO.

Here's an idea/preview of what's new for the devel ISO. All of the bugs noted with the previous devel release (Jan. 20, 2008) have been fixed and integrated into the new ISO. This also includes some new feature requests.

There was an issue where some of the kernel modules available on the ISO itself were not installed to the new system. This is resolved, and now the two kernels (and their modules) are the same.

There is a new keyboard layout/mapping selection script, accessible using only numbers (so you aren't required to type in qwerty in order to change to e.g. dvorak). The command to access the selection script is 539 (/usr/bin/539).

There is a new chroot setup script to make setting up and shutting down chroots easier. By default, it displays output of the commands it runs so that users can know how it is preparing/terminating the chroot, but the output can be disabled by passing -q as an option. The chroot command itself is called smgl-chroot.

The installer itself got a bit of a face-lift. It now prints some useful information to the user prompt (PS1), showing the current step in the installation, the next step, and the number of the current step out of the total number of steps. It also tells the user how to access help for the installer in the prompt.

There is a new help command (the name of the command is 'help') which displays a list of available commands in the installer and what the commands do.

The grub instructions have both been made more accurate/correct as well as simplified (the user no longer needs to copy the i386-image directory; it's already installed in the correct place).

Information about how to activate framebuffer modes in the ISO has been added to the boot screen. The functionality was available in the previous ISO release, but the documentation of the presence of the framebuffer availability was missing.

A new sample fstab has been created. This new sample is much easier for those who are less familiar with manually hacking together a fstab, and also includes a sample for using LABEL= which, perhaps, not so many users are aware of.

The previous use of the branch command has been deprecated in favor of using the simpler jump command for the bootloader choice. Now, at the bootloader step, to get to either lilo or grub, just enter "jump lilo" or "jump grub".

There is a new command which lists all of the editors available on the ISO so that the user knows what choices are available. Currently we only provide nano and elvis (a vi-clone).

There were general updates/cleanups to the installer step documentation. There is still documentation which needs to be updated though, all of which pertains to configuration of the newly installed system and does not block the install itself.

Issues that occurred from the use of the basesystem chroot have been cleaned up (eth0 being mapped to eth5 for example).

The user is reminded to unmount all of their new filesystems before rebooting the machine.

The next ISO release (to follow this one) will include a new manpage with instructions on "where to go from here", i.e. updating sorcery and what they can do with their newly installed system, as well as a modified /etc/motd which will tell them to read that manpage. The manpage will be made available as a spell that the user can then dispel from their system, and they will be instructed on how to modify the motd file as well.

The Cauldron component on http://bugs.sourcemage.org (Product: Install) is down to a scant 50 open bugs. Anyone who tests the upcoming devel ISO release will strongly be encouraged to file bugs against the ISO for any issues they have with it. The release should come this Friday or Saturday, depending on the results of my tests (the ISO is being packaged today, but then I will put it through initial testing).

flux

That's it for this week, but be sure to check back here at Mage Power for all of the up to date Source Mage GNU/Linux news!