lesslinux.org Development Blog

Do you also have some relatives that always ask for “family support”: When you come to their house, you find a totally f***ed up Windows XP machine with tons of spyware and you’ll get to hear “I did not do anything”. The worst part of it: While you do the work, they keep talking at you.

Well it can be easier. Just configure your DSL router to forward inbound traffic on port 5500 to your desktop machine and get a nice DynDNS hostname. Then remaster any LessLinux Search and Rescue CD to include one boot entry that does not disable earlynet and add the cheatcode

        xvnc=|reverse|1280x800|24|my.dyndns.name|

In case of emergency tell your grandma to boot the CD with the respective entry. The earlynet script requests an IP address on all wired interfaces and instead of starting a local Xserver Xvnc is started and a reverse connection to your host is made where a listening VNC viewer must be running.

There is one drawback: the data is transmitted unencrypted, which might be an issue with sensitive data. You might however use this first VNC connection to build up a SSH tunnel between two hosts.

The background of this feature: I got some customers quite far away from here. With this cheatcode I can help them no matter where they are – no special configuration of their router required. This feature also will work over WLAN soon. I just introduced some cheatcodes to attach to a wireless network while startup. Those are not tested yet, so please be patient for a few more days.

Should work in all builds higher than 20100701-000000.

After adding support for netbooting LessLinux by downloading the ISO image via HTTP/FTP I can announce support for NFS boot. For this feature you just need to add

        nfs=192.168.1.1:/dir/containing/iso

In this case, the NFS share is mounted read only (and no locking takes place), then all ISO files down to depth 2 are searched, loop back mounted and scanned for the proper version.txt. If the system is found, the settings for toram=value take place. In reasonable fast networks you should keep this threshold low, then the start of a program via network is quick, on networks with bad latencies you might set a low threshold to copy the entire system to RAM during startup.

You might download the ISO and the sources here:

• lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20100726-105414.iso
• lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20100726-105414-buildscripts.tar.bz2

To build yourself follow the instructions in those two articles: Build stage 01 and 02 and Build stage03.

This article targets mainly readers from Germany and Austria, thus it is in German. The topics “user support” and “financial contributions” will soon arise for other users as well, then a similar article in English will follow.

LessLinux ist ein offenes System. Mir liegt viel daran, dass eine breite Masse von Nutzern aller “Erfahrungslevel” mit den LessLinux-Systemen arbeitet, Kritik übt und Verbesserungsvorschläge beisteuert. Mir geht es dabei besonders um Feedback “normaler Nutzer”, denn dieses ist unheimlich wichtig, wenn es darum geht, ein wirklich benutzerfreundliches System auf die Beine zu stellen. Mehr »

As mentioned previously, support for netbooting LessLinux was recently introduced. In builds from 20100528-000000 it works stable and can be used in production environments. So please test the new function with this build:

• lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20100528-114807.iso

Currently for netbooting a DHCP and PXE server are required, a HTTP daemon should be present, although it is possible to load the ISO directly from download.lesslinux.org. For now the ISO is completely stored in volatile memory — future versions will probably also allow NFS access. To load an ISO via HTTP just one additional parameter is necessary: Mehr »

As I mentioned before, “LessLinux Search and Rescue” is intended to be a versatile live system for typical service jobs that have to be done in mixed environments. To make work easier, a service system should be net-bootable and accessible with a remote desktop application. In builds starting with timestamps after 20100526-000000 I included support for both functions:

• Booting the kernel and initramfs with PXE and loading the system ISO with wget by http or ftp
• Starting the desktop with Xvnc instead a local X server

Mehr »

In the third stage the final ISO image is assembled. To assemble the ISO you need an overlay with some fixes and the bootloader configuration. Eventually the bootloader configuration can be automatically generated – but not for now. Since assembling stage03 is basically calculating dependencies, copying files from the chroot environment, compressing the squashfs containers and finalizing the ISO image, this stage is usually done in 20 to 40 minutes. Mehr »

I recently assembled the build script to compile a completely free and open version of the Rescue System that started life as “Computerbild Notfall-CD 2.0″. The free version is dubbed “LessLinux Search and Rescue” and can be easily modified to build your own derivates. In the next three days I will guide you through the whole build process (kind of real time).

Currently the only supported build environment is VMware, this means you must have either VMware Workstation, VMware Player (Win, Linux) or VMware Fusion (Mac OS X) installed. Player is sufficient, since the build environments are considered as some kind of “disposable environment”. Note that the VMware image expands to up to 80GB, to prevent fragmentation and reach best performance you might want to put it on a separate partition. Mehr »

I apologize for not writing in the last few months. A lot of things happened since:

• Computer Bild Russia had the LessLinux based Sicher Surfen as Cover Disc in January
• Computer Hoi did same same
• Komputer Swiat Poland will follow in the next days
• Computer Bild Germany had a “Banking CD” with a very strict SMACK ruleset in January
• Data Becker uses a LessLinux based burning tool on the cover CDs of Linux Intern

In the meanwhile I am busy upgrading, including new software and opening the development. If you want to help, please grab one of the test builds from download.lesslinux.org/testing/, run it and tell me, what attracts you and what doesn’t fit your needs.

If the testbuild should not start in you language, press “Tab” in the boot menu and change lang=de to lang=en (or ru, pl or es — other languages are just partially supported.

Despite the lack of posts in this blog the work on LessLinux not just continues, but LessLinux even had it’s first big appearance: Computer Bild 19/2009 had a cover mounted CD that was based on LessLinux and co-developed together with the BSI and the TUV Rheinland. The goal was to make a live CD that is easy to use for first time Linux users but also more secure than the general purpose live disk.

Features include:

• Usage of SMACK to allow internet access for certain programs only
• Kernel hardened with PaX to limit the risk of buffer overflows
• Password protection for the access to disks and USB sticks
• Installable on USB thumb drives with encrypted container for the home file system
• Easily updatebale when installed on a thumb drive
• More secure firefox defaults

You might download a developer snapshot from here. Please note: The developer snapshot might contain laxer privileges on some security settings and it is not in the update stream. Default language of the CD is German, you might change it to English by pressing Tab in the boot menu and appending lang=de.

Build lesslinux-20090626-1010.iso lesslinux-20090626-1435.iso fixes firmware loading issues with lots of WLAN cards and adds some new applications (Evince Document Viewer, Gnumeric Spreadsheet, AbiWord, File-Roller):