lesslinux.org Development Blog

I just completed a fresh build based on kernel 3.8.12 and GCC 4.7.2 that introduces support for secure boot. The ISO now supports four modes: If burned to a DVD it boots on BIOS and UEFI machines – the same when written to a USB thumb drive. Many thanks to Thomas Schmitt of Xorriso fame for helping me to accomplish this. I have also rewritten the scripts that do the conversion from the raw ISO written to thumbdrive from a MBR partitioned HDD to a GPT partitioned disk with two boot partitions – one for UEFI and one with legacy MBR for BIOS.

UEFI should work flawless on most machines, you just have to add the hash of the kernel /l308sf.efi to your MOK database – upon first boot you are prompted to do so. There are still some features that are not yet complete. For example the safe startup or options for VNC access are not yet included into the boot menu used on UEFI machines. The build is generally considered “Gamma” quality. I assume there won’t be more builds based on kernel 3.8 since this is declared deprecated. I have begun moving to 3.9, so expect some Beta builds based on 3.9 and GCC 4.8 soon.

• Download lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20130510-125805.iso

There will be some major changes for builders ahead. If you plan to do builds based on this or later releases, please contact me.

We are working on our first images that work on UEFI secure boot as well as on normal BIOSes. This is quite a challenge, since until now images were prepared with genisoimage and later patched with isohybrid to contain a partition table. This resulted in images that could either written to CD or to USB stick. When written to a USB thumb drive some magic in the initramfs moved ISO filesystem and bootloader and created a new MBR partition table with one empty FAT32 partition at the start of the USB stick. This way the majority of space of a thumb drive could still be used – especially users with drives of 8GB or larger appreciated this feature. Mehr »

I just uploaded the first build containing linux kernel 3.8.0. Besides the new kernel, glibc got updated to 2.17. The most significant change is that now a (cross compiled) kernel for x86_64 is included. If necessary it will be accompagnied by a 64 bit busybox in one of the next builds. So currently three kernels are used: the 64 bit kernel, a kernel for 32 bit systems with PAE and a kernel for 32 bit systems  without PAE. This number will be reduced to two as soon as the 64 bit kernel proves stable. Choosing the right kernel is (hopefully) done by syslinux’ ifcpu64.c32 module. To see which kernel was booted, run “uname -a” from a terminal.

Please note that just the kernel is 64 bit, so chrooting to 64 bit linux environments should be possible now. Since I also plan to add EFI support with gummiboot we need a 64 bit kernel to be booted directly by the EFI loader (32 bit kernels will not boot on 64 bit EFI without intermediate loaders like GRUB).

• Download this unstable build: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20130226-123741.iso

I just uploaded a fresh build that includes some significant changes on driver loading – especially WiFi now works much better. Of course most packages were also replaced by fresh versions: Linux kernel 3.7.9 is included, Firefox got updated to 19.0 (the first release with the pdf.js PDF renderer included). Other changes are relevant for the use in companies where LessLinux is bootet via the network – either for repairing, inspecting, enrolling Windows on client machines or the usage as thin client:

• a root password hash can now be set via boot command line
• the thin client chooser now got much more configurable regarding mapping of Xfreerdps parameters and thus “real world usable” (in fact we use LessLinux as thinclient OS already in a small office netwerk with around ten clients)
• the possibility to pass through to USB printers has been added

This build still uses kernel series 3.7 and Glibc 2.16. Due to some major changes I suspect this to remain for a few stable builds while unstable builds will soon move to 3.8 and Glibc 2.17. Download this build here:

• Download lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20130221-145507.iso

I would also like to point to the handbook I started writing. For now it just contains ~10 pages on stuff that is interesting for administrators – like netbooting, using LessLinux as a thin client or remote access to running LessLinux hosts. The hand book is work in progress and will be frequently be updated. The latest version can be downloaded from here:

• LessLinux handbook current

Since the handbook is regularily updated as work on LessLinux continues it might contain documentation on features that are not yet avaialable in the build you just downloaded. In this case refer to the version of the handbook that is contained in the buildscripts tarball of a certain release. Future releases also will add the handbook as part of the CD.

I just got some requests asking for the inclusion of Nmap and Wireshark. Here we go: Winth Zenmap and Wireshark plus the command line tools tcpdump and aircrack-ng (WLAN drivers not yet patched for injection, sorry), LessLinux search and rescue just got better as a tool for network analysis. Besides this there are some minor improvements:

• Kernel 3.6.11
• other minor updates to libraries etc.

As always you can download the latest build from download.lesslinux.org: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20121228-165026.iso

I just uploaded a fresh build of LessLinux Search and Rescue. The most notable changes to the release from September are:

• Linux Kernel 3.6.10
• Glibc updated to 2.16.0
• Firefox 17.0.1 and Thunderbird 17.0
• Gparted updated to 0.14.1
• Tools for XFS, JFS and BTRFS added respectively re-added
• Nice icons in upper left corner show boot progress

Of course there are lots of minor changes as well, for example it is now possible to load the complete system via tftp. To do this follow the instructions to load the kernel and initrams from your PXE-/TFTP-server and add

wgetiso=tftp://12.34.56.78/path/to/ll.iso

Please note that this feature is experimental. The “wgetiso” cheat code might work much better with the protocols http or ftp, but in cases where you can’t or don’t want to setup a web server and still boot from the network, it might come handy.

There were some minor changes to the thin client functionality, but it still is not production ready, be prepared for more on this topic in January.

As always you can download the latest build from download.lesslinux.org: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20121217-095052.iso

Dear users, I just uploaded a fresh build of LessLinux Search and Rescue. It fits to the stable line, although not all features might be perfectly tested (this might be most obvious in Wifi support for some chipsets). On the software side practically all version numbers increased:

• Linux kernel is 3.4.11
• Firefox is version 15.0.1
• XFCE is version 4.10

A few programs have been added:

• Remmina for remote access
• FreeRDP for remote access to windows machines

Along with Remmina and xfreerdp comes a new boot mode: By specifying the IP of a host to connect to or the URL of an XML file containing chooser information it is possible to either directly connecting to a remote RDP host or offering a chooser to select from a view. Modes for access to VNC and X11 (XDMCP) will be added in the near future. Along with the RDP capabilities access to local drives and a printer daemon will follow soon. Stay tuned for an update on this new feature in the next few days.

Download LessLinux Search and Rescue 2.0.11 here:

• lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20120924-171612.iso

I am proud to announce a relatively stable and relatively complete development build of LessLinux Search and Rescue. It is built upon my latest efforts to emancipate from the Computer BILD flavoured “classical” desktop, moving to a sleeker desktop, using Cairo Dock and Openbox as desktop environment. The last twelve months have seen some fresh commercial builds, probably around more than 1.5 million copies included in cover mount CDs sold on various European computer magazines. So it is really time for more open source builds now.

Fresh software

This build is based upon Linux kernel 3.3.1 Glibc 2.14.1, XFCE 4.8, OpenBox 3.5.0 and Cairo Dock 2.4. The desktop now is a mixture of XFCE components, Cairo Dock as Panel on the bottom and Openbox as Windows manager. This results in a look clearly different from earlier open source builds. Take a look:

Mehr »

So now you are ready building the chroot environment – then it is time to assemble the final ISO. To do this you need an overlay containing some configuration files for the bootloader. I packaged such an overlay for the current LessLinux Search and Rescue: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20110202-155012-overlays-en.tar.bz2. You’ll find more recent overlays here: http://download.lesslinux.org/overlays/, but when building care that overlay and buildscripts match. Unpack the overlay in the folder /mnt/archiv/LessLinux. Mehr »

Besides the switch to SQLite there are other big changes regarding the build of stage02, which is the population of the chroot environment:

• LessLinux now supports tracking of dependencies after building packages. This allows to define the order of packages to build.

• As a consequence of the dependency tracking it is now also possible to parallelize the build. On a three core Athlon this brought down build times from around three days to less than 20 hours. With a faster machine you should even get better results.

Mehr »