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. (more…)