Yesterday, August 3^rd, two Linux recovery operating systems received minor updates: my favorite, RIPLinuX (10.7) and another OS which I wrote about a while ago, Parted Magic (5.2).

The changelog files show these new releases include bug fixes, minor enhancements and updated versions for the main packages (e.g. partitioning tools).

Changelog for RIP LinuX:

http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/Changelog

Changelog for Parted Magic:

http://partedmagic.com/change-log/158-parted-magic-52.html

I’ve always been amazed by these lightweight Linux distributions (~100MB) which you can use for almost anything. Not only do they provide tools to help you troubleshoot your system, but they can also be used as regular OS’s for browsing the Internet, chatting with friends or even listening to music.

So although I generally agree with the saying, I can admit – in this case – that size doesn’t always matter.

Yet another recovery OS has been updated this month. SystemRescueCD 1.5.8 is a minor update (the 2^nd release in 3 weeks) to provide new standard kernels (2.6.32.16), alternative kernels (2.6.34.1) and a new version of the gparted package.

Although I’m not a big fun of it (I prefer RipLinux) I wanted to give it a try, as I’d heard a lot of positive things about this OS.

Being a recovery OS, SystemRescueCD comes with lots of boot entries, as well as numerous boot options. The options list is impressive  — if you can read it (the color scheme with the blue/cyan background and the grey/yellow font is not the happiest combination). The developers even included an “out of the box” PXE boot server (which must be manually started after login) that can be used by other computers on the network to boot SystemRescueCD and  use it for  troubleshooting (http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_PXE_network_booting).

The text mode login screen displays a warning message that startx may fail, but the exact opposite happened to me: I couldn’t start X with the recommended Xorg or Xfbdev and startx was the only thing that worked.

The default desktop session (powered by the XFCE desktop environment) opens a terminal and I was really surprised to see the user’s shell is zsh which is a powerful shell and command interpreter:

The application list is not that impressive. It includes partitioning tools (gparted, Partition Image), disk tools (Testdisk), some file managers (mc) and text editors (gvim), an antivirus (Clam), a PDF reader (ePDFviewer), a burn utility and of course firefox and ssh/vnc. The full package list is available at http://www.sysresccd.org/System-tools.

The distro’s website is a great source for documentation, support and other useful information so make sure you check it out.

Conclusion

I don’t have anything bad to say about this Gentoo-based Linux OS. It is lightweight, fast and it runs a powerful shell. The list of recovery tools and utilities is not that long, but it includes anything you require for troubleshooting your system. The PXE server is a powerful feature for a recovery OS and it can be really useful in a LAN, although it only provides support for PXE booting 32-bit systems.

]]> http://linuxsysconfig.com/2010/07/systemrescuecd/feed/ 3 http://linuxsysconfig.com/2009/03/fedora-11-preview/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fedora-11-preview http://linuxsysconfig.com/2009/03/fedora-11-preview/#comments Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:00:05 +0000 admin http://linuxsysconfig.com/?p=773 Fedora 11 Alpha came out a month ago, 2 days later than the initial schedule, and it has recently entered its “Feature Freeze” state.

Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 is due to be released on May 25th and it includes a large number of new features (most of them have already been approved).

I’ve been using Fedora for more than 5 years and I often run Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch) to preview some of the future improvements. I couldn’t have missed this Alpha release, so I installed it for testing (first, as a guest OS in VirtualBox and then on my laptop).

Installation

Anaconda has been rewritten to address several issues and to improve partition management and block device encryption. A new pyparted module is currently being developed to be used in Anaconda’s new storage configuration code.

The new default file system is EXT4.  Large file support and journal checksumming are just a few improvements over the old EXT3.

The installation itself went smoothly, I chose the default package selection and checked the “Customize later” button.

Features

The Fedora project team has worked a lot over the years to improve user experience. This release makes no exception. All major desktop environments have been upgraded (KDE 4.2, GNOME 2.26, XFCE 4.6), several applications were updated (Firefox 3.1, Thunderbird 3) and lots of other features have been improved (VolumeControl, PulseAudio, FingerPrint).

The developers were not forgotten. Python 2.6, GCC 4.4 and NetBeans 6.5 have been accepted and implemented in Fedora 11.

An important new feature is the new architecture support. All 32-bit kernels are now built for i586 by default. x86_64 kernels will be installed on all compatible hardware (even on 32-bit systems) while PAE kernels will only be installed by default on older hardware (PII-P4).

I have a 64-bit CPU on my laptop, so the 64-bit kernel was automatically installed.

Conclusions

Fedora 11 Alpha is fast and incredibly stable. I’ve only had some YUM issues and a couple of minor crashes. There are still more than 2 months before the final release is out and plenty of features to be 100% completed (e.g. 20SecondStartup).

I’m sure Fedora 11 will be an amazing release, making user experience even more pleasant.

Enjoy!

Follow-up

Fedora 11 Beta released.

About

• 3rd release this year (2nd this month)
• maintenance release (a few bug fixes and several updated packages)
• different versions available (ISO, HDD, PXE, USB, GRUB4DOS) – all i386
• small size (87MB) and low requirements (128 to 256 MB of RAM)

Boot options

The boot menu contains 9 different boot options and a Memtest86+ entry.

Even more options are exposed by pressing F1-F3 (vga modes, keyboard maps, other kernel command line parameters). All lines are editable by pressing the TAB key.

If you’re going to use boot option 1, make sure you have at least 384 MB of RAM. I used VMware for this testing and the amount of allocated RAM for the guest OS was only 256 MB so it failed to boot.

Look and Feel

Parted Magic uses LXDE and Xorg for the graphical environment. The desktop includes a customizable panel, a digital clock and a Start button to access the main menu. A text-based menu is also available:

Partitioning tools

As its name implies, Parted Magic can be used to perform all sorts of partitioning operations. Thanks to the latest Linux kernel (2.6.28), EXT4 file system is fully supported. 

Besides graphical tools like GParted, there are also text-based utilities such as fdisk, cfdisk and sfdisk. An important tool to save/restore partitions to an image file is Partimage, which is also included.

I had no trouble creating an EXT4 partition and saving it to an image file on a mounted USB drive.

System tools

Parted Magic 3.7 comes with many utilities (the complete list is available here) which you can use for almost anything you can think of (data recovery, disk monitoring, remote connection clients, file managers).

• file system tools (NTFS-3G, FUSE, reiser4progs)
• boot loaders (lilo, grub, ms-sys)
• console-based tools (dd, ddrescue, dmraid)

Other features

• the ability to save all user-created content to another location (this can be a partition or a USB flash drive)
• create Parted Magic USB (this doesn’t wipe the USB drive, it only copies 2 folders on it and makes it bootable)

Weird stuff

For some reason Parted Magic uses the same mouse cursor theme as Windows Vista. You can see the resemblance to Vista’s aero_working and aero_busy here. I don’t know if that’s pure coincidence (I actually doubt it), but I personally don’t like it.

Conclusions

Parted Magic is a lightweight OS that can run as a Live CD/USB. It includes many recovery utilities that can help repairing damaged systems. Additional software tools are available as downloadable modules. It would have been nice to have some of these modules (e.g. ClamAV, F-PROT) inside the OS, but hopefully these features will be added soon.

It can be used for various tasks like maintenance, troubleshooting, rescuing an installed system, or even as a Live OS for browsing the Internet, chatting with friends, listening to music or watching movies. All that at a cost of a 90MB ISO image.

RIPLinux comes in different versions (X, non-X, Grub, Grub2, PXE) and it’s a lightweight distro, only requiring 256MB  of RAM and a 586 CPU to run.

Boot options

The boot menu offers a lot of choices:

I tried booting both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels and a Windows XP partition with no issues. It even offers support for Windows Vista Bootmgr and for any other partition that has a boot manager on it.  For that,  several pre-configured Grub entries are available, but all lines are editable so they can be customized to your needs.

The Desktop

The X version offers a graphical environment running on tty9. The default screen resolution was 1024×768 which is reasonable considering that I was running RIPLinux as a guest OS in vmware-server. Of course, non-graphical terminals are available too with CTRL+ALT+F{1-8} .

Recovery tools

There are quite a few tools included that can help you diagnose a faulty system.

• system monitoring: lshw, atop, htop, dmesg, dmidecode, mount utility (of course, these tools come with most of the Linux distros today but they could be useful to detect I/O errors, BIOS warnings, damaged partitions)
• partitioning: fdisk, cfdisk, Ghost For Linux, GParted, Grub, Partimage, Testdisk (the list of supported partition types includes EXT4, Reiser4 and NTFS)

• QEMU emulator (boot ISO, HDD or floppy images)
• F-PROT antivirus (can be used to scan mounted Windows partitions)

As a test, I successfully mounted a NTFS partition, modified a couple of files and scan it with F-PROT antivirus. I also played with partimage to create partition backups.

Other tools

RIPLinux includes a network configuration tool. It supports both wired and wireless connections. I’ve only tried the Ethernet as I didn’t have a wireless card to play with. Having Internet access while troubleshooting is important, that’s why you’ll find these applications very useful:

• remote connection clients (ftp, ssh, telnet, rdesktop)
• IM/IRC (Gaim, XChat)
• mail (Fetchmail, mutt)
• newsreaders
• Internet browsers (Firefox, Links)
• online and offline documentation

Other applications

I was able to play my mp3 files thanks to xmms, watch movies with xine and view pdf files with PDF Viewer. RIPLinux also includes several file managers, an archive extractor and even a GUI for rsync.

Issues

I only had issues trying to install/update some of the packages. The installation tools are either Slack based (installpkg) or BASH scripts (install-pkg). nmap installation failed each time with a “Not Found” error, while ntfs3g update worked second time I tried.

Conclusions

RIPLinux includes tools for system recovery and a series of scripts for self mainetance tasks (e.g. update-pkg, install-pkg) that can install and/or update several of its packages. That makes it a great choice for troubleshooting system issues using latest versions of the recovery tools.

Don’t forget that recovery is possible!

Well… I was wrong!

In the meantime they released another version of their OS, 2009.3. Based on Hardy Heron, this new version has some important new features:

• refreshing desktop - the desktop is now a lot cleaner and easy to use (they must have removed ~/Desktop/*)
• less bloat – you will notice that iMagic OS 2009.3 is a much slimmer and better structured system (?)
• file manager – Konqueror now combines a sleek blue and silver side bar, with useful features and places that will be familiar to all Windows users (they changed the sidebar color, what can I say, that’s a real improvement)
• etc.

Not convinced to buy it yet?

Maybe this will make you decide:

• it’s Microsoft compatible (you can install any application from this list and it will probably work…or not, thanks to CrossOver Linux which is included in this OS)
• it comes in three different versions with six different prices (isn’t that cute?)

So once you accept the license and swear you won’t install it on more than three computers, it gets more expensive!

Other things to consider

• comes with three of the strongest firewalls available
  
• phpBB forum board support (~ 20 threads so far)
• you only pay 5$ if you want to upgrade from 2009
  
• you get access to their private_packages section where you can get debs for hard to find binaries like Amarok, Kaffeine and Apache

Conclusions

iMagic OS is no more than another Lindows clone (it even uses CNR and a CNR clone called magicOnline) which obviously won’t attract Linux users (who have better options like Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSuSE) but might sound interesting to a couple of Microsoft Windows users.

FreeBSD 7.1 improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. The changelog includes kernel changes, new hardware support, storage and filesystem enhancements.

Installation

FreeBSD 7.1 is available for several platforms (including i386, ia64, amd64 and powerpc) for various installation types (CD-ROM, DVD, floppy, FTP etc.). For the first time, DVD ISOs are made available for the amd64 and i386 architectures.

The installer is the same small but powerful utility, sysinstall. It’s console based and it offers a variety of options before and after the installation.

Advanced partitioning, package selection and post-installation options are available. You can create slices on different drives, choose your preferred custom partitioning scheme or configure your own installation media. Make sure you read the installation guides first (simple, advanced).

Features

The most significant feature is the ULE scheduler which is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. This means improved performance on multicore and multithreaded systems. Disabled by default in previous FreeBSD releases, ULE is now active and it replaces the traditional BSD scheduler.

Another important features is DTrace, the dynamic tracking framework, which comes with dtrace, the user command line utility. Imported from OpenSolaris, DTrace allows system administrators and developers to troubleshoot kernel and application issues in real time.

GNOME has been updated to 2.22.3 and KDE to 3.5.10 (KDE4.1 is also available in the Ports Collection and can be later installed by simply typing pkg_add -r kde4). KDE3 and KDE4 can coexist on the same system.

GNOME 2.22.3

KDE 4.1

XFCE4 is also available as an alternative for those who want a simple and lightweight desktop environment.

Other tools have been updated to address security issues and to offer new features (CVS, awk, OpenSSH, ncurses, sendmail). A complete list of changes is available with the Release Notes.

Conclusions

7.1 is another good release from the FreeBSD Team. With almost 20,000 ports and packages available, FreeBSD offers performance and security and it supports applications for both desktop and server environments.

Additional resources

• FreeBSD BitTorrent Tracker
• FreeBSD Ports Web
• FreeBSD Documentation

Slackware still uses a text installation and manual partitioning is needed before the setup is started.

I’ve recorded a screencast about Slackware installation as it’s quite “non standard” and it requires more advanced Linux skills.

The video is about partitioning the HDD using the command line utility fdisk and partition configuration during the installation.

The screencast is hosted on vimeo in HD quality (the original source file is in AVI format and it’s available for download for registered vimeo users).

More on Slackware soon.

The 688MB LiveCD is packed with latest versions of firefox (3.0.4), gnome (2.24) and of course OpenOffice.org (3.0). The Time Slider (which is great) and the improved support for drivers and Suspend/Resume functions are presented as two major additions.

I chose a Dell D620 laptop (2GHz Core 2 Due, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD) as the installation machine. Sun’s Hardware Compatibility List shows a Reported to Work level for this machine. I was especially interested in testing it from the user perspective trying to find an alternative to Linux desktops.

Installation

After successfully booting the LiveCD, in a matter of minutes the GNOME desktop is displayed, offering the user the choice (actually a desktop link) to install OpenSolaris on a HDD.

Here is a screenshot with the default desktop (you can see that I plugged in a USB drive that was automatically mounted by the OS):

The “Install OpenSolaris” link allows you to install the OS on your HDD. The graphical installer offers few options to customize (timezone, locale) and forces you to create a new user. No package selection is available, it installs all packages that are available on the LiveCD.

The Disk option offers two choices: use the whole disk for installation (all existing data is lost and the HDD is formatted) or use an existing primary partition. No boot loader options are available, so you’ll have to backup your existing boot loader entries and restore them into the newly installed OpenSolaris boot loader if you’re planning on using a multiboot environment.

Features

The overall impression after the installation is good. OpenSolaris is fast, stable and secure. Its maintainers try to add new functionalities with each release and this one makes no exception: GNOME 2.24, firefox 3.0.4, OpenOffice.org 3, the Packet Manager, improved hardware support, just to name a few. You’ll find the detailed Release Notes on opensolaris.com.

Network Manager handles network connectivity so it automatically detected my wireless connection. I activated the ZFS snapshots under Time Splider setup window and opened Packet Manager to install additional software. ZFS is an important feature in OpenSolaris and it helps recovering lost data. You can watch a screencast here.

Additional resources

OpenSolaris provides a lot of online resources at http://opensolaris.org/os/ and http://opensolaris.com. A series of developers blogs are also available and can keep you up2date with latest additions.

Users with low bandwidth can obtain the latest release by placing an order for free OpenSolaris CD.

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