wtfm … I like it

Noirin’s post has inspired me to outline a little just what it is I do with/for Fullstory, Kanotix and Klik.

I can’t quite remember when I first attempted to make a contribution to Knoppix though it was probably in the lead up to the Linuxworld a couple of years ago. Since then all Knoppix releases (afaic) had lang=ie cheatcode support to give you some Irish locale settings (for English in Ireland) and I also submitted a patch or two in the startup scripts relating to things like only running hwclock after the timezone had been set correctly. Around the same time I also discovered a kernel bug relating to kernel command line parsing and managed to get Fabian “I am not a kernel hacker” Franz to go kernel hacking to discover the exact problem (afair the kernel could only set 9/10 foo=bar style command line variables) and cause (a fairly recent patch in the 2.6 tree). This issue was only one of a number of issues I had with doing a Knoppix remaster for LinuxWorld that year (another was somehow losing a mounted loopback filesystems contents when the underlying filesystem was accidently filled, unfortunately I could never follow up on what happened as it became panic time). There were a few other small little patches that crept in Knoppix somewhere (one in the installer anyway).

My first involvement with klik was on the Knoppix Forum, attempting to persuade it’s author that any distributed klik code should be Free (in fact GPL). The collective arguments of a few convinced him, but despite offering the option of encouraging developers as a reason to go GPL, I didn’t actually contribute in the slightest to klik for around a year. At that point (and I have no real recollection what inspired me), I ended up extending klik so that it’s dependencies on kde were virtually severed (it still isn’t perfect, but there’s no real excuse other then time for making it so). I ended up talking to Simon Peter, the father of klik, quite a bit at this time and we talked out and developed a number of improvements including changing to cmg (compressed images) from AppDirs and writing a script to help prepare a common baseline to help klik recipies run on unknown distributions (thanks to the now new “next generation klik based on serverside-apt”). Klik has attracted more contributors of various sorts over the last year and I’m now in the unenviable position of being one of the people who can fix (and break) klik completely, helping to provide better support to our users.

When klik made the change to cmg files, I ended up crafting a custom zAppRun program for Kanotix to meet Kano’s desires in how fstab should be setup and used. I don’t think this was my first actual Kanotix code contribution, though it might have been, but it is far from the only one. With the Kanotix 2005-04 release zAppRun now uses fuse with fuseiso/fusecram by default if they are available (this has been a roaring success with not one error with not one problem reported by kanotix/klik users yet). There are two other main areas of Kanotix I am involved with (apart from testing new code or release candidates on some of the particular hardware or setup) and they are poor mans installs and netcardconfig.

For those who don’t know, a poor mans install of K*ix is where you essentially copy the cd contents to a hard disk and run K*ix from there rather then a cd/dvd. My involvement in this started with trying to add support for using ntfs filesystems for a poor mans install and also to use the iso image rather then having to unpack it. Between some hackery of my own, and discoveries of pieces others had put together (and help from FF again) I came up with a working solution for Knoppix but it would never be included in an official release. Knopper didn’t really see the need for it and certainly not enough to justify including the loop module into the initrd, let alone the ntfs module or even a trivial losetup FF wrote (the patch got pared down to not needing the ntfs module but using it if available and Fabians tiny-losetup was down to 3.2k). However implementing the patch into Kanotix was pretty trivial and only required additions kano was willing to make so the kanotix knoppix-autoconfig was patched and kanotix fromiso cheatcode was born. I subsequently sent a patch to morphix (which I believe was applied a lot later when it was noticed lurking in sourceforge though I’m sure I’d told alextreme on irc that it was coming) and wrote/booted it for dsl though they also didn’t seem interested.

When unionfs arrived on the scene and was heading for inclusion in kanotix, I thought I saw the need to allow a bit more flexibility in the cheatcodes and happily again Kano and I could agree on what to do. Kanotix three unionfs cheatcodes, a simple level of persitence (and modification of the main loopback filesystem), were born. Coming up to the latest release of Kanotix (2005-04), my hands in the cheatcodes and Poor Mans install features are to be seen again though this time with some additional cheatcodes to block out using individual config files along with a reordering of how these config files are implemented. It will run a config file on the cd before a user supplied config file, though the user can now stop the on cd config file by being run with the noconfigcd cheatcode.

A total case of scratching my own itch, when I heard Kanotix developer/packager slh grumble about it again, was merging the wlancardconfig code (which is a dialog based script to setup iwconfig) with netcardconfig (a dialog based script to ifconfig) and therefore including the wireless setup into the interfaces file. Along the way I added fixes and tweaks all over the place in response to feedback from Kano and kelmo (who does “wireless driver” work for kanotix) including the start of some wpa support. I wish I had more time to give to this in particular as I have a bunch of improvements to make, but for now they are still things I hope someone else will do, or which perhaps I should have tried to get started on instead of writing a blog post like this! As it is there is often a new change here or there to be included into this code as the state of wireless (let alone on Linux) is hardely stable.

During all this, I wanted one obvious and central location for the development of all the Knoppix-alike distros to take place. I wasn’t the only one with some sort of a vision in that direction so eventually, after annoying FF virtually every time I spoke to him for a long time, fullstory on berlios.de was eventually born to be such a place. FF sent the requests to berlios when he had finally decided that fullstory was the most suitable name from all the candidates I kept coming up with, I wish I had a log of all the names I came up. Slh was onboard from very early on and a repository layout was agreed along with a vague outline of what we were aiming to do. The first stage was to get a full working set of code in there and then to make changes across the board to try and bring a greater consistency and flexibilty (/etc/default/distro in Kanotix 05-04 is a sign of this, though the wholesale changes are only really planned to happen for the next kanotix release).

So I have 3 freenode irc channels I lurk on far too much, all slightly interconnected and all manned by the developers of all aspects of the systems involved which leads me to having a chance to both give my 2c on just about anything or to hear a problem I could fix and try and figure out if I really have the time/inclination to do it, like the netcardconfig, which I could then find myself lumbered with as long as I am willing to maintain and improve it.

By the way, lang=ga is in Kanotix 2005-04 … anyone who can meaningfully test an irish language locale could you? Let me know about any improvements which could/should be made! If you have _any_ use of an Irish language Live Linux please let me know about it … I may have something for you to test and you may be able to help me give you what you want!

I’ve chosen this theme as it was the first I found which didn’t seem to be broken in Firefox 1.0 (should upgrade but the whole os install is going in the bin soon) on Windows. Is that Firefox 1.0 or the themes fault? If I wasn’t too lazy I’d go try and find some more blogs on blogs.linux.ie but to digress again they aren’t listed on the linux.ie homepage for quite a while (or are they hiding and am I blanking them along with “GRANT OPTION”?

Ati and Nvidia have both released new binary drivers for Linux very recently and both were supported on Kanotix within hours of being first spotted. Both are trivially easy to install on Kanotix, whether you are running from an installed system or a compressed one (e.g. from LiveCD)

With Kanotix all you have to do is be online and run two scripts, first one updates the local scripts to the latest version, second one takes care of the complete driver install.

This is just one of the things Kanotix has gotten right (or at least as close not to matter imho), if you are having any hardware/driver problems I’d recommend it over Knoppix, especially for installations/laptops/amd64, but ymmv. Note that I don’t actually run these binary drivers myself, but do try out installing them every few months just to see if it’s still as easy (after the pain and suffering it took to get ati drivers up the first time I ever tried). For people who want to just play games (perhaps using cedega) and don’t care about the licensing of their drivers (or do but just want to play anyway) it couldn’t really get much easier.

For those who don’t know … Kanotix was fathered by Knoppix but from the outset diverged back towards a much purer Debian sid but with even more hardware support, especially wireless cards, (and in recent times has ventured a little into experimental e.g. for KDE 3.4.1). It takes the approach that if the only good/working way to support something is a non-free way it will try and make it easy (ndiswrapper, slmodem, java, ati/nvidia, unfortunately XP SP2 made a mess of captive-ntfs even if it was horrifically slow). It’s certainly not just Yet Another Knoppix Remaster, but perhaps it could reasonably be called _the_ Knoppix successor.

In an ideal world we could do as Debian are planning and ignore all this non-free code, but the facts are that in the real world some of these pieces are frequently needed, so if you just want to get going with the least fuss give Kanotix a whirl. Of all the non-free parts, the only optional one imho is sun-java, but hopefully we’ll be seeing a free java up to the task soon enough (and everyone trying changing now may help it get there).

BTW everyone’s favourite Ubuntu is now planning to use the Kanotix/Mepis model (live cd is the desktop install cd) for their next release, though I don’t know yet just what they are planning to do for this installer (vis-a-vis cloning the running system or installing a pristine system). For anyone who just can’t wait I have heard Kano say he would do a “Kanotix Ubuntu Edition” if the interested parties forked out a very reasonable sum (less then the price of one MS OS and Office Suite no matter what price you get them I suspect, though the MS employees reading this may be able to get Windows+Office cheaper)

Remember all this the next time your thinking of downloading Knoppix or you feel like trying a binary video driver (or ndiswrapper or …) without actually tainting a real system … Append (or insert) “unionfs” on the Kanotix grub boot command line to have a writable system (all changes get stored in ram, unionr[ow] to store them on a drive) and lang=ie to get an Irish keyboard/timezone/language setting and join #kanotix or freenode for answers to questions (or the forum via kanotix.com).

It’s all choice, it’s all good If you really want to you can try most of this on Knoppix, but ymmv in a way it won’t with Kanotix!

And if anyone wants to help write record the Kanotix Song let me know

You are a transport operator on the Enterprise. An away team of Linux, Gcc, Rpm and Gtk go to planet RedHat. When you are beaming them back, you notice that something has attached itself to the team. You have 2 choices, first you can pass the input stream through the medical filters and remove the item if it’s a problem (or if it fails to remove the problem put the team into isolation or back on the planet until you can determine if it’s a problem or not), or else you can let the problem in and wait and see what happens.

The analogy is bad because the transporters in Star Trek shouldn’t allow option 2 because you just can’t let unknown stuff in without risking the whole ship and crew.

I just had to write it somewhere eventually, but while we were at the RDS, I had no problem using our 433MHz 128M machine with Kanotix (05-02) installed to run KDE 3.4, Firefox, OpenOffice.org 1.1.X and OpenOffice.org 1.99.X simultaneously! The OpenOffice.org was taken from klik while the others are part of the normal installed system. Performance was not inspiring, but anyone who would actually try and run such bleeding edge software on such a limited spec machine would surely not have expected any more? Certainly it proved to me just how useful klik could be as we could fire up ooo2 without having to risk breaking a display machine.

For anyone curious, the other machines on the stand were, afair, a PIII 700 w/256M and an amd64 2GHz w/1GB plus some laptops I could tell you nothing about and the Sparc monster which I think would make an interesting coffee table

I like the title of Brandon Robinsons talk for debconf5 so much I’ve stolen it for the title of this blog! wtfm = Write The Freakin Manual

Speaking of which I added a description of the union* cheatcodes on Kanotix (and fromiso) to the Kanotix Wiki StartParameters. Short description, unionro and unionrw allow you to use any directory/partition/loopback file as a read-only or read-write layer on top of the cd. This allows persistence with unionfs, a really easy way to “remaster” a cd, perhaps to a dvd.

I have also been hacking on trying to use Fabian Franz’s sarge-unionfs as a basis for an file image which you boot (initrd mounts it), makes all changes in a unionfs snapshot, compress the unionfs snapshot on shutdown (to cloop/squashfs etc) and then on startup remount all compressed snapshots over the original system. At any stage backup and consolidation of snapshots can reduce disk space usage back down by bringing your system down to having a minimal amount of live duplication. I’d also hope to create a script for the snapshot so you could have a cron job create new snapshots while the system is running but I wonder if this will work out ok (can processes with open files for writing handle the underlying system switching to read-only).

Of course I got to a first basic test image (just adding the startup and shutdown code) and it fell over … why? Well I think it’s cause the kernel/initrd doesn’t support sata So it’s burn a cd or hook up Paul O’Malley’s 80G ide driver which I still haven’t given back to him since the RDS! Or maybe I can get it to run off my 256M usb key

I’ve just given up all roles in my cricket club after busting a gut for 2 years, and now you ask if I want to stand for the ILUG committee! I knew I was asking for it though!

Should linux.ie not act as a staging center for projects? An umbrella under which ideas can be formed, projects started and assistance sought. The documentation on the linux.ie site would be one such project, creating a (self?) moderated forum for irish linux technical support could be another. I could probably rattle off a dozen such ideas, some perhaps deviating further from the areas linux.ie/ilug has currently dabbled in, but as the use of linux has grown shouldn’t we?

Slashdot is reporting today that 27 Central Banks form the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group which was behind the alteration to Photoshop CS which prevents you from working on images on banknotes. The Irish Central Bank is a member of this organisation, and it is at least alleged that the EU is looking to bring in controls similar to this under a Directive. While it appears that initially the directive would be targetted at Hardware such as Scanners and Printers, it is another step towards EU mandated limitations on what computers can do. Will in criminalise Lego Mindstorms becuase you could use it to build a scanner? Would it criminalise SANE because it makes it easier for you to build your own scanner? I think someone with a better stomach for trying to piece together the sort of rubbish document they have put out needs to examine it more closely and summarise it to see if we have anything to start getting worried about. I think on principle I object to the idea though I wouldn’t want ILUG to be seen as defending Counterfeiters!

First blog!

about the only potentially interesting thing I have to say though is that I wonder if the windows source release that everyone is talking about will lead to another call to arms for linux.ie to defend the “community”? Why? Well the source was being held on a linux box, the company had the source because it had worked on porting IE and Media Player to unix (not Linux) and obviously this must all be the fault of anti-MS pro Open Source people who are either angry at MS for porting IE to unix, or angry at them for not porting it to linux or just plain terrorists!