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[Sisuite-announce] SystemImager 2.9.4 is Released, and 3.0.0 is Frozen and Almost Out!
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From: Brian E. F. <br...@bg...> - 2002-11-07 20:40:04
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Greetings and salutations, SystemImager(R) unstable 2.9.4 is released. This is a SystemImager 3.0 release candidate. This should not be considered stable software, and should not be used in a production environment. We need your help in making 3.0 a successful release. If you find bugs in this software, please report them via the bug tracker link at the bottom of the support page: http://systemimager.org/support/. Be sure to include the version number (2.9.4). Installation instructions --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian based distributions: 1) Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list. Be sure to include the second slash at the end -- that's not a typo. ;-) deb http://people.debian.org/~dannf/debian/systemimager/ / 2) Cut and paste the following commands: # On your Image Server(s) apt-get update apt-get install systemimager-server systemconfigurator or # On your Golden Client(s) apt-get update apt-get install systemimager-client systemconfigurator RPM based distributions: 1) Cut and paste the following commands: cd /tmp wget http://sisuite.org/installer.pl chmod +x installer.pl ./installer.pl -v -i -t devel If you get dependency errors, you may also need to install the following RPMs. These are the most common, but there may be others that your system requires: rsync You can find this RPM on your Linux installation media, or at http://rsync.samba.org/ perl-DBI You can find this RPM on your Linux installation media. perl-Tk You can find this RPM here: http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=perl-Tk perl-XML-Simple You can find this RPM here: http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=perl-XML-Simple What to expect from this development release, and from SystemImager 3.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following are some of the key features or modifications that will be included in the next stable release, SystemImager v3.0. * SIS (System Installation Suite) script for easy installation on RPM based distributions. Debian installation is still as easy as lickety-split! SystemImager is a component of System Installation Suite, and it is recommended that you install the entire suite. The entire suite includes SystemInstaller, SystemImager, and System Configurator. * Modular kernel * SCSI, file system, other drivers compiled as modules. * Network drivers compiled in statically. * Many more network drivers compiled in. * Gigabit Ethernet support on autoinstall clients. * "Module only" drivers can be used, including network drivers. * Allows a "complete" kernel to be provided with SystemImager * Makes it possible to add support for additional file systems much more easily. * USB keyboard support on autoinstall client machines. * addclients * now allows leading zeros for client host names * recommends the use of DNS instead of /etc/hosts * Hardware auto-detection * Necessary modules are automatically loaded. * devfs is used * Eliminates the need to keep up with device files for new block devices as they get added (Hardware RAID controllers for example). * Building of initrd.gz from source code happens faster. * tmpfs * BOEL(2) now uses tmpfs as its root file system. * Size constraint of files that can be copied to the in memory file system on autoinstall clients is effectively eliminated. See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for details. * Additional filesystems now supported. The complete list now includes: * ext2 * ext3 * FAT (12, 16, and 32 bit) * JFS * reiserfs * XFS * boel_binaries tarball * A single tarball of additional binaries (that don't fit on the autoinstall media) is now pulled over to autoinstall clients once network connectivity is achieved. * This tarball contains additional kernel modules and other binaries, such as mke2fs, mkraid, mkreiserfs, and their shared libraries. * Many additional features in BOEL including: * a "vi" editor * filename completion in the shell * syslogd * Auto-install clients can send their syslog messages to the image server, or to a separate logging server. * HP Smart Array 5xxx series * Support for the HP Smart Array 5xxx series of hardware RAID controllers has been added. These devices use /dev/cciss/* device files. * Other HP Smart Array controllers * Support for HP Smart Array controllers that use /dev/ida/* device files has been added. * IA64 * IA64 support has been added. * GPT (GUID Partition Table) support has been added. * Build environment * The entire SystemImager package can be built on any distribution. It is no longer limited to a hand modified version of a specific Debian release. * Debian rocks, and I will continue to use it as *my* development environment, but this will make it much easier for packaging into other distributions, and for maintaining past releases. * Dynamic Partitioning support * Giving users the ability to specify percentages or megabytes for partition schemes. * Easily change file system types used by an image. This will an image pulled from a golden client using ext2 to be deployed on a machine as XFS, for example. * Easily change destination disks. This will allow an image pulled from a machine with IDE disks to be installed on a machine with SCSI disks. * A single image can be used across machines using different drive types and different file system types. * netbootmond and mkclientnetboot * The ability to control which PXE enabled machines boot from the network, and when they boot. This will give the system administrator control over network booting so that a machine can be made to boot from the network for an autoinstall, but not boot from the network after completing the install. * The imageserver can be configured to make PXE enabled machines automatically boot off their own hard drives after successful completion of a PXE based SystemImager install. * This allows you to plug in your brand new machines (configured to use PXE at the factory) and simply turn them on. On the first boot, the SystemImager imageserver will install them, and on subsequent boots, it will tell them to boot off their own hard drives! Certainly it's not possible to include all improvements here, but as you can see, there have been quite a few. Many of them are structural changes that will significantly improve our ability to add support to SystemImager for new file systems, hardware, and architectures. And of course you will see a number of bug fixes. The 2.0.x series happened to be a particularly buggy series. Funding levels have increased, allowing me to concentrate more time and effort on SystemImager and I'm anticipating that v3.0 will be a very stable release. If you have other features or modifications that you would like to see, please submit a feature request (http://systemimager.org/support/) or contact <sa...@ba...> to commission development. If a feature you are interested in is already listed, please add a "ME TOO!" comment as a logged in SourceForge user. This will help us determine demand for certain features. Notes: 1. All of this is subject to change prior to release. 2. BOEL(TM) is Brian's Own Embedded Linux(TM). It is the embedded Linux used to autoinstall clients. Please feel free to forward this message on to other lists, or groups that use SystemImager and System Installation Suite (SIS). Cheers, -Brian -- --------------------------------------------------- Brian Elliott Finley http://baldguysoftware.com/ phone: 214.280.8188 http://systemimager.org/ --------------------------------------------------- |