Finnix Blog

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour…

The ISOs have been mastered, the CDs have been printed, the shirts have arrived, the birthday party clown has been reserved… well, maybe not that last part. Finnix 88.0 will be released Thursday, August 4, the evening before DEFCON 14 begins. Now, normally Finnix ISOs are mastered about 48 hours before release, but this release is different for several reasons:

• This release was timed to coincide with DEFCON 14. Again, I’m not giving a talk or anything this year, but it seemed like a good place and time to release a new Finnix.
• Around the 20th, I ran out of “things to do”. The builds were feature-complete and rather bug-free. It was a good time to freeze, which allowed for…
• Massive testing. Finnix 88.0 introduces some rather radical changes underneath the hood, and I wanted to allocate as much time as possible to testing.
• Because I’ll be at DEFCON, giving out CDs, I had to have CDs made before I left for Vegas. Printing and burning a stack of CDs takes time.

Mark your calendars!

Finnix 88.0 will have Bootchart support; “finnix bootchart” will start bootchartd, and stop it at the appropriate time. (Bootchart will look for key processes to determine when it’s “done”, such as getty or xinit. Finnix does not utilize either, so finnix-scripts must stop it manually at the end. Below is a (largeish) image, and some notes.
(Read on …)

CafePress is now selling black t-shirts. I’m not sure of the quality, but I ordered 2 to wear at DEF CON. If they are decent quality, I’ll put it on the Merchandise page.

Finnix has been confirmed as bootable on a MacBook Pro 2GHz, using rEFIt. Here are the finnix-hwsubmit results. Ethernet works on the latest development snapshot (kernel 2.6.17), but not on 87.0.

(Thanks, Nathan!)

In addition to an RSS feed, new Finnix development ISO builds are now being announced via the CIA system. The easiest way to see this is to join irc.freenode.net #commits.

News from the development front…

First, a clarification about codenames. Namely, they will only be used during development. Currently, the daily builds are tagged as “Finnix version dev (Pulaski)”, with “Pulaski” indicating “after 87.0 release, but before 88.0″. When 88.0 is released, it will simply be called “Finnix version 88.0″.

As you may have heard 2 sentences ago, yes, the next version will be numbered 88.0. The vitals are looking like the following: Linux 2.6.17 (as of this writing, Debian’s 2.6.17-2), UnionFS 1.3 (no more CVS snapshots…), SquashFS 3.0. Finnix 88.0 will look a great deal like 87.0, but behind the scenes, a LOT has been done. As I mentioned before, PCI module autodetection has been completely rewritten to be much faster, “toram” and “testcd” are now more effective (in particular, “testcd” now tests the entire CD on a block level), Xen is now completely supported (both as a domU and now as a dom0, though no dom0 kernels will be distributed with the CD), and more.

I have finalized on which DOS disk I will be using for the “dos” profile. It is FreeDOS ODIN 0.7, which is essentially the DOS floppy equivalent of a LiveCD. I got the idea of including DOS after using a Caldera DR-DOS utility disk image that comes with Nero Burning ROM. Obviously I can’t distribute DR-DOS, and FreeDOS itself does not directly distribute a non-installation disk, but thankfully I came across ODIN. It works just like the DR-DOS utility disk, even better in some places, and is only 900k compressed.

In non-development news, I have migrated some services from Sourceforge to in-house. The mailing list and bug system is gone, replaced by a forums system. Older news items have been backported from Sourceforge into the “Announcements” section of the blog, and the home page now points to this instead of Sourceforge. (New version announcements will continue to be copied to Sourceforge.) I am currently looking at integrating the snapshots system to announce to CIA.

Oh, I guess you are wondering when 88.0 will be released. I’m thinking early August at this point, coinciding with DEF CON, which I will be attending for the 4th year. Nothing official, but I’ll probably be handing out stacks of CDs. Let me know if you plan on attending.

If 4 months between releases is not good enough for you, remember that there are always the snapshots, which are almost always (but not guaranteed to be) stable. Right now the uploads are triggered manually, every weekday or so. (I have many machines at work that I can test on, so I usually start uploading before I leave for work, download from work, then test.) So, at this point, if I uploaded it, it’s a pretty good indication I expect it to at least boot.