Finnix Blog

In the next few days, I will be archiving and deleting older Finnix development snapshots. The space does add up; 7GB of snapshots since I started posting snapshots in February. If you have a need for an older snapshot, you should download it now.

The latest snapshot has been uploaded recently. It is mostly functional, with the biggest problem being some mount points/fstab entries are not being created automatically. NFS/TFTP booting is pretty stable, and has been confirmed working on the PPC platform. I will be writing documentation for NFS booting soon.

One day, Finnix will be “finished”, and I will be left with releasing updated ISOs every few months with a dist-upgrade and maybe a new kernel. Thankfully, that day hasn’t come yet.

First up, for post-88.0 development, the new codename is Oshkosh, a city of about 60,000, on the west side of Lake Winnebago. Oshkosh is the original home of OshKosh B’Gosh, a popular line of children’s clothing. Oshkosh is also home to the world’s busiest airport… for one week, that is. The EAA AirVenture Fly-In is a yearly gathering of experimental aircraft enthusiasts, and the single airfield handles 10,000 to 15,000 aircraft during the week-long show.

New builds are up on the snapshots server. Here are the major developments being worked on:

• udev support. The primary benefit of udev for Finnix is automatic generation of fstab entries. If you were to partition a hard drive, the new partitions will immediately show up in fstab, with /mnt directories created automatically.
• Network booting. Finnix is now capable of being booted via PXE/bootp, expanding the possiblities of a sysadmin in need. Additionally, a new script is available, finnix-netboot-server, which takes care of configuring and starting TFTP and NFS servers from within Finnix itself. All you have to do is add a few lines to your DHCP server’s config.
• toram and testcd functionality has been reverted back to its “classic” file-based operations. Block-based operation was nice, but the drawbacks outweighed the benefits.
• A new kernel is available on the x86 image, 2.6.17-3-x86-finnix, based on Debian’s 2.6.17-8, which is based on 2.6.17.11 vanilla. Nothing special, it was mainly to test a new kernel build method. Future releases will have Debian-style kernel source/header packages available, which will make it easier to compile 3rd-party modules and remaster the kernel portion.

I recently applied for registration of the Finnix trademark with the USPTO. Registration is a long process, and should be completed in 13 to 18 months. Of course this doesn’t mean that I am not allowed to use the name “Finnix” yet; rather, trademark registration is designed to give you more power in asserting ownership of a mark for specific purposes (in this case, use of the name “Finnix” relating to “computer software”, dating back to 1999).

If you have an even moderately popular open source project, I would strongly suggest looking into trademark registration. Registration is $275, but worth it, especially considering recent headlines. You can hire a lawyer to do the work for you, but the USPTO does have a relatively simple “self-service” application for registrations. I used their online tools for searching for existing trademarks (nothing comes even close to the name “Finnix”), and spent about an hour filling out paperwork.

Due to SourceForge problems, for 88.0 I secured primary mirroring with OSU Open Source Lab (thanks again!), and will not be using SourceForge for future releases. However, I am looking for secondary mirror sites. Here are the requirements:

• Decent connectivity (DS3 or higher)
• 24-hour availability (occasional maintenance downtime is fine, I’m talking about excluding “available 9-5″ sites)
• Enough storage space and aggregate transfer for future growth, see below
• Ability to rsync from the main archive at least daily

Here is how things are looking for the archive currently:

• 1.3GiB currently, growing at an average of 1.5GiB per year
• 200GiB transfer per month, should not exceed 400GiB per month in coming years
• Releases quarterly on average
• Mostly compressed content in archives
• Current archives can be browsed at http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/finnix/; “current” is a symlink to the current release directory

If you are interested in providing mirror services, please email ryan@finnie.org. Thank you very much.

Over the weekend, humorbot, the main x86 development machine for Finnix, suffered a hard drive crash. Thankfully, the crash wasn’t absolute, and I was able to mount the dev partition read-only and copy/verify the last generated dev ISO snapshot. (All snapshots are GPG-signed, which in times like this helped make sure there was no corruption on that particular file.) This, combined with a full backup made on the 2nd, meant that thankfully no development work was lost.

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 88.0 for the x86, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 88.0 features Linux 2.6.17, a faster, more complete hardware autodetection routine, DMA mode enabled by default, Broadcom 43xx support, a DOS boot profile, and NTFS write support. Linux 2.6.17’s new bcm43xx driver has been tested successfully on both G4 PowerBooks and x86 laptops with Broadcom cards, even with optional wpa_supplicant. FreeDOS ODIN, a 1.44MB image containing many DOS utilities may be booted by typing “dos” at the boot menu. The NTFS FUSE package, while present in Finnix 87.0, has been heavily tested, and seems to work rather well. Instead of mounting the normal way, simply type “ntfsmount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfsmount” to use the FUSE functionality.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_88.0_release_notes

P.S. Many thanks to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for providing primary Finnix release mirroring, after still-unresolved problems with SourceForge’s mirroring system. Thanks OSL!

P.P.S. This announcement is being made a day early, as I’m not confident I’ll have internet access tomorrow evening, and I’d rather release a day early than a day late.