Finnix Blog

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 89.0 for the x86 (and now AMD64), PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 89.0 features Linux 2.6.18, a new “finnix64″ AMD64 boot profile, netboot support with a built-in netboot setup wizard, MD RAID and LUKS crypt autodetection.

AMD64 support

An AMD64 kernel is now included on the Finnix x86 CD. To use this kernel on an AMD64/EM64T machine, type “finnix64″ at the boot prompt. While the Finnix userland is still 32-bit, using an AMD64 kernel on a supported platform yields several advantages:

• More than 4GB memory can be utilized natively.
• Statically-compiled AMD64 applications can be executed.
• You can chroot into native 64-bit AMD64 filesystems.

This addition gives a total of 6 supported kernel environments: x86, AMD64, PowerPC, PPC64, User Mode Linux, and Xen.

Netboot support

Finnix can now be booted via a network. A NFS server export is set up with the Finnix files in it, and the kernel and initrd are served to the user via TFTP. The Finnix CD contains a utility called finnix-netboot-server, which allows one Finnix instance to serve as a NFS/TFTP server for a Finnix netboot instance.

RAID/LUKS autodetection

Previous Finnix installations would detect and automatically set up LVM volumes. Finnix 89.0 goes two steps further with autodetection for md-based software RAID arrays, and LUKS-based dm-crypt encrypted partitions. Software RAID arrays are set up automatically if all array parts are found, while LUKS partitions are set up if the user types in a valid decryption password for each partition.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_89.0_release_notes

The final touches are being applied to Finnix 89.0, and will probably be released within a week. Currently I’m waiting on an update for Memtest86+: 1.70 was released this weekend, but a chipset detection flaw has forced them to announce a release of 1.71 (with the fix) “within a week”. This gives me time to do some final testing and finish up a few of the non-development things that need to be done before a release.

Two of the most annoying non-development tasks are actually graphics and GPL compliance. Graphics are pretty self-explanatory: make a boot banner, CD art, etc. GPL compliance basically means I have to gather the source packages for every binary package in the release, burn them to CD, and throw that CD in my document safe for the next 3 years. Of course, nobody has actually asked for these sources yet (when you can just go to http://snapshot.debian.net and download specific versions yourself), but I do have to keep the sources around, just in case snapshot.debian.net were to disappear one day and someone needed sources to a particular package. The impetus is on me to provide these sources ultimately.

I got my hands on a couple Mac Pro quad-core (in reality, 2 dual-core Xeons) machines at work this week, and got Finnix to work on them, kinda. rEFIt found Finnix just fine, but the kernel would freeze when trying to mount the CDROM disc. “nodma” didn’t work either. My next attempt was to boot from a USB CDROM drive. Once again, rEFIt found the USB CDROM drive and Finnix disc, but isolinux would fail halfway though loading the kernel image from CD. I eventually booted by putting a copy of Finnix in the onboard CDROM drive, and another in the USB CDROM drive, then booting the onboard CDROM and typing “finnix root=/dev/sr0″. The problem seems to be kernel-related; hopefully 2.6.18 helps with this.

Core Duo Mac Minis and Core Duo Macbook Pros boot fine, however. I would assume the Core Solo variants work fine as well. I’ve also been able to boot Finnix successfully and easily on several non-Mac Core Duo laptops, as well as the latest and greatest Athlon X2 systems.

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Development is coming along well. In addition to udev and netbooting support, the next Finnix will support autodetection of dm-crypt/LUKS partitions, and md software RAID sets. Additionally, I am 99% sure I will be including an AMD64 kernel (bootable as “finnix64″ instead of “finnix”) along with the normal 586 kernel. There are two main reasons for doing this:

• Current x86 Finnix kernels are not PAE enabled, which means they cannot utilize more than 4GB RAM. This is done because PAE tends to be problematic on hosts with 4GB RAM or less. Native 64-bit kernels (on an AMD64/EM64T CPU, of course) have a much higher limit (petabytes?). Granted, the average machine still has less than 4GB RAM these days, but I have had to use Finnix on 6GB/8GB machines before. (Non-PAE kernels still boot, they just display the installed RAM as 4GB.)
• While the Finnix userland will still be 32-bit, booting a 64-bit kernel will allow you to run static-compiled 64-bit programs, and more importantly, chroot into pure 64-bit environments. This will become increasingly important as more and more distros offer native AMD64 userlands as an option (Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, and soon Debian).

However, another kernel means a larger distro. In order to cut down on size, I have decided to remove the finnix-uml package (AKA Finnix-on-Finnix) from the main distribution. Finnix-on-Finnix was created as a way to prototype and test Finnix virtualization support (by acting as both the host and guest, you test two birds with one stone), and virtualization support has proven to be incredibly stable the last few releases. However, once a Finnix release is gold, Finnix-on-Finnix itself becomes little more than a novelty, which very few people use, and takes up previous megabytes. The finnix-uml package will still be maintained and available in the apt repository, so it is little more than an “apt-get install finnix-uml” away if you still want to use it.

After all is said and done, it’s looking like the final compressed distro size will be about 110MiB after adding the AMD64 kernel. While still much lower than the project’s target ceiling of 185MiB, I had been trying to keep x86 under the magical 100MiB number. Oh well.

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.

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!