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Article posted on Jan 30

The future is now!

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 30, 2006, 2:31 am

So, I just found out about this new peripheral called a "mouse". Appearantly you no longer have to be confined to using a light pen; instead, you move a rodent-shaped device over your desk, and a triangle-shaped cursor mimics your moves on the compuscreen. Quite a radical idea...

Anyways, somebody used finnix-hwsubmit to submit a report that said everything worked fine, but there was no mouse support. Now, normally I don't use the mouse that often (on the desktop I use fluxbox, which is rather keyboard-friendly), so I didn't even consider gpm support for Finnix. Plus, with kernel 2.4, it used to be annoying setting up mouse support (PS2 port vs USB, PS2 vs ImPS2 protocol, etc), but kernel 2.6 makes it a lot easier. Now, everything is routed through /dev/input/mice, which simulates an ImPS2 device.

I haven't begun coding yet, but I have an idea of what should be done to get gpm working in Finnix. Load the base mousedev module, start gpm, load psmouse module, then usbmouse if USB was detected earlier. And of course, there will also be a "nomouse" boot option.

I'm not sure when the next version of Finnix will be released. I think I'm going to say mid- to late-March, or when 2.6.16 is released, whichever comes first.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 28

Works great, less filling

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 28, 2006, 11:27 pm

After completing LVM2 autodetection last week, I took a step back and looked at the boot process as a whole. I determined one thing: there is too much information being displayed during bootup. Of course, things like the amount of system memory and what swap partitions have been activated are important. But things like creating the unionfs partition happens during every boot, and only takes a matter of milliseconds. So, I have removed such lines from the final display. However, these status messages still display, the line is just cleared after successful completion. Below is an example of a normal bootup. Click the image to expand.

Notice that the new LVM autodetection is not displayed, because no LVM groups have been found. Compare the previous screenshot to this screenshot on an LVM system:

I also managed to get rid of the "INIT: version 2.86 booting" message using an ANSI trick: clear the line, move up a row, and clear the line.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 28

Purdy site “redesigns”

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 28, 2006, 5:29 pm

www.finnix.org now has a minor facelift, because as somebody mentioned, the default color scheme made you momentarily think you were on Wikipedia. The new design is still basically Monobook (Wikipedia's default skin), but now has a unmistakable blue theme at the top.

Additionally, the blog has a new theme that... kinda fits in with the rest of the site.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 21

New content on Finnix CDs in the store

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 21, 2006, 11:00 pm

In order to justify using a 700MB CDR to burn a 100MB distro (and possibly the $6 price tag), Finnix CDs bought through the store now include over 300MB of extra content not included with the downloadable version. This includes all packages needed to install Debian "sarge" via debootstrap, as well as stage 1, 2 and 3 Gentoo tarballs. Now you can effectively install either Debian or Gentoo without ever going out to the Internet.

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 20

Yes, those are ads.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 20, 2006, 7:00 pm

I added a small Google AdWords block to the top-right of the wiki. I did this because 1) the extra money would be nice, and 2) I had an AdWords account sitting idle. It seems to blend in well and should be relatively unintrusive, but if you have any suggestions, let me know. Today's Earnings: $0.32 Woo! I'm almost up to a free stamp!

If you are interested in doing something similar on your MediaWiki site, I wrote a short blurb about how I did it.

(Ironically, most of the ads I've seen so far has been for Knoppix and Xandros.)

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 20

LVM is coming to town

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 20, 2006, 12:09 am

It sees you when you're fscking, it knows /dev/hda... OK, bad joke.

One of the primary reasons for the re-incarnation of Finnix was LVM2 support. This came in the form of "apt-get install lvm2", and suited my purposes (if you knew you were on an LVM system, activating the volumes was as easy as "/etc/init.d/lvm start"), but I always meant to get around to making it a part of startup autodetection. In the next release, that will be possible. It'll scan for volumes, add to /etc/fstab and create a /mnt point (just like a normal scanned partition), and activate any LVM swap volumes. And of course there will be a "nolvm" flag, in case you want to shave 6/10ths of a second of bloat off the boot process for non-LVM systems.

[*] Scanning for LVM volumes... VolGroup00/LogVol00 VolGroup00/LogVol01
[*] Scanning for partitions and creating /etc/fstab... done
[*] Activating swap... VolGroup00/LogVol01
...
root@tty1:~# mount /mnt/VolGroup00/LogVol00
root@tty1:~#

This is real (not a mockup), but has had roughly 90 seconds of testing so far. Also: Fedora's default naming scheme for LVM volumes is boring, but there's not much Finnix can do about that.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 18

Disappearing CDs

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 18, 2006, 7:53 pm

I have found that Finnix CDs tend to disappear slower at work when they are of the the "300dpi full color" variety, as opposed to the "$.10 CDR with sharpie" variety.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 18

Finnix 86.2 on Linode

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 18, 2006, 10:06 am

The 86.2 update has been successfully tested on Linode, and I've been told it should be deployed to all hosts this evening. With 86.2, UML/Xen detection is now automatic, and you no longer need the "uml" or "xen" boot parameter (though it doesn't hurt anything if you leave it in).

If you are a UML/Xen provider, and want to offer Finnix as a recovery/sysadmin distribution, see this page, or drop me a line (ryan@finnie.org) and I can help you get it integrated with your platform.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jan 15

Two small updates: finnix-scripts, finnix-3ware-install

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 15, 2006, 12:26 am

A typo has been found in the finnix-hwsubmit program (included in finnix-scripts) that prevents the output of "lspci -vvn" from being included with the report. If you use finnix-hwsubmit (and if not, why aren't you?), you will want to do an "apt-get update" and "apt-get install finnix-scripts" before submitting.

Additionally, a small package called finnix-3ware-install has been released. At work, we have a great number of machines with 3ware SATA RAID controllers in them, and using the 3ware CLI management program (tw_cli) can be handy. Unfortunately, the CLI is binary-only and closed-source[0x01], so it cannot be directly distributed with Finnix. Instead, I have created a script (that comes in the finnix-3ware-install package) that shows you the 3ware EULA, then downloads and installs it automatically. If you want to use this package, "apt-get update", then "apt-get install finnix-3ware-install". Enjoy!

[0x01] Why? 3ware's drivers are GPL, and the 3ware developers work with the kernel.org people so the drivers included with vanilla Linux kernels are usually identical to the version that 3ware distributes itself. However, the array management tools are closed-source.

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 12

On August 29, 2007, Finnix became self-aware.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 12, 2006, 8:14 pm

I'm currently running Finnix 86.2 on a "modest" new system I built for work, a Supermicro 6024H-T, dual Xeon 3.6GHz, 8GB memory[0x01], and 6 400GB SATA drives attached to a 3ware 9550sx controller. Everything works great, which is quite puzzling considering it automatically found both the 3ware controller and the onboard Marvell SATA controller, neither of which are in the pcitable database yet. Yet somehow hwsetup determined the correct modules to load for each controller. I'll have to dig through the hwdata source to figure out HOW.

[0x01] Finnix's kernel does not include PAE support, because that tends to cause problems on machines with less than 4GB of memory installed (IE, most installations these days). Finnix is stable and usable on this machine, but the kernel only sees 4GB out of 8GB.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix