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Article posted on Jan 8

Finnix 86.2 Released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 8, 2006, 2:35 am

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 86.2 for the x86, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 86.2 contains several new features, including Linux kernel 2.6.15, improved hardware detection (using data from Fedora Core 4), improved reliability when booting from USB CDROM and thumb devices, and an expanded general-purpose task utility, aptly named "finnix". In addition, Finnix may now be installed and run directly from a hard drive. The ISO size has also been reduced, from 100MiB to 92MiB on the x86 platform, without any loss of functionality.

Home page
SourceForge page
Download: x86, PowerPC
Release notes

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 7

Another minor iMystery solved

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 7, 2006, 7:49 pm

On Wednesday, I brought a dev copy of Finnix-PPC to work to try out on the Macs there. I have a G4 tower and a G4 mini at home, which this copy both worked great on. But at work, we have a G3 iMac and a G4 MDD "Windtunnel", and I like to test on as much hardware as possible. The G3 worked fine (if slow; IIRC, it's a 6MHz proc with 24Kb of memory), but Finnix could no longer find the CDROM drive on the Windtunnel, even though 86.1 could boot just fine.

After some digging, I found that the CDROM drive was on /dev/hde, which Finnix did not have an entry in /dev for. This made me say "well how did this work in 86.1?", but I did not have an 86.1 PPC disc handy. Nonetheless, this led to a bug fix and a feature enhancement: adding more /dev entries to the initrd and "three strikes and you're on your own", respectively.

Before, if the Finnix initrd could not find its CD boot device, you were screwed. You would be dropped down to an ash shell, but there was no way to continue the process if you found a fix. "Three strikes and you're on your own" was a solution to a combination of this and some USB enhancements/fixes I made for 86.2; namely, some USB devices will take longer to "settle down" than the 5 seconds Finnix gives it before it starts mounting and checking for a compressed image. If Finnix does not find an image on the first time, it will wait 10 seconds, then try again. This process repeats 3 times. If Finnix still cannot find the image, it gives the user a "you're on your own" warning, and drops the user down to a shell. However, if the user can deduce why Finnix did not find the image, he can manually mount the device to /ramdisk/cdrom, and when he exits from the shell, Finnix will continue on, assuming it successfully mounted the image.

As for why Finnix-PPC worked on the Windtunnel on 86.1, but the dev copy didn't work? The Windtunnel has 3 IDE channels. In kernel 2.6.14, ide0 contained the hard drive (hda), ide1 contained the CDROM drive (hdc), and ide2 had no devices. In 2.6.15, the location of ide1 and ide2 swapped for some reason, so now the CDROM drive is detected as being on hde. Adding /dev/hde* to the initrd (and many more devices, just in case) fixed the problem.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 6

86.2 coming... soon

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 6, 2006, 4:05 pm

After 86.1 was released in November, I made some feature changes over the course of the next few weeks, wrote a kernel build system (I'm up to 5 kernels that need to be compiled for each Finnix release), and then sat and waited for Linux 2.6.15 to be released, which was one of my goals for 86.2.

Well, 2.6.15 is released, and 86.2 is... almost out. I had the build system going about 2 hours after the kernel was released on monday evening, and the plan was to finish the builds, test for a day, and release. Well, the kernels work fine, but I found a few bugs with Finnix itself. Then I fixed those. Then it reminded me of a feature that I wanted to implement. Then another bug cropped up. Then more new functionality. And so on, and so on...

The good news is I have put a freeze on new functionality, and will be regression testing over the weekend. (A lot of combinations can crop up. For example, testing booting a UML guest off a server booted from a USB thumb drive using the "toram" option. Yeah, those kind of combinations.) If all goes well, 86.2 should be released Monday... or Tuesday.

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 1

New website, remaster guide, upcoming release

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 1, 2006, 11:18 pm

To celebrate the new year, a new website has been launched. This site uses MediaWiki, and includes all content from the previous site. Since it is a wiki, if you have any info to add, just go ahead and edit!

In addition, a remaster guide has been posted. This guide shows you how to quickly edit Finnix to suit your needs.

"Hey, it's been over a month without a release! Are you going to take another 5 year vacation!" No, 86.2 is coming along well. All of my desired changes have been completed, I'm just waiting for Linux 2.6.15 to go gold. The 2.6.15-rc builds are working out very well, so a Finnix release will probably be made right after 2.6.15 is released.

New Finnix website: http://www.finnix.org/
Finnix Remaster Guide: http://www.finnix.org/Remastering_Finnix

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix