MCNLive Kris BETA, Beta testers wanted! opties

[HighKing]

MCNLive Kris - BETA

After a few years of silence around MCNLive, here we are again with a brand new MCNLive release, based on Mandriva 2010.0!

It won't have all the nice features you might remember from MCNLive, but the most important things are there. Copy2ram is present, remastering on-the-fly is possible again and even booting from USB is no problem at all!

Note that the way MCNLive is put on an USB stick has slightly changed. There is no wizard for this anymore, but you can simply dd the iso image to your stick, just like Mandriva One. You should even be able to use Mandriva Seed to put the image on your stick!

As I said, there are things which we didn't got running (which doesn't mean it won't return in a next release, just not on "Kris"). For example persistent changes with a loopfile are not possible. Also the boot screens are not graphical (the boot menu still is though).

Since you need a lot more memory to run Mandriva 2010.0 with KDE 4.3 then you needed to have in order to run Mandriva 2007.1 with KDE 3.5, we added a bootoption 'useswap', which searches your drive for swap partitions and enables them, giving you some more space to breathe in.


The name "Kris"
Kris is offcourse the nickname of the original MCNLive maintainer, so in some way this can be seen as a tribute to her work. On the other hand, a kris or keris can be a weapon, which is processed in the wallpaper.




ISO contents
MCNLive Kris is based upon a fully updated Mandriva 2010.0 release, with KDE SC 4.3 as desktop environment. SMplayer is added for your multimedia needs and since we do have a remaster option, we added K3B to enable you to burn the remaster directly.

Firefox is the default web browser but you can use Konqueror from the menu if you wish.

As you see, "Kris" is not filled with loads of software, but since you are able to remaster it you can easily create your own version with the pieces of software you need.


Beta testing
While most should work fine, it can perfectly be that it won't work on your hardware. Besides you might find some issues we haven't found ourselves. If you run into problems running "Kris", please let us know by replying in this topic. Please do not reply with "it doesn't work", but try to ground your reply. One small side note: if your hardware doesn't work on Mandriva One, it probably won't on MCNLive either.

In case of hardware problems, the output of this command can be very helpful:

CODE

lspcidrake -v

Putting "Kris" on USB
As said, you should be able to use Mandriva Seed, but if you're not affraid to use the command-line you can easily use the dd-command. Note that you put the image over the whole stick, not on a partition so you lose all contents of the stick!

CODE

dd if=mcnlive-kris-beta1.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M && sync

Where you change sdX into the device of your choice. Please be careful selecting the right device or you might overwrite your harddrive.


Download
You can download the beta on one of these mirrors:
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/man...l/mcnlive/Kris/
ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/m...l/mcnlive/Kris/


Update 03-18-2010:
The second beta has hit the mirrors!

Most important changes since the first beta:
- Mounting local partitions when using copy2ram has been fixed.
- The remaster script now checks if there is a partition for the temp files before going on.
- The vesa bootoption now places a default xorg.conf when none was written by drakx11.
- Antialias settings have been fixed.
- Allowed root login through KDM.

[PeterM]

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05947

[HighKing]

[MauRice]

Ook bij MIB...
http://mib.pianetalinux.org/mib/forum/view...?f=2&t=1887

MauRice

[RvP]

[RvP]

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05947

They still use the original M-logo. Can someone help them to the new 'celluloid' Kris-logo?

[kris]

* My crap on board video chip needs the vesa boot option, since the xorg nv driver doesn't work (same problem on MDV Free 2010.0)

nvidia nForce 630i [DISPLAY_VGA] (vendor:10de device:07e2 subv:1462 subd:7504)

Commercial nvidia driver does work, but not included in this version.

* The 'root' password is: root
(you need this for installing and un-installing software and for settings)
* The 'live' password is: live
( if you logout and login again)

* Works nicely in VirtualBox, with 512 MB RAM

* GUI Remaster-on-the fly doesn't see and doesn't offer my NTFS partition (in VirtualBox), not able to remaster using GUI script.
Command line remaster works, NTFS partition is mounted RW by default after the start. This command worked:
# mkhotmedia -t /mnt/sda1 -o mnt/sda1/output-file.iso

(with 512 MB RAM assigned to the VM, and very little changes made, mostly changing KDE settings to save RAM, and uninstalling stuff, remaster took 6 minutes.)

* The fonts setting are unfortunately still in subpixel hinting: medium style, and not in NONE.
After my remaster they use the correct settings.

______________________
P.S.: I'm flattered. Thanks for the MCNLive *Kris* . It's sweet.

[Tux Brothers]

______________________
P.S.: I'm flattered. Thanks for the MCNLive *Kris* . It's sweet.

You deserve it !!!

[isadora]

Good job. Nice to read reactions from "all over the world".

[HighKing]

They still use the original M-logo. The new can someone help them to the new 'celluloid' Kris-logo?

What new logo do you mean?

[HighKing]

* GUI Remaster-on-the fly doesn't see and doesn't offer my NTFS partition (in VirtualBox), not able to remaster using GUI script.

What is the output of this command on your system?

CODE

df -T -m

[kris]

What is the output of this command on your system?

CODE

df -T -m

CODE

[live@localhost ~]$ df -T -m
Filesystem    Type   1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
none       unionfs         251       162        90  65% /
/dev/sda1  fuseblk       10229      2739      7491  27% /mnt/sda1
[live@localhost ~]$

[HighKing]

Ah, so your ntfs partition is identified as type 'fuseblk', that explains why the script can't find it as it greps on ext and ntfs.

This is line 26 of /usr/sbin/mkhotremaster:

CODE

partitions=$(for partition in `df -T -m | grep "ext\|ntfs" | awk '{ print $7 }' | grep [0-9]`; do

Can you change the line to this:

CODE

partitions=$(for partition in `df -T -m | grep -i "ext\|ntfs\|fuseblk" | awk '{ print $7 }' | grep [0-9]`; do

And then retry?

[kris]

I replaced 'ntfs' with 'fuseblk' in the script (I believe we don't need 'ntfs', df identifies RW ntfs-3g partitions not as ntfs), and it works!
Solved

[HighKing]

Ok. Did the same on my original file, so this error will be gone in the next version.

[mzee]

After such a long time : was despairing ...

Let me first say 'Hello' to Chris. Glad you are still there.

Also : 'Thank you' for providing this MCNLive Kris BETA. Thank you very much indeed.

Am writing now from within MCNLive Kris. So this is not too bad!!!

Will use it for a couple of days and let you have my comments then.

Just one question now: can I install it as ISO on a hard disk ( "frugal" or "poor man's install")? What would be the grub entry then?

Thank you. And all the best with this nice piece of work.

[HighKing]

You can do a normal installation, see the "Live install" icon on the desktop. As far as I know it is not possible to simply place the iso on disk and boot that.

[RvP]

What new logo do you mean?

THE Kris-wallpaper.

[HighKing]

I don't see a new logo in that wallpaper... but maybe my eyes are bad (oh yes they are! ).

[Tux Brothers]

When i do a remaster in the "copy 2 ram" mode it creates a iso file of 8 MB
Also i can not choose a temp directory....