0ca51c9d2e0cf2453fc971bfac15c1aa lente-beta1.iso

Download: ftp://ftp.belnet.be/pub/mirror/urpmidev.m...nlive/xTesting/
Screenshot: http://home.tiscali.nl/berenstraat/lentemcnl.jpg

Please:
* control the md5sum
* burn on low speed

Info about this beta version:

* Mandriva Cooker (2007.1 Spring beta)
* A test kernel, not yet the final
* not yet the final drakxtools (-> hardware detection)
* 3D desktop with Intel and ATI cards only, activate it via Menu --> MCNLive, choice is: Cube (AIGLX) with beryl, or Metisse (no commercial drivers, no XGL, no compiz)

A new bootcode: vesa
(just: vesa, not: livecd vesa)
* For computers which can't boot graphical with automatic video card config
* For booting with VirtualBox and VMware

At the initial bootscreen hit F1, at the boot prompt type: vesa
It will disable the MDV hardddrake and start the (old) mklivecd hardware detection and additional will write a static xorg.conf, video driver: vesa, standard monitor, screen resolution 1024x768, standard mouse.

Draklive-install (Install to HD) and Create Live USB (USB key setup) are tested but would need more testing.

Remaster-on-the fly: one rpm is missing, my fault. You need to add it:


You might run into software sources problems when adding software - it's cooker and sometimes the sources are gaga.

Help us to find bugs, in particular hardware issues, booting, screen/resolutions, wireless network ...
Or leave a comment on which hardware it works

--chris

Again a great job Chris !
Thanks!

Great! What are some new features of this version apart from featuring the new Mandriva 2007.1 kernel and the vesa boot code?

I booted with the live cd on a Dell Optiplex GX280, which has a pentium 4 (HT) proc with onboard, integrated graphics (i845 or something like that). Anyway, the boot from cd was pretty fast, I was surprized about it.
All my hardware was autodetected and loaded correctly. It even recognized the correct flatscreen panel.
KDE loaded and I was surprized with the beautiful and attractive desktop.
Browsing the menu and loading software was quite fast. I also browsed through the MCC and desktop setup and everything worked very well.
I tried 3D desktop, but I only could work with Cube with Beryl. When selecting Metisse, it auto-switched back to cube, even after a fresh reboot. So here, something might be wrong, or i don't have the right graphix card (that's why I mention it in the first sentence of this post).

All in all, I like this product very much.
I will look into live-usb and such later, I will not have time for this today nor tomorrow.

Cheers,
and congrats!

Davy

Woow thanks, i'm going to download the iso right now. Maybe i'm gonna use it for my presentation about virtualisation, on the MCNL meeting.

Okay, i tried to install the live-cd on my harddisk, but at the bootloader config tool, I tried to add my ubuntu install, so i pressed the add button and fill in the required fields, pressed the add button again, but the whole install wizard disappeared (and the bootloader isn't installed). Do you know about this bug Kris?

The software VirtualBox is not included, doelman. But you could use this beta perfectly to demonstrate an install to a virtual box image on a harddisk - with the vesa boot code.

@Adrian: it is a new Mandriva version, all software upgraded, not only the kernel.
No earthshattering new features yet, just live usb, install to hd, copy2ram, remastering etc.

No, did not know.

What I saw yestreday in cooker, that they made fixes in the drak tools for grub and also changes in draklive-install to handle grub better. Of course this is not yet in our beta version. Next one.

Can you describe how the menu.lst looked after the install died?

Yes, the menu.lst only included the "automatic detected" installations, just my Windows installation, and the new mcnlive installation. So, my personally added ubuntu partition is not included AND grub-install did not run.

Okay. I hope that this will be fixed in the next beta. Thx, Roeland. I hope you still have a booting system.

(For saturday I will try to make a special version with virtualbox)

Ow yes, i still have a booting system. I'm familiar with fixing bootloaders using chroot from within a live-cd for example.
And if i didn't had a booting system, it was my own fault because i used a "beta" live cd on my work laptop

Woow, would be nice, but if you don't have enough time I can still use the VirtualCity version, or an installed system with VirtualBox included.

Thanks davo !!

Right, I messed up Metisse. It's all my fault. I changed the config tool and did something stupid. Your system will perfectly be able to use metisse. I will fix that, in the next version. If you have it already installed I'll post the changed file, later tonight.

Yes, i also had lots of troubles (slow down etc.) with "cube", and when i choosed Metisse, X won't startup.

in my case (see above), I had no slowdown what so ever - even with beryl the system remained bleeding fast, it's incredible. But i still have to test tonight on my p4 laptop with radeon 7000 mobile, we'll see what that does.

X started up after choosing Metisse, although I got some obscure X error and X started with Beryl.



@Kris: thanks a lot for looking into this. I'll test it again after you update it.

Kris,

hate to be a pest, especially since youve probably already addressed this and i missed it, but what made you decide to leave the Virtualbox sw out?

or was the Virtual City a seperate development path, and this new release is for the main MCNL?

either way, youre doing amzing things,

thanks

j

You sure are not a pest, Jerome. Welcome in the beta section :-)

Usually our first beta is only about the basic hardware detection and to assure that our main features are working, like Live USB, copy2ram, remaster-on-the-fly, install to harddisk.
The software included mostly is a decision of 'space' - bad news is, that MDV cooker/Spring 2007.1 needs much more space than VirtualCity - mainly because of the dependencies of Metisse and Beryl.

I even think of creating two different editions. Because it just doesn't fit all in ~385 MB (the max. to keep the copy2ram for people with 512 MB RAM).

Maybe I can have some feedback about this decision. I thought of:
* one fun version (with 3D desktop, beryl, compiz metisse - and without virtualbox, without KOffice)
* one version with VirtualBox and an Office suite (and without this 3D stuff and all the gtk and gnome libraries)

What do you all think?

PS: btw .. the next final MCNLive will be of course not a cooker version, but get released after the official MDV 2007.1 spring.
(This pre-beta was also meant for the NL and BE meeting of MCNL on saturday).

Your basic questions about VirtualBox: the software VirtualBox OSE will be officially part of the next Mandriva edition. So, it will be very easy to add it even we don't include it. But I need to wait for the official kernel to do this.

Well, we had this discussion a while back about creating a basic MCNLive without anything, besides a small windowmanager. People could use this as a starting point for building a custom version, like adding KDE, GNOME, OOo, or whatever they want.

So yes, a fun version would be nice, and a very basic one also, with juist KDE or XFCE or WINDOWMAKER.

I gave up on the idea of a very basic one. Xfce meanwhile is even big as KDE when you try to include some applications - and even worse, the RAM usage is worse than KDE because you need Firefox as browser. We don't gain much.
The main problem building a live cd based on Mandriva is .... the Mandriva Control Center. It is gtk based and has a lot of perl and gnome (even python) dependencies. MCC + dependencies in the already compressed' iso is ~ 80-100 MB, and you just can't get rid of it, not with windowmaker, not with xfce. The second big issue are drivers/firmware/codecs/flash - do they belong to a basic version, if yes, byebye to a small iso.

A very cool option would be a system without the (graphical) MCC, without rpmdrake --- but then, I have no clue if the hardware detection would still work (drakxtools).

To put it the other way around: why not create a very BIG one? Lots of usb-pendrives are 2GB nowadays. A moment ago I created an image with the size of 714 MB. It cannot be larger, because you have to burn it to cd first. It would be nice to build an option to create an image directly to usb-pendrive, so the image could be larger than ~700MB.

(You can burn a bigger image on a DVD )

It already exists, Mandriva One, in various editions, gnome, kde, free, non-free, various languages. And if I am not mistaken, the next version has a way to put it on a usb key :-) This feature already exists for Mandriva One since a year - but it is not advertised because draklive was a bit broken.

I still like the idea of a small footprint, for people with 512 MB usb keys and the copy2ram feature -- we would loose it with a big iso.

But I would not mind if someone would publish a big remaster

Indeed, my remaster ISO is 925 MB large and I don't bother burning it to DVD . So I wrote a little script to remaster directly to USB (conditions of use are listed in the first dialogue - it only copies the livecd.sqfs file). Maybe people can give comments and improve it and something like it could be included in future MCNlive version.

I think it would be great to have an MCNlive version with Openoffice and with the full KDE / MCC help files, that would be a real attractive one for people changing over from Windows. As a newbie, my heart sank when I found there were no help files, and Openoffice is a much better incentive to give up MS Office than KOffice. MCNlive has a HUGE potential to lure people away from Windows - a major reason why I chose it - but that means you are dealing with Linux newbies, so having help files and a script like this could increase MCNlive's appeal to that kind of target group.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
success="1"
until [ $success -eq 0 ]
do
dialog --title "Remastering" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --inputbox "Note: this script assumes that a) the device you are about to remaster to has already been remastered once using the Create LiveUSB menu, and is currently NOT the medium form which the system is being run (you have either booted from a different device, or have booted from this device using the copy2ram mode).

Please enter the path and name of the remaster ISO file (e.g. /mnt/hda5/live2.iso)" 13 74 2>/tmp/input
sel=$?
if [ $sel -eq 1 ]
then
exit 0
fi

path=`cat /tmp/input`

echo "Checking..."
ls $path
pexist=$?
if [ $pexist -eq 0 ]
then
success="0"
else
success="1"
dialog --title "Error - Invalid Path" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --msgbox "The file $path does not exist, please try again." 8 50 2>/tmp/input3
fi
done

success="1"
until [ $success -eq 0 ]
do
dialog --title "Remastering" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --inputbox "Please enter the mount point of the device to which you will copy the remastered system (e.g. /mnt/sda1/ or /mnt/win_e):" 9 58 2>/tmp/input
sel=$?
if [ $sel -eq 1 ]
then
exit 0
fi

path2=`cat /tmp/input`

echo "Checking..."
ls $path2
pexist=$?
if [ $pexist -eq 0 ]
then
success="0"
else
success="1"
dialog --title "Error - Invalid Path" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --msgbox "The device $path2 does not exist, please try again." 8 50 2>/tmp/input3
fi
done

echo "------------------------------------------------------------"
echo "------------------------------------------------------------"
echo "Please wait, the remastering process can take a few minutes."

# ensure that /mnt/iso is available
/initrd/loopfs/bin/umount /mnt/iso

/initrd/loopfs/bin/mkdir /mnt/iso
/initrd/loopfs/bin/mount -o loop $path /mnt/iso
/initrd/loopfs/bin/cp -f /mnt/iso/livecd.sqfs $path2

result=$?

# unmount and remove
/initrd/loopfs/bin/umount /mnt/iso
rm -f /mnt/iso

if [ $result -eq 0 ]
then
dialog --title "Remastering" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --msgbox "Remastering was successful, you may reboot from the device $path2 at your convenience." 8 50 2>/tmp/input3
else
dialog --title "ERROR" --backtitle "Remaster Your System" --msgbox "Remastering to device $path2 failed. Please ensure that you have write access to it." 8 50 2>/tmp/input3
fi

rm -f /tmp/input
rm -f /tmp/input3

It already exists. It is called Mandriva One. Just use it.

I asked you all about a way to keep MCNLive small, not to make it huge.

I won't make a big MCNLive, again: it already exists, MDV One, Knoppix, Fedora Live -- there are hundreds out there.

And the discussion about OO exists since we have MCNLive. Won't happen - with me as live cd builder.

You script: remastering is more than rebuilding the livecd.sqfs file.
BTW: in /initrd/loopfs/bin are only very stripped down progs, they are not the normal linux commands, they are called with busybox, and only used when mcnlive is starting up.

And there is a switch in the mklivecd build command to keep the 'build' files in the tmp dir, --noclean.
Try also: mklivecd --help

They do exist, and NONE of them has the newbie friendly easy-to-use remastering functionality that distinguishes MCNLive! I am saying that MCNLive, and not so much the other LiveCDs, has the potential to lure folks away from Windows!!
IMHO, a LiveCD without such a remastering feature is virtually useless except for having a quick glance at a new system, because using it for daily work requires many customisations. And manually restoring saved settings each time you boot is not great at all (and that restoring feature doesn't restore everying you changed...). But I understand where you are coming from...won't press the point any further

BTW, what do you think is about the maximum build size for using copy2ram on a 1 GB machine? For example, if the remaster is 600 MB large, does that mean that the booted machine will have about 400 MB free RAM left or will it be less?



The script only serves the very specific purpose of transferring the new remaster (i.e. the file that has changed - livecd.sqfs) to another device without burning it to CD/DVD, which is kind of convenient and faster than burning. It especially helps people with large remastering images who don't have a DVD burner .



What's the potential application for doing so? Meaning, why would one want to do that?

Kris, i tried with VirtualCity and it has the same "bug". The whole wizard dissapeared when i try to add my ubuntu install.

i have to agree w/ kris on this one, and rememeber im the one using mcnl as a fulltime desktop installed os.

i have OOo,gimp,pan,thunderbird,audacity,rosegarden and a few other things installed, and as of last night i was still able to keep it on one cd, but its almost 2x the size that K wants to keep it for the copy2ram

and although i dont use that f(x) myself, i have used it to introduce linux to several officemates who LOVE the speed.

so i think that making 2 sub distros, one basic, one w/ the bling, is [rpbably a good idea.

if someomne had the space and we all wanted to start storing "our" mods, that would probably benefit some folks as well, but then you have to ask yourself if youre willing to devote as much time and support as kris does, in answering questions from people like me

To the English speaking folks ...

What you see now on the download mirror is a special cooker edition for the MCNL meeting tomorrow.
With a broken HD install ;-)

But with working 3D desktop, live usb and a better hardware detection.

It is not beta2 - please don't bother with this version, or only when you got too much time.

I will inform you all when the next beta2 test version is available.
I am out of town the next 2 days.

I'm a newbie - only 3 weeks old in using MCN live, yet with a friends help I am creating the iso to my external hardrive, then remastering to this same drive and booting from a partition on that external drive. My remaster is now about 780 M and growing, yet by using an external hardrive space is not an issue - really nice to build something bigger and it still runs very fast!
John