Bootable Business Card distro needs testing!

Posted 31 Dec 2002 at 06:18 UTC by crackmonkey Share This

Many here have read the recent FSF Associate Program announcement. The much-coveted membership card is to be a version of the Bootable Business Card distribution. We are curently looking for testing of our pre-2.0 releases and automated builds.

The 2.0 release of the LNX-BBC (and, thus, the FSF membership card) will use the powerful GAR build system to compile nearly all software on it from source code. As such it has changed greatly since the 1.618 release from 2001.

Here's a list of the most important changes:

  1. no longer keeps the initrd around (freeing up RAM)
  2. uses tmpfs for read-write space, allowing the user to turn on swap partitions and let the fs swap out of core as needed.
  3. supports journaling filesystems: reiserfs, xfs, ext3, and JFS.
  4. LVM support
  5. builds entirely from source code using the powerful GAR packaging system
  6. "discover" package auto-detects hardware and loads appropriate modules
  7. Now uses devfs, and the read-only mounts of disk partitions uses sane disk1/part4-style layout as opposed to the 1.x BBCs' directory of monotonically increasing integer mount names.

The sooner we get this release hammered out and tested, the sooner we can fold in the PPC port (which has nearly been completed by a rogue faction eager to merge).

Testing the pre-2 releases of the LNX-BBC not only helps us, but also the FSF. Please take it for a spin! You can burn these ISOs to any CD-R or CD-RW (that is, they don't need to be business card sized).

If you find bugs, please send them to submit@bugs.lnx-bbc.org with a line reading "package: testing".

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