[Grml-devel] [Grml] First Release Candidate of Grml version 2017.05 available

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

some more observations from booting the 32 bit part of the grml96-full
image on an EeePC 900A via USB stick:

Of course the boot process is slower on a nearly 10 years old EeePC
than with a 2-year old ThinkPad, but this showed at least one issue
with the move to systemd and its parallel booting. When finished
booting, the grml-quickconfig box already partially scrolled off the
screen and quite some boot messages were only shown after the
grml-quickconfig box:

===========================================================================
 │ Welcome to grml-quickconfig                                │
 │ Press a highlighted key to perform an action, or press     │
 │ Return or q to go back to the shell.                       │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ Set keyboard layout (grml-lang): de at ch es us            │
 │ Configure network (grml-network)                           │
 │ -> Configure ethernet card directly (netcardconfig)        │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ Show information about Grml (grml-info)                    │
 │ Start x (grml-x)                                           │
 │ Install Debian to hard disk (grml-debootstrap)             │
 └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Press a key: [  OK  ] Setting kernel ring buffer to level 2.
[  OK  ] Starting rsyslog in background.
[  OK  ] Activating language settings:
[  OK  ] Writing language settings (en) to /etc/default/locale was successful.
[  OK  ] Setting up unicode environment.
[  OK  ] Running loadkeys for us in background
[  OK  ] Setting font to Uni3-Terminus16
[  OK  ] Running Linux Kernel 4.9.0-1-grml-686
[  OK  ] Creating /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf for use with mdadm.
[  OK  ] Just run 'Start mdmonitor' to assemble md arrays or boot using 'swraid' as bootoption for autostart.
[  OK  ] Searching for any present dmraid sets:
[  OK  ] No active dmraid devices found
[  OK  ] You seem to have logical volumes (LVM) on your system.
[  OK  ] Just run 'Start lvm2-lvmetad' to activate them or boot using 'lvm' as bootoption for autostart.
[  OK  ] Found CPU:
        Processor 0 is Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz 1600MHz, 512 KB Cache
        Processor 1 is Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz 800MHz, 512 KB Cache
[  OK  ] Trying to set up cpu frequency scaling:
[  OK  ] Setting ondemand governor
[  OK  ] Searching for device(s) labeled with GRMLCFG. (Disable this via boot option: noautoconfig)
[  OK  ] Configuring soundcard "Intel"
[  OK  ] Setting mixer volumes to level 75.
[  OK  ] Starting gpm in background.
_
===========================================================================

The cursor blinks at the last line where the underscore is.

Another strange error message popped up when connecting to my home
wifi after DHCP has succeeded:

===========================================================================
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.5
Copyright 2004-2016 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:22:43:2d:7d:97
Sending on   LPF/wlan0/00:22:43:2d:7d:97
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.1.227 on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.1.227 from 192.168.1.1
DHCPACK of 192.168.1.227 from 192.168.1.1
smbd.service is not active, cannot reload.
invoke-rc.d: initscript smbd, action "reload" failed.
Error: invalid characters specified in hostname: '...' can not be used inside hostnames.
bound to 192.168.1.227 -- renewal in 18283 seconds.
===========================================================================

Note the "invalid characters specified in hostname" error in the
second-last line and especially that it's saying "..." would be part
of the hostname. (Since I never saw that error message on other hosts
in the same network, I assume it's not a misconfiguration on the DHCP
server -- which is a Turris Omnia running dnsmasq.)

Then I noticed that the grml96-full image has at least one different
text inside the "Additional boot entries for:" menus compared to the
grml64-full image (for the same functionality):

  grml96: "Graphical Mode" (both, for grml32 and grml64)
  grml64: "Start X by default" (or similar)

Additionally, grml64-full has two menu entries "Load grml to RAM" and
"Load whole medium to RAM" while grml96-full only has "Load to RAM".

I would have expected that the submenus on grml96 are identical to
those of grml64.

On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 07:12:23PM +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> * X does _not_ start if I press "x" but throws some error messages
>   including some "permission denied" and "cannot connect to X server".
> 
>   Similar if not identical errors show up when trying to run "startx"
>   as user "grml".
> 
>   The boot loader menu item "Start X by default" does not work either
>   with similar error messages.

This does not work either on the EeePC. Similar error messages, so I
assume it's not hardware specific but a real bug. (modern Nvidia
graphics card vs. nearly 10 years old Intel graphics card)

		Kind regards, Axel
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