Annvix Development Blog

Annvix 2.0-RELEASE (Surtr) is now available!

Today marks the fourth public release of the Annvix Linux distribution. It was exactly 50 weeks ago when 1.2-RELEASE was made available; this version is the fruit of almost a year’s worth of hard work. We believe that 2.0-RELEASE is the best version of Annvix available. It is recommended that everyone using 1.2-RELEASE upgrade, as it is no longer supported.

Some of the new features you can find in 2.0-RELEASE include:

- 2.6.16.39 kernel with RSBAC and AppArmor support
- updated services including PHP 5.2.0, MySQL 5.0.27, PostgreSQL 8.2.1, and Apache 2..2.4
- a greatly enhanced installer; it’s still the same great text-based installer, but with many new features and enhancements to make installation even easier
- a completely overhauled init system; the traditional SysV init system is no longer used — the new system is very similar to Gentoo’s approach
- the use of the tcb suite for authentication; by default passwords are stored using tcb rather than shadow, and encrypted with blowfish rather than md5
- the use of apt-rpm as the default package manager

Version 2.0-RELEASE can be downloaded from the mirror sites listed at:

http://annvix.org/Download

Read the full release notes for 2.0-RELEASE as well, especially if you are upgrading from 1.2-RELEASE:

http://annvix.org/Release_Notes/2.0

If you use and like Annvix, please consider making a donation to the project.

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packages, ports, and tools.

Not sure if anyone has noticed (googlebot sure hasn’t) but I’ve dropped the /index.php/ part from the annvix.org website (mediawiki). Looks a little nicer now (http://annvix.org/Home instead of http://annvix.org/index.php/Home). The latter still works, so links and stuff should be fine.

Oh, I’ve also had to take down svn.annvix.org as it was getting hammered by googlebot and was dragging the machine down a bit (load averages of 15.0 and higher)… not to mention sucking up my bandwidth (thanks google, my payment for this month will be higher I’m sure).

I plan to open it again soon, but it’ll be on a different (dedicated) machine at home here where the bandwidth is (presumably) more free than it is at the colo.

Well, it came out a little faster than I had anticipated, but beta3 is now available. This one has a few important fixes such as separate /var partitions no longer cause the gettys not to start (resulting in a booted system that you can’t do much with). At the same time, I’ve verified that LVM2 works properly and made a few fixes in that area too. You still can’t use / as an LVM (I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be able to or not tho). If you *are* supposed to be able to use an LVM device as a root device, then I suppose I’ll need to fix that (although short of putting the lvm2-static binary into the initrd image I’m not sure how you’d accomplish it).

Anyways, the i586 ISO is on ibiblio now and the x86_64 ISO is being uploaded and should be there shortly. If nothing else is discovered wrong with the installer, this will be exactly what the end installer looks like.

Enjoy!

On it’s way up to the mirrors now are the ISOs for beta2. This is quite a bit later than I expected, but due to circumstances largely out of my control, this is as quick as I could get it up there.

Not much has changed in the installer other than some cosmetics and you no longer need to run net-setup separately before executing install-pkgs. install-pkgs will now offer to help setup your network (by calling net-setup for each found device). Beyond that, there’s no real changes. I’ve tested this in vmware (both i586 and x86_64) so it should work for folks where the beta1 ISOs didn’t.

I’m very close to my package freeze as well. The only thing remaining to stuff in there for version upgrades is courier-imap. I meant to do that today, but monkeying with the installer sucked up quite a bit of time (as well as tracking down all the bits to make the new subversion compile properly). There’s been a massive flurry of updates over the last 2-3 days; lots of stuff to test. I still plan to do a bit of packaging, but it won’t be new versions of anything, what you see is what you get (minus any found/reported bugs, of course).

*Please* provide feedback! Not only on the installer but on 2.0 in general (even compared to 1.2). A lot of hard work has gone into this release over the last 10 months and there are some pretty significant changes. The more hands-on testers, the better.

As for the kernel, looks like we’re stuck with RSBAC for the time being. I’ve emailed Brad about a grsecurity patch for a 2.6.16 kernel but no response from him whatsoever. A little disappointing, but maybe he doesn’t keep older patches kicking around, and porting the 2.6.19 patch back to 2.6.16 looks to be far too much work to do. Things may change for 2.1, but it’s too close to the “end-game” to fight with it now.

I’ve updated from a CVS snapshot of ViewCVS to the latest version of ViewCV and made some modifications to the default css styles. I think it looks better than ever! A lot easier to read, a much nicer set of fonts… mmmm… goodness. Check it out at svn.annvix.org.

I had done some other site updates, like upgrading the forum software and such. All that’s really left to upgrade is Bugzilla. I’m contemplating using the latest development release version instead of the latest stable version (which I’m using) a) because I’m having some issues with the new version that seemed to come out of nowhere and b) it gives me something new to play with (not like there’s a lot of people filing bugs on there anyways… most bugs hit the mailing list).

I’ve also done some revamping of the Developer’s Reference, particularly with respect to the RPM spec file stuff, noting new macros and policies I’d like to see. In particular is the consistent use of tabs (and the preferred use of spaces). I also find a rocking good RPM guide for those interested… it’s noted in the Resources section of that page.

UPDATE: Bugzilla just got a facelift so it’s running the new development version. A few minor hiccups but seems ok so far and I like some of the new features. At any rate, I’ve also added a new product: Ports! That’s right, you can now file bugs against ports packages. Sorry Ying… you might actually get some bug reports now (I sent you one already to make you feel warm and fuzzy).

Now all I need to do is overhaul the ports system so it works better… hmmmm….