rPath Linux 2 Alpha 4 Released
Today we released rPL 2 Alpha 4. This has been a long time coming. It involved a few rebuilds of the distro from scratch and switching away from our old internal build mechanism to rMake. Hopefully now that we have alpha 4 out the door beta 1 will be coming down the pipe soon.
One of the major changes in Alpha 4 is the addition of splashy for graphical boot. With splashy you get a splash screen and progress bar at boot and shutdown instead of the normal initscripts output. (Don’t worry for those of you who like to watch initscripts run, you can disable splashy by removing the “splash” and “vga=” kernel options from your grub.conf.) We are still working out some of the kinks, but don’t let this stop you from testing out splashy and remeber to file an issues that you happen to run across in rITS.
Another major addition in the alpha 4 release is the support in anaconda for the “Appliance Installer”. The Appliance Installer is significantly faster and has a smaller memory footprint than the “Installable ISO” that we normally use. How do we do that? We first let rBuilder generate a tarball of the group, split the tarball into chunks, and then add the chunks to the ISO. On the install side of things we feed the tarball chunks to tar over a pipe until the tarball is complete and then let anaconda write out some of the hardware specific configuration. This makes the Appliance Installer faster than *any* anaconda base that I have ever seen. Unfortunately there is no way for rBO projects to consume the Appliance Installer at this time, however there are some rBuilder features in the works to make it easier.
Posted: October 18th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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