At the CeBIT we handed out some m23 advertising material (in German) and now the printer files are ready for download.

The stickers may be even from interest for you, if you are not interested in m23. The sticker page contains penguin motives among m23 themes and the template for creating your own sticker page. The template was created for Canon MP520 and the adhesive labels from Tedi discount, but may be altered to fit on other printers and on other adhesive labels too.

A favoured give-away was the folded m23 business card with contact information, description of goos-habermann.de's services and the m23 short information, that contains an overview about m23. A bit more information is available in the "Was ist m23?" (What is m23?) sheet and the long overview about the goos-habermann.de's services.

The presentation file of my speech is ready for download too.

Have fun!

m23 rock 10.2 follows shortly after 10.1 and contains some corrections and new functions.

The biggest novation is the integration of the debconf mechanism into m23. This feature allows you to configure the package parameters directly and comfortable from the m23 webinterface. The parameters are identically with the questions APT would ask the administrator during manual installation. For example the package "mediawiki" would ask for the webserver it should configure. This configuration becomes possible by determining the configuration parameters of all packages of a distribution. Tools for extracting the configuration parameters and converting the gathered information into m23 package option pages are included in the MDK.

Optimisations in the calculation of the package installation status result in a speed improvement during the start of the recovery procedure of one ore more clients. The speed increase may be a multiple faster than the old method, depending on the amount of installed packages.

The creation of package pools is more "tough" now. This means that packages, of which APT means that they don't fit together, can be combined into one package source. All desired packages can be downloaded from the internet and combined into a package source.

The m23 virtualisation functions support VirtualBox 2.x and 3.x now. Adjustments on the m23 virtualisation functions were needed due to changes in the parameters of VirtualBox 3.x. Now 2.x and 3.x versions of VirtualBox can be used to create virtual m23 clients.

Some changes were made to improve the support for (K)Ubuntu e.g. to advance the language support or to assure a stable network. Settings for the KDE4 desktop were revised too.

With the new security functions unfortunately came some deactivations of other functions, that should be fixed now. The client debug page and the status page and the group functions were re-activated and revised. Many thanks for the hints go to the community :-)

The new version is available as update via the m23 webinterface or APT. But m23 rock 10.2 can installed with the m23 rock 10.1a server installation CD too, if the online update is choosen during the installation procedure.

Have fun!

The speeches (or at least most of them) of the CeBIT-Open-Source-Forum are available as webcasts now. My m23 speech can be found at www.techcast.com/events/cebit10/fr14-goos.

Have fun!

F.r.t.l: M. Hachmann, Felix von Courten, Hauke Goos-Habermann
Photo: Helge Haacke

The CeBIT 2010 is over, the remains of the booth materials are unpacked, the penguin (our favored photo model) is returned to his ancestral place and now I take the time to write a short article about the first m23 booth at the CeBIT.

m23 had a booth on all five days at the "CeBIT Open Source Project Lounge" near to the "CeBIT Open Source Forum", where speeches about free software were held during the fair. Among these speeches was the daily Knoppix speech by Klaus Knopper, that was recognisable very easy: If it is full, it must be Knoppix ;-)

At our booth we showed new and well known things from and about m23 and the "Musterbüro Mini" (the "Musterbüro" shrinked to one laptop), that demonstrated that Linux is not limited to servers. We had the opportunity to talk to lots of (future) m23 users and on friday I held a speech about m23, that was unfortunately not visited as well as the Knoppix speeches ;-)

The first CeBIT day was a bit too calm and only few visitors came to our booth, but then from day to day even more and more attended. We had the chance to get to know the other projects as well. Most I liked Nexenta a Debian/Ubuntu based distribution with OpenSolaris kernel. I was told that Nexenta tries to become an official part of Debian as alternative architecture. If it happens, it may be possible that m23 will be able to install Nexenta (or how it will be called then) then.

Here I want to thank the Linux Magazin again, that made the m23 booth possible. All together I want to summarise this CeBIT as very successful, interesting, exciting and exhausting. We - or at least me - would do this all again, if the possibility will be given again ;-)

Have fun!

I got the information, that I will have the posibillity of a speech at the CeBIT. The talk will be held on friday (5th of March) from 17:15 to 17:30 in the Open Source Forum in hall 2, booth F38. In 15 minutes I will give a short overview about m23 and afterwards as much information as requested at our booth. The gap in the plan of the Linux-Magazin currently marks my speech, but I was told that the speech is visible in the printed programm table and will be shown in the web as soon as possible ;-)

Have fun and maybe we will see then!