Once again I would like to to inform you (a bit lately) about the availability of two updates.

m23 rock 0.6.5

The creation of software RAIDs is now possible (without corruptions) again with this update. The important hint for fixing it came from Yann from France. A big "thank you" at this place. This update added a new selection box that allows you to choose the MBR installation target. The target will be calculated automatically but now the administrator has the possibillity to adjust it and choose another hard disk. The translations were updated in addition.

m23 rock 0.6.8

The changes in this update are bigger as expressed in the jump of the version number. The m23 packages were changed to be compatible with Debian 5.0 Lenny, Apache 2.x and PHP 5. I did these changes, because I want to migrate the operating system basis for m23 from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny as soon as the final Debian Lenny is ready. At the moment I'm very satisfied with the development degree of Debian testing/Lenny, but I want to wait, till it is final. These changes were time consuming but were not the only changes I made in this release. I've changed the routine for creating the SSL certificates and keys for the client server communication and accessing the administration interface. The keys are having a strength of 4096 bits now and a 16 digits long semi-random serial number is calclulated on every run to avoid Firefox's 3.x complainings about double used certificate serial numbers. The support for additional SATA controlers as the virtual SATA controler of VirtualBox was added too. And at last the language support for the Gnome desktop was extended.

And now have fun with the updates!

The design of the m23 project page has changed slightly as you may have noticed. This has to do with the migration from postNuke to the lightweight content management system devalcms. I've invested some days on the implementation of the missing functions and changed devalcms to fit the needs of the m23 community page. The same functional level, in comparison to the old postNuke page, should be reached now. The new site is no direct clone of the old page, becauses it doesn't implement functions that were not needed (seriously) before.

Some may ask, why I spent time on the website migration and develop features for a "foreign" CMS. The answer is simple: I hope to save a lot of time with this step. The publishing of new articles was a time consuming akt and the upgrade to new postNuke versions on the SourceForge server was even worse. Another benefit of the lightweight CMS is the faster creation of the HTML pages.

And now test the new page please and report any bugs that you may find, so I could fix them quickly.

Thank you and have fun!

The live presentation of the "Musterbüro 2008" has comming to an end because the Kieler Linuxtage 2008 are over now. The Musterbüro 2008 is a showcase of Linux applications in dayly office use and was installed on three office PCs at the Kieler Linuxtage 2008. These exemplary Linux applications showed word processing, business graphics, table calculation, eMail, VoIP and image processing amongst others.

You can have a look at the Musterbüro even if you missed the Kieler Linuxtage. This can be done in several ways (the following pages and information are available in German only):

First you can have a look at the Musterbüro page at www.kieler-linuxtage.de and get an overview about the installed software. An abstract is available as PDF too.

You can download the pre-installed virtual machine and run it in VirtualBox, if you want to try out the Musterbüro at you own.

Even more direct is the installation of the Musterbüro on your hardware. There is a detailed description for installing the Musterbüro with m23 on page two in the flyer.

Have fun!

The new faster release cycle kept me so busy that I could not keep up with the announcements. So here is an overview of the last two releases:

m23 rock 0.6.3

New

• KDE desktop enhancements: Added an applet for removable media (CD, USB sticks, etc.) to KDE's kicker.
• KDE desktop enhancements: GTK applications are using the KDE look now.
• Downloading of packages from faulty pools: The download of all packages should now be possible even if the external pool has faulty package dependencies.

Corrections

• Calculation of base packages: The base packages can now be calculated for all Debian releases and get downloaded to a local package pool.
• Fixing functions for package sources: Faulty Releases files should now get corrected automatically.

m23 rock 0.6.4

New

• Security enhancements for Grub and LiLo: The boot parameters are locked against editing with the network boot password.
• Additional language support: Additional language packages are installed for different applications on Ubuntu clients.

Corrections

• Gnome installation: The minimal Gnome package is installable again.
• Reboot or shutdown: The clients are set back to the same status (running or turned off) after the installation and now there is only a reboot or a shutdown job active.

Installation

You can install m23 rock 0.6.4 via the update manager in the webinterface of your m23 server. Have fun!

The waiting has now an end. m23 0.6.0 is ready for downloading!

There are some changes since the last released ISO and this are not only optical aspects, but also in the deeps of m23. I've made uncountable test-runs and figured out much that had to be changed. And you helped me with your hints to find other inconsistencies and mistakes. A big "thank you" to all who helped.

Obvious things
When you install a client with m23 rock it's obviously that something has changed. The new m23 rock logo can be found on the desktop background, the graphically login manager, the KDE startup dialog and the bootmanager grub. The help texts of the user manual and the administration interface were revised and should be in an aligned status for all languages now. For all who don't like the code names of the Debian and Ubuntu releases, the version number is now shown in the distribution selection dialog too.

Imaging
Did i really read "grub"? Yes, m23 now supports grub as alternative to the LiLo bootmanager. The imaging function can now restore a filed master boot record. So it should be possible to clone all operating systems. A status bar gives information about the process of creating or restoring a partition or drive image on the client's screen now.

Updates
The Linux kernel was upgraded to version 2.6.26.5 on all install media for improved hardware support. A relict that was part of m23 since the beginning was removed too. This was an archive that contained user settings and files for all created user accounts. The files and settings now resist in a Debian package and are installed in the usual directory.

Corrections
There are some not visible changes under the surface: After installing a server with the m23 server installation CD the LDAP and MySQL databases are now free from residues of earlier installs. The problem of incresed network device numbers was fixes with a new configuration of udev too. When the m23 server was updated it could occur that the configuration of the DHCP server lost all clients. This was fixed too.

Outlooks
Since the beginnings of m23 I was very conservative in increasing m23's version numbers. This lead to a version number beginning with a 0 after over five years of development. In my oppinion such a version number doesn't match the development grade of m23. So I will icrease the version numbers more often in the future even for little changes. The code name "rock" will remain a bit longer, because it was lot of work to finish the new logo ;-)

In the near future there will be integraded support for KDE 4.1, because I'm considering to show it as part of the Musterbüro 2.0 on the Kieler Linuxtage. I will include the setting for the Musterbüro 2.0 into the m23 packages when I'm happy with the configuration.

No pre-configured VMware machines any more
This will be a sad message for all who (still) use VMWare: I will not create and upload any new VMware virtual machines any more, because I'm only using VirtualBox right now. But if anybody wants to create the VMware images, I would happyly upload them to the m23 project page. So if you are interested in creating VMware images please write me a mail or contact me via the forum.

A "thank you" to the developer of sf-upload
And last but not least a special "thank you" to Slaven Rezić for his open source project sf-upload and the uncountable improvements he has made. sf-upload is a very handy tool for managing SourceForge's time-consuming file release system. Thime-consuming because all steps have to be done by hand normally. sf-upload automatised these steps and makes it possible to archive all m23 package versions with a script.

Downloading
The ISO for burning the m23 server installation CD can be found here and the image files for the pre-installed VirtualBox machine here.

Have fun!