As we already announced in our previous post, we will be present at this year's Linuxtag in Berlin with our booth. Preparations are in full swing - as you can see, even our Tux has already dressed up!

The daily lottery is now assured: thanks to our sponsor getDigital.de we can run a prize draw where you can win one out of two cool t-shirts on each fair day.

This year, the m23-quiz reenters the stage with more than the double amount of questions, so no boredom can arise. There are also news from our decorations division: Now we have still more beautiful and more colourful stickers for our small and grown-up fans - those who cannot visit us at Linuxtag, can download them here and print them.

Have fun!

Just like last year, we will again have a booth as a free project at the Linuxtag (Linux Fair) in Berlin in 2011! And it will be even bigger! We are very much looking forward to present you m23 in its latest version with the new halfSister extension live and we are right now already assiduously making preparations.

Among other things, you will have the opportunity to meet the main m23 developer in person and to learn about m23 directly from a pro. Those who came to our booth last year will remember the m23 quiz with Tux as quiz show host with a smile. Everyone else - and of course, everyone who took a turn last year, is invited to test his/her abilities, as in addition to the prize of knowledge acquisition, there will also be some real practical prizes in form of some small goodies. Presumably, there will again be a lottery and free e-tickets for the Linuxtag for m23 users (and those who might still become one).

The Linuxtag will take place from May 11th to May 14th 2011 at the fair ground below the radio tower ("Messegelände unter dem Funkturm") in Berlin. You will find our booth in hall 7.2a, booth number 129 opposite the juice bar and the LPI.

We are looking forward to your visit!

After endless testing, adjustments and developments it is finally ready: The new m23 version m23 rock 11.1! Its most relevant innovation is the support for virtually any available Linux distribution by use of its halfSister extension.

Its functional range now contains Fedora 14 as the first distribution supported by halfSister. This means that Fedora 14 now can be installed and administered with its full package range as a distribution for a m23 client. (Almost) all the management features provided by m23 are available for Fedora clients. There are (still) restrictions concerning the automatic adjustment of the VirtualBox guest additions and the usage of an m23 Fedora client as a host for virtual m23 clients. The half Sister commands that are translated into distribution specific commands by m23HSAdmin on the m23 client now send extended status reports to the m23 Server. In case of an error, even the complete output of the concerned program is sent, which facilitates the elimination of an error enormously.

Beside the introduction of halfSister, there have been added numerous changes, corrections and new features. As a preparation for the new server platform Debian Squeeze 6.0 some adjustments were made in m23 to replace the outdated PHP functions in the currently provided PHP version by its corresponding functions of the latest version. For the same reason, phpMyAdmin was updated to version 3.3.9.2. The next m23 version will be installable on Debian 6, which will entail further changes (e.g. in the package installation scripts). In my development surroundings already updated to Squeeze, m23 already works as usual ;-)

To reduce the time between m23 versions and to give you the opportunity to test new m23 features before their official release, I have set up a new package source containing m23 server installation test packages which I can upload by a new menu entry in my MDK. The test area packages are really only for testing and on no account for productive m23 servers ;-)

In addition, I had to make a lot of minor changes to reestablish old functionalities in interaction with functions supplied by SourceForge. The hardware detection was refined and can now gain more information from the program hwinfo. An new function now combines preselected (de)installation tasks to a single (de)installation task which increases the execution speed a lot.

Several corrections in the mass installation tool now again allow an installation of predefined clients on physical hardware and the procedural recalculation of the target partition sizes. Support for halfSister distributions has also been added to the mass installation feature - so there is no further obstacle to the mass rollout of Fedora systems with m23. Another annoying error that led to the Christian name of the user being interpreted as log-in name that occured while securing by the variable firewall, is now history. Furthermore, the time-controlled server backup functions are now available to all users, not only to those who are m23 service provider and consequently already had access to the m23@web extension.

The latest m23 version is available as update via the m23 interface, via APT, as an ISO file to burn the installation CD and as preinstalled virtual machine (the last two to be found in the download section.

Have fun!