When the repairing after the SourceForge attack is mostly over, I updated the m23 community page.

As you may have noticed, the m23 landing page is vanished and replaced by a dog-ear (top right). A new feature chooses German, if your browser has German as default language and all other get the English edition of the page.

There were some registrations with strange user names and eMail addresses before the attack of the SF servers. A research of these names resulted in the conclusion that these are used by spam bots. At the right time - just before the SF servers for uploading web pages were shut down - I secured the m23 forum from getting flodded with spam messages. This measure of safety includes a relocation of the forum's URL and I installed a Honeypot that logs all spamming attempts on the old location. The normal m23 forum is reachable - as usual - from the m23 page after solving a captcha.

Now there are some short URLs for reaching m23 pages directly:

• What is m23? / Features: m23.sf.net/features
• Downloads: m23.sf.net/download oder m23.sf.net/dl
• Screenshots: m23.sf.net/screenshots
• Installation guide: m23.sf.net/instManual

Have fun!

And again I did some advancements: Now the Fedora 14 base system is not only installable by m23, but also a complete localised KDE 4. I fixed some errors meanwhile and begun to work on the (de)installation of packages. Searching of software from the m23 webinterface is working now.

Have fun!

This is only a little interim status: I have adjusted m23 in serveral places and now m23 can install a minimal Fedora 14 in a virtual machine. The changes on the m23 webinterfaces are finished now. The meta distribution, that combines other installable distributions, is called "halfSister" now, because the support for these distributions is only half.

The installed Fedora is able to boot from the virtual hard disk. The base system archiv is derived from the Fedora-14-OpenVZ-Template, but ships some other packages and settings to enable e.g. the booting. The KDE packages are installable with m23 too, but the X server doesn't work right now.

In the last days I made some big steps in very short time, but of course there are lots of unfinished things (such as the setting of the root password or the system language). But it is only a question of time, when all will work well.

So long: Have fun!

The year has just begun and I'm working on the next m23 version that will bring generic support for quasi arbitrary Linux distributions.

The support is reached by doing the base installation from a compressed and pre-configured archive. This way the usage of distribution specific tools like debootstrap or rpmstrap for installing a minimal system is avoided. A similar routine is used for speeding up the installation of Ubuntu with m23.

And the simplification goes on: To hide the differences between the distributions from m23, there is an adequate administration tool for the particular distributions that uses a consistent instruction set for all administartive tasks. That's why m23 doesn't need to "know" how a specific package manager works and how it is used. It doesn't matter if the native package manager is yum, APT or something else. On every system the command for updating the package list is "m23HSAdmin pkgUpdateCache" and the installation of the package "mc" is done by "m23HSAdmin pkgInstall mc". There are other commands of m23HSAdmin that call the native tools of the distribution for setting up the network, the installation of the bootmanager or for adjusting the system language, etc.

This generic approach has disadvantages on the other side: The m23 server cannot search for packages any more on its own, because the package manager is run directly on the m23 client. It is required that the m23 client is running for searching packages in the m23 administration interface, because the m23 client takes the search query and sends the result back to the m23 server. Similar is done for previews.

Currently I'm working on m23HSAdmin for Fedora 14, the function API for the m23 server and changes on the m23 webinterface. There is no specific reason for choosing Fedora (it was more or less fortune), because I never worked with Fedora before. Ultimately, it could have been any other distribution, that is different enough from Debian. Otherwise it would not be much fun ;-)

I ask you (if you are a Fedora guru), to check my efforts for creating the administration tool for Fedora and to tell me, if it is good enough or if there things can be optimised. The current version of m23HSAdmin-fedora14 can be found in the version management. Please write me, if you find errors and/or better solutions :-)

I will focus on your help for supporting other distributions. Even if it is interesting to explore a new distribution, this is a time consuming task. So I'm searching for all of you, who want to make their favourite distribution installable and managable with m23 by writing the matching m23HSAdmin (written in BASH). Simply write me, if you are interested :-)

Have fun!

This new (and obviously last 10.x) m23 version should make the hearts of all Ubuntu fans beat faster, because this release introduces Ubuntu (Official site), Kubuntu (Official site) and Xubuntu (Official site) in the (three years by Ubuntu supported) LTS version 10.04 as official client installation plattform for m23. Another delicacy is the KDE version of Linux Mint 9 that can be installed with m23 as additional distribution as well.

There may exist errors and inconsistencies with these new distributions in co-opperation with m23 even if these worked well in my tests and were installable without problems. I had to change some internal things (e.g. the migration to the new init system Upstart) to make the support possible. So I would like to ask for your support and to report errors and inconsistencies more and better than before, to make these failures history ;-)

There were some changes (not allways for the better) in the field of virtualisation. First the good news: The VirtualBox additions are installed and configured on Ubuntu 10.04 and its "forks" automatically and configured when run in VirtualBox. An automatic reset helps to make sure that the fresh installed and maybe compiled module is used at once. Virtual machines started by m23 are filed and restored when the host is started next time. The setup of the VNC server (used for starting graphical virtualisation sessions) was revised to get a newly generated VNC password after installing m23 via the server installation ISO. That were the good news.

The bad news are, that the new versions of VirtualBox lead to instabilities ("guru meditations") and network failures. So I decided to ship the version 2.2.4 again. This pushes the priority of KVM or other free virtualisation solutions in my list ;-) So it may be possible that the next m23 version contains another virtualisation plattform. You can write me about your favourite virtualisation software you would like to see integrated in m23, if you like ;-)

Among these big changes are some smaler that are no eye-cachers. So there is the option to activate and deactivate network booting for the m23 clients. And now it is possible to write the MBR in the installation partition of the m23 client's operating system, if the administrator wants to install another boot manager by hand. The MDK (m23 development kit) was extended by an option to clear the complete Squid cache.

The hardware detection of m23 uses a three-pass-scanner now, that uses the tools discover, hwsetup and hwinfo to reach the best available detection rate. The hardware information databases were updated too. The bootsystems for m23 client and m23 server are using Linux 2.6.35.7 now.

Of course there were fixes for some other bugs (e.g. the server update shows texts and icons for the updates again) too.

The new version is available as update via the m23 webinterface or APT and as ISO file for burning the m23 server installation CD or as pre-installed virtual machine (both can be found in the download section).

Have fun!