Reiser4 minimal liveCDs
Introduction

These CDs were built with the intent to help people have a fast, reliable, small recovery disk in case they use Reiser4 as a main filesystem. The release was born and is intended for power users, that is: users that know how to deal with the commandline tools (and also users who don't but wish to learn).
I won't be offering support forums (at least for now) and I won't be accepting incoming requests about "how do I...?". There is plenty of documentation available on all of the features that are included in this release. Thus, when highlighting features, known bugs, packages, etc. I'll focus on things that are specific of this release, that is: things that you won't find elsewhere.

This product utilizes TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/

 
Release Schedule

Next full release is planned in between the 1st and the 22nd of January, 2010.

Stages get automatically rebuilt starting on the 4th of each month, you should see the newer ones on the 5th at about 4.00 GMT.

This is how I plan to support/release the medias:

  • one full release every three months (stages+liveCDs)
  • one build per-month up to stage3 (to include latest updates to the core features of the release)
  • release dates may vary according to
    • kernel development
    • gcc availability in the portage tree
    • Gentoo release schedules
    • these "restrictions" are to avoid a lot of work in means of CPU-time spent re-doing same things over and over
    • +-2 weeks from declared schedule (for the reasons above)
  • If you wish to ask for some package inclusion, I'll setup soon a submission form/page from where you can request things; doing this, please do not ask to include some particular upgrade that's a key feature of the release (gcc, linux-headers, etc.), I'll try to keep every part of the release as updated as possible when it gets published

 
 
Features

LiveCD releases are based off Gentoo Minimal LiveCDs, they feature:

  • dev-lang/perl
  • app-crypt/truecrypt
  • full update of system packages
  • reiser4-sources (with custom power patches) && reiser4progs
  • latest unstable gcc
  • latest unstable glibc
  • 2008.0 pure profile
  • wider hardware support (mostly PATA/SATA controllers and wireless cards): if the kernel being used for the new release supports new hardware it will be included in the next release as well (ath5k etc...)
  • various packages

Some have already asked for X/graphics inclusion, my answer has always been "no" for the following reasons:

  • minimal liveCDs weigh ~100Mb, full liveCDs ~700Mb or more (less pain for users, faster availability)
  • troubleshooting the base profile with basic settings it's a matter of hours, whereas troubleshooting >700 packages it's a matter of weeks (I don't have such time)
  • I don't have enough CPU power available to make a big release available to the public in my few spare weeks (2~3 weeks every 3~4 months)
 
Current set of features

This is a list of what you'll find in the latest release

  • Current key features:
    • 2.6.33.1 kernel + reiser4
    • gcc 4.4.3
    • glibc-2.11-r1
    • linux-headers-2.6.33
    • TrueCrypt 6.3a
  • Filesystem tools
    • sys-fs/dosfstools
    • sys-fs/e2fsprogs
    • sys-fs/evms
    • sys-fs/hfsutils
    • sys-fs/lvm2
    • sys-fs/ntfsprogs
    • sys-fs/jfsutils
    • sys-fs/reiser4progs
    • sys-fs/reiserfsprogs
    • sys-fs/xfsprogs
    • sys-fs/xfsdump
    • sys-fs/ecryptfs-utils
    • sys-fs/btrfs-progs
  • Applications
    • app-admin/testdisk
    • app-arch/p7zip
    • app-arch/pbzip2
    • app-arch/xz-utils
    • app-misc/dtach
    • app-misc/screen
    • app-misc/secure-delete
    • app-misc/wipe
    • sys-apps/usbutils
    • sys-boot/grub
  • Monitoring
    • app-admin/hddtemp
    • net-analyzer/bmon
    • net-analyzer/iftop
    • net-analyzer/packit
    • net-analyzer/tcptrack
    • net-wireless/wavemon
    • sys-apps/pv
    • sys-apps/smartmontools
    • sys-power/acpitool
    • sys-power/powertop
    • sys-process/acct
    • sys-process/atop
    • sys-process/iotop
    • sys-process/htop
    • sys-process/latencytop
  • Networking
    • net-analyzer/tcptraceroute
    • net-analyzer/traceroute
 
Known Issues

Since nothing is perfect, here's a list of the known issues with the all the current releases:

  • FIXED: doesn't allow keymap selection at boot (can be done later with loadkeys )
  • doesn't have splashscreen/progress bar at boot, no framebuffer decorations
  • using provided stage3 to install forces you to unmask latest gcc, glibc and linux-headers in /etc/portage/package.keywords right after install to prevent downgrades
  • if you want to migrate to reiser4 on root partition, you have to edit /etc/init.d/checkroot to avoid fsck segfaults (file available through server); otherwise, you can update e2fsprogs and unmask latest reiser4-progs, that provides compatibility with e2fsprogs (can be "normally" fixed using baselayout-2 + reiser4progs-1.0.6-r2)
  • Unable-to-include drivers:
    • rt2500 wireless drivers (newer ones should be available in-kernel)
    • slmodem (not even latest unstable does compile)
    • FIXED: acx, acx-firmware (latest acx 0.3.38 doesn't compile)
    • FIXED: madwifi-ng, madwifi-ng-tools (latest unstable doesn't compile)
 
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