14 DAY TRIAL // The development team of the Debian-based Grml Linux operating system announced the general availability of the final release of the Grml 2017.05 operating system, codenamed "Freedatensuppe."
Grml 2017.05 "Freedatensuppe" is a major update rebased on the software packages of the Debian Testing repositories, which will soon become Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system. It uses the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series, specifically kernel 4.9.29, and all Debian Testing updates released as of May 30, 2017.
A bunch of improvements have been implemented in the grml2usb tool for writing Grml ISOs to USB flash drives, the grml-live build system for creating Grml-based Live Linux systems, the grml-hwinfo tool for collecting hardware information, grml-zshrc Zsh configuration, and grml-debootstrap debootstrap wrapper for installing pure Debian.
Grml 2017.05 switches from file-rc to systemd as default init system
Grml 2017.05 is the latest GNU/Linux distribution to adopt the systemd init system, replacing the file-rc init that was used in previous releases. Because of this major and important change, some of the boot options provided in this release might not work as expected, so do report any issues you'll encounter.
"grml-live (the build system for creating Grml (based) Linux live systems) still supports non-systemd systems using file-rc, though we don't plan to maintain this in the long run. For the reasons why we actually switched to systemd please visit the FAQ," read the release notes.
Following in the footsteps of Debian Stretch, the 32-bit support now defaults to i686 processors only. However, it would appear that Grml 2017.05 still supports a limited number of i586 processors, such as the AMD Geode. A script is provided in the release announcement if you want to see if your CPU is supported by Grml.
Other than that, it looks like there's a new signing key used for the main Grml software repository, namely 4096R/21E0CA38EA2EA4AB, which you'll have if you install the latest version of the grml-debian-keyring package. You can download Grml 2017.05 right now from our website.
