14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian-based Grml GNU/Linux distribution designed for system administrators is once again in development after taking a long break of approximately two and a half years.
Dubbed "Freedatensuppe," the next major release of the operating system is versioned Grml 2017.05, and a first Release Candidate (RC) build is now available for public testing. Development of Grml 2017.05 is currently based on the Debian Testing branch, which will soon become Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch."
Therefore, the Grml 2017.05 RC1 development release includes packages taken from the Debian Testing repositories as of May 7, 2017. It contains a total of 64 newly added packages, but 63 other packages have been removed from this release, and you can see details about each shipped package and its version here.
Grml 2017.05 will be powered by the Linux 4.9 kernel series
Among the major changes coming to the Grml 2017.05 release, we can mention the switch from file-rc to the more modern systemd init system, implementation of a new signing key for the Grml repository (4096R/21E0CA38EA2EA4AB), and a bunch of updates to various in-house built tools like grml2usb, grml-live, grml-hwinfo, grml-zshrc, and grml-debootstrap.
"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," reads the release announcement. "If you're using the Grml repositories please make sure to use a current version of the grml-debian-keyring package."
Under the hood, the Grml 2017.05 RC1 development build is powered by the Linux 4.9.17 kernel, which suggests that the final release of the operating system will use the long-term supported Linux 4.9 series, just like Debian Stretch. Of course, numerous bugs and annoyances reported by users since Grml 2014.11 have been addressed, but various known issues are still present.
If you want to test drive Grml 2017.05, you can download the first Release Candidate right now from our website. However, please try to keep mind that this is a pre-release version that isn't suitable for deployment in production environments. Don't forget to take a look at the detailed list of packages pre-installed in Grml 2017.05 RC1 and the known issues if you want to report bugs.