Hm, problems with MD5 checks on 1.1 i386 on both torrent and Andy's mirror! Well, they have the same MD5sum, but it's not the same as Dotsch states on his site. Now trying directly from Dotsch site, but it'll take some time to download...
The cd I burnt from the torrent iso boots up (though with errors during boot), but trying to do 1st step USBkey-install crashes the installer... hopefully because of the above MD5 errors...

The 1.1 x64 version got ok MD5 checksum on torrent, but I can't use that one on the x86 machine I'm trying to boot on this ;)

k, got the 1.1 i386 from your site Dotsch and it has the same MD5 hash as the file from torrent and from Andy's mirror:

bb8f039bdfe6c78309cadbd81cfa9915

but on your site it says it should be

dd85d7dc9a1708c6672ccdce8389b233

so what is correct here?

k, got the 1.1 i386 from your site Dotsch and it has the same MD5 hash as the file from torrent and from Andy's mirror:

bb8f039bdfe6c78309cadbd81cfa9915

but on your site it says it should be

dd85d7dc9a1708c6672ccdce8389b233

so what is correct here?

The file on my server was uploaded by Dotsch himself, so would guess he has put the MD5 wrong on his site?

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I am very sorry, I have put the wrong md5 on my homepage. The right md5 sum for 1.1 i386 is bb8f039bdfe6c78309cadbd81cfa9915

Great! :) or maybe not, cause now I have to figure out why the cd I burnt doesn't work as expected... at least on the laptop I'm tryin to boot it on :/ I'll try on some other computers...

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Well, I just ran "Check CD" on the 64 bit copy I burned and it responds that there are errors in 7 files. Would that be expected?

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Could you please try to enable the debug mode by enter F6 in the boot menu and remove the options "silent" and "quiet" from the boot string. This would give us more informations about the root cause.

I am investigating the boot problem. - I guess that your and ShEM's problem are differnt problems...

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Well, I just ran "Check CD" on the 64 bit copy I burned and it responds that there are errors in 7 files. Would that be expected?

It's no feautre ;-) It's a failure from my side. But this should be ok.

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Well, I just ran "Check CD" on the 64 bit copy I burned and it responds that there are errors in 7 files. Would that be expected?

It's no feautre ;-) It's a failure from my side. But this should be ok.

OK. I ran the check without "quiet splash" on it and get the following files as problems:

64bit CD:
./casper/filesystem.manifest
./casper/initrd.gz
./casper/filesystem.squashfs
./umenu.exe
./autorun.inf
./wubi.exe
./README.diskdefines

i386 CD:
./casper/filesystem.squashfs
./casper/initrd.gz
./isolinux/boot.cat
./md5sum.txt
./umenu.exe
./wubi.exe

The first 64bit ISO I burned didn't boot in my first server, but I moved it to another identical, server and it booted. Too bizarre, but I'm not at the office so I can't research further until tomorrow. I'm looking forward to some 64 bit Ubuntu installs though so I can test them on projects that should perform better at 64bit... At least I know ABC works better if Windows is 64bit, I just want to see if that's true for their Linux 64bit app as well.

Because I haven't gotten far enough, could you confirm if the manual network config and hostname changes are now persistent across re-boots as well? I didn't notice anything about those items in the release notes ether. That would be very helpful. It would also be helpful if the USB setup process included the ability to name the system that you're building.

I am investigating the boot problem. - I guess that your and ShEM's problem are differnt problems...

Yes, it's a different problem... After trying on 2 other computers, it appears that laptops dvd-drive is defective (and also the harddrive, but that I knew already which is why I wanted to try making a USB-bootkey to be able to crunch on it). I'm still not able to create the boot usb-ket from any computer: The installer simply crashes right at the beginning every time :( Maybe it's the USB-key.

Will talk about it on your forum, when I get some time later the coming week :)

Well, I grabbed both, and the 64bit won't even finish booting on my server. I'll have to experiment a bit more to figure out why. Starts up after I pick from the menu, but bounces back out to the POST at some point in the midst of it discovering hardware...

Well, I just ran "Check CD" on the 64 bit copy I burned and it responds that there are errors in 7 files. Would that be expected?

It's no feautre ;-) It's a failure from my side. But this should be ok.

OK. I ran the check without "quiet splash" on it and get the following files as problems:

...

This is ok. I have make a last minute change and forgot to update the checksums for the CD check. Sorry.

The first 64bit ISO I burned didn't boot in my first server, but I moved it to another identical, server and it booted. Too bizarre, but I'm not at the office so I can't research further until tomorrow. I'm looking forward to some 64 bit Ubuntu installs though so I can test them on projects that should perform better at 64bit... At least I know ABC works better if Windows is 64bit, I just want to see if that's true for their Linux 64bit app as well.

If you ran into boot problems, you can also remove the options "silent quiet" from the boot string and can debug the boot process.

Because I haven't gotten far enough, could you confirm if the manual network config and hostname changes are now persistent across re-boots as well? I didn't notice anything about those items in the release notes ether. That would be very helpful. It would also be helpful if the USB setup process included the ability to name the system that you're building.

Yes, the bug which removed the IP config was a problem in the initramfs. I have fixed this and it works since 1.1.
Very good idea for the release notes. I will add this for this and all next releases and also publish this on my website.

I just wanted to say: you're doing a great job at this Dotsch. Keep up the good work (even if I don't use Linux)!

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I just wanted to say: you're doing a great job at this Dotsch. Keep up the good work (even if I don't use Linux)!

I agree with that one OzzFan! I've got 9 hosts running Linux simply because Dotsch did all this nice footwork to get it to a point a Linux novice could get there easily enough. And it's only getting better...

Hi Dotsch, I was browsing through various linux sites and distributions, and came across these two sites: Consolidated Menu and Themes.

I know that the main aim behind all this is to develop a better distro that caters the seti crunchers. However, I felt that maybe you could spice it up bit and make it more boincy. Moreover, as most of the users are accustomed to windows, a similar environment might be more appealing.

Just a suggestion though...
______________

Thank you very much OzzFan and Mumps.

Hi Dotsch, I was browsing through various linux sites and distributions, and came across these two sites: Consolidated Menu and Themes.

I know that the main aim behind all this is to develop a better distro that caters the seti crunchers. However, I felt that maybe you could spice it up bit and make it more boincy. Moreover, as most of the users are accustomed to windows, a similar environment might be more appealing.

Just a suggestion though...

I also thought to make a custom splash, but I have not found the time to make a picture.

I am not shure, if it's the goal to look like Windows. A MacOS look and feel would be better in my opinion.
But, you can install it manualy. The Ubuntu packages or packages for Ubuntu would also work on Dotsch/UX...
I thought also on a tool which the user could choose the favourite desktop (GNOME/KDE/X) and the window manager would be downloaded and installed. Eventualy I can also add this Windows look and feel.
Biggest problem is that I have got to keep the ISO image handy, that it fits on a CD and on small USB sticks..

Have you gotten any feedback from folks installing v1.1 64bit Dotsch? I'm notice some things that I'm wondering about.

64 bit installation
O Install to HD or USB key. Both fail to eject the CD. So I have to manually eject the CD so it'll boot the key or drive. It used to auto-eject with v1.0.
O When it's done installing, the initial launch of the BOINC client produces no list of Projects to attach to. All that I find in the BOINC folder is an "all_projects_list_temp.xml" that has a size of 0. I can copy over a version of "all_projects_list.xml" from another install though and it works OK.
O With network configurations based on DHCP, I find my network doesn't connect until I go in and edit /etc/network/interfaces to add an "auto ethx" line for whichever interface I've got connected and "/etc/init.d/networking restart".
O If I launch the BOINC Client, and choose to Exit, it indicates it's going to shut-down BOINC completely. Even though it was running as a "service" when I started the Client. And it then fails to stop the "service" installation that's running anyways :-)

I'm happy to confirm you've got the persistence of hostname/network configs working. That has helped quite a bit for me with my USB installs.

One more little helper might be to more clearly indicate the release (64 bit versus i386) somehow after the install is done. I keep thinking customized desktop backgrounds for either. It takes a couple seconds for me to remember which I'm running on which systems, and BOINC itself doesn't include i386/64bit in the O/S display for Linux. (I'm up to 13 Dotsch-UX Hosts at this point. Only 5 of which are floating USB Keys. :-))

Next step is figuring out how to hook up with an X-Session from a remote system. I've already surprised myself by finding I can SSH in. :-)

Regarding a way to remote in.. realVNC does well with Linux/Windows compatibility. I use it at work for one Linux file server and a handful of Windows servers. Usually for the Windows boxes I just use Remote Desktop, but RealVNC works..just not as well on windows-windows connections.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Regarding a way to remote in.. realVNC does well with Linux/Windows compatibility. I use it at work for one Linux file server and a handful of Windows servers. Usually for the Windows boxes I just use Remote Desktop, but RealVNC works..just not as well on windows-windows connections.

I'm not necessarily looking for a new way in. I've already got the cygwin based X-Server installed on my workstation and use it for remote access to some Unix servers at work. I was just thinking that it would be more useful if I could get X running on these Dotsch-UX hosts and use that same tool for accessing them as well. More a challenge, than looking for something less than optimal, but easily functional. :-)