I am testing the x86 distribution in the moment. If you are interested in alpha testing the new distro, please contact me via pm or email.

I am testing the x86 distribution in the moment. If you are interested in alpha testing the new distro, please contact me via pm or email.

I would be interested in further testing. But here's some additional findings from some more work with the current release over the last 2 days.

64 Gig USB Key: I couldn't even get the installer to install to that large a Key. I'm not exactly sure of the root cause of that though.

32 Gig USB Key: I have successfully installed to (3) 32 Gig USB Keys. But I was not able to do Step 1, boot the key and do step 2. In all cases, I had to do step 1, immediately followed by step 2 without an intervening boot to the key. If I booted the key (when it would boot, see further notes) step 2 would fail indicating that it couldn't find a USB key on the system. Even though it had just booted from it. :-)

Network configuration: In my network, I need to assign IP addresses to most devices. I was not successful in getting this existing version to configure a Manually assigned IP address. The closest I was able to get was assigning the IP address to the NIC using ifconfig, but I couldn't manage to get it to a "RUNNING" status. The GUI Network Config applet wouldn't even assign the address to the NIC. I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu to guess as to why.

Automated boot: It took me a while to realize how to get the USB key to boot. The installer (step 1) wasn't working. Each time I did only that on a freshly opened USB key, the system would always indicate a "damaged boot partition" when I tried to boot it. Ultimately, I figured out that my first success was a USB key I had previously formatted using the HP usbkey utility which can make a USB key into a DOS bootable drive. Then layering the Dotsch Linux over that does indeed produce a bootable key.

I have been booting and rebooting these keys with pretty much success, but I'm also sporadically seeing issues where the system complains about loading Control Panel applets. It doesn't seem to cause problems running the install, but it can be annoying because I've had to click through anywhere from 1 to 8 applets on at least one of the keys each time I've booted it.

Aside from a working Manual Network config, what I'm hoping for next is a 64 bit install. :-) (Even without the ability to configure the network, I've had success with loading the key with a bunch of WU's on a machine that is plugged in where it has access to a DHCP server, then moving the loaded key to boot one of the systems without to actually process the WU's, and moving it back to do the uploading. :-))

Once again though Dotsch, thanks for all this effort!

I am testing the x86 distribution in the moment. If you are interested in alpha testing the new distro, please contact me via pm or email.

I would be interested in further testing. But here's some additional findings from some more work with the current release over the last 2 days.

64 Gig USB Key: I couldn't even get the installer to install to that large a Key. I'm not exactly sure of the root cause of that though.

Automated boot: It took me a while to realize how to get the USB key to boot. The installer (step 1) wasn't working. Each time I did only that on a freshly opened USB key, the system would always indicate a "damaged boot partition" when I tried to boot it. Ultimately, I figured out that my first success was a USB key I had previously formatted using the HP usbkey utility which can make a USB key into a DOS bootable drive. Then layering the Dotsch Linux over that does indeed produce a bootable key.

I have figured out both of these problems after doing a bug report to launchpad. Both issues are related to the USB Key not having a Partition table on it. After goofing around a bit based on some notes on a similar bug-track item I was able to get usb-creator to work both on the 64 Gig USB-Key and to make the key auto-boot without the help of the HP usbdrive formatting utility.

According to the bug-track item (#277865) you must invoke gparted and create a partition table on the USB Key. I then went ahead and created a smaller partition on the key and when I went back into usb-creator, it indicated it needed to format the key. It happily re-formatted it to it's full capacity and the key then rebooted fine after I did step 2.

Next to get the Manual network going. :-)

I am testing the x86 distribution in the moment. If you are interested in alpha testing the new distro, please contact me via pm or email.

I would be interested in further testing. But here's some additional findings from some more work with the current release over the last 2 days.

64 Gig USB Key: I couldn't even get the installer to install to that large a Key. I'm not exactly sure of the root cause of that though.

Automated boot: It took me a while to realize how to get the USB key to boot. The installer (step 1) wasn't working. Each time I did only that on a freshly opened USB key, the system would always indicate a "damaged boot partition" when I tried to boot it. Ultimately, I figured out that my first success was a USB key I had previously formatted using the HP usbkey utility which can make a USB key into a DOS bootable drive. Then layering the Dotsch Linux over that does indeed produce a bootable key.

I have figured out both of these problems after doing a bug report to launchpad. Both issues are related to the USB Key not having a Partition table on it. After goofing around a bit based on some notes on a similar bug-track item I was able to get usb-creator to work both on the 64 Gig USB-Key and to make the key auto-boot without the help of the HP usbdrive formatting utility.

According to the bug-track item (#277865) you must invoke gparted and create a partition table on the USB Key. I then went ahead and created a smaller partition on the key and when I went back into usb-creator, it indicated it needed to format the key. It happily re-formatted it to it's full capacity and the key then rebooted fine after I did step 2.

Wow. Great. Thank you very much !

Next to get the Manual network going. :-)

In /etc/interfaces networks you can configure the networking for static IPs. For example :
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
network 192.168.1.0
gateway 192.168.1.2
broadcast 192.168.1.255
netmask 255.255.255.0

I am testing the x86 distribution in the moment. If you are interested in alpha testing the new distro, please contact me via pm or email.

I would be interested in further testing. But here's some additional findings from some more work with the current release over the last 2 days.

64 Gig USB Key: I couldn't even get the installer to install to that large a Key. I'm not exactly sure of the root cause of that though.

Automated boot: It took me a while to realize how to get the USB key to boot. The installer (step 1) wasn't working. Each time I did only that on a freshly opened USB key, the system would always indicate a "damaged boot partition" when I tried to boot it. Ultimately, I figured out that my first success was a USB key I had previously formatted using the HP usbkey utility which can make a USB key into a DOS bootable drive. Then layering the Dotsch Linux over that does indeed produce a bootable key.

I have figured out both of these problems after doing a bug report to launchpad. Both issues are related to the USB Key not having a Partition table on it. After goofing around a bit based on some notes on a similar bug-track item I was able to get usb-creator to work both on the 64 Gig USB-Key and to make the key auto-boot without the help of the HP usbdrive formatting utility.

According to the bug-track item (#277865) you must invoke gparted and create a partition table on the USB Key. I then went ahead and created a smaller partition on the key and when I went back into usb-creator, it indicated it needed to format the key. It happily re-formatted it to it's full capacity and the key then rebooted fine after I did step 2.

Wow. Great. Thank you very much !

Next to get the Manual network going. :-)

In /etc/interfaces networks you can configure the networking for static IPs. For example :
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
network 192.168.1.0
gateway 192.168.1.2
broadcast 192.168.1.255
netmask 255.255.255.0

Actually, after further testing, the 64 Gig USB key is still not working right. It will boot and reboot, but as soon as I start configuring BOINC, it totally trashes the filesystem. (The next reboot drops into the squashfs filesystem on a RAM disk and the installation is totally gone.) It seems that this is because usb-create is happily creating a Fat32 filesystem larger than the spec supports, so everything just gets all screwed up. But I still learned some things. :-) I'll revisit that again shortly with a few more fresh ideas related to the sizing of the filesystem...

Let me go try your suggestions for the Networking. :-)

In /etc/interfaces networks you can configure the networking for static IPs. For example :
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
network 192.168.1.0
gateway 192.168.1.2
broadcast 192.168.1.255
netmask 255.255.255.0

Actually, after further testing, the 64 Gig USB key is still not working right. It will boot and reboot, but as soon as I start configuring BOINC, it totally trashes the filesystem. (The next reboot drops into the squashfs filesystem on a RAM disk and the installation is totally gone.) It seems that this is because usb-create is happily creating a Fat32 filesystem larger than the spec supports, so everything just gets all screwed up. But I still learned some things. :-) I'll revisit that again shortly with a few more fresh ideas related to the sizing of the filesystem...

Let me go try your suggestions for the Networking. :-)

Bummer. Even my other keys aren't working right. I can boot them and move them around, but it seems there's something going on with flushing to disk when I use the shut-down menu option. I'm seeing that all my work on my "no network" hosts is getting discarded when I boot back up on a net-connected host. I see at least one project is going and generating a new host_cpid for the host running off of the key. Which implies the seqno field from the client_state.xml is not matching what that project had on record for the host. *sigh* :-)

Also, in your instructions for the networking, that was in /etc/networks that I found the file named interfaces which had only the local loop-back device in it. And while I was able to add my other NICs, it looks like this release doesn't support the 10 Gig Network cards in these systems. So even though I did manage to get one of them with it's NIC in an UP/RUNNING status, still no joy with network communications.

I'm going to go look a little deeper at the shifting. I think if I try the following, it may have better success:

In BoincMgr, Activity -> Suspend activity and Network Disabled.
/etc/rc0.d/K01boinc stop
sync
Then shutdown from the menu.
Restart it on the no-net host and resume Activity.
After the cache runs out, same steps prior to shutdown before I move it back to the net connected host.

I think I'll also set it to NNW prior to re-enabling the Network activity once back, because my suspicion is something is getting confused by the repeated requests for work intermingled in the flurry of uploads. This may be some bugs based on the unusual version of BOINC in the Distro... (6.2.15) (I'd rather suspect that than the Distro has issues flushing to the USB keys... :-))

I never had any problems at the shutdown and flush the data to the USB stick.

Btw. have you tried to install the driver for your network cards via synaptics ?

Edit : Do you had this problem on the persistent image (all FS changes in all FS except /home) and on the image of the /home directory ?
The image for /home is in a ext2 FS. - I guess that this is a FS related problem.

Dotsch, you've hit the Big Time! You're listed in the latest DistroWatch News!!

New distributions added

Congratulations and good work.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Dotsch, you've hit the Big Time! You're listed in the latest DistroWatch News!!

New distributions added

Congratulations and good work.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

Wow !!! Great !!

Thank you very much !

I never had any problems at the shutdown and flush the data to the USB stick.

Well, I've noticed a few times that during the shutdown that the display shows errors on writes to the filesystem and I've seen strange results afterwards.
I've also been noticing, at least on one of the keys I've been moving around a lot for testing, that it sometimes seems to launch two copies of the BOINC "service." I've had it where I've toggled the Network state from "by preferences" to "disabled," and when I go open the dropdown again I can see the indicator flipping back and forth between the two states.

sudo /etc/rc0.d/K01boinc stop
sudo /etc/rc0.d/K01boinc start

seems to clear up that problem. Also, it looks like it may be running from an unexpected path, because right after the first reboot after the install, choosing to Add Projects commonly doesn't list any to select from. Stopping and restarting the boinc service produces the expected long list of available projects...

Btw. have you tried to install the driver for your network cards via synaptics ?

Um, pardon my ignorance, I'm new to this Ubuntu thing... If I have no network connectivity, how could I D/L updates? :-) Also, in digging around in the packages Synaptic Package Manager offers, I wasn't successful in finding anything I recognized as "drivers" much less "NIC drivers."

Edit : Do you had this problem on the persistent image (all FS changes in all FS except /home) and on the image of the /home directory ?
The image for /home is in a ext2 FS. - I guess that this is a FS related problem.

Well, as an example, I've taken the terminal icon from the applications menu and copied it onto the desktop for using frequently. ;-) That stays no matter what happens. And in experimenting with this between two keys, it looks like it may actually be caused by Enigma@Home. Since I started my experimenting with keeping the Network disabled and projects NNW while they are networkless, that does seem to have fixed the problem. I just seem to need to keep then NNW and Network disabled until I get everything reported in. Then I can Allow New Tasks and turn the network on OK. Enigma@Home is also the project I caught generating that new cpid I first mentioned.

One of the other things I'll be digging into further is that it may be related to the Architecture's I'm playing with. I built the keys on an Intel P4 system, but then move them to an AMD Opteron based one for the crunching. Then back to the Intel one to report. The most recent couple of "reports" I've done by going to a different AMD Opteron system and that seems like it may have made an impact too.

It still looks like I'm getting a lot less credit than I'd expect from the kind of systems that are actually doing the crunching though.

I have started building Ubuntu systems without the USB keys though to keep testing. :-) Now that I've noticed the updates available, I may have to go force an update to what's running on the USB keys. :-) (Just need to go back and review that Power Management package that I need to remove...)

I also have one of the keys (the one I leave living on the system I used to build all three) has been flakey too. I let the machine crunch with that key all the time, but if I choose to reboot it, the USB key never reboots on it's own. It'll boot off of the hard drives. But if I power the host off, remove the key, reinsert the key then power the host on, it'll boot the key just fine. Another one of those too strange moments.

Last little tidbit that may be related is that the system they were built on is USB 1.1, whereas the others involved are all USB 2.0.

EDIT: Oh, one last note. I can't seem to get the USB keys to rename the host.

sudo hostname newname

changes it for that session, but doesn't seem to change persistently across reboots. I'm used to a SYS-V variant where the syntax would actually have been

hostname -s newname

but that's not Linux. ;-) I'd rather not have 6 hosts all saying their name is "boinc" LOL

I never had any problems at the shutdown and flush the data to the USB stick.

Well, I've noticed a few times that during the shutdown that the display shows errors on writes to the filesystem and I've seen strange results afterwards.
I've also been noticing, at least on one of the keys I've been moving around a lot for testing, that it sometimes seems to launch two copies of the BOINC "service." I've had it where I've toggled the Network state from "by preferences" to "disabled," and when I go open the dropdown again I can see the indicator flipping back and forth between the two states.

I will try to reproduce this FS flushing errors.
A user user has also reported that the network connection symbol on the desktop showed wrong states. - I can reproduce this, but have found a solution.

sudo /etc/rc0.d/K01boinc stop
sudo /etc/rc0.d/K01boinc start

seems to clear up that problem. Also, it looks like it may be running from an unexpected path, because right after the first reboot after the install, choosing to Add Projects commonly doesn't list any to select from. Stopping and restarting the boinc service produces the expected long list of available projects...

For the next release, I have changed the BOINC client startup order, to start a lot of later. I think that this problem would also been fixed.

Btw. have you tried to install the driver for your network cards via synaptics ?

Um, pardon my ignorance, I'm new to this Ubuntu thing... If I have no network connectivity, how could I D/L updates? :-) Also, in digging around in the packages Synaptic Package Manager offers, I wasn't successful in finding anything I recognized as "drivers" much less "NIC drivers."

I thought to search there, and download them on a other host and transfer the files...
What card do you excatly use ? - Had you searched/found an driver at the Ubuntu site ?

Edit : Do you had this problem on the persistent image (all FS changes in all FS except /home) and on the image of the /home directory ?
The image for /home is in a ext2 FS. - I guess that this is a FS related problem.

Well, as an example, I've taken the terminal icon from the applications menu and copied it onto the desktop for using frequently. ;-) That stays no matter what happens. And in experimenting with this between two keys, it looks like it may actually be caused by Enigma@Home. Since I started my experimenting with keeping the Network disabled and projects NNW while they are networkless, that does seem to have fixed the problem. I just seem to need to keep then NNW and Network disabled until I get everything reported in. Then I can Allow New Tasks and turn the network on OK. Enigma@Home is also the project I caught generating that new cpid I first mentioned.

Huch. Strange.

One of the other things I'll be digging into further is that it may be related to the Architecture's I'm playing with. I built the keys on an Intel P4 system, but then move them to an AMD Opteron based one for the crunching. Then back to the Intel one to report. The most recent couple of "reports" I've done by going to a different AMD Opteron system and that seems like it may have made an impact too.

It still looks like I'm getting a lot less credit than I'd expect from the kind of systems that are actually doing the crunching though.

The moving of the stick bewteen differnet CPU architecutres is the cause problems.

I also have one of the keys (the one I leave living on the system I used to build all three) has been flakey too. I let the machine crunch with that key all the time, but if I choose to reboot it, the USB key never reboots on it's own. It'll boot off of the hard drives. But if I power the host off, remove the key, reinsert the key then power the host on, it'll boot the key just fine. Another one of those too strange moments.

It's a BIOS/USB problem. I had simliar at one of my hosts.

EDIT: Oh, one last note. I can't seem to get the USB keys to rename the host.

sudo hostname newname

changes it for that session, but doesn't seem to change persistently across reboots. I'm used to a SYS-V variant where the syntax would actually have been

hostname -s newname

but that's not Linux. ;-) I'd rather not have 6 hosts all saying their name is "boinc" LOL

Enter the ip for the ethernet interface and hostname in /etc/hosts and also add the hostname in /etc/hostname.

Hey Dotsch, you happen to get my PM's?

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Yes, and awnsered...

Man, this is starting to annoy. I finally found out part of my troubles with the USB keys. I currently have two of them available on the network and it suddenly came to light that (at least with this pair of keys) 3 of my problem projects have insisted on assigning then the same hostid! I've detached and reattached (to Docking in this example) and it reassigns the duplicate hostid seemingly based on something stored on the server side.

The Cross-Project ID on these two keys is different, but the project just keeps handind them back the same duplicated hostid. Sheesh! Now I've got to try and figure out how to get past this problem.

Whew! One problem down. Network connectivity is now available. (Note to self: Blades can't talk on the network unless the slot they're plugged into is associated with a VLAN. ;-))

Today I have released Dotsch/UX 1.1. Mayor changes are the availability of a 32 bit (i386) and 64 bit (x64) distribution, mixed i386 and x64 diskless client on one single diskless server, build in BOINC client 6.4.5 and bug fixes
 for the USB, hard disk, diskless server and diskless client Installation tools.

The distribution is available at http://www.dotsch.de/Dotsch_UX

Today I have released Dotsch/UX 1.1. Mayor changes are the availability of a 32 bit (i386) and 64 bit (x64) distribution, mixed i386 and x64 diskless client on one single diskless server, build in BOINC client 6.4.5 and bug fixes
 for the USB, hard disk, diskless server and diskless client Installation tools.

The distribution is available at http://www.dotsch.de/Dotsch_UX

And the torrents are being seeded since about 16 hours ago (0300utc).

---

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

I am downloading and seeding the new torrents now and will keep them up until the next version comes out.

---

Thank you very much for seeding my Distro !

Lovely. I just grabbed both versions and look forward to trying them on the USB keys shortly. Thanks again for all the efforts Dotsch! I'm naming my USB Keys after you! :-)