News: 2011.08.19 installation media
2011-08-20 - Dieter Plaetinck
Hi,
time for a much needed update to the Arch installation media, as the last release (2010.05) is not only quite outdated, but now yields broken installations if you do a netinstall (because the old installer is not aware of the changed kernel/initramfs filename in our new Linux 3.0 packages).
What has changed in this period of more than a year?
AIF (installation tool):
- Experimental support for btrfs and nilfs2.
- Support syslinux bootloader, as well as grub.
- Changes to configuration formats to support new rc.conf and linux3.0
- Make selecting source more flexible (multiple local and/or remote repos)
- Show package descriptions when installing packages
- Run with debugging and logging enabled by default, add /arch/report-issues script
- Make automatic profiles switch source depending on whether core or netinstall system is running
- Remove support for tcp_wrappers in accordance to Arch Linux policy
libui.sh (bash UI framework):
- Made long checklists much easier in CLI mode, by using $EDITOR
- More flexible initialization
Archiso (image builds):
- Snapshot of current core, including kernel 3.0.3-1, pacman 3.5.4-3, glibc 2.14-4, mkinitcpio 0.7.2-1, initscripts 2011.07.3-1 and netcfg 2.6.7-1
- Big overhaul: use dm-snapshot instead of aufs2
- All needed files to boot for custom USB media installed on /arch
- Allow changing NBD export name
- Allow using serial console (kernel parameter: console)
- Allow starting custom script (kernel parameter: script), autologin tty1.
- Add self integrity test (kernel parameter: checksum=y)
- Add support to mount iso in loopback mode
- Added packages: btrfs-progs-unstable crda curl dhclient dialog dnsmasq hdparm netcfg nilfs-utils openconnect rp-pppoe rsync vpnc wpa_actiond
- Removed packages: aufs2 aufs2-util joe ndiswrapper ndiswrapper-utils tiacx tiacx-firmware
- Remove x86test, add HDT to initial syslinux menu
- Add support for booting from memdisk
- XZ compression for SquashFS and initramfs.
Obviously there's more, such as bunches of code cleanups and bugfixes, but this should be the most important.
.