[Aurora-sparc-announce] [ANNOUNCE] Build 0.4 (Titanium) releases

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

The Aurora SPARC Linux Project is proud to announce Build 0.4 
(Titanium) to the world. This release is for sparc32 & sparc64, and it
closes a lot of the ugly bugs still present in 0.32, in addition to
having a 2.4.19 based kernel.

The installer has been significantly improved, so if you installed 0.32,
please strongly consider installing 0.4 instead. Especially if you have
a Sun Blade. :) One big fix worth mentioning: tftp installs should work
now. Many thank-yous go out to Matt Wilson for pinning down the bug and
patching mkcramfs.

The ISO images are multi-boot enabled, aka, you can use the same iso set
for sparc32 & sparc64.

This build is to be considered BETA. Like all the other Aurora builds.

This release has some known bugs:

- sun4d machines probably won't work. The last several reports I
received stated that the 2.4 kernel is in a bad state on these machines,
and I have no sun4d machines to test on.

- KDE seems to want to use /dev/dsp, and this doesn't seem to work. I 
don't use KDE much, so this is low priority. If you fix it, and send me 
the patch, and it looks sane, I'll apply it. I suspect this is an issue
on the kernel level with the audio drivers. /dev/audio works just fine.

- Swapon segfaults on sparc32 SMP, yet still seems to work. *shrug* 
Accepting patches.

- I actually split the floppy images for this release at the last
minute. I successfully installed with the boot32.img and the
initrd32.img on a sparcstation 20. Good luck finding a working sparc64
floppy drive.

- There might still be sections of the installer, especially Text and 
Serial that refer to Aurora as (C) Red Hat, Inc. Aurora is NOT a product
of Red Hat, Inc. If you find one of these lingering references let me
know.

- SPARCs don't generally like ISOs burned at high speeds. I had the most
success burning at 12X or lower. Your mileage may vary. If you are
getting screens full of DMA timeout messages, try reburning at a lower
speed.

- Some of the language translations may be really really off. If you
catch something mistranslated or wrong, please please please send me a
fix.

- Sun Blade 100s (possibly others) need to have ide=nodma passed on the
boot string so that they don't scribble crap all over the disk during
install. You should also add it to /etc/silo.conf after installing so
that it gets passed as an option.

Downloads are available at the following locations:

ftp://zenIII.uk.linux.org/pub/distributions/aurora/build-0.4/
ftp://auroralinux.org/pub/aurora/build-0.4/
ftp://ultra.linux.cz/MIRRORS/zenIII.uk.linux.org/pub/distributions/aurora/build-0.4/

These two sites should also be synced within the next 24 hours of me
sending this release notice:

ftp://kickstart.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/aurora/build-0.4/
ftp://aurora.markab.net/build-0.4/

Wanna be a mirror? Found a bug in the tree? Something missing/corrupt?  
Email me: tcallawa at redhat.com

Tested machines:

Ultra 2, Ultra 10, Sun Blade 100, SparcStation 20, SparcStation 2

Install methods:  
Serial (works) 
Network (HTTP/FTP/NFS/TFTP works) 
HD (not tested, no idea if it works or not) 
Text (works) 
Graphical (works)
Floppy (works on sparc32, should work on sparc64, in theory)

Thank yous go out to:

Ed Halley, for doing all the art in the installer (that you actually get
to see now!).
Jeremy Katz, for not killing me when he looked at my anaconda patches.
Ingo T. Storm, for catching a pivotal bug at the last minute.
Robr, for figuring out how to split the floppies.
Jakub Jelinek, for fighting for sparc patches.
Dave Miller, for fixing the UltraSPARC III+.
Uzi, for fixing that sparc32 SMP swapon segfault... wait a minute...
Tom Duffy, for reminding me about UFS at the last minute.
Peter Jones, for his continued support of sparc32 via sparc32.org.
All the mirror admins, bandwidth isn't cheap, thank you.
Everyone on aurora-sparc-devel & aurora-sparc-user.

[TRIVIA]
There was actually an 0.33 release called Tree Frog, but it was internal
only. It was installed on a grand total of 5 machines, and someone
walked off with my only burned copy. Thats for those of you playing the
"where did the build name come from" game.

the Aurora SPARC Project lives at:

http://auroralinux.org

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> Red Hat Sales Engineer
Sair Linux and GNU Certified Administrator (LCA)
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
GPG: D786 8B22 D9DB 1F8B 4AB7  448E 3C5E 99AD 9305 4260

The words and opinions reflected in this message do not necessarily
reflect those of my employer, Red Hat, and belong solely to me.

"Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." --- T. S. Eliot