2015-05-14

m23 11.3 rocks, because m23 rock 11.3 again consists of a really large version leap. Among the highlights, you will find the added support for openSUSE 11.4, the very much extended client language support, the conversion of the server base to Debian Squeeze 6 and various corrections and bug fixes.

openSUSE 11.4 is now (like Fedora 14) a distribution supported by m23 via the halfSister extension. Arno Bauernöppel undertook the task of developing this feature. In addition to the OpenSuse support, he also extended the m23-halfSister API in order to make it possible to request a list of the available packages when the halfSister-client is turned off. In the original version, this only worked when the client was running. At this point I'd like to compliment Arno for his work!

m23 now supports a whole bunch of additional languages on the client side. These languages are available on the different desktops, e.g. KDE or Gnome, naturally depending on the availability in the specific distribution. The list of languages supported by m23 now contains German, Belgian (Flemish), Bulgarian, Swiss (German), Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, English (Great Britain), Serbian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Greek, Estonian, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian and Hungarian.

The m23 server installation packages are now installable on Debian Squeeze 6 - in addition to Debian Lenny 5 -, which made a lot of adjustments necessary. In making these adjustments, there were also added a great many of corrections, improvements and simplifications - as the m23 server installation CD, too, had to be changed to Squeeze. The installation CD was improved by a more robust installation routine and the bootmanager is now 'grub'.

Beside these bigger changes, there were also made a lot of smaller improvements, some examples of which I'll mention here now: The dialog for creating virtual hard disks for defined clients now shows an error message if there was not entered a valid disk size. To improve the readability of the m23 interface the single options in the 'add clients-dialog' are now clearly separated from each other, and in the Google Chrome browser (and possibly other webkit-based browsers) the superfluous scroll bars (for example in the client overview) should now be gone. 'LDAP user' and 'group ID' are now shown in this dialog beginning with 1001. The m23 hardware detection 'baseScanner' now buffers the device IDs of the kernel modules in order to speed up a repeated hardware detection with the same kernel. Swap partitions with the new signature can now be recognized by the m23 hardware scanner. The status bar for the client status now reflects the current status more appropriately. The newly added m23 questionnaire invites you to support m23 by entering your experiences with m23 and providing a reference. The graphical VNC console to operate and view virtual m23 clients now also works on Debian-based distributions which use 'zenity' instead of 'Xdialog' to draw dialog elements. By using a mirror server, the installation of Linux Mint 9 is now a lot faster. The package source list editor now contains an option for the architecture(s) fitting to the list and if a client is now assigned an inappropriate package source list, a dialog is shown where you can choose an alternative architecture for the client. At the client integration, the code for the recognition of the kernel package was extended, installation and swap partitions addressed by UUIDs are now detected and support was added for the 'dash' shell. The boot images and CDs now also use Debian Squeeze 6 for a basis.

The corrections list is quite large this time as we invested a lot of time into internal testing (thanks to Maren). This is also the reason, why the completion of this version took us relatively long ;-) Included in this list is the recovery of the home directory-on-NFS function. NFS can now also be deactivated on the client side, which means that the home directories will be downloaded from the NFS server to the hard disk of the m23-client. Concerning LDAP, there were also corrections and extensions made, in order to make it possible that LDAP users can now log on on any of the distributions supported by m23. At mass installation, the assigned group is now transferred correctly from the defined to the real client (if the according option is selected). In the integrated client virtualisation, the virtualisation session in headless mode is now running in 'screen' and the state of running machines is now transmitted correctly to the m23 server. The processing of package status information of clients on which there are more than 1000 packages installed works correctly.

The latest version is available as an update via the m23 interface, via APT, as an ISO file for burning the m23 server installation CD or as preinstalled virtual machine (the last two to be found in the download section.

Have fun!