From this version on, m23 offers support for m23 clients using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus. A set of desktop environments is, of course, included for the new Ubuntu. Friends of the Univention Corporate Servers will be happy to hear that the m23 app is now available in the Univention App Center. As always, several small improvements have also been made to various parts of the software.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus

For your m23 clients using Ubuntu 16.04, you can choose between these five preconfigured graphical desktops: KDE, Mate, LXDE, Unity und XFce. This includes a couple of new or updated programs. The usual m23 functionality is now also available for m23 clients with Ubuntu 16.04.

The adjustments which had to be performed to add the new Ubuntu version to m23 were rather small, fortunately, which is why this m23 version is already available such a short time after the Ubuntu release - faster than ever in the history of m23.

The largest chunk of time was taken up by making adjustments for systemd, as the version coming with Ubuntu seemed to exhibit random behaviour (correct execution, failure during execution, no execution at all) when running the m23-specific XOrg recognition routines. Lastly, the only thing that worked – after lots of tests –, was to install specially configured SysVinit scripts on the clients, as even a configuration using "systemd unit files" was not successful. If someone reading this knows of a better, permanently workable solution, please contact us.

m23 app available for UCS

Another novelty is the m23 app, which you can install onto your Univention Corporate Server via the Univention App Center.

Unlike is the case for the other m23 server platforms, on UCS, apt-cacher-ng is used to cache software packages instead of Squid. In the m23 app, the following m23 components are deactivated, to avoid collision with UCS-specific components: DHCP server, LDAP server, IP management, firewall, virtualization and client backup.

The little things

m23 is now able to integrate clients with dynamical IP adresses. The corresponding dialog offers a button for this. When a new client is created, an appropriate client's time zone matching the selected language will now be suggested. The bootloader LILO, which is deprecated, can no longer be selected.

The documentation was updated to include a hint about the script /m23/bin/externalDHCPControl.sh, which is called with parameters (action, client name, IP, network mask, MAC address) for any change concerning a client's DHCP boot configuration. This is especially useful when you intend to not use the internal m23 DHCP server, but an external one, which can be configured dynamically using externalDHCPControl.sh.

The new developer tool meldFileDevelVsRelease allows to compare a file in the release and development version. The script m23Search no longer yields inappropriate results for the geshi files. The base system archive for the distribution that will be installed will first be downloaded completely to the m23 server and be checked for authenticity using the GPG signature.

Downloads / Update

The new version is available as an update via the m23 interface, via apt (Attention: the package source server for m23-specific packages is now "heanet.dl.sourceforge.net". Setup is described in the installations guide), as ISO file for burning the m23 server installation CD, as preinstalled virtual machine, or as image file for Raspberry Pi (the last three are available in the download section).