From this version on, m23 also supports LinuxMint 18.3 Sylvia as a Linux distro for the clients, including the desktop environments Mate, Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce. Debian 9 Stretch and MariaDB are now used by default for the m23 installation media. Performance has been improved significantly, hardware support is now available for more devices and many other, smaller improvements have been made.

Greater performance

The interface of this new version of m23 is significantly faster. This is due to database optimizations, which allow to process data 10 times faster, and also to other, smaller changes, like setting timeouts and preventing redundant requests. The newly gained speed most noticeably affects the client overview page, when there are lots of clients managed by the server. As a handy profiling tool Xhprof is now included, and allows you to see how long it took to execute any function and where things could profit from further optimization.

Boot media

The boot media for m23 clients and server are now based upon Debian 9 and the Linux kernel 4.9.54. Support has been added for USB Ethernet adapters which can be used if a system does not have a built-in network card. m23 clients can now also be installed on NVMe SSDs. Client boot media now contain a script named fetchJobManual, which can be used to enter the m23 server and the m23 client ID manually.

Interface updates

Each page in the m23 interface now has a help icon that allows you to jump right to the help section of that page. The page "Make boot CD" has been substantially overhauled and was renamed to "Create boot media", as, presumably, only a very small portion of all m23 servers will still have a CD writer. Simultaneously, the dialog for writing boot diskettes has been removed. The update dialog, which can be used to install the official m23 packages, is now also available on UCS systems. On the newly added page called "Server features", optional m23 features can be activated - for example, the clients' online status can regularly be determined and displayed in the client overview. Client IDs are now displayed in the client overview. In the dialog for adding a new client, the client can now be assigned to multiple groups. When a client goes into a critical state, its control center will automatically display the most recent error from the client log. The dog ear that opens the m23 questionnaire has been removed. The option to upload encrypted server backups to share-online.biz has also been removed.

Smaller changes

The m23 command line now provides a new module that can find differences between the client data sets of the UCS LDAP and the m23 database. The module "DB_changeAllCollations" allows you to set all fields in all tables in the m23 database to use the character set "latin1_general_ci". Another module can help you with batch-changing IP adresses in the UCS LDAP and the m23 database. For MDM, the resource-hungry fading effect of the slide show has now been deactivated and the delay for a change between images has been increased to 5 minutes. The Script "pool2ISO" will convert a repository that has been created by the package source architect into an ISO file, which can be burnt to a CD/DVD/Blu-ray. For Ubuntu 16.04, an additional desktop profile has been created that installs a minimal Unity with German localization.

Updates

phpMyAdmin has been updated to 4.7.6. The integrated virtualization now also works with hosts running VirtualBox 5.x, uses "Debian_64" with 32MB video memory for the system profile and suggests 1GB RAM.

Downloads / Update

The latest version is now available as an update via the m23 interface, via APT (Note: package source server for packages specific to m23 is now "deb http://m23inst.goos-habermann.de ./". Setup as described in the installation guide), as ISO file for creating an m23 server installation medium, as preinstalled virtual machine or as an image file for Raspberry Pi (the latter three can be found in the download section).