Snowing...

Yesterday evening it started snowing and we went out around 8pm to enjoy the snow and take a few pictures. It was fun to be the first going through the snow (at least in some quieter areas), and taking photos. The snow was initially quite heavy, so the first picture shows the tower of the Fürth municipal taken from a safe (dry) spot. The second one is from the "Grüner Markt" where I photographed one of the statues. We weren't the only ones out to have fun - we saw a familiy building a snow man and their 2 year old even throw a snow ball at me.



Today we went to the local park and I took a few pictures along the river Pegnitz of the birds.

Murphy and 10.1 Alpha4

Today I released SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha4 - but only the torrents to give our mirrors some time to sync the ISOs. The ISOs will be announced tomorrow.

Alpha4 was not an easy release. First there was a bug writting grub during the installation so that the system did not boot at all. Once this was fixed and grub was written, we found a bug in the graphical boot where there was a bad interaction with grub and therefore the system would only boot with some manual intervention. We also noticed some serious bugs in the ReiserFS code of our kernel - and fixed these two issues. Finally the system installed but I could not login. Looking further into this, we had two problems:

* One on the text console: One of the pam modules is broken and therefore the first time a user logs in on the onsole, an error is reported. A second (or third) login should work.
* And one on the graphical console where the login did not work either - due to some changes in the new bash 3.1 release. The fix is trivial: Login on the console and change /etc/X11/xdm/Xession as follows:

--- /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession 2005-11-21 22:22:10.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession 2005-12-15 12:09:03.000000000 +0100
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@
     */rzsh) shell=/bin/zsh ;;
     *)  shell=/bin/bash ;;
     esac
-    exec -la ${shell} ${shell} -c ${1+"exec $@"}
+    exec -l -a ${shell##*/} ${shell} -c ${1+"exec $@"}
 }

Since those two issues should be easily fixable by those that dare to install an Alpha, I went ahead and released this. As usual I've updated my laptop with Alpha4 and I'm now writing this from my Alpha4 environment.

And now - 6 hours after the announcement of the torrents - I figured out that the torrents were not distributed from our system :-(. Ok, fixed and I'm seeding the torrents myself now as well.