We recently added device-mapper and dmraid to paldo testing.

Device-Mapper enables you to do a variety of things with block devices, read here for further info. In combination with dmraid it is capable of granting access to many software RAID devices out there included on many mainboards.

paldo's initramfs included since linux-2.6.15 should detect such raid setups automatically. The disks are accessible through eather /dev/dm-n (for a integer n) or /dev/disks/by-name/<name of your raid setup>. Be advised: The original disks (sdX) are still available in /dev but any write operation on them will most certenly destroy your RAID setup.

Hint: Since initramfs includes all this tools, booting from such a RAID disk ist supported, however the GRUB setup is a little more complicated than usual because if you start GRUB out of your paldo it will not detect your raid. There are 2 possible ways to solve that:
1. You already have a GRUB in your master boot record: You can simply restart your computer and do the setup from the GRUB console at startup. (This works because the BIOS fakes the RAID devices).
2. You don't have any GRUB on your boot records: You have to tell grub which device it will find at starup. To do this you need to create a little file, called a device-map. E.g.
hd0 /dev/dm-0
hd1 /dev/hda
Attention: Do not include your original member disk of the RAID system (/dev/sdX).
After doing that, fire GRUB with the --device-map=<your file> option and setup your MBR.

I have a perfectly working setup here with Intel Matrix Strorage RAID.

Previously, the device nodes of cdrom drives and cd/dvd recorders have been owned by the group "disk". However as the "disk" group grants access to all harddisks, adding a user to the "disk" group may be very dangerous. Hence we've added a new group "cdrom" to better split device permissions.

This change is now in paldo testing. Please update the group membership of your users. The FAQ has been updated accordingly.

The wireless networking stack in paldo consists of the following packages:

• Wireless driver: Part of the kernel package, cares about communication with the hardware
  
• Wireless Tools: iwconfig, iwlist, and others may be used to manually scan and associate with an access point
  
• WPA Supplicant: Background daemon controlling the wireless connection, automates scanning and associating
  

Without changing the default configuration, paldo 1.2 didn't start the WPA Supplicant daemon and the scanning behaviour depended on the wireless driver. Some drivers automatically scan and associate with any unencrypted wireless network. This may be convenient if you only use unencryted networks but is inconsistent among the drivers and holds security issues as your system may associate with an unknown network without your knowledge or agreement.

This behaviour has been changed now so that the WPA Supplicant daemon is always responsible for scanning and associating even without any configured networks. It furthermore works around a bug in the madwifi wireless driver that caused system lockups. If you have relied on your driver associating with your unencrypted network you'll now have to add your network configuration to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, for example as follows:

Code	[In neuem Fenster öffnen]
network={ ssid="public" key_mgmt=NONE }

In future versions of paldo you'll be able to configure your wireless networks graphically, we are working on incorporating the necessary changes.

With its 1.3 release, paldo has initial x86_64 support.

paldo x86_64 is not yet complete. There are several applications which refuse to build or to work properly on this new platform. Packages known to cause problems are deactivated and will not be installed along with the default paldo packages.

paldo x86_64 is a pure x86_64 build i.e there is no x86 support even if the hardware is able to do the emulation. This implies, that no binary built for x86 (i386) will run on paldo x86_64. The advantage on the other hand is that the distro is looking as normal as a x86 paldo one. There is no lib64 and libraries are not installed twice.

In order to install paldo x86_64 you need an x86_64 host system. Rescue discs containing traditional paldo wont work since the kernel on them does not support x86_64. The remaining installation procedures are the same as on x86.

All our kernels make use of special initramfs capabilities but our unstable branch had a kernel which used initramfs in a new way: Everything but kernel capabilities is now built as module (apart from very few troubling drivers). This means that you should be able to boot paldo from any device and file system Linux supports. This method obsoletes also the old fashioned "cold-plugging" of devices. The whole device driver loading procedure is now truly event based. As long as there are enough drivers inside initramfs there is virtually no need to build a customized kernel. Fire up paldo with this kernel build and check lsmod
This kernel was now moved to testing! Please do as many tests as possible.

Finally, after months of hard work, we finished paldo 1.0. Go and install this fresh and new Linux distribution!