TurnKey Core 12.0 RC based on Debian Squeeze

Although not sure when I'll get a chance to play with it... So much to do, so little time... I'm really hoping life will settle back down in a week or two and I can get back to much of the geeky TKL goodness that I love to play with. Looking forward to taking this for a test drive.

Anyway it sounds like it was a good excuse to squash a few bugs! :)

Squeeze is very similar to Lucid. I routinely use packages from one in the other usually without any problems. If I'm not mistaken I think this is because Lucid was branched from a version of Debian testing that eventually became Squeeze.

Regarding the choice between Ubuntu and Debian I agree that this could be an issue. We need to think some more about it.

I was really waiting for a new TKL Core to start some work on appliances, althou I'm still more inclined to ubuntu-based ones. I surely take this core for a spin, I have discovered that 90% of my TKLs were self developed, so I was really needing a core to work with.

What worries me is that development of new appliances suffer because of the 2 base core: they should be completly compatible considering that ubuntu is debian based, but I'm not really sure. Also, more options not always is good, because you can make a less technical audience to be confused with which appliance to download.

Anyway, I think I'm late to the discussion, so I'll make the most of this debian core trying out my tklpatches. I'll give you guys some feedback as soon as I can.

Great going guys :)!!

Due to work pressure, need to try it end of the month :).

Cheers!

TKL Rocks!!

This is such a good comparison it should really have been a blog post! It's not too late Jeremy. Think about it! :)

Most of your information is spot on, with a few minor gaps. For example, Debian actually has a very impressive array of developer tools, they're just much more old school's than Ubuntu's launchpad and not as well presented. It's not all click and point. You have to learn the ropes. But the developer infrastructure/sprawl is there and it works well enough for a much larger group of people (Debian Devs) than are working on Ubuntu via Launchpad.

Debian's infrastructure vs Ubuntu's infrastructure is the Bazaar vs the Cathedral...

Regarding the community, the forums aren't where the action's at in Debian so that's not the best comparison. The Debian community goes way way back to before the web existed (1993!). They still prefer old school email to all this newfangled web forum stuff. We're talking about hard core Unix guys many of which still read their mail in a terminal window program such as mutt (not that there's anything wrong with that).

In recent years Debian hasn't gotten as much of the glory as Ubuntu because the people driving the community mostly don't care about marketing or market share. They're just doing Debian for themselves, they've been doing it for 20 years and I'd be very surprised if they're not doing it in another 20. I can't say that for any other major distributions.

In my experience, Debian generally contains less bloat (138MB Debian-TKL-Core vs 180MB Ubuntu-TKL-Core) and seems to use less resources and thus run a little quicker/smoother. Many long term Debian users claim that it is more stable than Ubuntu. I have little experience with Debian servers, but a Debian desktop feels much more responsive that Ubuntu with similar packages (i compared Debian Squeeze to Ubuntu Lucid which contains many of the same packages due to Lucid being taken from Debian testing while it was frozen - just prior to Squeeze release).

As Debian and Ubuntu are so close (most Ubuntu packages originate from Debian with little or no modification) I don't think development/maintenance will be an issue. Also this has been on the cards for a long time so I think that if the devs release a stable/final release then they will maintain it regardless.

Here are the fundamentla differences as I see them (my opinion only):

As for TKLBAM, generally this shouldn't be an issue between official appliances that include minimal custom tweaks. As Ubuntu is more-or-less a fork of Debian they are very similar. However once customised and additional packages are included it could become problematic (often package names differ between Ubuntu and Debian). This will be a case of trial and error I imagine.

Is there any performance or other benefits?

Is there a risk that it will become unpopular and hence no longer supported?

TKLBAM between Ubuntu and Debian, and vice versa?

Thanks for the feedback.

I've tested on VirtualBox 4.1.8 on Linux (Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS) without issue. Can you reproduce this? What disk type are you using? Fixed or Dynamic?

Could you take a look at /var/log/di-live.log to see what error is displayed?

BTW, you can run di-live in debug mode which might help, by booting the live system, exiting the confconsole and executing 'di-live --debug'.

Excellent feedback JedMeister. Alon setup ProxMox for the testing so hopefully these problems won't be too hard to reproduce and squash when we do the final release..

Installing to a .raw vHDD (which is static size of 32GB). I haven't played at all, just installed with defaults (yes, yes ,ok, etc) and got very similar result to Shantanu:

Unable to install GRUB in /dev/disk/by-id/ata/QEMU_HARDDISK_QM0001
Executing 'grub-install /dev/disk/by-id/ata-QEMU_HARDDISK_QM0001'

This is a fatal error.

I persevered and tried to make it finalise anyway but it hangs after reboot on "Booting from harddrive..." using 100% CPU (like it's still in virtual BIOS).

I haven't had a chance to look any deeper but I assume I'll need to mount the .raw image to check the logs? I'm not sure how to launch di-live in debug mode as I can't exit it (anyway that I can see)...

However I just tried again, but this time I said no to installing grub to the first harddrive, then manually told it to install grub to /dev/sda1 (in the di-live dialog) and it worked fine.

BTW it doesn't shutdown cleanly when the 'Shutdown' button is clicked in the PVE WebUI (like the Ubuntu based appliances do IIRC). I had to click 'Stop'.

Thanks for reporting the issue folks! I managed to reproduce the bug on vanilla KVM, and updated di-live with a newer version of grub-installer which seems to have solved the issue.

I've uploaded a new ISO (12.0rc2), and updated the download link in the above annoucement, as well on the core appliance page.

It would be great if you could test the new version and report back whether the bug has been squashed.

My dom0 as host for all my VM is Debian Squeeze, and i was planning to quit tkl and move to debian installing all hand grinding (web servers and mysql servers) so with this notice, im keep in tkl.. thanks!

It leaves much to be desired in my opinion as well. The whole "it ships when the date hits" idea sounded great when Debian was stuck in a glacial release cycle, but these days I'm thinking it was an overreaction. There's much to be said for releasing a product when it's actually done as opposed to an arbitrary schedule.

I've come across mind-boggingly stupid bugs in LTS versions of Ubuntu that would never have made it into a Debian release.

I posted briefly about this not that long ago...

Xen is open source hypervisor tech as opposed to XenServer which is a proprietry hypervisor OS (built on top of Xen technology). These are Xen images - not XenServer ones...

According to this post the Xen images are not directly compatible with XenServer (although there is mention of how they can be converted).

Me too. Working on it.

I came across something similar on one of my home servers. USB device that was detected too late in the boot process or something. Workaround: edit /etc/rc.local and put that manual mount command in there. Not pretty but it might work.

I'm pretty sure that Debian has less 'required' packages in base install.

Just a quick update that you can now deploy 12.0rc appliances (currently only core, more will be added once they are ready) to the Amazon EC2 cloud via the TurnKey Hub.

Feedback is ofcourse welcome. If you come across any issues, drop me a line.

I wanted to test tklpatch on turnkey 12.0 before adding it to the archive, but slipped my mind so thanks for the reminder. I just updated the archive to include tklpatch, but haven't had time to test it yet, though it should work without issues. If you do find any issue, please post back.

You'll need to update the package lists to get the new index before you install:

apt-get update
apt-get install tklpatch

TKL appliances have security updates automatically applied so there is no need to 'apt-get upgrade' (unless you want to).

As for TKLPatch, perhaps that is an oversight of the devs. If you add the Lucid repo to your sources.list (as detailed in the wiki) that may work. Although it may not as the Debian packages TKLPatch relies on, may have different names in Debian. After adding the repo rerun your commands above and see what happens.

Regardless it should hopefully install from source though I would think (but not sure).

Installed perfectly.  Some notes:

-- 2 vCPUs - 1024 Mb RAM - thin HDD - 

-- Had to cron-apt after install because static IP situation

-- Always install webmin-time for correct time

-- Installed VMware tools -- no problems

-- Installed iSCSI server target for testing

-- Installed sendmail

-- Installed sendemail: a very small smtp client which I like

Ubuntu has always gobbled up memory over time for me. This is my first experience with debian.  I see lower memory usage so far.

I'm enjoying the Webmin 1.580 upgrade.

Fantastic work guys !!!

The issues between ESXi and Ubuntu aren't all Ubuntu's fault IMO. The kernel panic issues (which I'm guessing may have been an issue for you) only occurred from ESXi v4.0.1 IIRC. IMO the problems with using a proprietry product...

Having said that I don't think Debian can be beaten for rock solid stability and extensive testing.

So none of us will know when it is ready until they release it. Having said that, I know that the guys have been chipping away at the new release and I imagine that it can't be too far away.

As for migration, v12.x will assumedly support TKLBAM (something wrong if it doesn't) and that will provide a migration path, although it may require some additional tweaking by end users. TKLBAM will migrate the data, but some updating/upgrading of database scemes and other data may be required. This will be dependant on specific software and changes between the relevant versions. Many software devs/communities have documented upgrade proceedures for their software, some even provide upgrade scripts.

Hopefully TKL community members will be able to help each other out in this regard. But we'll have to just wait and see...

Here are some handy documents

You don't really install the turnkey core from the command line. Turnkey produces a number of products that are really meant to be used as 'appliances'. That is, the Turnkey images contain the oeprating system (based upon Debian) as well as the applications that you're looking for... all packaged up in a easy to consume way.

Taking the core appliance as an example, there are a few ways you can deploy it:

- Install it onto your bare metal system. This will replace any operating system on your computer so only do this if you are really sure you know what you are doing/want.

- Get some kind of virtualization engine (like VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Virtualbox, Microsoft Hyper-V, LXC, Docker, etc). You can then create a Virtual Machine (VM) or Container that allows you to install TKL without replacing your physical systems). This is what I do, primarily with VMware Workstation and VMware ESXi.

- Utilize the Turnkey Hub and deploy an instance onto Amazon Web Services. I have chosen to not do this but many people do and can help if you need it.

Now, github.com hosts the sources for the appliances but if you're looking for prebuilt images (iso, vmdk, ovf, whatever your need is), they can be found on the page for the individual applaince. As an example, the core appliance information/downloads can be found here.

If I didn't answer your question, let me know. It may be good to start a new thread here on the forums if there are specifics you need assistance with.

As far as I know, there's no way to turn a generic debian installation into a tunkey image. Maybe someone else knows some tricks.

You might be able to take a look at the manifest file for the appliance you want (for example, the 13.0 core manifest is at http://releases.turnkeylinux.org/turnkey-core/13.0-wheezy-amd64/turnkey-...) and install the missing packages if you can determine the right repos to install from... but I'm not sure what success you will have.

You could also look for a different provider that alowed you to provide your own image to install from. We all know that amazon offers the TKL images but I believe you can install from your own with linode. I'm sure others exist as well, if that's an option.

Sorry I'm a bit late here but hopefully better late than never...

Firstly, there was a guy a few years ago who successfully got TKL running on RackSpace (which doesn't offer TKL) by installing a standard barebones base OS (for TKL v13 that'd be Debian Wheezy) and rsyncing the TKL appliance over the top. I would assume that there'd be directories that you won't want to sync (like /dev and /proc for starters) but he seemed pretty happy with the result...

Secondly out of interest, which was the host you were hoping for? Maybe TKL can reach out to them and ask if they would be willing to host TKL images for their VPS customers (such as yourself)...?!

Well, that's just the problem. A lot of the virtual device hosts don't let you install from your own uploaded iso. You can only install from the isos that they provide, which are generally the basic install isos for all the usual suspects: debian, ubuntu, centos, etc. 

So my question is what can I install to get started if any anything? Is there a list of the files that tkl adds to the base install to get to the tkl core? or is it just hopeless?

This is an old blog post which relates to a really old release. As such, it isn't super relevant anymore. As it seems to be attracting a lot of spam posts, I'm going to lock it. Please feel free to comment elsewhere or better still sign up and start a new thread.