Tag: c02ware

MiniTSS 2.9.0 released, plus c02ware site redesign

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

If you take a look at the page for the Tritech Service System distribution of Linux, you’ll notice a few new things. The most obvious is that I’m redoing the c02ware site design; there’s now a basic logo, proper site navigation, a mobile-friendly layout, and a cleaner-looking color scheme. Consistency across pages has been greatly improved, and lots of unnecessary old junk and confusing content has been completely tossed out.

This change is being driven by my push to release the Tritech Service System with all of our proprietary bits included as a commercial product, with regular updates, bug fixes, and support. I will continue to release TSS without any proprietary bits as a public and completely free system, but for anyone in the PC repair business, the paid-for stuff can easily pay for itself in workflow acceleration and productivity boosts within a month, and we want to be able to bring that advantage to other PC service shops and I.T. departments. If you are interested in being notified when the Tritech Service System becomes available for purchase, send me an email and I will keep you in the loop.

A major goal in TSS is keeping the system as small as possible without cutting out basic features. In the effort to move towards this goal, I have released MiniTSS 2.9.0! The download is a paltry eight megabytes in size, and includes includes the following software packages:

  • busybox 1.21.1
  • chntpw 110511
  • cifsmount (mount.cifs helper)
  • dd-rescue 1.28
  • dropbear 0.52
  • fuse 2.8.3
  • glibc 2.10.1
  • libblkid 1.1.0
  • libuuid 1.3.0
  • ncurses 5.6
  • ntfs-3g-ntfsprogs 2011.4.12
  • pv 1.2.0
  • rsync 3.0.7
  • socat 1.7.2.1
  • sysfsutils 2.1.0
  • tar 1.22
  • tss-base-fs-mini 101
  • tss-bootstrap
  • udev 163
  • xz-utils 5.0.4
  • zlib 1.2.3

MiniTSS is not just a live CD/USB system. You can download the “source” archive, unpack it on your Linux system, add or remove packages to initramfs as you see fit, and rebuild your own custom version with whatever software you actually need. The system only provides basic tools and a command line interface, and therefore is aimed at intermediate-level Linux users.

Tritech Service System 2.1 progress

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

So far, only a few bugs remain in TSS 2.1, which is currently at  version 2.1-alpha5.  There are some problems currently being worked out with KMS support, which is the biggest issue so far.  The entire “init” system has been rewritten to replace traditional “init” with the runit-init tools provided by BusyBox.  The move to a partially modular kernel has been done, and we’re testing that out on machines to make sure it behaves as expected.  (Modular support is necessary for drivers that must load firmware, like most wireless network adapters and some of the KMS video drivers in the kernel).

We haven’t set up the “beacon server” features yet, mainly because some security issues need to be addressed.  Persistent home support has been thrown out for now, since we will be replacing it with something more robust in the future.  We’re not too far from the 2.1 release.  It’s going to be pretty sweet!  Stay tuned!

Update (2011-04-08): Up to -alpha7b2, trying to help the Linux kernel developers with some serious framebuffer issues.  It seems that Intel i915 framebuffers (inteldrmfb) like to cause a completely black screen at boot time on plenty of computers (and that’s even using today’s most recent git pull of the kernel code).  Radeon and nVidia once in a while has the same issue.  In the meantime I’ve built a second kernel that has all the graphics stuff stripped out so that we can use console-only mode.