Grml is a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

based on

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

. It is designed to run mainly from a

live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading fro ...

, but can be made to run from a

USB flash drive A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since firs ...

. Grml aims to be well-suited to

system administrator A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to ensu ...

s (sysadmin) and other users of text tools. It includes an

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

server and a few minimalist window managers such as

wmii In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overla ...

Fluxbox Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the des ...

, and openbox to use the graphical programs like Mozilla

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

which are included in the distribution.

Features

In addition to the sysadmin tools, security and network related software, data recovery and forensic tools, editors, shells, and many text tools included with grml, the distribution focuses on accessibility by providing kernel support for speakup and software like brltty, emacspeak, and flite. Another feature Grml is its use of the

Z shell The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with many improvements, including some features of Bash, ksh, and tcsh. Hist ...

(zsh) as the default login shell. The customized zsh configuration used by Grml can be retrieved from the project's repository. Since early 2009, Grml ISOs come with MirOS bsd4grml, a minimal

MirOS BSD MirOS BSD (originally called MirBSD) is a free and open source operating system which started as a fork of OpenBSD 3.1 in August 2002. It was intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD with better support for European localisation. Since then ...

flavour. After the release of Grml “Lackdose-Allergie” 2009.05, daily ISOs and later releases, such as Grml “Hello-Wien” 2009.10, use the manifold-boot technology to provide ISOs that can be written directly to a USB stick, CF/SD card, hard disc, etc. and are immediately bootable. Since Grml 2010.12 the ISOLINUX loader is used in all cases by default, providing a consistent menu. While Grml is primarily designed as a live CD image, it can also be run as a desktop operating system through its "persistent home" feature.

References

External links

* {{Linux-distro Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Debian-based distributions Linux distributions

Features

References

Further reading

External links