Debian installer problem with GRUB

OpenMediaVault is using the Debian installer d-i to install the core system. The install process is preseeded to reduce user interaction and to do not allow the user to choose incorrect settings. While testing i realized that the installation of GRUB fails when the following parameters are given:

  • The system is installed on sde for example
  • sda-sdd are empty disks

In this case the installation fails with the message that it is not possible to install GRUB on sda. What? sda? I have choosen /dev/sde to install the core system. Why the hell is GRUB trying to install itself on sda?

Is this a bug or do i miss something?

The following options are used in the preseed.cfg file:

d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean true
d-i grub-installer/with_other_os boolean true

Any tipps or suggestions?

Update:
The bug also appears when using the latest Squeeze netinst ISO. A bug has been reported to Debian grub-installer package.

Unstripped build of FFmpeg for Ubuntu

If you want to enable various codecs in FFmpeg that are not supported by the official Ubuntu package (e.g. H.264) then this short howto will help you to build your own package quickly. I’m using the official package sources to make it as easy as possible and to ensure to do not break something. Make sure you have the Multiverse and Universe repositories enabled.

Create a new directory

mkdir ffmpeg-unstripped
cd ffmpeg-unstripped

Install some additional packages, especially the codecs you want to add to the FFmpeg package

sudo apt-get install build-essential libxvidcore-dev libx264-dev libfaac-dev libmp3lame-dev

Have a look into the debian/confflags file to find out additional packages that can be added also.

Next the packages required by the offical FFmpeg package are downloaded, also the source package itself.

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
apt-get source ffmpeg

Now its time to build the package

cd ffmpeg-*
fakeroot debian/rules binary

Finally we can install and validate the result. Before it is necessary to remove a previously installed FFmpeg package.

sudo apt-get remove ffmpeg
sudo dpkg -i ../*.deb
ffmpeg -format

System statistics

Today i’ll give you a short impression about the new implemented feature: System statistics. I’m using collectd to collect the system statistics every 2 minutes, the graphs will be rendered every 5 minutes. I’ve choosen collectd because of its better performance and lower load than Munin. The WebGUI can be enhanced easily by plugins later. The ‘Time’ configuration page has also been refactored a little bit.

Installer live in action

Here is a little life sign from OMV. The newest video shows you the installer live in action. After a short installation phase OMV can be used out-of-the-box.

Note, OMV uses the whole harddisk selected during the installation for the system OS. So if you’ll use a 1 TB volume for that you’ll waste 999 GiB of this disk for nothing. That’s fact, nothing will be changed in that way. No stupid OS/data partition solution as in FreeNAS will be supported, instead use a small HDD (maybe an older one) or better a SSD/DOM/whatever. Currently the OS requires about ~250MB in summary, but this may increase in future.

User portal

The next really important feature has been implemented, the ‘User portal’. This is the OpenMediaVault WebGUI for the normal NAS users. If they have been allowed to modify their user account data it is possible to modify the email or password for example.