Extending the holiday sale

We decided to extend the holiday sale for 2 weeks.  So instead of the second, you can get Black Lab Image Creator for $20.00 USD until January 16, 2015.  Thats a savings of $30.00 USD plus free lifetime updates, get it today.

"The Package is of bad quality:" Error Message

It has come to our attention that some users are having an issue when installing with Ubuntu Software Center that they are getting a message "The Package is of bad quality:  The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath."

The Ubuntu Software Center uses a program called Lintian and lintian If the package doesn't meet the Debian policy, then it is considered to be of a poor quality.

This does not mean that the package is bad.  And you can install it using gdebi,  

sudo apt-get install gdebi 

and you can right click the deb file and install with Gdebi.  Or you can install via the command line using

sudo dpkg -i blacklabimager15.deb 

It doesnt like the way we set the file permissions and the problem happens because the build script has to be set to a certain permission and  marked executable otherwise it falls on the user to go through and set the permissions.

But there is no issue with the package quality.  The Ubuntu software Center is doing its job and pretty much and flagging packages that are not administered via the software center.

More information on this issue plaguing other packages can be found here

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/how-to-install-deb-files-when-getting.html

And more information on Lintian can be found here

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/lintian.1.html

We are working on this to correct the problem with the Lintian checker.

Black Friday and cybermonday sales

Ok guys, today is the day. Instead of waiting for hours in a line at a store. Give the gift of Black Lab Linux. Installable media or on a preinstalled hard drives. just slap in the hard drive, boot up and instant Black Lab Linux. Get it today, all the way up to December 2nd

http://www.pc-opensystems.com/2014/11/black-friday-and-cybermonday-sales.html

Black Lab Image Creator and the holidays

For this holiday season, and it starts today and lasts until the first of the year, January 2, 2015.  If you donate $20.00 USD to help support the Black Lab Image Creator project, you will get the install deb and the source code for Black Lab Image Creator. 

If you need the remastersys source code that is also $20.00 USD until the end of the holiday season.

Black Lab Linux Black Friday and Cyber Monday specials

Today we are starting our Black Friday and Cyber Monday specials.  This sale runs Nov 24 - Dec 2

Black Lab Linux 6.0

Black Lab linux 6.0 on installable USB key, SD card or Live DVD.  $35.00 USD $25.00 USD + Shipping

Black Lab Linux 6.0 preinstalled Hard Drive SATA interface.  $99.00 USD $75.00 USD + Shipping

Black Lab Linux Boxed Set

Black Lab Linux 6.0 $25.00 USD Black Lab Linux 6.0 Preinstalled Hard Drive SATA Interface $75.00 USD

Install Media

Live USB Live SD Card Live DVD

Preinstalled Computers

Black Lab Consumer Hardware

Black Lab Professional Hardware

Black Lab Refurbished Hardware 

Black Lab Image Creator and the GPL

Somebody asked me recently.  Why did we rebrand remastersys as Black Lab Image Creator.  We rebranded it because Fragadelic who produced Remastersys asked us to rebrand it.  He did not want Remastersys to continue in any way shape or form in terms of branding.

Recently someone has said we are unethical, that by rebranding and redistributing Remastersys that we are committing fraud and some of the more feverish sponsors of the FSF are donating, acquiring the code  and then filing complaints with PayPal to get their donations back.  Personally, thats defrauding us.  But I want to clear up some misconceptions on our supposed illegal distribution of GPL code.

We do not charge you for the software.  When you make your $50.00 USD donation you are helping to support this project.  Because it is a project.  When you donate one time, you continue to get updates from us for the life of the project.  We do not "charge" per release.  The GNU GPL does not say that I have to give you the software free of charge.  It says I must provide the source code to those I distribute the software to.  We do that.  All the way.  There have been many distributions who have taken it inhouse and rebrand it, and create facilities to roll their own distributions and thats fine.  Its your source code to do that with.  Richard Stallman himself, used to sell copies of Emacs for 150.00 USD on Floppy when he first got started.

We enhance, maintain and keep Black Lab Imager up to date with current Ubuntu releases.  We have always done that and we have never misrepresented our work or our "ethics" to anyone.  For those of you more feverish FSF supporters who dont like the fact we ask for a $50.00 USD donation for GPL code.  You are more than welcome to go back to Fragadelic and ask him for the original Remastersys source code.  He charges $50.00 USD for it and its untested and unmaintained on newer releases of Ubuntu.

We provide this software on our honor.  There are no activation schemes, there is nothing "protective" in nature to force you guys to "purchase" this software.  You are making a contribution on your honor to help us maintain and enhance this software.  Like many free software projects we require donations and contributions to keep working on it.  If this becomes unmaintainable we will be forced to discontinue it and then everyone is stuck without the facilities to roll your own distribution.

Black Lab Image Creator 1.5 Released

We have finished work on Black Lab Image Creator and we have wrapped up support for another Ubuntu variant.  This release supports Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10 along with the following variants:

Ubuntu-GNOME
Ubuntu-MATE
Xubuntu
Kubuntu 14.04

We have not tested with Lubuntu.  This release is available now and we have made the following fixes.

1.  did a massive code cleanup from the remastersys source code so alot of the legacy remastersys stuff has been cleaned.

2.  Your backup remasters can be installed via TimeShift system restore facility as well as a LiveCD or LiveUSB

3.  Backup Remasters can be installed via Clonezilla, if you are creating your own distribution you must install via USB or LiveDVD

4.  Distribution Remaster partitions can be in XFS or EXT4, we are still working on BTRFS.  If you are doing a backup remaster you can use BTRFS

5.  Cleaned up the man file

6.  Black Lab Image Creator is still supporting 32 bit.  Even though we dropped 32bit support in Black Lab Linux, http://www.pc-opensystems.com, we are still supporting 32 bit with this tool

Known issues:

1. MIR technical preview ISO's cannot be remastered.  We are working on this and hopefully will be getting some feedback from Canonical on what we need to work on.

2.  Distribution Remasters cannot be accomplished on a BTRFS filesystem.  We are still working on this issue.

3.  12.04 is no longer supported because of the changes that were brought forth by 14.04 and 14.10.  If you need 12.04 support contact us at support@pc-opensystems.com and we can get you a working copy of 12.04 supported Black Lab Image Creator.

4.  Secure Boot is not supported as of yet, we are working on this for 1.6, which will work with Ubuntu 15.04

What we are working on

1.  ARM support Projected Delivery June 2015
2.  POWER support Projected Delivery April or May 2015
3.  GUI Interface

If you ordered a subscription of Black Lab Image Creator we will be shipping your copy to you via your PayPal e-mail address.

If you need a copy of Black Lab Image Creator 1.5 you can make a donation of $50.00 USD via PayPal and we will send you an installable binary .deb file as well as the full source code for Black Lab Image Creator and you get all further updates for FREE.  Please note in your PayPal Donation that you wish to receive Black Lab Image Creator.

Black Lab Image Creator 1.5

Black Lab Image Creator 1.5 will be released Oct 15, 2014.  This will include full support for Ubuntu 14.10 as well as Linux Mint 17.  Now I want to respond to a lad named cactusneedle who wrote a comment about us taking this project a donation required project.

The Linux and Open Source philosophy does not require us to make our project free as in beer, it requires us to make the source code available.  We do this with every donation that we receive.  You get a copy of the sources and an install file and we offer support for this piece of software like we do for Black Lab Enterprise Desktop.

Users who donate $50.00 USD, one TIME, get free upgrades for the life of the project.  We think thats fair.  Now, when Frag quit producing remastersys he quit because of the problem we were having which was funding.  We are keeping this project alive and ARE NOT giving up on it.

Black Lab Image Creator 1.4 Released

Using feedback from a few of our users we have introduced many new fixes.

1.  Initial Ubuntu 14.10 support
2.  Requirement asking for lightdm has been fixed
3.  automatic cleanup of the APT cache during the remaster
4.  Black Lab splash screen

You can acquire the  installation .deb and source code by donating $50.00 USD

We would like to thank  Dr. Saleem Khan Marwat for his contributions for remastering Kubuntu 14.04

Black Lab Image Creator Project public offering pulled offline

Black Lab Image Creator 1.4 will not be making a public release. As of today, we are rolling Black Lab Image Creator into our Enterprise Linux offerings.   Why are we doing this?  Lack of public contributions.  This project has garnered 0 external developers, even with the source code available.  That was very important to us and why we released the source code.  It garnered 0 in public donations and at this point even the Kickstarter has been a failure with no backers and no activity.  So without funding and without public contribution, the best thing for us is to pull this tool internally and it will continue to be enhanced for Ubuntu-GNOME and Xubuntu which comprise the base of our own Linux distribution.

Anyone who wants the source code along with the binary distribution can donate to help support the project for $50.00 USD using the Donate button and we will send you a copy of the binary installer and source code.  Once your payment clears I will send it to you.  We will continue to make announcements regarding our progress on this site.

Black Lab Image Creator 1.3 released

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Image Creator 1.3, with this release we have fixed the following issues.

1.  Ubuntu 14.04 support is complete
2.  Mint 17  support is complete
3.  kernel wont sync issue - This is due to the filesystem being btrfs during the compilation

4. Deb package now provided

With this newest release you can now build Unity and KDE desktops, here are some issues that need to be addressed and before you file any bug reports please follow these know issues.

- The build system must have an ext4 filesystem.  The default btrfs filesystem that Ubuntu uses WILL NOT WORK.  You can install your image on any filesystem you wish but the build system MUST BE EXT4.  One of our contributors is working on btrfs support but we have no arrival date as of yet.

- If you get a command not found when running blacklabimager you must run the following commands

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/BlackLabImager
sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/BlackLabImager-skelcopy

- If you get a home directory size error you must bring the size down below 4 gigs.  This is a left over issue from  remastersys.

- Your image presents you with a login screen:  Leave the user name as is and click on login, no password is necessary

To download Black Lab Image Creator visit our sourceforge page where the .deb and source files are available

Download Black Lab Image Creator

Kickstarter launched

We have started a project on Kickstarter to help fund development of Black Lab Image Creator.  With the funding we plan to continue to develop Black Lab Image Creator and hopefully get some of the bugs fixed that currently plague us.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1799080619/black-lab-image-creator

Remastering Ubuntu 14.04

There have been some people who have complained about the functionality on 14.04 so we have tracked down the problems and here are some workarounds:

1.  You must be using the ext4 filesystems - 14.04 uses BTRFS by default, BTRFS was created after Black Lab Image Creator, what happens is that it doesnt know how to appropriately count the inodes in the BTRFS filesystem.  Before you ask, no, I dont intend to implement BTRFS support, I dont have the motivation or time to do this.  We did implement XFS support in 1.3 because of the commercial release thats in Black Lab Linux for Enterprise so customers can clone their Red Hat 7 and Oracle 7 installs so we filtered that down to 1.3.  If you are knowledgeable enough to use this tool, then you are knowledge enough to format your drive in ext4 or in 1.3 XFS.

2.  Do not deb copy the 1.3 install in Black Lab Linux 5.1 - ALPHA, it is tuned to Black Lab Linux and will not work on any other distribution, please wait for the official release next week.  Do not deb copy from BLL 5.1 Alpha and then cuss me out that it doesnt work, you have been warned.

3.  If you use sudo BlackLabImager disk in 1.3 it uses destructive partitioning, it will ignore any partition requests that you may make to the installer.  Its designed to do this.  This is for Red Hat 7 and Oracle 7.  To remaster Red Hat 7 or Oracle 7 you must do it from a LiveCD session rather than from an installed system.  It will break.

4.  Black Lab Image Creator 1.3 will work with Black Lab Linux 5.1 onwards and Ubuntu 14.04.  Do not use it for Ubuntu 12.04.  Ubuntu 12.04 users should use Black Lab Image Creator 1.1 or the legacy remastersys 3.04.  This is because some of the packages have changed in 14.04 and dont exist in 12.04 if you use remastersys or BLIC 1.1 in Ubuntu 14.04 make sure you install discover, sudo apt-get install discover.

5.  EFI support - No, quit asking.  Its not gonna happen.  Disable secureboot, or install with Secureboot disabled and install the signed kernels from the installed system.  I have no motivation or time to implement UEFI support.

Black Lab Image Creator 1.3 coming in 2 weeks

Hey folks,

We have finished on the latest round of bug fixes for Black Lab Image Creator 1.3 and will be releasing an updated bundle on that day.  We are also working on packaging in Deb format to make the installation easier.

Black Lab Imager 1.1 Source Code available today

Today we are releasing the source code for Black Lab Imager, a utility for creating a backup of your system in a redistributable ISO or backup copy for your own use.  As you guys recall we have forked this over from Remastersys.

Now, we lack a GUI because Fragadelic did not give us the source code as promised so for right now its command line only.  We havent debanized the project files yet because we are still in the process of testing and building but we believe we have reached a level of stability that we are confident in its performance.

Why are we releasing the source code only?  We are still testing this release on 14.04 although users can contact us and let us know what works, what doesnt, and any fixes they may have in mind

How do I install this?  Right now because its not debainized, copy the blacklabimager folder and blacklabimager.conf file over to /etc/ and copy the blacklabimager and blacklabimager-skelcopy scripts over to /opt/  also make sure you run the dependencies script to download and install all your dependencies.

Where is the GUI?  When Fragadelic left he did not give me the source code for the GUI, so we will be making one ourselves outside of our webmin plugin.

What systems has this been tested with?  Black Lab Linux 4.x, Ubuntu 12.x, Ubuntu 13.x partially tested on Ubuntu 14.x.  What do we mean by partially?  We have rebuilt Xubuntu 14.04 and not pure Ubuntu

You guys can download the source code from sourceforge

UPDATE:

For some reason Sourceforge keeps saying its pending, so we have uploaded the file to an alternate download section