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Saturday, October 30, 2010

Trinityhome : New TRK 3.4: easier than ever before

New TRK 3.4: easier than ever before
Monday, August 16, 2010

Big news from the Trinity Rescue Kit camp: an all new version of the live distro has just been published after almost a year of (public) silence.

People, we can't hide our excitement: the new TRK 3.4 is better, easier and more debugged than ever before!
The biggest visible enhancement here is the addition of a menu interface. Not a graphical one -who needs that in a rescue distribution?- but a text based, scrollable menu from which any regular computer user can perform otherwise complicated tasks.
So no more learning curve for new users, just boot from it and select your task from the menu.
Of course the menu is not the only enhancement: TRK 3.4 has received numerous feature additions like 'winclean', a home brewed utility to perform offline Windows disk cleaning, a new virusscan engine in the seriously debugged virusscan tool, rewritten winpass (password reset tool) which is way more tamperproof, complete manpages for TRK's own utilities, a quick and dirty guide for the impatient and literally thousands of other changes.

1 other major new feature which has not directly to do with TRK is the TRK version that can burn itself to CD! Indeed, using cdrecord, 7-zip and some cmd-scripting I was able to create a self burning Trinity Rescue Kit in the form of a Windows executable. So no more external ISO-burn software needed anymore; any computer with a CD burner can write TRK to a blank cd.

Download TRK 3.4

Here 's brief sumup of the major enhancements:
-the TRK simple menu (see picture), an easy to use textmenu interface that puts all major TRK features to the tip of your index finger. (with thanks to a very generous contributor who wishes to remain anonymous)
-rewritten and heavily debugged virusscan, a tool that brings 5 different antivirus engine to a single, uniform commandline. Supported AV engines: ClamAV, F-prot, BitDefender, Vexira and a new one: Avast. Grisoft AVG has been abandoned because their new version had no more cleaning capability.
-rewritten winpass with "hacked" chntpw: because too many people disabled SYSKEY (although it stated NOT to do it and the default answer was "N") in Windows using winpass (a wrapper for chntpw by P. Nordahl), bricking anything higher than NT 4.0, I hacked the source code so that the prompt for disabling SYSKEY never appears anymore, ever. Also the backup function now only writes 1 backup, which is the original, untampered SAM-file.
-winclean, a script that searches for unneeded junk files like temp, IE-cache, javacache, hanging printerjobs, uninstall files from Windows update patches, dllcache and recycle bins. On a heavily used computer it can easily recover gigabytes of free space and serieously enhance speed.
-pi, a contributed tool which is an automated backup wrapper script originally for Partition Image
-kernel 2.6.35 to support the latest hardware
-improved documentation and enhanced website design
-many standard tools that have been added or upgraded to very recent versions
-debugging, debugging, debugging: for this release TRK went through a long period of beta testing by numerous people on the beta testers forum.
But there 's one guy I would like to have a big round of applause, and that's Ted.
Ted who?
Yeah, well, I only know his first name and that he's from South Africa. But this guy has been putting TRK to the bench all the way, each time coming up with bug reports and suggestions. Ted, you are forever in my gratitude!

Old TRK specific features that have been debugged and enhanced are:
-fileserver: run a local samba server sharing all of your drives
-trkbootnet: a utility that makes a TRK network bootserver out of the running TRK
-mclone: mass clone PCs over the network using multicast
-full (virtual) read/write support, allowing exterrnal RPMS to be installed
...and much more secondary utilities like util-linux-ng-2.16.2, e2fsprogs 1.41.9 with support for ext4, wgetpaste, Truecrypt 6.2a, sysinit 2.87, gpart 0.1h, findutils 4.4.2, Mondoarchive 2.2.9.3-r2622, fuse 2.8.4, parted 2.1, LVM 2.02.61, dmraid-1.0.0.rc16 (support for recent raid devices), device-mapper 4.15, rkhunter 01-2010, etc. etc...

Get your copy now!



Read more...
http://trinityhome.org/Home/blog_comments.php?front_id=15&blog_cat_id=2&b_node=2&blog_id=249

Don

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