Oh boy, 3 major announcements, all in one item.

-First start with the short news items: My cry for mirrors has been heard: the kind people at Hyguard have offered to rsync and mirror Trinity Rescue Kit. Download speeds are up to as much as 10mbit and response times are very good. Thank you Hyguard!

-New build of TRK 3.0 available, number 201. Solved some bugs with keyboard metacharacters and hopefully with startup hangs when activating certain drivers

-New BRANCH of TRK 3.0 available: parallel to new versions of the ‘regular’ TRK (which runs on the official kernel releases), I ‘m also releasing a version with the latest Mandriva kernel (currently 2.6.12.14mdk). This differs only from the regular TRK in kernel, all else is the same.
Why do I do this? I ‘m trying to figure out which would be the most useful kernel for TRK to build on. Official kernel releases have less drivers and take longer for new hardware to get supported, but on the other hand, whatever makes it to the official kernel is regarded as stable.
Then again, Mandriva dares to include less tested or vendor contributed drivers into their kernels.
Only downside maybe is that kudzu, the TRK hardware detection utility, comes from Fedora and probably doesn ‘t know about these 3rd party drivers. I ‘ll figure out a way to use those drivers anyway, probably by making a separate page with references between hardware description <=> module name so you can modprobe the right driver afterwards.
Please report as much as you can about any problems

Here ‘s the changelog since build 199:

build 200
*keyboard scripts don ‘t load unicode but normal font => resolves metacharacter problems.
*new build tree with Mandriva 2006 2.6.12.14mdk kernel (=more/alternative drivers)
kernel 2.6.14.3 recompiled with loopback devices in kernel

build 201
*recompiled both kernels (2.6.14.3 and 2.6.12.14mdk) with SCSI disk support compiled in kernel instead of as module
*added /lib/tls libraries to the initrd. I keep having problems with a certain Compaq DL380 where insmodding cciss for its SmartArray keep giving me problems: it hangs. Even an ‘strace insmod cciss’ doesn ‘t show me anything. Hope this solves it, I don ‘t have access to that machine daily. Please report me any problems on this.
*added feature to startup in some sort of debug mode: rc.sysinit runs with ‘set -x’, kudzu and modprobe run with ‘strace’. Type ‘debug’ at the startup commandline (F1) to start in this mode.