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Quirky 6.0.1 released

December 20, 2013 — BarryK
Quirky 6.0 was released only a few days ago, see announcement:
http://bkhome.org/news/201312/quirky-60.html

Version 6.0.1 is a bug-fix release, however it has the first foundation-stone of the proposed "audit trail", that will allow easy upgrade, downgrade, recovery.

Full announcement and release notes:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.0.1/release-Quirky-6.0.1.htm

Download from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.0.1/

...you will see that the main Quirky file has a very strange name, 'quirky-6.0.1.usfs.xz' -- this is a complete image file, that can be installed to either a Flash drive, or HD partition. Note its size, only 103.9MB!
The "usfs" is the name I have given to identify it, it is an uncompressed squashfs file. And of course the "xz" is the compression. That is, the xz compression is not in the squashfs file, it is applied afterward -- which gives much greater size reduction.
(This means, if you uncompress it, then just rename the "usfs" to "sfs", then click on it, Puppy (or Quirky) will mount it)

As the release notes explain, there are two installation scripts:
'install-quirky-to-drive.sh' installs to a Flash drive
'install-quirky-to-partition.sh' installs to a HD partition


Installing to a drive
This script is most "taxing" and most likely to be troublesome on a non-Puppy distro. Though, it should work. You will see that I have included a syslinux PET package, version 4.05, as 5.x in Quirky 6.0 is broken, well, it just seems to be broken regardless. Version 3.x should work.

Installing to partition
This is a pretty simple script, and (touch wood) should work on all Linux distros.
One caveat, it can be used to upgrade an existing installation of Quirky 6.0, but not when you are actually running 6.0 -- you have to be running some other Linux installation, so that the target partition is unmounted. This is a temporary limitation.

"audit trail"
After installation, you will find /audit/quirky-6.0.1.usfs, which is the complete image. This is forms the foundation stone for future upgrades. All future upgrades only have to be small delta files.

Note that I am going for "atomic" upgrading, rather than package-based. The Ubuntu Touch people have gone this way, as upgrading on a per-package basis is very troublesome. Thus, they are abandoning the Debian package system in smart phones.

My upgrades also, will be a single file that you download. It will be a "delta" (difference) file, that is reconstituted to the full image, then installed. The delta file gets stored in /audit, for future use.

Discussion can continue at the Forum:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90784&start=45

Comments

aarf sent me this email:

http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/aarf/quirky/quirky-6.0.1/quirky-6.0.1_Directory.torrent

and mirror http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/aarf/quirky/quirky-6.0.1/

Tags: quirky, linux