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newsEasyOS Pyro64 0.9 released
This is a beta-quality release, bumped from many alphas before it, of EasyOS.
EasyOS (also known as just "Easy") is built with the woofQ build
system, which can use the binary packages of any other distro. However,
this release, one of the "Pyro64" series, is built from packages
compiled from source using OpenEmbedded. Specifically, the "Pyro"
release of OpenEmbedded, more specifically, a fork of OpenEmbedded.
This is the github repo of my fork of OpenEmbedded. It has a
"meta-quirky" layer that compiles all of the extra packages needed by
Easy:
https://github.com/bkauler/oe-qky-src
EasyOS is an experimental distribution, a complete rethink about
ease-of-use, security and maintainability. An overview page is here,
with links to tutorials:
Summarizing some of the highlights of EasyOS:
- Container-friendly. Designed from scratch to implement containers in an extremely efficient way, and be extremely easy to manage (with simple GUI tools).
- Version control. Greatly enhanced roll-back, roll-forward, recovery, version upgrade/downgrade, snapshots.
- EasyShare. Extremely simple file and printer sharing over a network (again, simple GUI tool).
- Enhanced pup_event. Background service manager, an "under the hood" thing.
Apart from those, Easy has a fine pedigree, with Uncle Quirky and
Grandfather Puppy (Puppy Linux). Puppy is famous for ease-of-use, lots
of apps in a very small size, and a very special user interface, based
on the JWM window manager and ROX-Filer file-manager and desktop
manager. Easy has all of that, so on the desktop looks very much like
Puppy, except is very different "under the hood".
With this release of Easy, I have not been so bothered with keeping
size down, and the download file is now 399MB. But with that you get
just about everything -- such as LibreOffice, Gimp, Dia, Inkscape,
SeaMonkey, HomeBank, Planner, Grisbi, Osmo, Notecase, Pidgin, Gnome-MPV,
Xine-UI -- as well as all of the underlying support such as Xorg,
printing, scanning and kernel device drivers.
The list goes on... quite amazing that it is still only 399MB!
Download
Easy is very kindly hosted by ibiblio.org, as yet no mirrors:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/0.9/
The file to download is 'easy-0.9-amd64.img.gz'. This will bootup and
auto-detect your video hardware. However, if you know that Linux has
problems with using the "proper" hardware-accelerated Xorg video driver,
you might like to download 'easy-0.9-amd64-MODESETTING.img.gz', which
is exactly the same except has preselected the Xorg 'modesetting'
driver. Or, the last resort, is the very basic Xorg 'vesa' driver,
without any hardware acceleration, file 'easy-0.9-amd64-VESA.img.gz'.
Installation
The Easy download file is intended to be written to a SD-card, which can then be booted. Here is a how-to:
http://bkhome.org/easy/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html
...I do recommend that 'easydd' utility. Note, with some Linuxes, you may have to prepend "sudo" to use it.
Once booted up from the SD-card, you can just keep using it like
that, as it is already full installed on the SD-card (and automatically
expands to use the entire card). However, if you wish, you can also
install to a hard drive, as explained here:
http://bkhome.org/easy/how-to-install-easy-os-on-your-hard-drive.html
Development
As with Puppy Linux, Easy has a single file that will transform Easy
into a complete compiling/development environment. This is the famous
"devx" SFS file, which is a Squashfs file that mounts as a layer in the
aufs layered filesystem -- thus can be as easily un-installed as it is
to install.
At the top of the screen, you will see an icon labeled "sfsget", for installing SFS files, including "devx".
Infrastructure & containers
Containers are a very interesting feature of Easy. There are a couple
of "how Easy works" pages, that explain the underlying architecture,
and introduce how containers work:
http://bkhome.org/easy/how-easy-works.html (very technical)
http://bkhome.org/easy/how-easy-works-part-2.html
And a tutorial on containers from the end-user perspective:
http://bkhome.org/easy/using-easy-containers.html
Feedback
If you would like to get involved, there is a thread on the Puppy Forum;
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=988694#988694
Tags: easy