Easy Pyro 0.9.3 released

May 25, 2018 — BarryK

Yay, another release! Still classified as beta-quality, as some parts need more work, such as containers.

If you are new to EasyOS, please read the release notes for 0.9, as there are introductory details:

http://bkhome.org/news/201804/easyos-pyro64-09-released.html

If you are able to run any Linux, I strongly recommend using the 'easydd' utility. It will make writing the downloaded file to a USB stick super-easy, but most importantly will give a report on the sustained write-speed of your USB stick.

The importance of read and write speed of the USB drive cannot be emphasised enough. At the bottom of the price range, there is incredible difference in performance. My experience with cheap Verbatim and Mtec drives is that they are abysmal. I have one Verbatim drive with sustained write speed just under 4MB/sec, which gives a very poor experience running Linux.

On the otherhand, cheap home-brand USB3 drives from BigW here in australia have around 20MB/sec sustained write-speed, running in a USB2 socket.

Download

Ok, download from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/0.9.3/

And instructions to obtain 'easydd', write the file and make the USB drive bootable:
http://bkhome.org/easy/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html

Note, recently I have been experiencing problems with downloading from ibiblio. Today, I downloaded Easy 0.9.3, to test that the md5sum is OK, and it kept hanging. I had to resort to using wget with "-c" option, using ctrl-c to kill the download, then restart it. Like this:

# wget -c http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/0.9.3/easy-0.9.3-amd64.img.gz

...not nice! I will look at mirroring it somewhere else.

Features

Release notes for 0.9.1:
http://bkhome.org/news/201805/easyos-pyro64-version-091.html

Version 0.9.3 brings some great new features and apps:

For container security, there is a patched kernel offering cap_sys_mount capability. Kernel now 4.14.41.
The Xorg default mouse cursor can be difficult to see in high-resolution monitors, and easily get lost. There is now a new default, named 'jaguarx', that is a little bit more easy to see.
Mime-sensitive right-click has arrived. Previously, there was a fixed "Open With..." menu, now apps are presented based on the mime-type of the file being right-clicked on.
Qt5 libraries are now built-in, or rather a subset of the full Qt5 package, and Qt5-based apps Scribus (desktop publishing) and Symphytum (easy database manager).
Audacious is a very nice music player, built with GTK2. Although Xine-ui and Gnome-MPV multimedia players handle playing of music, a dedicated music player is nice.

Desktop publishing, easy GUI database and music player, were identified as three gaps in the collection builtin to Easy, now filled.

Bugs

One known bug is that LibreOffice Writer displays an error message when save or open a .odt file. Previously, I had only tested .doc and .html files, which open/save ok, so never discovered this bug.
Despite the error message, the file seems to have saved and opened ok. Using LO version 5.0.6.3.

EDIT 20180526:
This bug goes way back. A quick google showed it being reported as far back as 2011. Then reported fixed, then back again.
I compiled LO 6.0.4.2. and that bug has gone. I also noticed LO starting up quicker.

Not a bug, but the mime-sensitive right-click menu needs to be tweaked a bit. I will need to patch ROX-Filer source.

Feedback

Forum thread for feedback here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=993151#993151

Note, the download is getting a bit too big for my liking, at 426MB. For the next release, plan to trim it a bit, knock off about 10MB I think.

Tags: easy