site  contact  subhomenews

EasyOS Pyro 0.9.4 released

June 06, 2018 — BarryK

Here is another beta release of EasyOS, the Pyro series, version 0.9.4. If you are new to Easy, it is helpful to read the earlier release announcements -- version 0.9.3 is announced here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201805/easy-pyro-093-released.html

Download 0.9.4 from here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/0.9.4/

The big news for this release is encryption. You will asked for a password at first bootup. If you just press ENTER, there will be no password and no encryption. With encryption, the folders in the working-partition are encrypted, not the entire partition, and you will have to enter the password at every bootup to unencrypt them.

Here is my announcement about the encryption mechanism:

http://bkhome.org/news/201806/encryption-has-arrived-for-easyos.html

Release highlights:

  1. Encryption of folders in the working-partition.
  2. LibreOffice 6.0.4.2
  3. Kernel 4.14.44, with cap_sys_mount patch
  4. Fixes for rollback.

Regarding encryption, this should be OK for a frugal installation. The working-partition is required to be ext4, and only the EasyOS folders will be encrypted, so not affecting the rest of the partition. However, the filesystem needs to have encryption capability enabled -- I considered testing for this in the 'init' script and automatically enable if required, however did not implement it. Therefore, if doing a frugal install, on the working-partition, unmounted, you have to run "tune2fs -O encrypt /dev/device".

With encryption, everything should appear normal. It is only when the Easy USB-drive is plugged in when some other Linux is running, it will just see garbage in the folders in the second partition.

I discovered some issues with rollback/forward, now fixed. However, it does mean that rollback to 0.9.3 and earlier does not work properly. Therefore, restrict the Easy Version Manager (see Filesystem menu) to rollback/forward from 0.9.4 onwards (and snapshots therein). For example, after upgrading to 0.9.5, you will be able to rollback to 0.9.4.

The download file is 415MB. I managed to get it a bit smaller than 0.9.3. Ideally, I would like to stay around 400MB.

Forum feedback for 0.9.4 starts here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=994518#994518

Have fun!

Tags: easy