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Quirky Beaver x86_64 version 8.7.1 released

September 22, 2018 — BarryK


NOTICE:
Quirky Linux is a discontinued project. This is the last release.
Retirement announcement is here:
http://bkhome.org/news/tag_quirky.html 


Quirky Xerus x86_64 version 8.6 was released only a few weeks ago:

http://bkhome.org/news/201808/quirky-xerus-86-released.html

The transition has been made to building with Ubuntu Bionic Beaver 18.04.1 DEBs, and now codenamed "Quirky Beaver", first release is version 8.7.1, for x86_64 PCs. Some announcement blurb:

Quirky Linux 8.7.1 is the first in the "Beaver" series, binary-compatible with x86_64 Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, though built with woofQ and architecturally very different from Ubuntu.
Quirky is an experimental distribution, that forked from Puppy Linux a few years ago, and has followed a different path, exploring some new ideas. Continuing the Puppy tradition, Quirky has a "complete" suite of applications, drivers and utilities, in a very small size.
Version 8.7.1 is very similar to 8.6, but with a complete upgrade of package versions. The kernel is now 4.18.9.

Package versions may be seen here: 1 2

More details, including an overview of the release history of Quirky, is here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/amd64/releases/beaver-8.7.1/release-beaver64-8.7.1.htm

The primary download site is courtesy of ibiblio.org:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/amd64/releases/beaver-8.7.1/

As usual, there is a choice of an image file to write to a USB-stick, or an ISO, instructions are here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/amd64/releases/beaver-8.7.1/howto-install.htm

Feedback is courtesy of the Puppy Forum:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=106460 

EasyOS

I would like to mention also EasyOS, the latest version released yesterday. EasyOS is also built by woofQ, and mostly the same packages as for Quirky, so they are very similar. The difference is that EasyOS is a fundamental rethink of the underlying architecture, so, another experimental distribution. EasyOS is also available as the "Pyro" and "Beaver" series. See announcement of the latest EasyOS, "Easy Beaver", version 0.9.3:

http://bkhome.org/news/201809/easy-beaver-093-released.html

And, for an overview of what EasyOS is all about, see here:

http://bkhome.org/easy/

Note that EasyOS gets most of my attention these days, and perhaps ultimately Quirky will be retired. Though, the future is completely open at this stage.

Have fun!

Note, there was a Quirky Beaver version 8.7, with a brief life of two days. There was a security advisory for the 4.18.8 kernel, requiring an upgrade to 4.18.9, and youtube-dl (Youtube downloader script) did not work, also requiring an upgrade. 


Quirky Beaver 8.7.1 Bug reports

20180923
So far, one bug found. 8.7.1 has the Busybox 'fdisk', not the full 'fdisk' from the 'util-linux' package. If running from live-CD, and run the Quirky Installer, the advice for configuring GRUB is wrong, due to the less-functional Busybox applet. The fix is easy, just install 'fdisk' from the Ubuntu repository. The bug and the fix is discussed in the forum: 1   

Tags: quirky