Quirky

Quirky is a Linux distribution and is in the "Puppy Linux family", also known as a "puplet". However, Quirky is not a mainline Puppy release -- it is a distinct distro in its own right.

Quirky is built with the Woof build system, as is Puppy 4.3.x and later official puppies. Quirky is my plaything, an avenue for me to try out some quirky ideas -- hence the name "Quirky".

My blog has a "Quirky" category, so you can go there for the latest quirky news:

http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewCat=Quirky

Quirky ideas

These are few of the ideas or objectives that make Quirky different. This list is just a start, and some may be dropped and others added. Some ideas may not even have have any practical usefulness -- they are just there because they are, well, quirky...

Embed the distro inside the kernel
Recent versions of the Linux kernel have the ability to embed the initramfs and the entire distro filesystem inside the kernel. That sure is one big kernel!
A distro that keeps getting smaller
Everything keeps getting bigger of course. Feature creep, inefficient coding. Puppy Linux started life as a 20MB live-CD and is now pushing 150MB in the latest betas. Quirky is currently 89MB and intends to move down with each new release.
Chroot instead of switch_root
This is a very technical thing. The initramfs will stay in existence after bootup and perform a kind of "super root" security function and ensure clean shutdown of all partitions.

What Quirky is not

Unlike Puppy, Quirky is not intended for "everybody". There will be less kernel drivers for example. Less video drivers. I'm not really aiming to please anyone except myself -- or rather, it will be nice if many people like Quirky, but given that it is the plaything for me to try ideas, it cannot be expected to cater for everyone.

But then, since anyone can build their own variant of Quirky using Woof, then like Puppy, there may end up being a lot of "quirklets" that cater to a wider audience.

How to get Quirky

This may seem funny, but Quirky can be built in Woof without any quirks. As such, it is then a straight Tpup. Hmmm, if you're new to all of this, the previous sentence doesn't mean much!

A Tpup is a Puppy Linux distro built from binary packages compiled from source by the T2 build system. I have a page that explains this:

The T2 project

Yes, you could start with T2 and compile packages from source then import them to Woof and build a Tpup and/or Quirky distro. ...if you're game. Or, build from T2 binary packages that I have already compiled. It is definitely worth reading up on what this Woof thing is all about:

Woof: the "Puppy builder"

But 99% of users are not going to be interested in Woof, and far less so in the T2 route. Instead, you just want a ready-made Quirky live-CD ISO file:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/quirky/

Go here for download page with mirror repositories (faster than ibiblio.org) and CD for sale at a nominal price: http://puppylinux.com/download

A great thank you to these guys for hosting Quirky ISOs!