Precise Puppy 5.5

After a long "dry spell", suddenly we have a flurry of official Puppy releases, all version 5.5. There was Wary, Racy, Slacko, now Precise. Here is a brief announcement:

The very first Precise Puppy was version 5.4, on 23 October 2012, built from Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 12.04.1 binary DEBs. Since then we have had bug-fix and minor upgrades, versions 5.4.1, 5.4.2 and 5.4.3, the latter released 17 December 2012.
Well, time marches on, and Ubuntu have released their second build of Precise Pangolin, 12.04.2. Precise Puppy 5.5 is built from 12.04.2+ DEBs, but of course it is extremely important to understand with Puppy Linux that our use of the binary packages of another distro is only a convenience for us, to obtain binary compatibility, hence compatibility with that distros package repositories -- in all other respects, from the lowest levels of the infrastructure upward, Puppy is unique.

There have been many bug-fixes and improvements at the Woof-level since Precise 5.4.3 was released, plus many package fixes and upgrades. Enough to warrant the number jump to 5.5.

Here is the full announcement and release notes:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/precise-5.5/release-Precise-5.5.htm

Download the live-CD ISO file (167.5M):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/precise-5.5/precise-5.5.iso

Download the 'devx' SFS file (138M):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/precise-5.5/devx_precise_5.5.sfs

Or, if you have already downloaded Precise 5.4.3, there are small delta files to upgrade.

Extra release notes:

1. Installing DEB packages from the Ubuntu repositories, using the Puppy Package Manager (PPM), is still a work-in-progress, though generally working well. Let us know on the Puppy Forum if you find any glitches.

2. The Configuration window of the PPM has a button to sync the local package database with the online repo database. It is a little bit slow in converting from the Debian db format to Puppy db format -- it did actually get much faster recently, but I introduced some extra checking which has slowed it down again -- the 'universe' db takes exactly 2 minutes to convert on my laptop (Intel i3 CPU), but may take several minutes on an older PC.
Note, I have an idea to speed it up again, that I plan to do soon.
Anyway, it is not that often that you need to sync the package db -- it is to get the latest updates in the 12.04.x precise-updates repo. You won't need to do it right now either, as I synced it a few days before releasing Precise 5.5.

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Comments

Precise 5.5 fast download
Username: BarryK
If you are in Europe, here is a fast download mirror of Ibiblio: http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/distr/quirky/precise-5.5/ Other mirrors can be found via my download page: http://puppylinux.com/download/

Precise 5.5 Forum feedback
Username: BarryK
"I have started a thread in the Forum, for feedback on Precise 5.5: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84896

Upup Precise 3.8.2
Username: BarryK
"Forum member pemasu has created an alternative to Precise Puppy, using 3.8.2 non-PAE kernel: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84944

bugs Upup Precise 3.8.2
Username: aarf
"need better documentation of the bugs in older woofs so that the devs can fix them before releasing all the old bugs again. and devs need to certify that all the old bugs have been fixed/known before releasing stuff built with history woofs. else testers will only test new stuff that is absolute current release. </rant>

Tags: puppy