Quirky 6.0

Quirky 6.0 is released. An extremely brief introduction:

Quirky is my fun project to explore new ideas for Linux. I founded Puppy Linux in 2003 and maintained it for 11 years, then decided to step back and let the keen "younguns" take charge. However, I am still involved in Linux development -- I started Quirky Linux in 2009 as a venue to explore new concepts, and I am continuing this.
"Quirky6" is the "6.x" version series, with a raft of new ideas that I want to try out. It has turned out well, I like it and use Quirky as my everyday Linux distribution.

In a nutshell, Quirky6 is intended to be as small as possible (hence compiled from source in T2), very fast, very simple, and optimised to run on Flash memory media. There are other extended ideas that are in the pipeline.

A detailed announcement and release notes here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.0/release-Quirky-6.0.htm

...please read, as this contains the installations instructions!

Download from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.0/

The list of packages used in 6.0:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.0/woof-installed-packages

Extra release notes
1. /run and /var are symlinks into /tmp, which is a tmpfs. Only /var/local and /var/cache/fontconfig persist between boots -- let me know if you think anything else should persist.
2. Quirky6 automatically does a filesystem check after a power failure. It does this by booting into ramdisk rather than the f2fs partition.

Known bugs
There are some minor bugs that I discovered after uploading 6.0.
1. Menu -> Desktop -> Xfontsel, the executable is missing from the build. However, the alternative Gfontsel is there.
2. GTK will not display SVG images. This is a small oversight, the librsvg is there, should be easily fixed.

Theme
I developed a "signature theme" for the Quirky 6.x series. It is quite striking, but if you don't like it, of course you can change it. Thanks to afgs, jq8 and trio, whose designs I hacked on. I created themes all named "Quirky60" for JWM, GTK, desktop icons and wallpaper.

Other issues
1. ibiblio.org recently experienced a security breach, and the mirror sites stopped mirroring. This has not yet resumed, so you have to download from the fairly slow Ibiblio site.
2. I also experienced a security issue on my blog. Someone would not stop posting pornography so I have disabled comments. The maintainer of pe_pplog will implement email registration soon, then I will re-enable comments.

Feedback
If you would like to provide feedback about Quirky 6.0, and communicate with other users, there is this thread on the Puppy Linux Forum, started by Billtoo:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90784

---

Comments

aarf has advised this:

multiple webseeded directory torrent
http://puppylinuxstuff.meownplanet.net/aarf/quirky/quirky-6.0/quirky-6.0_Directory.torrent

came down for me at 700K/sec
I have written another installation script, that will install Quirky 6.0 to a partition in a internal hard drive. Your Quirky will then run just like any other Linux installation (except be faster, smaller and easier to use ).

Announcement and download link here:
http://bkhome.org/news/201312/install-quirky-60-to-hard-drive.html

Don't forget to make it executable:

# chmod 755 write-quirky-to-partition
# ./write-quirky-to-partition

You must run the script as root, and there must be over 8GB free space in the working partition (where you have downloaded the files from ibiblio), as the 'quirky6-6.0-8GB.img.xz' file gets expanded, so that its contents can be copied out.
The working-partition must also have a Linux filesystem.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=743991#743991

http://bkhome.org/news/201312/quirky-601-released.html

Tags: quirky, linux