Quirky 6.1 released

Quirky 6.0 was released on December 15, 2013, see my blog announcement:
http://bkhome.org/news/201312/quirky-60.html

Followed closely by 6.0.1, a bugfix release, on December 20:
http://bkhome.org/news/201312/quirky-601-released.html

Now, barely 11 days afterward, a significant new release, version 6.1. A very brief announcement:

Quirky is a Linux distribution that lives up to its name "quirky". A number of unusual ideas are experimented with, as described in the detailed Release Notes.
Quirky 6.0 started the ball rolling with the feature-set proposed for the 6.x series, now 6.1 adds the comprehensive upgrade/downgrade/rollback/recovery mechanisms. In essence, these are in three sections:
1. Rigorous handling of package uninstallation, such that the system can never be broken.
2. System snapshots, with history, allowing recovery to any earlier state.
3. Simple version upgrade, with Service Packs.

The above three new features are explained further in earlier posts to my blog, read the Announcement and detailed Release Notes, which has appropriate links to my blog:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.1/release-Quirky-6.1.htm

The Release Notes also explain how to download and install Quirky 6.1, please read. There are a few choices. If you already have 6.0.1 installed, there is a Service Pack PET. For new installations, there are two scripts, for installing either to a Flash drive or a hard-drive partition. Or, there is an easy ready-to-go image for a 8GB Flash drive, that just needs to be copied to the drive.

For those who are into compiling source packages, the "devx" is no longer a SFS file. SFS files are no more, history, gone, kaput. They are now PETs. Again, the Release Notes explain this.

At the time of posting this, the mirrors of ibiblio have not yet got it, so download from ibiblio.org here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.1/

For those interested in size, the pertinent file is 'quirky-6.1.usfs.xz', which is only 104.0MB. The contents of this file get installed to either a Flash memory (USB stick or SD-card) or hard-drive partition by the appropriate script.
For those who are wondering, that "usfs" means "uncompressed squashfs", that is, it is a SFS file, but without compression. The xz compression is applied to the file afterward. Therefore, if the 'unxz' utility is applied, the resulting .usfs file can be mounted like any squashfs filesystem.

Issues/bugs
I did find some peculiar behaviour with the Service Pack. Although it is for upgrading 6.0.1, I applied it to a 6.0 installation. I don't know if that was the cause or not, but somehow the new menu entries "Quirky Version Upgrade Manager" and "Snapshot Manager save/restore partition" moved from the Filesystem menu to the Multimedia menu. Also, the new background image is distorted on my widescreen.

That latter one is a generic problem with how widescreen image truncating is handled in Puppy. I implemented it way back, and I knew after having done it, that it was not the best solution. I need to take a fresh look at it, and let the woof-CE guys know if I come up with a better way of doing it. It needs to cater for multiple different monitors and aspect ratios.

Note, commenting to my blog is still disabled. You can provide feedback to the Forum, see link inside the Release Notes.

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Comments

Nluug now has Quirky 6.1:

http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/pub/os/Linux/distr/quirky/quirky6/x86/quirky-6.1/

You might find this to be faster than ibiblio.org.

Note, I found another buglet in the 6.0.1-to-6.1 Service Pack, so that is definitely a work-in-progress.

Announcement for Quirky 6.1.1 here:
http://bkhome.org/news/201401/quirky-611-released.html

http://bkhome.org/news/201401/quirky-612-released.html

http://bkhome.org/news/201401/quirky-613-released.html

Tags: quirky, linux