Appril 7.1 (Quirky Linux) released

This is the latest release of Quirky Linux. The April series, that started at version 7.0, is built entirely from source using T2, and is not related in any way to any other distro.

Appril 7.1 is a specialised build of the Quirky Linux April series, for Android app developers. These packages are included:

Android SDK
Android Studio
App Inventor
Oracle JDK
LiveCode

These packages and their dependencies have blown up this Quirky way beyond our usual pup. The download file is just under 1GB.

The intention is to have out-of-the-box, just-click-and-get-going Android app development, catering for total non-programmers with App Inventor, through intermediate with LiveCode, to hard-core coders with Android Studio.

A significant feature of Appril is that App Inventor runs locally, whereas the official project is hosted by MIT "in the cloud".

A very significant difference from all other quirkies, puppies and Puppy-derivatives, is that Appril contains all development tools. Other pups are designed for users, with a optional humongous "devx" package available to provide all compiling, version control, etc.
Appril has it all builtin, absolutely everything you can think of.
This makes Appril superb as a compiling environment for any Linux project.
The full Samba as well. You can see the package list in the running Appril, in files /root/.packages/woof-installed-packages and devx-only-installed-packages.

Installation
Installation notes are here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/releases/appril-7.1/appril-7.1-README.htm

There are two files to choose from:
appril-7.1-16gb.img.xz is an image for a 16GB USB Flash drive or SD card.
appril-7.1.usfs.xz can be installed to any drive or partition. Use the installquirky.x86 utility running in any reasonably modern Linux.

Download
This is the link at ibiblio.org. It will filter through to faster mirrors soon:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/x86/releases/appril-7.1/

Feedback
I have started a thread on the Puppy Forum:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=100654

This is all of the announcement and release notes, though comments will likely be posted.

---

Comments

QtCreator was going to be in the release, however I pulled it out as it is too unstable.

I left the desktop icon for QtCreator, and if you click on it, an information box will advise what PET packages you need to install (three of them), if you want to try it.

QtCreator is an SDK for QML and Cpp coding, creating apps for multiple platforms. I have it setup for targeting Linux and Android.

If anyone can find out why the crashing, please go for it. Appril only has API8 and API15 installed in the Android SDK, which might be the cause.

Here is my reply:
http://bkhome.org/news/201508/android-sdk-apis.html

In summary, 4.0.3 and 2.2.x (with qualifications), with easy ability to add more.

Of course, these represent minimum versions. If you build for API-15 (Android 4.0.3) then the app should also work in all later versions (with some exceptions).

Note that Google recently stated that 90% of visitors to the Google Play Store have Android 4.0.3 or greater.

The 'which' utility, at /usr/bin, is broken. When I executed "which pwd" it returned nothing.

This 'which' is from the 'bash' package. If you look in /usr/bin, you will see 'which-BB-NOTUSED' -- just rename that to 'which', and that will restore the busybox 'which' utility, which works fine.

I have modified the bash template in woofQ to fix this.

Tags: quirky, linux