Quirky Linux 8.1 for Raspberry Pi2 and Pi3

This is the first release of Quirky built for ARM boards, specifically the Raspberry Pi2 and Pi3. Brief release announcement:

Quirky 8.1 is built using Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 armv7 DEBs and some especially compiled PET packages such as SeaMonkey 2.40.
Version 8.1 is the first to be built for the ARM platform, specifically the Raspberry Pi2 and Pi3. Note that Quirky will not work on a Pi1. It is expected a build for the Odroid XU4 is coming soon.

The functionality is much as you have come to expect with a Puppy-derivative -- you get "the kitchen sink" in a very small package. That is, an application for just about everything and utilities to setup and configure just about anything.

A difference though, with the Raspberry Pi build, is that it includes LibreOffice and Inkscape, whereas Puppy-derivatives usually have light-weight choices, such as Gnumeric, Abiword and InkscapeLite. This decision was made so as to provide the same functionality out-of-the-box as Raspbian, and in fact a whole lot more.
This has resulted in a somewhat larger build than usual, a download file of 360MB. However, compare that with Raspbian at 1.3GB, and Quirky is still relatively small.

The full announcement and release notes are here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/armv7/releases/xerus-8.1/release-xerus-8.1+.htm

Download
The primary download site is ibiblio.org, though it can be slow:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/armv7/releases/xerus-8.1/

A faster mirror of ibiblio.org is thanks to nluug:
http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/quirky/quirky6/armv7/releases/

Quirky 8.1 has also been archived at archive.org:
https://archive.org/download/quirky-linux-pi2-sd-8gb-xerus-8.1

Installation
Quirky is provided as an "8GB" image, quirky-pi2-sd-8gb-xerus-8.1.img.xz, that can be written to a micro-SD card. Currently, this is only for the Raspberry Pi2 and Pi3, it will not boot on any other ARM board.

If you are running Windows, you will first need to expand the file. It is compressed with XZ, and a suitable Windows program to expand it is 7-zip. Almost 8GB of free space in the partition is required. Then, write the expanded image file to the SD-card, using a Windows program such as Win32DiskImager. The raspberry Pi website has some instructions for the latter step:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/windows.md

If you are running Linux, then it is easy-peasy, well, especially easy if you are running Puppy Linux, or derivative (such as Quirky) -- some other Linux distributions will automount the card, and give it a strange device name, so you have to unmount it and determine it's correct device name (/dev/sdb for example). Instructions here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/quirky6/armv7/releases/xerus-8.1/install-quirky.htm

Feedback
Expect on-going posts to this blog. Discussion, including bug reports and fixes, and general user experiences, are to be found at this thread on the Puppy Linux Forum, from page 12:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=108132&start=165

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Comments

Please do not download Quirky 8.1, version 8.1.1 has important bug fixes and improvements.

Announcement:

http://bkhome.org/news/201611/quirky-811-for-raspberry-pi2-and-pi3.html

http://bkhome.org/news/201611/quirky-812-for-raspberry-pi2-and-pi3.html

Tags: quirky, linux