Introducing Easy Bookworm

The Dunfell-series of Easy is built with packages compiled from source. There was an earlier Buster-series, now retired, built with Debian Buster DEBs.

Debian 12 is not scheduled to be released until mid-2023. It is known as the "testing" branch, and will become the "stable" branch when released. It is also known as "Bookworm".

Although the Bookworm DEB package repository is going to be very much a moving target, I decided to do a build of EasyOS. It has worked out quite well, and testers are invited to give it a go:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/bookworm/2022/0.1/

It is version 0.1, as I have only done limited testing, and there are bound to be issues.

The intentions of the planners is interesting:

https://wiki.debian.org/NewInBookworm

Interesting that 'which' is deprecated. Well, it is going to stay in EasyOS, I like it. It is a busybox applet.

Also very interesting, the decision to support only "merged-usr", where everything is in /usr, not in /lib, /bin, /sbin. I don't see any sign of that happening in the DEBs that I used to build EasyOS.

A little usability note. At first bootup, when asked for a password, don't just press the ENTER key, do type in a password. There are many security enhancements from having a password. It is not just that the folders in the working-partition are encrypted, also the root password gets set to the same bootup password.

It is also worthwhile knowing that if you plug in another EasyOS usb-stick, or mount the working-partition of another EasyOS installation, if you have used the same bootup password for all of them, the folders are all accessible.

While I'm at it, another bit of advice. Use a "good quality" usb-stick. A couple of users recently have reported that the first bootup is slow. This is when 'easy.sfs' is copied from the boot-partition to the working-partition (this is done for future rollback support).
Many cheap usb-sticks have extremely slow write speed. Pathetic in fact. There is a 10:1 write speed difference between a "good" usb-stick and a "cheap and nasty" one.

Testing Easy Bookworm, I timed the copy of 'easy.sfs' and it took 11 seconds. That was on a SanDisk Ultra usb3 stick. This is a mid-range usb-stick available at major stores -- I bought mine from BigW.

I also own a couple of SanDisk Extreme sticks, and the copy drops to about 5 seconds (approximate, as I recall). They are more expensive though, and not readily available at major stores.

Discussion welcome at this forum thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5952

Now for a snapshot...

...a pleasant wallpaper.    

Tags: easy