WoofQ2 the next generation Woof?

I gave TrixiePup-legacy beta-1 a quick spin; quite nice. This is created by Roger (radky in the forum), see this thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=14554

...this has moved away from the traditional Puppy ROX-Filer and JWM desktop. Same thing happening for other recent pups and pup-alike distros.

Which has got me thinking; how will EasyOS be positioned, going forward, relative to these other pups and pup-alikes?

EasyOS already has unique features, such as Easy Containers and run each app as its own user. Yeah, but still very traditional-puppy-like. ROX-Filer and JWM for example.

Yes, I want to position EasyOS as a retro distribution. ROX-JWM desktop, keep the gtk2 apps, keep x11 (not wayland). Continue to run on old computers, right back to the very first 64-bit CPUs.

However, there are things that need to change. PKGget package manager, which derived from the Puppy PPM, is great because it is a chameleon, able install many different types of packages. .pet., .deb, .tat.xz, .rpm for example. However, it will install a .deb using it's own scripts, not using the Debian APT package manager.

This is a problem, as .debs do not always install correctly. This has lead to recent pups, such as TrixiePup, adapting APT under-the-hood, with PPM still there as a legacy manager; mostly for installing .pet packages.

APT and PPM are not integrated though; it is an uncomfortable co-existence.

In the case of QV, I redesigned PKGget so that it remains a chameleon, but is a frontend to the Void XBPS package manager. It even converts .pet and .tar.xz packages to .xbps, so that XBPS can handle them. That is complicated, and needs a rethink.

Enter woofQ2

In light of the above comments, I have created woofQ2. This is a merge of woofQ (EasyOS) and woofQV (QV), hopefully getting the best of both. Have chosen the Debian-family APT, mostly because have developed a dislike of the Void rolling-release model.

woofQ is able to build an EasyOS from binary packages of any distro; have had to forego that. woofQ2 is limited to any distros repository that uses APT.

woofQ2 is 80% written, or there-abouts. Got to a desktop; decided good enough to make an announcement.

Have taken some snapshots showing the folder structure of woofQ2. Soon I intend to upload it as a tarball, with all .deb, .pet and .tar.xz packages builtin. It will be pushing 1GB, but the great advantage is anyone can download it, open the tarball, then execute the scripts and create a drive-image file, ready write to a usb-stick. Internet access is still required, as APT will download any required updated packages that are not in the tarball.

Here is the result, after running the scripts, built from Devuan/Debian Excalibur/Trixie packages:

...the drive-image file 'easy-6.90-amd64.img' is 957MB (actually, MiB), big, but have thrown in everything including the kitchen sink. Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape, Gparted, LibreOffice, Celluloid, lots more.

Going to the top of the woofQ2 folder hierarchy:

...the build scripts and files are in folder 'woofq2', and the build in 'sandbox'. As shown above. 'sandbox/export' has the final result. Folder 'sandbox' also has downloaded .deb packages. The scripts are in '/woofq2/rootfs', see snapshot:

...just execute those in sequence, and it sails through, no issues. Will probably create a 'build.sh' to perform that sequence of execution. Moving up-one, there are more folders:

...I won't bore you with an exhaustive description of what they all do. One important point is that APT does not know anything about the .pet and .tar.xz (from OpenEmbedded Scarthgap) that get installed. These will be there, but invisible to APT.

This works in cases where there is no matching package in the Devuan/Debian repos, for example, rox-filer.

An interesting observation: I counted the number of gtk2-based apps in the Debian repos; 168. A lot have gone of course, such as rox-filer (it is in Bookworm repo, not in Trixie repo).

But, in some cases, I want to install a .pet or .tar.xz that is also in the Debian repo...

That is a clash. However, a clash is avoided by the Debian "equivs" mechanism. These are empty packages, that APT installs, then thinks it has installed the package, when it really hasn't. This is the folder of equivs .deb packages that have been installed:

...these have been assigned a very high version number, "999.0", so that APT won't overwrite them. However, there is something else, the "epoch"; these packages have been assigned epoch of "9", absolutely ensuring APT won't update them.

An outline of how to use equivs is here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/18192/how-to-fake-a-package-version-installed

The text files in the above snapshot are the "control" files that I edited to build the .deb packages. They all have "Version: 9:999.0", where "9:" is the epoch. Assigning a very high epoch guantees that APT won't update the package. Epoch is explained here:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/332617/when-to-create-new-epoch-for-a-debian-package

Marching ahead, the end result, get a desktop:

...chose the same theme from QV.

Hah ha, heaps of things are broken! See in the photo, container icons incorrect images, most tray applets missing. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Networkmanager not working, but I connected to Internet via ethernet. Quick check; Firefox works, LibreOffice works. No audio. These are all, hopefully, just details that can be fixed. Just takes time.

One thing that did take a lot of time, is still using Busybox init, intead of Devuan's sysvinit; that was quite tricky to figure out.

Anyway, extremely interesting and I'll keep at it. Try and have a life in between long sessions in front of the computer. Will upload a woofQ2 tarball soon, or expect to.   

Tags: easy