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Next-generation EasyOS 6.101 V7alpha

July 04, 2025 — BarryK

Heaps of progress since version 6.94 was released. Blog posts:

As well as various things tweaked and fixed not mentioned in blog posts.

By "next generation", I mean built with the new "woofQ2", which is maybe shaping up to be the next-generation, only "maybe". Easy Scarthgap is built with woofQ, and that isn't going to change, as woofQ2 is specifically tied to using APT (Debian's package manager), and hence to building from packages of a Linux distribution that uses .deb packages. Though, should mention, there is "apt-rpm".

There have been some pretty sizeable issues, that have taken awhile to fix. And, still some outstanding. Let's see, including these:

  1. PKGget is a frontend to APT, which works, though you will see some "oddnesses" here and there.
  2. Easy Containers is still broken.
  3. Bluepup is broken, but replaced with Blueman that works, or does for me.

There are things not yet tested, such as Samba and network sharing via EasyShare.

I had fun creating a new theme. Got really creative; it certainly can be described as "interesting", though "appealing" might be going a bit too far. Went for a colour medley. Decided to stay with that Australian rural farm scene wallpaper, and as the sky is blue, went for JWM and GTK blue themes to match the sky. And, as the grass is yellow-brown, went for the JWM tray brown. Then the popup menu something in-between. Here it is:

img1

...then, if it isn't multi-coloured enough, threw in those pink "update" and "save" icons!

Download the drive-image file from here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/woofq2/easyos/

The "update" desktop icon does not yet work. These alpha releases cannot be updated, not by the icon anyway. Version 6.101 has to be a fresh new install.

The "devx" sfs works. I don't know if "SFSget" works; anyway, can download it directly from here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/sfs/easyos/devuan/excalibur/

...place at /mnt/wkg/sfs/easyos/devuan/excalibur, then run the BootManager and select it for next bootup.

For anyone who might want to, you can try out woofQ2. It is here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/woofq2/woofq2-project/

...there is a readme file, that you must read -- should also mention, must run the scripts as the root user. The 'repos-250704.tar.gz' has all required binary packages for the build. Yes, it is big, 1.1GB, but it means the build can happen with very little download required -- the build script does have to download the latest package databases, and also any .deb packages that might have got upgraded (which might happen as Trixie is still at soft-freeze).

On my computer, with woofQ2 on an external SSD (Samsung 870 Evo SATA), with USB3 gen1 caddy, the total build takes 30 minutes, give or take a minute.

...though, I don't know why anyone would want to do it. Down the track maybe, if someone wants to create their own spin-off of EasyOS.

Testers welcome, feedback in this forum thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=151564#p151564

There is another thread discussing PKGget:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=14681

A final thought; at startup of PKGget, it downloads latest package databases. Does this once per session. This is necessary, as Trixie is still at soft-freeze. After the final release of Trixie, can do the updating less frequently, maybe by user choice. Or, PKGget can check the modify dates of the online 'Packages.gz' files, see if they have changed.   

Tags: easy