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EasyOS Excalibur-series version 7.0 released

August 15, 2025 — BarryK

Where to start... compared with prior releases of EasyOS, Easy Excalibur is almost a completely new design. Here is an announcement blurb:

Compared with prior releases of EasyOS, the Excalibur-series is a "whole new ball game". All prior EasyOSs were built with woofQ; Easy Excalibur is built with woofQ2, that is a redesign of woofQ based on Debian's APT underpinning all package management. Easy has PKGget, a package manager GUI, that is able to install all kinds of packages, such as .deb, .txz, .rpm and .pet; that chameleon-like ability is retained, but now PKGget is a wrapper on top of APT. So now PKGget and APT talk to each other, and even if utilities such as 'apt' and 'apt-get' are used in a terminal, it will automatically sync in PKGget.

Easy Excalibur is built with Devuan Excalibur packages, equivalent to Debian 13 Trixie, but without systemd. Instead, EasyOS uses the simple busybox init, enhanced with pup_event service management.

EasyOS has inbuilt containers support, known as "Easy Containers" and this is taken to the next level. In particular, there is now a pre-created container named "devx" that has everything for a compiler/development environment. Like all Easy Containers, "devx" runs just by clicking a desktop icon, and the user can flip between any of them with single clicks.

Easy Excalibur is big, the download is around 1GB; and it takes EasyOS's habit of "including the kitchen sink" to the next level. Not just the Chromium browser, also the SeaMonkey browser suite is included, builtin. And of course all the usual guys, such as Celluloid, Inkscape, Gimp, SolveSpace, LibreOffice, HomeBank, StreamTuner2 and Audacious. For the first time, SpaceFM is included, for those who must have a two-pane filemanager.

It should be noted that there were major challenges with Devuan/Debian Excalibur/Trixie, due to crashing and hanging experiences that were not in the Debian 12 based builds. They are now all fixed, "touch wood". Read the blog posts below to find out more about the challenges.

EasyOS ships as a drive-image file, not as an ISO. Download from here, courtesy of ibiblio.org:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2025/7.0/

If you know about ISO files, not drive-image files, they are quite easy to install. Either write to a USB-stick and boot that, or open it up and copy the files into an internal drive. There are tutorials that explain these choices, such as this one to install to an internal drive:

https://easyos.org/install/easy-frugal-installation.html

Or, to a USB-stick (or any complete drive):

https://easyos.org/install/how-to-write-easyos-to-a-flash-drive.html

If you live in Europe, you might prefer this fast mirror, courtesy of NLUUG:

https://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2025/7.0/

Or, courtesy of aarnet in Australia:

https://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2025/7.0/

If you would like to scan through the development of Easy Excalibur, from the genesis of woofQ2, see these blog posts:

...yeah, rather a lot to wade through.

These are also listed in the 7.0 release notes, here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2025/7.0/release-notes.htm

Here is a screenshot:

img1

If you are interested in woofQ2, you can use it to build your own custom EasyOS. See blog posts:

Now for the caveats: EasyOS has always been an experimental distribution, and that has not changed. There is so much of the structure that is fundamentally different from any other linux distribution, many components of which are still a work-in-progress. In addition, there is new infrastructure in woofQ2, such as the sync with PKGget and APT that need more work. Bear this in mind when using Easy.

If you would like an overview of how and why EasyOS is different, read this page, though right now at the time of writing this blog post, it does need to be updated:

"How and why EasyOS is different"
https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html

Feedback is welcome at the Puppy Linux forum, in the EasyOS section. Discussion on 7.0 is here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=15572

Have fun!

EDIT 2025-08-18:
Version 7.0.2 has been released, see blog announcement:

https://bkhome.org/news/202508/easy-excalibur-702-released.html

I won't append any more update notices to this blog post. Please monitor the latest posts on my blog for announcements of new releases.     

Tags: easy