EasyOS
THE PAW-FECT DISTRO
Nick Peers can hardly ‘container’ himself after taking the Puppy Linux developer’s new distro for a good run off the lead.
CREDIT: Puppy
When Barry Kauler first launched Puppy Linux back in 2003, he can’t have imagined just how far his tiny distro would travel over the following 20 years. Renowned for its tiny pawprint – Puppy is a great choice for older and low-powered PCs – the distro is also well known for the dozens of variants that it’s spawned. There are official variants based on various versions of Ubuntu, Raspbian and Slackware, as well as unofficial variants known as puplets, remasters that spin Puppy Linux in all kinds of different directions. And then there’s EasyOS.
In 2013, Barry Kauler stepped down from maintaining Puppy Linux, and handed the Woof2 build system to the community. That subsequently became Woof-CE, which is still used to build Puppy Linux and its derivatives. However, Kauler moved in a different direction, developing woofQ to build his own experimental derivative, Quirky Linux (https://archiveos.org/quirky). In 2017, he launched another experimental distro on the back of woofQ – EasyOS – and it’s this he focuses his efforts on.
Despite its pedigree, Barry Kauler is keen to stress that EasyOS is not Puppy Linux, and while there’s similarities, there’s also a lot going on that’s unique to EasyOS. The result is a lightweight, regularly updated distro that runs beautifully on older hardware and serves as a test bed for concepts that could one day find their way into more mainstream distros, including the ability run any app in its own container. You don’t even need a spare hard drive or partition to run it.
Woof, woof!
EasyOS’s woofQ build system is a collection of scripts that stitches the OS together from scratch. Up until September 2023, you could technically use woofQ to build both Puppy Linux and EasyOS’s predecessor Quirky Linux, but it now focuses exclusively on building EasyOS and derivatives. Like all woof-based systems, woofQ can import binary packages from anywhere – including Void, Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware – as well as packages compiled from source using T2sde and OpenEmbedded/Yocto. The current release series – 5.x – is based on the Kirkstone release of OpenEmbedded, built using the Yocto Project (www.yoctoproject.org).
In living up to its name, EasyOS starts by providing a single IMG file download as opposed to a regular ISO. The reasoning is simple: the IMG file contains the complete installed operating system (deployed across just three files: vmlinuz, initrd and easy.sfs), so when you write it to disk (including USB flash drive), EasyOS is already in place. This enables you to test EasyOS in a real-world environment from the off without having to drive, but the lack of ISO isn’t a dealbreaker for those who’d prefer to test it in VirtualBox – the box (right) reveals the steps you need to follow.