Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux, may have retired from maintaining Puppy Linux a few years ago, but he appears to be still active, as he’s just released Quirky Linux 8.1 for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 boards, a lightweight Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04, and including LibreOffice & Inkscape to have the same out of the box experience as Raspbian, but with a 360 MB download size instead of 1.3 GB for Raspbian. A build for ODROID-XU4 development board should also be coming soon.
The image has been designed for 8GB micro SD card, and needs to extracted and dumped onto the card with the usual Win32DiskImager or dd tools. There are three mirrors for quirky-pi2-sd-8gb-xerus-8.1.img.xz firmware: iBiblio.org, nluug.nl, and archive.org.
You can read the full release notes if you want more details. In case you don’t have a spare micro SD card, you can also boot from a USB flash drive.
Thanks to Mary for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Yes, if you want a non-optimised, bug-ish linux, this one is just for you!
@JotaMG
Following the release logs, it’s optimized the same as Raspbian but on an Ubuntu base. “Bug-ish” wise, there’s no denying replacing systemd with busybox’s rc init scripts will break some packages. However, the relevance of those packages to someone running an embedded board like a raspi is disputed.
Personally, I’m satisfied with Raspbian on a headless 2012 512mb model B. I have no issues with systemd and do in-fact write my own units for certain services but it really depends on your use-case.
post your discovered bugs at the murga puppy forum link, chances are they will be fixed in days. lot of talented people there now