[HN Gopher] EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release - lightweight Linux fro...
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EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release - lightweight Linux from the guy
behind Puppy Linux
Author : jandeboevrie
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-02-26 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bkhome.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bkhome.org)
| rom-antics wrote:
| https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...
|
| > In a traditional "full" installation, the filesystem occupies
| an entire partition, with the usual /etc, /bin, /usr, /proc,
| /sys, /tmp, etc. Easy does not install like this.
|
| > Easy installs to hard drive in what we call frugal mode, which
| occupies just one folder in a partition, allowing to co-exist
| with whatever else the partition is used for.
|
| Honestly, this is huge. I wish all distros supported this out of
| the box. It would be a lot less daunting to reinstall your system
| or try out a new distro if you could preserve your current
| working system in another directory.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Barry and Puppy have been doing this for years upon years. But
| yeah it's surprising the idea hasn't been picked up more in the
| Linux mainstream..
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| A UMSDOS linux revival then?
| capableweb wrote:
| That'd be really cool, one disk with: - os/
| - archlinux/ - ubuntu/ - nixos/ -
| fedora/ - windows/ - home/
|
| And everything shared between every OS, specially $HOME
| commandnotfound wrote:
| btrfs already supports this using subvolumes but you have to
| install the OSes manually (no installer supports this OOTB
| afaik)
|
| however Fedora uses btrfs with two subvolumes (root and home)
| by default but I haven't found a way to install it without
| formatting the root filesystem though.
| snvzz wrote:
| I do this with Gentoo+Arch.
|
| Complete with enough mount --bind/rbind I can chroot the
| other system and launch anything I need, as if it was the one
| I booted from.
| The_SamminAter wrote:
| Can I ask how you would go about doing this starting on a
| system where the home dir and OS are on the same partition?
| Arnavion wrote:
| With a gparted liveCD and a big enough spare disk / USB
| drive you can move unmounted partitions around to your
| liking. If your filesystem supports shrinking then you
| may not even need a spare disk. And have a phone or
| another computer that you can use to read man pages,
| ArchWiki, etc for help.
|
| Practice in a VM if you need to.
|
| I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition
| for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted
| partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode,
| all from a gparted live CD plus a live CD of the actual
| distro I use (useful for chrooting to be sure I was using
| the same kernel and filesystem packages, and because I
| needed to update the packages and configs in `/` itself).
| Didn't lose any data or need to do any backup-restores.
| Just do everything carefully, one step at a time.
| delusional wrote:
| > I once moved a system that had one unencrypted
| partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two
| encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in
| UEFI mode [...]
|
| I've done this a bunch of times. First from a single
| partition on a spinning disk 7 years ago to slowly
| migrating more and more parts onto SSD's as they became
| affordable, then converting the root to GPT, and finally
| merging it all back when I finally had an SSD big enough
| to store all of it. You just make your new partitions and
| rsync it all on there. The most important part is keeping
| all of the file attributes, but the correct rsync flags
| take care of that. Then you just need to update your
| fstab and bootloader and you're basically golden. It's
| been quite simple.
|
| The key for me has been to keep the old stuff in place
| for a first boot so that I could easily recover if I
| fucked it up. I've never needed it, but it was a nice
| feeling of safety.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Assuming you are running a Linux distribution, you could
| install Debian or Ubuntu in its own folder using
| debootstrap:
|
| https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebootstrapChroot
| cosmojg wrote:
| Bedrock Linux[1] enables something very similar to what
| you're describing, although it's lacking support for NixOS
| and Windows.
|
| [1] https://bedrocklinux.org/
| mysterydip wrote:
| Webpage says 5.0? Either way, really excited about this. I've
| been a fan of puppy linux for a long time.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29490679 - Dec 2021 (110
| comments)
|
| _EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from
| scratch for containers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989 - Sept 2019 (86
| comments)
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Every time I see "lightweight Linux", my first thought is, "Will
| it run better/faster/smaller on RPi compared to its default
| distro?"
|
| There's no mention of Raspberry Pi in the website. I think if
| it's indeed more lightweight, they should mention it.
| spyremeown wrote:
| >Easy will work on an old computer, as long as it has a 64-bit
| x86 CPU
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| different interpretation of "old" than what I had in mind
| haha
| trynewideas wrote:
| > There's no mention of Raspberry Pi in the website
|
| https://bkhome.org/news/202101/easyos-dunfell-26-released-fo...
|
| > even a Pi3B with 1GB RAM will work, or rather "just work" --
| I recommend at least a Pi4 with 2GB RAM -- I have the 8GB RAM
| board.
|
| EasyOS is a container-focused OS with its own in-house
| containerization mechanism,[2] and it's seemingly not designed
| for or aimed at Pis specifically.
|
| 2: https://bkhome.org/news/202204/some-handy-tricks-with-
| easy-c...
| e12e wrote:
| A fine criteria except for the fact that the rpis have some
| special problems - the combination of low(ish) ram and
| unreliable storage? So you can't (shouldn't) expand ram via
| disk (eats the SD card) - and need to fit everything in ram.
| This is different from a typical low end netbook/laptop - which
| might have more ram, and reliable, fast (compared to mechanical
| hdds) reliable storage (cheap ssd).
|
| In principle I agree - rpis are small/lightweight - but I'm
| afraid distros would do better targeting rpi _or_ typical
| "small pc".
|
| Ed: that said, this _is_ (like puppy) designed to run from USB
| stick, in ram, with a section for user data:
|
| https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=2535
|
| I'm not sure if it has the option to limit writes, like puppy?:
|
| https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=6526
| rom-antics wrote:
| > I'm not sure if it has the option to limit writes, like
| puppy?
|
| From https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-
| different.htm...:
|
| > Flash drive will last "forever"
|
| > The default mode is to have a "save" icon on the desktop,
| to flush RAM to drive whenever you want, or not at all, or at
| shutdown. Thus, writes to the drive are severely constrained.
| fffrantz wrote:
| Apparently, it requires a 64-bit CPU but I wonder if really early
| 64-bit CPUs (e.g. 1st gen Intel Core) would work. x64 has evolved
| quite dramatically since its inception.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > x64 has evolved quite dramatically since its inception
|
| Can you expound on this? Besides AES acceleration and
| virtualization support, I don't know of any features on modern
| x64 CPUs that would be a limiting factor in an OS that doesn't
| 'require' TPM support.
| e12e wrote:
| One thing that comes to mind is 32bit efi w/64bit kernel for
| older netbooks and laptops.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| But that has been an solved issue for years now. Both GRUB
| and systemd-boot support loading a 64 bit kernel with a 32
| bit UEFI
| e12e wrote:
| I thought some newer distros dropped 32 bit uefi support
| - i certainly seem to recall an old thinkpad that
| wouldn't boot latest Ubuntu lts - but maybe I was wrong
| and it was old enough to be 32bit (don't think so...).
| Narishma wrote:
| The article says it's running fine on a Core 2 Duo.
| sposeray wrote:
| [dead]
| gandalfff wrote:
| Is it still running everything as root?
| spyremeown wrote:
| As a professional Yocto-guy-developer-maintainer-dude, I've
| always wanted a lightweight distro built with Yocto for the
| desktop. This seems to fit the requirements pretty well! I'd love
| to pair this with some light and portable notebook.
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(page generated 2023-02-26 23:02 UTC)