It's fully compatible with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS repositories

Jan 16, 2017 23:04 GMT  ·  By

Puppy Linux's creator Barry Kauler is kicking off 2017 with a new stable release of the Quirky "Xerus" operating system, which is built from the binary packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

The developer used his in-house built woofQ Quirky Linux build system to create Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus," which is fully compatible with all of the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS software repositories. In other words, if you're installing Quirky Linux on your personal computer, you'll be able to install and use apps from Ubuntu.

Being built using the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS binary packages, Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus" is shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.40 kernel, and the default web browser / email client / chat client is Mozilla's SeaMonkey open-source Internet suite, which was upgraded to version 2.46 in the new release.

Quirky 8.1.6 is provided as a small download, but with a large selection of apps

From the release notes, it doesn't look like Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus" is a major release, but rather a small maintenance update to the 8.1 stable series, improving the system infrastructure and various core components. It also implements Easyinit, a tiny ramdisk that Quirky can use for file system checking and recovery.

As you can see from the screenshot gallery attached at the end of the article, Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus" is using a brand-new "peachy-red" system theme for its ultra fast and lightweight JWM (Joe's Window Manager) desktop environment and GTK+ applications, along with new icons and wallpaper.

Despite all the changes and improvements, Quirky remains true to its origins as a fork of Puppy Linux, which means that the distro is provided as a small download, but with a large selection of apps. Quirky differentiates itself from Puppy Linux as being a "full installation"-only operating system featuring disk recovery and snapshot functionality.

Service Pack upgrades are also provided for this tiny GNU/Linux distribution, and you can download Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus" right now from our website, where it is delivered for free as an 8GB USB or SD Card binary image, which you can write with the proper tools or by using the dd command-line utility as instructed on the announcement page.

Quirky 8.1.6's Applications Menu
Quirky 8.1.6's Applications Menu

Quirky 1.8.6 "Xerus" (2 Images)

Quirky 8.1.6 "Xerus"
Quirky 8.1.6's Applications Menu
Open gallery