EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release – lightweight Linux from the guy behind Puppy Linux | Hacker News Reader

EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release – lightweight Linux from the guy behind Puppy Linux

bkhome.org

95 pointsjandeboevrie32 comments

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.

That'd be really cool, one disk with:

    - os/
      - archlinux/
      - ubuntu/
      - nixos/
      - fedora/
      - windows/
    - home/

And everything shared between every OS, specially $HOME

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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/

This is basically distrobox.

I wonder if systemd-homed tried to solve this particular problem?

A UMSDOS linux revival then?

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..

Wubi [1] did something similar for Ubuntu, if I recall correctly.

For live booting, there's Ventoy [2], which boots directly from ISOs. Very convenient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)

[2] https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

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.

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.

>Easy will work on an old computer, as long as it has a 64-bit x86 CPU

different interpretation of "old" than what I had in mind haha

My home desktop was running 64-bit x86 back in 2005. My laptop in 2007. What did you have in mind?

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

> 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.

> 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...

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)

Webpage says 5.0? Either way, really excited about this. I've been a fan of puppy linux for a long time.

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.

> 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.

One thing that comes to mind is 32bit efi w/64bit kernel for older netbooks and laptops.

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

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...).

The article says it's running fine on a Core 2 Duo.

Is it still running everything as root?

Not firefox/seamonkey (and presumably others)

"This is controversial, however, it is just a different philosophy. The user runs as administrator (root), apps may optionally run as a non-root user or in containers as a "crippled root". The practical outcome is that you never have to type "sudo" or "su" to run anything, nor get hung up with file permissions. Note, current releases of Easy default to running Firefox as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com