Overview
Lazyux is an experimental distro similar to pUPnGO: it's a tiny, Puppy-like distro.
It's in early development, but it already boots and reaches a working desktop. Networking works, but only if you're familiar with command-line networking tools such as dhcpcd
Goals
- Find new, efficient ways to implement a "Puppy".
- Provide a testing ground for research and cool, new features for woof-CE (for example, better compression), which benefit all Puppy variants.
- Reduce Puppy's footprint and make it easier to develop truly minimalistic puplets, by developing lightweight, drop-in replacements for commonly-used packages (i.e a lightweight, yet compatible /bin/sh replacement).
- Make Puppy more sustainable, by providing an automatic building infrastructure of small, static binaries, for use with multiple Puppy versions.
- Have some R&D fun
Eventually, the ultimate goal is to allow the building of a 64-bit, fully static Puppy with the same selection of packages, using woof-CE. Is this possible? I don't know, let's try out. Is this cool? definitely!
Features
- Built automatically, from source.
- Uses the most recent versions of packages, where possible.
- 64-bit; supports both BIOS and UEFI and does not depend on 3D acceleration.
- Free: follows the latest LTS branch of Linux-libre, 3.10.x.
- Lightweight: uses musl instead of glibc, lazy-utils instead of BusyBox and eudev, loksh instead of Bash, tinyxserver instead of X.Org and so on.
- Provides a classic JWM and ROX-Filer desktop.
- Comes pre-loaded with a variety of applications: a browser, an e-mail client, an audio player and much more. These applications already work in Puppy.
- Has a strong, geeky, Damn Small Linux-like, retro feel.
Missing Features
- Package management (in progress).
- Configuration wizards (e.g for setting up a network connection).
- Multi-user support.
- WiFi and DHCP support is included, but some useful network tools (e.g netstat) are missing.
- A 32-bit flavor (needs a kernel configuration - everything else is already in place).
- A graphical browser that doesn't crash every 5 seconds (just try Dillo, it's funny).
Requirements
Lazyux requires a x86_64 processor, 32 MB of RAM and a GPU with an in-tree driver that support KMS (not-too-old Intel GPUs, some Radeon cards, nVidia cards supported by Nouveau).
Building Lazyux takes about 50 minutes on my Acer C720P and should work on pretty much any modern x86_64 distro. However, it requires several packages and tested only against Debian. It is known to work against the latest stable version (7) and the experimental branch.
Download
This is a development snapshot - use at your own risk!
ISO: lazyux-26042014.iso (53 MB)
MD5: e99be16147d0e8f6d7981fd5b2f8bb05
Running
In order to run Lazyux, you'll have to either burn the ISO image or dd it to a flash drive (be careful!). Then, boot your computer from the bootable media.
The user is root, the password is also "root".
Changelog
31/3/14 - first upload
26/4/14 - fixed crashes in Beaver, new JWM configuration, more features in mtPaint, package updates, added support for parallel building, added squashfs-tools, diffutils, patch, bc and dialog, updated to the latest lazy-utils (with sed and file), added a "Suspend" menu entry, added GtkDialog1, added Flattr icons and removed unneeded files from the ISO
Building
First, install packages required for the building process:
Code: Select all
apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake autotools-dev autoconf-archive unzip flex bison git nasm xorriso squashfs-tools pkg config librsvg2-bin file subversion bc xfonts-utils dosfstools mtools
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git clone https://github.com/iguleder/lazyux.git
cd lazyux
make
All the built packages are archived in the built_packages directory and can be used with a 64-bit Puppy (FatDog or Slacko64). All applications are static binaries, so most of them are a single, static executable that "just work" (i.e mtPaint).