Quirky Xerus 64-bit 7.90 (8.0beta)

Welcome, this is a beta release of Quirky Xerus, built from beta DEB packages of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. It is expected that the final, 8.0, will be released about the 21st of April.

Installation

This beta release of Quirky Xerus is only provided as image files for USB Flash stick or SD-card. Images are provided for 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB drives (8GB recommended minimum).

Running Linux, this is how to write the image file to drive (case of 8GB drive, assuming the drive is sdb):
# xz --decompress --stdout xerus64-7.90-8gb.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync
# sync
...actually, that "sync" should not be needed, as 'dd' has "conv=fsync".
...also, be sure that the drive is unmounted beforehand. This is usually only a problem with Linux distros other than Puppy and Puppy-derivatives.

For 'dd' version 8.24 and later, a progress bar is supported:
# dd --version
# xz --decompress --stdout xerus64-7.90-8gb.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync
 status=progress oflag=sync
...note, it doesn't seem to say anywhere in the 'dd' docs, but for "status=progress" to work properly, also "oflag=sync" is required.

Windows

There are Windows tools for writing a drive image to drive, however, do note that they require the image file to be expanded first -- so the 32GB image file has to be expanded to 32GB in the Windows hard drive before it can be written to the Flash stick.

I have posted to my blog about Windows tools to write image files to Flash sticks:
http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00330

Booting

On PCs with ye olde BIOS, which is all of them prior to 2012, the BIOS-Setup must be configured to boot from USB stick or SD-card.

For PCs with Windows 8 and 10, these all have UEFI-firmware. Follow these instruction to configure to boot from USB stick (I haven't tested SD-card yet):
http://barryk.org/quirky/uefi.htm

Bugs

There are some that I know of. I will post to my blog as more are found and fixed:
http://barryk.org/news/?viewCat=Linux

Regards,
Barry Kauler
April 13, 2016