Racy Puppy 5.4.93 (5.5 Release Candidate 2)


Wary and Racy 5.5RC1 were released a few days ago. Wary targets old hardware, whereas Racy targets newer hardware. Racy has all the "innards" of Wary, except various things are upgraded to suit newer hardware -- especially Xorg and the kernel.

Racy does not have as many analog (dialup) modem drivers, nor true-SCSI drivers. For that, you need Wary.

Racy is intended for "more modern" hardware than Wary, but not necessarily the very latest. Think perhaps most hardware a year or more old.

Another way to separate them is that Wary is optimised for single-core CPUs, whereas Racy is optimised for multi-core CPUs.

The last official Racy was version 5.3, released on 5 April 2012 (see my blog). There was a beta of the next release uploaded on 28 September 2012 (see my blog).

Racy 5.5RC2 has the 3.0.66 Linux kernel, configured without PAE support (so only accesses first 4GB of RAM), and for a i686 CPU. It has SMP (multi-core) support.

Most of the system libraries and some applications in Racy (and Wary) have not been upgraded since 5.3, however a plethora of "in house" applications have been updated. Also, the Woof infrastructure has undergone mammoth fixes and improvements since 5.3.

In fact, it is the significant improvements in the infrastructure that have made building of a new version of Racy imperative.

I might upgrade some libraries and more applications, but targeting that for Racy 5.6.

A note about KMS, for those who know what that means. Wary does not use KMS at all. Racy has KMS enabled for the intel 'i915' kernel module and for the 'nouveau' kernel modules, but not for the 'radeon' kernel module. Wary doesn't even have the 'nouveau' kernel driver, only the 'nv' driver (Racy has both, but the 'nv' driver is by default not used).

For progress reports, see my blog:
http://bkhome.org/blog2/

Regards,
Barry Kauler
March 1. 2013