Easyos 2.2
Lazing into his chair with a hot toddy, Mayank Sharma mulls over the age‑old question: can an old dog learn new tricks?
Lazing into his chair with a hot toddy, Mayank Sharma mulls over the age-old questions: can an old dog learn new tricks? And can you judge a book by its cover?
At first glance Easyos looks and feels like yet-another variant of Puppy Linux. It’s got the same Jwm-rox-powered retro-looking desktop, and the same unconventional applications menu that houses a slew of Puppy’s custom apps for all desktop tasks. Even behind the scenes the distro uses Puppy’s Sfs-layered filesystem and continues with the distro’s infamous run-as-root philosophy.
But despite the similarities, Easyos isn’t another fork of Puppy. The project is an experiment in using container technology to create a secure yet easy-to-use and manage distro. Its developer doesn’t claim to be an expert in security or containers but wanted to apply the concepts to the distro he knows well. Also, while Easyos does security by containerised isolation, it doesn’t use any of the existing container technologies like LXC and Docker. Instead, it uses its own home-brewed solution to isolate apps and even complete distros without a load of computing overhead.
Easyos’s workflow is a little different compared to Puppy derivatives thanks to its reimagined design. The entire OS resides in a single file that unfurls during bootup, and includes a working partition that can be optionally encrypted. Besides the normal apps, the containerised ones have a padlock and are placed on the desktop, and you can fire them up just like any other app.
The container-specific advancements reside inside the Filesystem menu in the familiar-looking desktop. While the distro ships with some containers (the icons with the padlock symbol) you can use the Easy Container
Management app to isolate any of the other installed apps inside a container. The interface of the app isn’t the prettiest, but is a lot better than messing around the CLI.
You can also containerise entire distros, as long as they’ve been packaged according to the distro’s specifications. To that end, you can use the SFS package manager to download two Puppy derivatives, Racy Puppy and Xenialpup, which you can then run inside containers.
Best of breed
Another interesting feature of the distro is its advanced version-management capabilities. By using this you can roll-back and roll-forward to another snapshot of the installation. Here too the distro ships with the custom graphical app called Easy Version Control to create and jump to snapshots of your installation.
As it strives to be a secure distro, another use case it offers is executed using the Copy Session To RAM boot option that runs an instance of the distro exclusively from the RAM. When running in this mode, the distro stays clear of any connected drives. In addition, the distro invokes the kernel’s lockdown module in this mode to further enhance security.
The best thing about Easyos is that you can still use it as a regular desktop distro, its new-fangled containerised tech notwithstanding. Easyos, like Puppy Linux, takes the kitchen sink approach and includes an app or two for virtually all possible use cases. Most of these are homebrewed Puppy variants, though there are several mainstream ones as well, including Libreoffice, GIMP and
Gnome MPV. The latest release is built from Debian 10 and has access to its huge repository of packages, which you can access via its Petget package manager.
Easyos doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s an outlet for its developers’ experiments with containers. That said, the container-specific enhancements are mostly behind the scenes and stay out of the way of anyone not interested in tinkering with them. In essence, the experimental features don’t prevent you from enjoying Easyos as a fast and lightweight alternative to your regular desktop installation.