Preannouncing 'UniPup'
I mentioned in a comment to the last post, that Slitaz expands in RAM so takes up a lot of space, despite the original tiny size.However, the idea of running in the initial ramdisk, not doing a switch_root, no layered-filesystem on '/', is something that I have often thought about.
It is so simple. Everything is in the initrd.gz file and we stay in the "initial ramdisk" (actually initramfs) after bootup. I decided to build a Puppy that works that way, and yep got it going. I have written a special script in Unleashed for building this pup, ...it needs a codename, so I have named it "UniPup".
The achilles heal though, how to minimise the size expansion when the initrd.gz has loaded into RAM? The kernel modules are gzipped, I upx'ed many executables -- but shared library files can't be upx'ed. So I converted everything in /usr to usr.sfs and use aufs or unionfs to mount it on /usr with a tmpfs on top.
Yes, I know, a layerfs again, but it is only on /usr, not on /, and that has enormous advantages, like clean shutdown.
I haven't got there yet, but I am planning a system that will allow all of the user-created files in / to be saved to a pup_save file. It won't have the limitations of Puppy 1.x.
This is still partly vaporware, but thought I would let everyone know what I'm doing. I'll see if I can upload a demo in a day or two.
Thanks Eddie, 2.6.25.10... hmmm, I see that it has an important hotplug bugfix. Here we go again... downloading it right now.
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LZMA patches don't work
I am experimenting with LZMA for the kernel and/or initramfs -- or rather I want to, but can't find a patch that works with the 2.6.25.9 kernel.Ted Dog are you reading this?
Yes, I have finally seen a need for LZMA for the initramfs, for something new I'm working on.
There was a link, for 'linux-2.6-lzma-1.patch', which fails to patch, but I think that one is only for the kernel, not the initramfs.
I found 'bzip2-lzma-kernel-2.6.23.12.patch.gz' which is for both kernel and initramfs, but it also fails -- in quite a few places.
I looked at the Slitaz site, but they don't seem to have made their LZMA patch available. Their 'cooker' distro has the 2.6.25.5 kernel.
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Alternate 4.1alpha3 with udev
My 'pup_event_backend_d' daemon has much of the same functionality as 'udevd', so I could test udevd as an alternative.For me this has been a great learning experience, tackling kernel uevents at the grass-roots level, having implemented my own replacement for udev I understand pretty much how udev works. Which is an improvement on a month or two ago when I didn't have a clue.
I think that I can write udev rules to call a script whenever there is a uevent that I want to pass onto the pup_event_frontend_d.
This will be a very interesting exercise, a worthy comparison. I reckon I'll do this over the next few days.
Busy today though. Driving home from Perth. Also have to pickup some chooks.
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Puppy 4.1alpha3 uploaded
Get it from here:http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.1alpha3/
There is one inconvenient bug, the problem with inotifywait utility not being able to restart. I am awaiting feedback from the 'inotify-tools' developers before tackling this. What it means in practice is that if you use the Puppy Event Manager to change desktop hotplug settings (such as change the drive icons from showing individual partitions to one icon per drive) then it won't work just restarting X, you have to do a complete reboot. Restarting X kills the desktop hotplugging entirely.
As before, this build does not have any SCSI modules.
I'm particularly interested in knowing whether encrypted wifi is working better.
Also whether PCMCIA devices get autodetected properly.
There is a new modem driver for Lucent chips, the Martian driver, but it may need some study to setup properly -- I think it needs a /dev/tty??? node created.
I have uploaded the madwifi utilities and modules as a separate package to ibiblio. You would probably need to use the BootManager to blacklist the 'ath5k' module if you want to use the Madwifi modules.
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Xfprot virus scanner
An antivirus application in Puppy is not for Puppy
If you have a compromised Windows installation it is great to boot Puppy and scan and repair the hard drive.
Xfprot is small, as it is just a GUI for F-Prot, the latter being a commandline scanner with antivirus signature file. Xfprot is GPL, F-Prot is commercial, requiring a licence, however it seems that you can use it for personal purposes. You don't have to go online to register for the licence key -- it is in the F-Prot download package.
I have setup the Xfprot package so that when chosen from the menu a script will run and download F-Prot (about 14MB).
One problem is that Xfprot calls xterm with the '-hold' option, but Puppy has rxvt which does not support that option. I solved it by writing a little script for 'xterm' that detects the '-hold' option and modifies the call to rxvt in such a way that the same functionality is achieved.
Xfprot will be in 4.1alpha3.
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