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Puppy 4.00alpha1 uploaded

November 11th, 2007

As usual, alpha and beta releases of Puppy are not for general release, only for our band of Puppy-testers.

The live-CD is 75.4MB. Get it from here, also the ‘devx’ file and patched kernel source:
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.00alpha1

This is the first alpha of what I have been referring to as ‘RawPup’. I decided that it is a significant jump forward to warrant calling it the version-4 series. This puppy has been redesigned from the ground up for smallness. Packages were compiled from source using T2, for minimum dependencies. As it is a complete rethink, I made some very tough decisions, that will not please everyone. Puppy has grown over a number of years, and all sorts of stuff has been included. Anyway, if something is not there, Tcl/Tk for example, it can be made available as PET packages. There may be some things that aren’t there simply due to oversight.

I have released alpha1 today simply because tomorrow I won’t have broadband2 access, not until the following Sunday evening when I plan to be back in Perth. I still have a longish to-do list. Here are some release notes:

1.
I haven’t put the volume control in the taskbar yet.

2.
No PET packages on ibiblio yet. I plan to create a new directory on ibiblio for these. So, the PETget package manager won’t be able to download anything yet.

3.
The Universal Installer is partly broken. I used it to do a full hd install, then found no modules at all got installed in /lib/modules. It is easy to fix though, just click on zdrv_390.sfs (and devx_390.sfs) and ROX will mount it, then open a terminal and run ‘cp -a –remove-destination ./* /mnt/xxx/’ where ‘xxx’ is the install partition.
There is also a problem with Flash installs as ‘mtools’ is missing and Puppy has the version of syslinux that does not use mtools, which may require script changes.

4.
Do not, I repeat, do not, attempt to upgrade an existing pup_save file. There are some issues to sort out. Boot with ‘puppy pfix=ram’ and at shutdown you can create a new pup_save.

5.
You might be somewhat taken aback by the color scheme! Especially if you prefer blue/grey themes. I’ve just been looking at it, and I think those icons don’t look quite right …maybe if they went back to transparent or semitransparent color fill. In fact, transparent fill would blend with any theme. Note, the live-CD also has zigbert’s theme and icons. Anyway, it’s just an experiment and likely will be different in the final release.

6.
I chose the 2.6.18.8 kernel as it is the last one that uses the traditional upport for IDE drives. The 2.6.19 kernel introduces a unified SCSI emulation layerfor all IDE drives, which although it is optional, there are hardware compatibility issues whether you decide to adopt the new system or decline. I intend that this version4 series will also be available with a more recent kernel. However, there is a problem, see point 10.

7.
Xvesa only. There will be a PET package soon with the full Xorg drivers.

8.
The Roaring Penguin PPPOE package is there, but no GUI as it is based on Tcl/Tk. I never use this, so know very little about it, but I am wondering… the ppp package has a PPPOE plugin which is code taken from Roaring Penguin, so couldn’t ordinary dialup GUI programs be made to use PPPOE?

9.
Kernel 2.6.18.8: I compiled a heap of extra modules, including the ‘tifm’ driver required for many SD card readers. But, I failed to compile at76c503a, Intel 537ep and rtl8180 drivers. I obtained the latest of these, but perhaps what I need are older source packages — this was the case for the tifm package, where v0.8 would not compile, v0.6 did.

10.
And now for something weird. I have been happily using SeaMonkey 1.1.5 with various alpha builds of RawPup for the last couple of weeks. Now I have just uploaded the alpha1 and when I went to login to my blog, SeaMonkey crashed. And kept crashing whenever I hit the login button. Worked every time before. Only error message is “Segmentation fault”. There are some odd messages in /var/log/messages and /tmp/xerrs.log about dhcpcd not running, although ‘ps’ shows that it is.
There is one thing different though, the 2.6.18.8 kernel, whereas before I used the same 2.6.21.7 kernel as in pup3.

…so, I built pup 4.00alpha1 with the 2.6.21.7 kernel (from pup3, not recompiled) and SeaMonkey logs into my blog ok. Hmm, I wonder if the old dhcpcd from Puppy 2.16 would work? (it has the 2.6.18.1 kernel). This will need to be sorted out.

Anyway, both puppies have been uploaded. If the 2.6.21.7 kernel in Puppy3 worked for you, then go for that kernel. If you had problems with the 2.6.21.7 kernel then try the other, bearing in mind that you might have the above-mentioned network problem.
….well, this is an alpha!

We need to start a forum thread for feedback on this new pup.


Responses to “Puppy 4.00alpha1 uploaded”

  1. November 11th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

    Sage
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 09:58 AM
    “And now for something weird”. Opera might kill two stones with one bird? Dillo is the fallback, either way.

    Sage
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 10:22 AM
    Everything except ‘Play’ in ..21 works for me - including the ‘munster. HardInfo is a distinct improvement, although SystemStats may be smaller and has dmesg OP.

    Henry
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 11:02 AM
    Truly impressive, Barry,

    I have upgraded more or less successfully from 3.01 with k21.

    Temporarily of course. The Halloween color is a bit unnerving!

    Lobster
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 11:17 AM
    desktop background can not be changed with wallpaper changer
    processor system info much better
    Have added a thread in forum under cutting edge

    wii info and Puppy 4 page added

    A lot to explore :)
    Is there any way to get the res in xvesa higher? I am stuck at 800*600 I am sure there is but have not figured it out yet . . .
    Lobster
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 11:19 AM
    wii=wiki - oops . . .

    vern72023
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 12:26 PM
    in order to get icewm to work I had to impoprt an earlier version of IMLIB apart from that and the wallpaper changer issue that Lobster mentions wine46 works okay so taht is my largest concern

    magerlab
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 12:31 PM
    will the packages from raw pup work in puppy 3.01?

    Bob Bagwill
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 12:32 PM
    Will gslapt be include in the standard rawpup?

    mdisaster2
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 02:15 PM
    What about Slackware compatibility ?

    linuxcbon
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 04:59 PM
    It’s great, just testing the new beta.
    So far I am very pleased with all your changes, colors are cool, menu is simpler, xvesa works good (screen refreshing rate is not high but this can be changed).
    Still some bugs to be corrected like chat icon doesn’t work or mplayer not displayed ?
    It is on the good way to be a terrific 4.0 :-)

    BarryK
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 06:19 PM

    Sage, ah, yes, the ‘play’ icon. You have to edit /usr/local/bin/defaultmediaplayer and change “mplayer” to “gmplayer” — that was a bug.

    Lobster, ah, the wallpaper setter assumes the existence of directory /root/.config/tmp — manually create it, then wallpaper setter works. But, it still has issues — is supposed to know the current setting at startup but doesn’t. Anyone a wiz at setting up ROX-Filer and can fix this?

    Lobster, regarding higher resolution, have you run the Video Wizard (in the Setup menu)?

    magerlab, packages from RawPup may not work in 3.01 as they use the very latest versions of libraries. Also answering mdisaster2, the reverse is probably okay, Slackware packages will work in RawPup, except maybe some missing dependencies. Bob, no, Gslapt will be a PET package, at least in the main ‘official’ Puppy, at least that’s my thinking for now. Gslapt should work fine, and should automatically determine any extra dependencies that would need to be installed.

    linuxcbon, see above note about mplayer. The chat icon: RawPup has Pidgin and that should be working. Hm, I just tried ‘pidgin’ in a terminal, and it crashed with a segfault and a message to report this to the developers. Well, I did have pidgin working before, so I’ll look into it. Perhaps I left something vital out of the PET package. Sometimes, just leaving out an icon causes an app to crash at startup. RawPup has pidgin version 2.2.1.
    …of course, if you’re keen, you could compile it.

    BarryK
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 06:41 PM
    Note, I have fixed the old blog, existing comments were not displaying.

    cthisbear
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 08:28 PM
    Barry:
    You never cease to surprise and amuse me.
    Do we call this Sandy Desert colour?

    No this is good.
    Shock the hell out of the detractors.

    Strangely couldn’t mount C:\ Drive to delete Windows temps etc.
    Other drives OK to delete recycle bin etc.
    Maybe just a one off…I will reboot and see.

    And you are still King of the Castle.
    Have a good day…………………….Chris

    cthisbear
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 08:54 PM
    ” Strangely couldn’t mount C:\ Drive to delete Windows temps etc.”

    Now testing on a HP Pavillion 772a….never a favourite.

    NTFS has the same problem as my regular computer.
    Sees Fat32 and writes to them
    Sees NTFS and it’s Red Alert….cannot write to the drive.

    Is it a newer version….because since Puppy 2.10,
    fixing hard drives is a pleasure with Puppy….but not today.

    And of course this is where Puppy shines.

    Why I use Puppy to tuneup XP

    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=20312

    Chris
    cb88
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 10:23 PM
    I wonder how this version of puppy will compare to say 1.9 or 2.02 and 2.12 as far as speed and efficiency…. would be nice to see some numbers

    Lobster
    Tuesday, November 6, 2007, 01:21 AM
    “Lobster, regarding higher resolution, have you run the Video Wizard (in the Setup menu)?”

    Yes I have. Not used xvesa in a long time. The max resolution offered in the wizard is 800×600 24 bit It is possible that 1280×1024 is not possible in xvesa with the Nvidia Geforce I am using. I might try the inbuilt graphics card on this board. In the early xvesa you could manually set with options such as #0×011a - not sure if that is possible? After trying to config varous ‘x files’ I had to reboot and run “puppy pfix=purge” - enabling me to boot up again into xvesa.

    I am glad this has turned from an ‘Experiment’ into a full ‘Alpha 4′ (I am using the code name PAL (Puppy Advanced Linux) for Puppy 4. That should bring in some interest :) In particular the use of SVG is welcome and may even be possible to use icons, superimposed or shadowed or blurred to generate infinite background abstractions with very little code . . .

    What tools are used to generate SVG? Ah . . . inklite . . . built into Puppy. Onward to the magic castle . . .

    Raffy
    Tuesday, November 6, 2007, 05:21 AM
    That high resolution is supported by default in my test PC - this is SiS600+ integrated graphics card.

    PAL - Beware, Lobster, ‘coz PAL could stick and finally make the connection between Puppy’s name and the advanced features of Linux. Good thinking out of the blue (ocean, that is). :)

    (To the script: No, am human - timeout did not go away with this new version. ;)

    Dougal
    Tuesday, November 6, 2007, 08:37 AM
    Wasn’t this blog supposed to be commentless?

    Anyway, RE: volume applet.
    If you are referring to AbsVolume, then, the way I understand the README, it’s not a volume applet — just a volume control app that’s supposed to be launched from a panel-button.

    Sage
    Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 04:58 AM
    Big problems with network connection on full install, reported here:
    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto

    - and, yes, timeout defect remains on this board!

    Sage
    Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 06:22 AM
    BK list No.3 :”just click on zdrv_390.sfs”
    Failed mounting or unmounting
    Is this related to the network failure?
    Whatever, dumbos like me would need an expanded explantion of the above proposed fix (if it were working!)

    Sage
    Thursday, November 8, 2007, 12:30 PM
    vide supra - just lobbed the /lib/modules from the (pfixed) liveCD onto the HD install and entered the addresses manually. Amazing - it worked. Guess this is what BK will do for alpha2, anyway?
    Reporting here as John’s board is down again.

Gmeasures units converter

November 11th, 2007

I needed an application to replace Tkconvert, the Tcl/Tk units converter used in previous puppies. I found it, Gmeasure, created by Paul Schuurmans. Paul has created various little GTK2 apps:
http://home.hccnet.nl/paul.schuurmans/linux/index.html


Responses to “Gmeasures units converter”

  1. hairywill
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 12:15 AM
    Barry,
    I’ve modified absvolume so that it now swallows properly.
    You don’t need a swallow entry for it just start it in .xinitrc.
    I struggled with trying to get it not to display the window on the taskbar and in the end just created an entry in .jwmrc for


    absvolume
    absvolume
    nolist

    I’ve removed the spin button and the close button, you just click on the systray icon to close.
    I’ve bound the right-click to rxvt -e alsamixer as I don’t what you are doing for a full gtk only mixer. If you want to change/disable this it is at line 68 in main.c

    http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wmd04r/pup

    hairywill
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 08:19 AM
    barry
    I know you have disabled comments on your old blog, but it is now no longer possible to view the existing comments.

    mrperson
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 10:18 AM
    test post
    Administrator (BarryK)
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 10:24 AM
    hairywill, thanks for that!

    Yes, some setup problems, think it’s right now.

    (Mr.) Kim Lawson
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 10:22 PM
    This is in reference to your blog entry asking about a simple image display app. You may find “xv” useful.

    Kim

    hairywill
    Monday, November 5, 2007, 08:08 AM
    Barry,
    Last hack of absvolume didn’t update mixer until you let go of slider try this instead. I’ve been a bit less aggressive at removing stuff and used a different icon.
    http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wmd04r/pup

    Irritatingly absvolume is higher up the top listings than mini-volume.tcl. I should be able to get it to do different icons depending on volume as well.

    Will

“Fast boot” implemented

November 11th, 2007

Ok, I have heeded the suggestion made recently on this blog and implemented “fast boot”.

I added a checkbox in the BootManager. If you tick it, then Puppy will boot with minimum probing and will just load the same set of kernel modules as are currently loaded. This of course is fine as long as the hardware doesn’t change.

The way it works is there is a variable ‘FASTBOOTMODULESLIST’ added to /etc/rc.d/MODULECONFIG, and /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit reads this. If this variable contains a list of modules, then “fast boot” mode is initiated.

The initial ramdisk still has to do some probing to locate the Puppy files. Also, one of the biggest delays in the initial ramdisk is to wait for USB devices to register, which is unavoidable.

I have only tested booting from a USB Flash drive so far, and the boot time, from the moment the kernel starts to load until the desktop fully visible, is 38 seconds. This time includes reading the ‘pup_xxx.sfs’ file into RAM, which is probably the single biggest delay.

I don’t yet know how fast this will be booting from CD or hard-drive, but it’s going to be exciting to find out.

If you want to change your hardware, like a different modem or whatever, first run the BootManager and untick “Fast boot”. Changing many things, like USB drives, does not matter — reprobing is only required if the loaded set of modules is likely to need changing.


Responses to ““Fast boot” implemented”

  1. ChiHang Lee
    Saturday, November 3, 2007, 09:59 PM
    Please try CD booting frist ! I found the pupsave.sf2 loading time was very long(”frugal install” in HD) . In USB booting , the pupsave.sf2 loading time was very short (”frugal install” in USB) . I think it was some different . Thank very much ! PuppyLinux is the best Linux .
    cb88
    Saturday, November 3, 2007, 10:50 PM
    as far as fast boot goes maybe you could look through texas flood I know luciano aka lam777 on the forum is working on it and seems to be finding puppy to be an excellent distro(he said that puppy is “supernatural” so I guess that is a good thing! :) … he did get puppy downloaded and has found it to be different than he exprected not a bad thing though…

    perhaps you could go ahead and incorporate some of the paralellization methods that texas flood uses and incorporate the full texas flood if it works out?

    I am sure that luciano would apreciate any tips you could give him on getting it working correctly

    heh just tried to post and aparently i miss a caracter in the captcha it said ERROR: are you a spambot or something :)
    cb88
    Saturday, November 3, 2007, 11:08 PM
    barry would you consider putting stanfords folding program in puppy?
    is is only 246kb and it would be for a good cause with a menu option to start it it may only need i’ll try out the linux verison on my laptop soon and report back
    #!/bin/sh
    rxvt -e FAH504-Linux.exe

    here is the adress for anyone interested in folding: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegrou

    make sure that you get the linux console version and the smp verison since puppy does not support that and it also doesn’t shut dowm the processes properly you have to hunt them down and kill them manually
    nagy feri
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 02:42 AM
    fast boot…amazing! searching for pupsave files it is another time consumig issue? could’nt be an alternative to search for the first time in only in the directory from where was puppy lounched? (PSUBDIR, …) and if it find it there the pupsave file to stop further search and load only eventually other sfs files located in same directory? (or maybe better make an explicit switch for this kind of short search in one directory?) it should speed up the daily use of puppy, and simplyfies maintainig separate version of puppyes in separate subdirs…I don’t know how much work is to implement it…. Thank’s for the great job with puppy
    Tony
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 07:04 AM
    Cheers Barry, can’t wait to try this.
    Perhaps with some suggestions from the Texas Flood team, and the Time Travel Puppy crowd we can make a distro that boots before you even press the on button 8-)
    wm.wragg
    Sunday, November 4, 2007, 02:49 PM
    Sounds good to me, the only problem I forsee is that when I want to move to another machine with my USB flash, I have to remember to un-tick the box before shutting down and moving to a new machine. Although I suppose that if I’m doing this a lot I could just leave it un-ticked.
    Tony
    Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 01:13 PM
    Hi Barry, any thought’s on when fast boot might make it into Version 3? and if it might contain other fast boot features like using previous pup-save files etc.
    Many thanks
    vern72023
    Thursday, November 8, 2007, 08:03 AM
    I copied the files that relate to fast boot over to puppy3.1 without any modificatioon and hey presto worked perfectly - as far as I can see

    nice one barry
    Tony
    Thursday, November 8, 2007, 08:25 AM
    Many thanks vern72023 I shall give that a go
    Can you tell me what files they were please?
    Cheers
    Tony

First test post

November 11th, 2007

First test post.

I did not get off to a very good start with Servage. I installed this blog, but could not login. I raised a ticket with them, the first reply was pathetic, implying that I had made a mistake and that I should install again. I insisted that I had done everything correctly and after some messages backwards and forwards, suddenly I got a message that the “problem has been resolved”. I was then able to login.

Anyway, hopefully this is the start of a long and happy relationship with me and Wordpress.

NEW BLOG FOR PUPPY DEVELOPMENT NEWS 

Saturday, November 3, 2007, 09:12 PM
From November 2007, my Puppy Linux Developer Blog has a new home, at:

http://www.puppylinux.com/blog

The new blog script is WordPress.

This old blog at ibiblio.org will remain indefinitely, but is now read-only.

Manage apps in JWM taskbar? 

Saturday, November 3, 2007, 09:51 AM
I thought that I had read somewhere on the forum that someone has developed a GUI app for managing applications in the JWM taskbar.
That is, applications can be represented by icons on left side of the taskbar, click on one and the application opens. The GUI manager was for adding and removing apps.
Does anyone recall anything about that?
tronkel 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 11:09 AM
I think something like that was included in Muppy007. MU might have a few ideas on that
Jason Pline 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 11:19 AM
I added that function to the jwm config tool quite a while ago. I'll see if I can track down that post.
Jason Pline 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 11:24 AM
Here's the post:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12451
alienjeff 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 12:40 PM
When all else fails, sh-300# geany ~/.jwmrc-tray

Jason Pline 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 05:25 PM
By the way Barry, I just updated Pwireless to 0.3.1. It seems to work perfectly for me, though I'm not sure how many people have tried it.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=150100

Interesting GTK2 apps, Anjuta IDE 

Friday, November 2, 2007, 07:42 PM
Thanks to plinej who posted the link to 'xfnrename', a batch file renamer. I followed the link and found another little treasure trove of GTK2 applications. This is the link:
http://home.hccnet.nl/paul.schuurmans/linux/index.html

Thanks to Paul Schuurmans for developing these. Paul uses Anjuta for development and I took a look:
http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/
...well, well, I didn't know it has a visual GUI designer. This looks like it should be in the 'devx' module!
wolf pup 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 08:30 PM
is rawpup a recompile of the kernel in puppy 3.01?

how much space is saved vs pup301?
cb88 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 10:40 PM
before you release rawpup lets get the gradient themes right in 3.00 there are are hardly any

as far as i can tell window borders and the menu on mouse over can be gradient

I uploaded an new theme to the forum also in the thread where jwm themes should be uploaded... so you can see how the gradients work/look although most of you may already know
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=151081
I'am still not sure how DSL gets the gradient taskbar.... does anyone know?
cb88 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 10:59 PM
figured it out by messing with the .jwmrc in DSL all you have to do it define the tasklisk atributes with gradients and thats it
magerlab 
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 10:46 AM
will it be possible to use the apps from raw pup in puppy 3.01
i just switched to 3.01 and like it very much!

Slight change to packages.txt format 

Friday, November 2, 2007, 07:12 PM
One of the outcomes of my marathon improvement of the Help page, is a slight change to the format of entries in packages.txt, livepackages.txt and alienpackages.txt. There is now a space between the name of a package and its version number in the second field:

"abiword-2.4.6" "abiword 2.4.6: premier wordprocessor" on "RAW +fribidi,+gtk+,+goffice 7364K" \

Notice the space after the 'abiword' in the second quoted field.

The reason for doing this is that sometimes it is difficult for a script to separate name from version number of a package name. It's easy if it's named 'abiword-2.4.6' but more difficult if 'yabbi-pro.B1' for example.

The indexgen.sh script needs to make this separation, so I decided to clarify it in the *packages.txt files. I also modified 'petget' script so that when alien packages are installed an entry will be made in alienpackages.txt with this new separator.

The second quoted field is a comment-field so a change in it i unlikely to upset any existing scripts that read/write the *packages.txt files.
Raffy 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 09:52 PM
Re: blog: Wordpress blog installed at http://puppylinux.org/blog/ . To transfer to your ISP, simply copy the files then:

# Edit the file wp-config.php for your database settings
# Open /wp-admin/install.php in your browser - this should setup the tables needed for your blog.
# Password for admin will be given to you.
# Login and change dashboard theme to "superidea".

To play with the current blog, login with user "admin" and password "x", x=the logo/puppy's name that starts with small v. Have fun!
Raffy 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 09:58 PM
Login page is wp-login.php

Improved Help page 

Friday, November 2, 2007, 01:27 PM
The Help page in Puppy, what you see when you choose 'Help' from the menu or click 'help' icon on the desktop, is less than satisfactory. I've been wanting to do something about it for a long time, now it is finally done.

Most of the help for applications and utilities is online, so the Help page needs to list everything currently installed in Puppy with appropriate links.

The Help page still has links to the internal documentation, but now I have added two pull-down menus and one input box to quickly find online help. The first pulldown menu lists all applications that are in the window manager menu. The second menu lists all installed packages. The input box is for entering the name of any utility program.

It works well. It does still need some customisation to bring up the most appropriate web page. The default for applications is wikipedia.org and for utilities is linux.die.net.

I wrote these in Javascript ...well, not exactly, since I don't know anything about Javascript. I just hunted around and copied bits of code until I got what I needed. I also rewrote /usr/sbin/indexgen.sh to build the new /usr/share/doc/index.html.

Oh the tired bones, it's now 2.30am. Signing off.
Raffy 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 07:02 PM
Thanks, Barry. If you can find time later, kindly check on the humongous initrd booting feature of init. The feature works with 2.16 but not in newer versions. This feature would also be useful in frugal installs, especially with the new barebones.

Experimental LightBlog 

Thursday, November 1, 2007, 10:35 PM
Ok, here's another one:
http://www.puppylinux.com/news2/index.php

This also has a flat-file database, which I prefer.

For security, there is an extra step, as registration is first required. Both registration and commenting have a captcha image.

There is also a facility that the admin has to approve each comment before it appears, but that seems like too much work so I turned it off.

I'm exploring this alternative, as I too have reservations about Google and their accumulation of everyone's personal information. The dossiers that they are collecting on people and businesses makes me very apprehensive.

UPDATE:
Well, that's a bit pathetic. I typed a few emoticons into a comment and it caused error messages all over the front page. It's lights out for LightBlog.
craftybytes 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 02:30 AM
I believe you stated in a previous post some time back that the software for this BLOG is now not being updated or maintained - however you decided to continue to use it as it was fairly straight forward and simple - also was 'flat-file' type database..

As you already have one 'anti-spam' filter entry box at the bottom of the Comment screen - maybe you could try two (2x) 'anti-spam' filter entry lines instead with the 2nd one having an image which has both alphabet 'characters' as well as 'numbers' - I've seen this done on a few other BLOG sites and seems to work OK - but maybe too much extra coding required - don't know - but could be worth a try..??

Also - maybe this 2nd 'entry' box could be the "password" for the actual person submitting - maybe setup the 'database' to have a listing of "known" puppy BLOG users who submit comments - with their 'password' - this than can be used as another form of 'anti-spam' filtering..!!

Hope you can sort this out as it would be a shame to lose this BLOG to spammers..

crafty.
.
Sage 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 05:46 AM
I am not clear whether Barry is suffering generalised spamming or a deliberate targeting by a malcontent? Not much any of us can do about the former until the criminal element is silenced by the capitalist pigs. As for the second, the only time I availed myself of the CIA/FBI 'basic' reporting service, the problem stopped the same day. I figured I really don't need to know how they did it nor receive official reporting of their operations, etc.
alienjeff 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 12:21 PM
Barry Kauler wrote: "Well, that's a bit pathetic. I typed a few emoticons into a comment and it caused error messages all over the front page."

That's not a bug, that's a feature.

Bypass serial probing at bootup 

Thursday, November 1, 2007, 08:42 PM
Puppy probes for a serial mouse and true serial hardware modem at bootup, and I have made this optional. The utility 'puppyserialdetect' does the actual probe, but this does not detect software modems, so if serial detection is turned off, Puppy will still detect many software modems.

I created a variable 'BYPASSSERIALPROBING', located in /etc/rc./MODULESCONFIG, and this is set to 'yes' or 'no'. I added a dialog at first shutdown, asking whether you want to disable serial probing, and I also added a checkbox into the BootManager (System menu).

The advantage of turning it off is that it's an unnecessary delay at bootup if you don't have serial mouse or modem. Many modern PCs have software modems and the detection of those is done separately in Puppy, so if you happen to have one that Puppy recognises then it will still get detected.

Also, the serial probe can be troublesome. There was at least one report of bootup hanging at the serial probe, but I don't have an answer to that yet -- that is, I have not yet implemented a kernel boot option to bypass serial probing, so on the very first boot it will still occur.
craftybytes 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 01:56 AM
Might be a good time to look at another option - to have a couple of variables - 'FIRSTBOOT' (set to 'yes' [ the default ] or 'no'..) and 'BOOTPROBE' (which sets the "dir" location of a 'bootprobe.txt' file which lists all the "base" peripherals (e.g. keyboard, mouse, usb,modem, etc..)...and maybe a 3rd variable - 'NEWDEV' (set to [the default] 'no' or 'yes' ..)..

The way I see this operating is -

a.) that early in the "boot" sequence a check is made on 'FIRSTBOOT' =
if 'yes' - booting cotinues as normal..- see b.) below..
if 'no' - then the "dir" as defined in 'BOOTPROBE' is checked for the
'bootprobe.txt' file - and the peripherals listed in this file are those "already"
connected to the machine ( don't then need to detect them every time )..-
so just load the requisite modules & drivers etc.. - see c.) below..

b.) if 'yes' - run 'puppyserialdetect' -
1. create 'bootprobe.txt' file in "dir" -
2. set "dir" ref link in 'BOOTPROBE' -
3. set 'FIRSTBOOT' to 'no' -
4. load modules & drivers for the 'found' peripherals as per normal -
5. continue 'boot' as normal..

c.) if 'no' - setup as per a.) above - BUT ALSO - during shutdown &/or the 'install'
of new peripheral/s - the 'shutdown' & 'install' scripts pop up window which
asks if 'NEW' peripheral/s or devices have been installed -
1. if 'no' - then just continue as normal -
2. if 'yes' - then "reset" 'FIRSTBOOT' to 'yes'..- then continue as normal..

This type of bootup sequence should hopefully speed things up as unneeded 'detection' runs can be 'removed' from the process AFTER the initial 1st-time bootup..EXCEPT for when new devices are installed..

HTH..

crafty.
.

Tony 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 04:30 AM
Hi Barry I agree with Craftybybtes, if a file could be constructed from a successful boot and then you have the option of "Boot same as last time" (Default perhaps selection could be made in GRUB as most people use that?)it would speed Puppy up no end.
It could perhaps include obviously the hardware detection but also, no need to check for other Pupsave files, add ons, version upgrade etc which all seem to be adding to the boot time and bringing to closer to PCLinux and other distros.
Many many thanks
Tony
PaulBx1 
Friday, November 2, 2007, 10:02 PM
Unless I'm mistaken, this will flop if you change the hardware on your machine (e.g. add a pcmcia card). Then you have to tell it that you have a first boot again. For that you have to KNOW that you have to tell it, something not so easy for newbies. Also it appears to add complication on shutdown.

Might I suggest leaving the default the way it is now (probing everything), then having a bootflag for people to tell it to use the old probe information? Maybe call it "fastboot".

Google blog? 

Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:10 AM
Hey guys, what do you reckon about this?:
https://www.blogger.com/start

Gmail works pretty well, I have an account and rarely get any spam.

UPDATE:
Here is my new experimental blog at google:
http://puppydevelopernews.blogspot.com/
Sage 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:30 AM
Google and esp. gmail have come in for a lot of stick, recently. Data mining on a scale of you-know-who. Think there's an investigation ongoing? No free lunches!
BarryK 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:37 AM
http://puppydevelopernews.blogspot.com/

Seems fine to me.
The kind of stuff we post, it doesn't matter if whoever trolls through it looking for whatever.

Sure will save me a lot of hassles.

Gerardo 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:52 AM
A good decision for sure. Even if Microsoft say they always publish betas, Google's products are very good IMHO.

vern72023 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:54 AM
as a google user for at least 3 years they have always worked well for me
data mining doesnt bother me -
Barry Kauler 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:55 AM
I've just disabled all tags in comments, in this blog, hence my above url does not show as a link.
wm.wragg 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 08:24 AM
Seems a good idea to me. Anything that will make your life easier gets the thumbs up from me. Very excited about the new Rawpup.
ICPUG 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 08:34 AM
Tried the proposed new blog. It is readable with my non-javascript browser (OffByOne) but cannot make any comments with it.

Using IE to see it properly I see that when you try to make a comment it asks for a Google Account.

I will not be making any comments in the proposed new blog. I DO value privacy and don't like having accounts all over the place, especially with a company that openly admits they store data for ages to do with as they will.

Once upon a time I lived in a country, (England), in which most people valued freedom, democracy and privacy. I realise I now don't - but I don't have to give up the struggle to try and maintain standards!

ICPUG

Eric 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 09:10 AM
Barry,

Looks good...just need to get used to it.

Google has been a good experience for me with docs,spreadsheet etc.

It's good if it saves time and effort...I'm all for it.

Eric/caneri
alienjeff 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 09:27 AM
Google is the Microsoft of the new millennium - a pied piper you'll ultimately regret parading in step behind.
Raffy 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 10:06 AM
It does not stop the willful spammer, who can obtain gmail account/s at will and still post there.
cb88 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 11:56 AM
I would prefer the wikki or registering by email approach myself...
JustGreg 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 01:07 PM
The Google bog looks good. It does have safe guards. I think you should use it.
jonyo 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 01:10 PM
I know a few folks who use google blog and have not heard of any probs with spammers though traffic is minimal for them to date.

What did come up (& i'm not sure of the details) is the blog is advertisement supported by google & at some point they show up with links on the main page. Dunno how much control one has in regards to what ads are run by google.

My friend was hugely embarrassed when google ran an add for a product that he did not endorse at all.
haroldmarshall (haroldmarshall<at>gmail.com) 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 02:16 PM
Blogger is as good as you make it...So-called "data-mining" is of a purely mechanical nature and certainly isn't political or invasive of normal privacy. Blogger has a community of users similar to the Puppy community, and help is easy to come by. Comments CAN get out of hand there too, but that could be solved by making people register on the blog (once) in order to comment (Not a great sacrifice!!) As for ads, they are completely optional, and are mostly used to raise funds by high-traffic sites. Also, objectionable ads can be blocked... Of course, I'm not a googlephobe, so others may disagree...
hanishkvc 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 04:08 PM
Hi Barry,

a) The only issue I can find with the new news blog system is its dependene on Google emails/Ids. This would make it difficult/impossible for people without Google emails/Ids to post.

b) Is it that
b.1) The current antispam image logic is using relatively simple images for access control thus making it easy for some bot/program to spam
OR
b.2) Is it that there is some loophole in the blog back end you are using which is allowing spammers to bypass the antispam image logic.
Astro 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 06:50 PM
I have found these resources helpful:

Side by side feature comparison of 23 Weblog Apps (includes Blogger): http://www.weblogmatrix.org/

Also includes Blogger:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_soft

Reading your post of May 20, 2007, makes me think you are abreast of the most recent vulnerabilities in Simple PHP BLOG, but just in case:

Secunia Advisory 2007-10-24:
http://secunia.com/advisories/27359/

Security Focus 2007-10-21:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/482603

Comparison matrices for:
Forum Apps - http://www.forummatrix.org/
Wiki Apps - http://www.wikimatrix.org/
Content Management Systems - http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Best wishes mate
Astro 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:02 PM
Url correction from previous post:

Also includes Blogger:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_soft
Astro 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 07:09 PM
Zoiks! Maybe this will work:

Also includes Blogger - http://preview.tinyurl.com/adef8

Gcolor2, Galculator, "Pwireless" 

Thursday, November 1, 2007, 04:29 AM
Puppy has 'Grabc' for picking a color off the screen and 'Color Explorer' for choosing a color. The former is inaccurate. The latter has a rather awkward Tk interface. I found a very nice GTK2 replacement that performs both functions: 'Gcolor2'. Read more:
http://gcolor2.sourceforge.net/

Puppy has a variety of calculators, including 'Xcalc' and 'Ycalc' -- these are simple Xlib applications and have the advantage of being very small. But, I reckon one nice GTK2 calculator should replace them, and it is 'Galculator'.
http://galculator.sourceforge.net/

Jason Pline has created a little wireless scanner, named Wireless-Gtkdialog. I don't have Rutilt in RawPup, and Jason's app looks like a good substitute. The only thing is, the name is a bit long for the menu, so I took the liberty of renaming it to 'Pwireless', and in the menu it will be "Pwireless wireless scanner'. Read more:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23121

So, when am I going to bring out this new RawPup with all these goodies? I'll aim for end of this week. It should be, hopefully, good enough to classify as an 'alpha' release. Well, it must be reasonably okay, as I'm using it everyday.

Continual spamming of this blog 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:39 AM
A very malicious person is spamming this blog. They seem to be random links, not even links to valid URLs, and the text totally changes each time, two or three a day. Banning the IP address is useless. Banning strings in the message is effective for one day only.

I don't know what purpose this spamming serves, unless it is just to try and wear down the blog administrator. I my case, I will reach a point where I just can't be bothered, and will revert to static web pages.

Or, I get a blog that requires email validation before posting.
Sage 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 09:33 AM
There have been several nutcases on John's Forum over the years. John is an extremely tolerant guy who accepts comments of technical, personal, political and religious nature - one of the main reasons I like to support his site. One wonders whether some of those who have indicated their own intolerance on his board are so dim witted as to confuse your operations with John's? John has only ever banned two (one-and-a-half??) contributors; it would be my contention that both of those guys were beyond reproach, even if their views aren't acceptable to John. Perhaps the nature of the illicit content could help John and you to rout out the goon? If it turns out to be an American, the penalties could be severe, including incarceration and fines; not too sure about Europe and Oz. At one time the CIA had a reporting website but it entailed reams of questionnaires. Notwithstanding, they always want to know about sinister characters and can accept a simple email report provided a reply isn't needed.
Raffy 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:29 AM
One option is the WikkaWiki. As your host is now ibiblio, you can install the Wiki there and I will give you a backup of the current Wiki users for uploading (so that current members can comment under your posts). This way, we can also help you police spam.

New wiki members are now added manually (a very quick process), and I can easily do this for 2 sites.

cb88 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:47 AM
sound cool...

also have you considered adding pdrive? it small and very good
cb88 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 11:09 AM
barry could you have a look at texas flood? there seems to be problems loading the zdrv_xxx.sfs (speculation...video and ethernet are both messed up) and the menus are gone

are there any other things besides codecs and drivers that are in the zdrv_xx.sfs?

sorry if the messages are messed up it is kinda hard to translate something you have never seen....
Eric 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 11:38 AM
Barry,

I feel your pain.

I am getting huge amounts of spam hits from the forum, this blog and from China,Taiwan,Dallas,NJ USA and even Oman (among others).

I haven't got a handle on it yet and by your experience it's seems maybe it's not possible.

I'm not sure of my response yet but I'll need to address this soon as now I'm getting it directed at my local ip which is starting to cost me real money.

What a pain...and yes what's the point but to try and break in or just be annoying.

SHEESH!!

Eric/caneri
Bill St. Clair (billstclair<at>gmail.com) 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 02:34 PM
I get wierd random-letter comments on my blog. Even with a captcha on the comments. And lots of bogus registration requests. Don't these people have lives?
lobster (ed.jason<at>gmail.com) 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 02:38 PM
Spamming is normally done by bots.
It seems personal but rarely is.
The main reason is to get links
on as many active blogs and sites as possible
as this ups their rating and linkage on Google.

The solution sad to relate, is to inconvenience
genuine posters by using a restricted blog or wiki

(Mr.) Kim Lawson (kimlawson<at>yahoo.com) 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 03:54 PM
For simple image display, you might like xv described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv

Kim
Dougal 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 05:09 PM
Any chance of the full X11R7 directory (from compiling Xorg) being uploaded, like last time? This will give us a chance to add Xorg and I'll also need to update the /etc/X11/xkb directory.
Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:39 PM
Xv... I'm thinking back. I think we had it in Puppy once, but we replaced it with qiv as that is much smaller. I on't know what dependencies xv has. If imlib then no good.

Full X11R7 directory, yes, I have that on the to-do list. So far I only compiled the Xvesa driver, but I intend to run T2 again with settings to compile all the Xorg X servers, then I'll have a fully-populated X11R7 directory, then will make it into a tarball.
...maybe this weekend.
cb88 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:19 PM
barry any chance the petget installer could be updated to look more gtk-like like progress bars and such especially since you are trying to get this puppy all gtk'ed it should "look" gtk shouldn't it?

pdrive has a notification for when the drive is being scanned could the same be done for the installer

also could it be split up so as to be more manageable perhaps as an appdir (those are easy to make....poke arough /usr/local/apps)

also jwm in DSL has gradients on everything why doesn't puppy jwm? you could jack swm and the theme for jwm from DSL i don't think they would mind...why not have swm too? only 27Kb

I know that swm from DSL works in puppy I tried it
PaulBx1 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 01:10 AM
"At one time the CIA had a reporting website but it entailed reams of questionnaires. Notwithstanding, they always want to know about sinister characters and can accept a simple email report provided a reply isn't needed."

Well, no need to solve a problem with a small thug by bringing in even bigger thugs!

Barry, we are much more inconvenienced by supplying a captcha for every post than we would be by a one-time handshake using our email. Particularly since the blog software needs a reload so quickly! Go ahead and have us register. No big deal!
jonyo 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 04:59 PM
free blogs google brings up many alternatives

Gview image viewer 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:12 AM
I have a need for an ultra-simple image viewer, that can be called from a script to display an image, nothing more. I just want a window with the image in it, no menu, no toolbar. Note that RawPup does not have the imlib library, so 'qiv' is out. I'm trying to recall, I think Mark (MU) developed something, but as far as I can recall it used imlib.

I found what I wanted: Gview. This is only 9KB and uses the GDK library in GTK2, which means that it supports all the image types, even SVG. What Gview does not do is write to the root window, but that feature is no longer required since ROX-Filer 2.x draws its own window over the root window. Gview does not have any scaling options, just drawing the image at 100% size.
From Tom 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:27 AM


Once the image is displayed there are a couple of commands that the app recieves all via the mouse or the keyboard (there's no menu in the app).

Left mouse - click and hold to drag the application window.
Scroll wheel - roll forward to enlarge the image, roll backward to shrink the image.
Middle mouse - click to zoom in on an area of the image.
Right mouse - click to restore the image to its original size.
i - display the images information such as original width and height and current width and height.
r - restore the image to its original size

pakt 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:46 AM
Barry, getting back to Xvesa: I'm a bit confused about what you mean with 'Xvesa'. I just re-read your first blog post on 'RawPup'. There you said "Xorg is 7.3, but using only the Xvesa (or Xfbdev) servers from that package." So does that mean you're not using the Xvesa Kdrive X server as you have up till now? I thought that's what you meant for RawPup.
Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:47 AM
Tom, thanks for that, I didn't read the docs properly!
Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:49 AM
Pakt, the Xvesa and Xfbdev Kdrive servers are part of the Xorg package.
Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:50 AM
I mean, they are in the Xorg package, and you can configure to build them and/or the other full X servers.
pakt 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:55 AM
Ok, I see. There used to be a Kdrive server called Xi810 - is that still available? Might solve the problem with Intel i810 graphics...
Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:35 PM
Well, find out if this latest Xvesa works with i810 chip first. I presume it has been considerably improved (it now has xinerama) since the old version we used.

HardInfo hardware information, PCMCIA 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 03:43 AM
Since the very beginning, Puppy has had Xproc, which displays hardware information gleaned from the /proc directory. This is a GTK1 application, but it is also designed for an old kernel, not even 2.4. Time to move on.

As RawPup is a clean sweep, totally GTK2, my choices were beween 'lshw' and 'hardinfo' packages. Both of them compiled okay, but neither worked properly.

Lshw has a console 'lshw' executable and 'lshw-gtk' with a GTK2 gui. The former works, the latter responds weirdly to mouse selections and is unusable.

HardInfo started up nicely, but clicking around caused crashes at the drop of a hat.

I think there may be issues with GTK 2.12.1, and considering that the above projects are active, I thought they may have fixed it in SVN/CVS. So, I grabbed HardInfo out of SVN, and sure enough, it works perfectly.

HardInfo is lovely. Congrats to the guys who develop it. This is definitely in Puppy. Read more about HardInfo:
http://hardinfo.berlios.de/HomePage

While on the subject of clean sweeps, Puppy has has the 'pcmcia_cs' package right up to 3.01, even though the 2.6 kernel has a replacement system to handle PCMCIA. Tempestuous posted a 'pcmciautils' package awhile back, to help me to make the move to the new system. Okay, I've done it. Getting it to work though, is another matter -- Puppy enthusiasts with PCMCIA hardware will be welcome to test the RawPup alpha and get PCMCIA fully functional.
Sage 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 04:33 AM
Without a shadow of doubt, System Stats, used by DSL is most useful utility I've ever encountered for HW discovery and it even has dmesg built in. No idea what libraries, etc. but DSL is 2.4, of course, so it's likely to be [i]small[/i].
I first mentioned SS a couple of years ago.
lobster (ed.jason<at>gmail.com) 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 05:09 AM
This to reduce booting time has been
translated and released as an alpha
http://resulinux.forumdebian.com.br/texasfloodweb/

:-)
BarryK 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:24 AM
Sage, is this the one:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/system_stats/
Sage 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:46 AM
Looks remarkably like it! I'm not the best to ask, just a user - but check with DSL, they've had it ever since I can remember and it does the job perfectly for me. Bear in mind that I am almost exclusively interested in HW, so it may not suit a lot of our clan who prefer to dig around with SW! As always - your decision.

Dkop, Pcdripper, Gexec 

Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 09:35 PM
I have added Dkop, another DVD burner application. RawPup already has Nathan's Grafburn, my Burniso2cd, and also zigbert's Pbackup, for a variety of burning requirements, but I thought another that just targets burning files to DVD would be useful. Previously I used TkDVD a lot, but that's a Tcl/Tk app.
Dkop also does incremental backups, so overlaps Pbackup functionality a bit.

I took the liberty of renaming PBcdripper to Pcdripper, as the 'PB' kind of implies PuppyBasic (some other PuppyBsic apps have this prefix to their name), whereas this app is written in Bash.
Pcdripper is written by Jason Pline (plinej in the forum) and I have version 2.5 in Puppy, that I've bumped up to 2.5-1 with my name change.

The previous "run commandline" in Puppy is a GTK1 application. This is the equivalent of the "Run" thingy in Windows, that displays a window with a single line entry box in it, allowing execution of any command. I need a GTK2 equivalent, and found Gexec -- tiny , just 16KB.
magerlab 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 01:51 AM
Barry, what will happen with 'normal' puppy?
i 've just switched to 3.01
BarryK 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 04:06 AM
No problem with "normal" Puppy. If you decide to move to RawPup, it will just be the usual upgrade, except that if you installed any extra Slackware packages they may (or may not) have missing dependencies.

The question about the future of the puppy3 Slackware-compatible series though, that is another question. I just do what interests me, and right now that's RawPup. Many improvements I am making are generic, and there will likely be a 3.02 which is still following the Slackware-compatible path.

I have been wondering myself how RawPup is going to fit in, as far as version numbering. I don't want to call it v3.02, as the v3 series is really claimed as the "Slackware 12 compatible" series. If I number it v4, that implies it supercedes the v3 series, whereas they are really just different. So for now I haven't decided what version number to give it.
Jota 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 04:42 AM
May I suggest version 2.5 ??
(because you build it from the T2 code...)
And, in your migration scripts, you could do the downgrade for the people that had already puppy 3.xx in place.
Jorge.

Barry Kauler 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 08:36 AM
No, RawPup is no way a downgrade. It has the latest of everything.
cb88 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 09:56 AM
barry since rawpup is essentially an official puppy dirivative why not start at 1.0? or .9 if you plan to do bug fixes

then there is the consideration of if CE should be based on rawpup
Raffy 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:38 AM
Puppy 3.00R
Raffy 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:42 AM
Or to emphasize GTK2, Puppy 3.00G2 (guess who will be most happy with this :-) ).
zygo 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:55 AM
Ruppy, Rawpy or Woolf.
zygo 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 10:59 AM
Guppy.
cb88 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 12:17 PM
puppy 3.00 GT that way it sounds fast...like a sports car :)
Me 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 05:57 PM
GreyHound, Dingo, Donny ( as in Osmond ) ;-)
zygo 
Wednesday, October 31, 2007, 07:43 PM
Dingo - spot on!
PaulBx1 
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 12:56 AM
Jackal or coyote, small and clever. :-)

Runt? :RASPBERRY

Or just always call it Rawpup, never Puppy; then cb88's suggestion of 1.0 makes sense.

Wallpaper, icons 

Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:13 PM
Nathan has created a great little app for setting the wallpaper, named, appropriately, 'wallpaper'. He is developing this for Grafpup, and I reckon it is nice and have put it into Puppy.

Note, I fixed a limitation in JWM. Previously, JWM only searched in /usr/local/lib/X11/mini-icons and /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps for icons to use in the menu. The .desktop files can have name of an icon without any path, and JWM will search for it.
I have now added /usr/share/pixmaps to the search path, which is where most packages have the "signature" icon.

Note also, JWM will scale an icon to fit the menu. The top-level displays icons at 24x24, sub-menus at 16x16.

For anyone interested, when you get hold of the first alpha release of RawPup, look in /usr/local/lib/X11/themes. This is where I have setup the theme mechanism for the desktop and menu icons. There is a README file there.

Abiword is great 

Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 05:26 AM
I have had some positive experiences with Abiword in the last few days.

A relative of mine emailed a Word document that she had gotten into a mess, pleading with me to fix it. She created it by pasting in text from various web pages, so it was a mix of styles, and some text in tables had gone weird, all squashed up. The document opened in Abiword, but I was really up against it, trying to sort out the layout, so I exported it as plain HTML, no CSS, then reopened the HTML file in Abiword -- the formatting was reduced to the simplest level and the weird styles were gone. I saved as a Word document and sent it back to her.

Yesterday I needed to whip up a couple of simple PDF documents. Easy as pie to create them in Abiword.

Note, I fixed something. When you open Abiword, the default blank document shows "Times New Roman", even though there isn't such a font in Puppy. Actually, Abiword substitutes the closest existing font, which happens to be "Nimbus Roman No9 L".
I edited /root/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt and replaced the former with the latter, so as to avoid confusion.

Note also, for you guys in the USA, still stuck in a non-metric time warp ;-) . The default template has 'A4' paper size, but you probably would want to change that to 'letter'. Otherwise, there will be page over-run when you try to print on letter paper, as A4 is longer (and slightly wider).
John Dubery (jdubery<at>ukonline.co.uk) 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 06:44 AM
Hi,

sorry to seem picky, but to avoid any confusion for our cousins in the non-metric time-warp ...

A4 is actually a little narrower than letter.

cheers, John
(not in a time-warp)
Raffy 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 06:59 AM
Thanks for the tip about setting the default font. To minimize document porting problems, I have used Liberation fonts in Puppy since August. I replaced all fonts in TTF with it.
Sage 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:02 AM
That'll be shorter and wider.
john_c 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 08:55 AM
To save others bothering:
A4 is 297 x 210 mm
Letter is 11 x 8.5 inches, i.e. 279.4 x 215.9 mm
A4 is longer and narrower

My puppy is 473 mm x 220 mm viewed from above.

PaulBx1 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 10:21 AM
In Puppy 2.16 I found the templates in /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.4/templates. normal.awt has "Letter", not "A4". Also I noticed they have a warning not to edit by hand. There are other templates for Australia, Canada, etc. but none specifically for the US.

I couldn't figure out how to access templates from within Abiword. :VACANT The "help" page wasn't much help, implying you should edit the template files by hand.

Paul
cb88 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 12:10 PM
correct me if i am wrong but isn't directfb the way to go?

http://www.directfb.org/index.php?path=

It claims to compile against gtk 2.10 so i guess also 2.12 ...(maynot though)

Doesn't it provide hardware acelleration (for some) and should work through the frame buffer on every thing else just like xvesa?

cb88 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 12:14 PM
check out the numbers on this site looks like a winner but is it better than xvesa?

http://www.directfb.org/docs/GTK_Embedded/
disciple 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:00 PM
Barry, you'll probably want to get hold of Pfind 2.7
Zigbert's squashed a whole lot of recent bugs, and added a configuration gui.
The last major feature improvement was about 2.4, when he stopped it from refreshing the results gui every time you did anything.
disciple 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:03 PM
I like that, cb88. We really need to run Linux on our fridges, toasters and light bulbs LOL
BarryK 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:28 PM
With regard to GTK 2.12, I have encountered some issues. I'm using 2.12.1 in RawPup. Most apps work ok, but a couple are broken. Like, you click on something and what is supposed to happen, like a dialog box, or whatever, doesn't. I presume they worked with an earlier GTK.

Fotox image viewer, AbsVolume tray applet 

Monday, October 29, 2007, 10:48 AM
I had chosen Gqview to replace Gtksee, however I'm not happy with it. I have found Fotox, that I like much more, and it's also smaller. Fotox is part of Rosi and Mike's Kornelix collection, and I already have PicPuz jigsaw puzzle from that collection in Puppy. Read about Fotox here:
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotox/

Rounding off the tray applets, a volume control is missing. It has to use GTK2, as this is for my experimental all-GTK2 RawPup. I found one, AbsVolume, however it doesn't quite work. It's designed to be swallowed in the tray, and in JWM the way you do this is to put this into /root/.jwmrc-tray:

<Swallow name="absvolume">
absvolume
</Swallow>

absvolume does get swallowed, and a button appears (although it's too big), but click on the button and absvolume exits. However, without the swallowing, just executing 'absvolume' from a terminal, a nice volume control does appear.

Anyone interested in fixing this? AbsVolume can be obtained from:
http://www.pcbypaul.com/software/absvolume.html

UPDATE: is has occurred to me that perhaps I'm not using absvolume how the author intended. Perhaps it can't be swallowed by the <Swallow> tag, only by the <TrayButton> tag -- however, that would put the icon on the left side of the tray, not the best.
hairywill 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 03:32 PM
Barry
Did you have any problems getting absvolume to compile?
Its giving me grief about missing absvolume.o
I wanted to see if I can get it not to kill itself but if I can't compile it ....
BarryK 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 04:08 AM
It compiled okay for me, in RawPup. I did this:

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

but none of those parameters should make any difference to whether
it compiles or not.

Are you using pup 3.01?
hairywill 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 06:21 AM
No Barry,
I confess to using 3.00, I can't keep up with the bleeding edge!
I get the same results as before using your configure parameters
I'll leave this until I have a chance to upgrade at the weekend.

thanks


BarryK 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:32 PM
Well, maybe there's something wrong with the 30x devx file.

Do you have an older Puppy that you could compile the app with?

Pprocess, Pschedule 

Sunday, October 28, 2007, 10:43 PM
Thanks to zigbert for creating Pprocess v0.2, a simple process manager. This is great for RawPup which only has GTK2 GUI apps and not even Tcl. Our previous 'KP' process manager uses Tcl/Gnocl, so it is GTK2 but is written in Tcl.

Zigbert has updated Pschedule, to version 0.4.
Raffy 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 07:16 AM
From the blue :-) - any chance that an application can access the clipboard? This will be useful for some situations, like screen reading. Flite has been prepared for such use in the Forum.
BarryK 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 11:02 AM
Yes, there's a console app for reading and writing the clipboard, that has been in Puppy for sometime. I think it's in Puppy3.... ah, yes, it is. The package is called 'xcut' and so is the executable. There is also a help file, type 'man xcut'.

I took it out of RawPup, as I thought noone wants it.
zygo 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 12:16 PM
Is xcut the magic that replaced glipper for copying from one app and pasting into another (without having a gui itsef) in v3? Or is that done by something else?
Raffy 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 10:46 PM
Thanks, Barry. As to having a new platform for browser-based applications, there is the "prism" project: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

Freememapplet alternative, "barebones" comeback 

Sunday, October 28, 2007, 09:29 PM
Regarding freememapplet, I reported that it eats up CPU time. Well, it doesn't matter, I've implemented an alternative that writes directly on the desktop.

Puppy has a script, 'savepuppyd', that is launched at bootup (by /etc/rc.d/rc.local0) and runs at low priority in the background. It's primary purpose so far has been to perform the periodic saves to Flash drive, every 30 minutes. I did originally intend it for other monitoring purposes, such as free memory, but then 'freememapplet' came along.
As freememapplet is not working right, I added code to savepuppyd to display free memory directly on the desktop, at extreme top. The advantage of this over freememapplet is more informative text string can be displayed.

Note, savepuppyd can easily be extended to display other information, such as battery status.

"barebones" is a cutdown puppy that I released alongside the full "standard" Puppy, sometime ago. There has been continued interest in a cutdown puppy with all libraries in place, but only an absolute minimum of applications, and various people have created such puplets.
Well, I do think it time that the official barebones returned. As I have been rebuilding Puppy from scratch, in the form of RawPup, I do plan to release a barebones RawPup also.

Just a note, for those who don't like or want Xvesa. I do plan a Xorg-drivers addon PET package for RawPup. I do like Xvesa on my laptop, there are no noticeable disadvantages. Let's see, what are the advantages and disadvantages:

Disadvantages:
1. Does not support X input extension, library libXi.so.
2. Fixed vertical screen refresh frequency. (not a problem for LCD screens)
3. Slow screen drawing, no hardware acceleration. Only 'Xshm' for playing video.

Advantages:
1. Very small
2. Very easy to setup/configure.
3. Runs on almost all video hardware.
4. Starts virtually instantly.

Actually, the slower rendering speed is somewhat counteracted by it's smallness and simplicity, so multimedia files play okay.
The screen refresh frequency on CRT monitors is pot-luck, sometimes you get a good high frequency, sometimes not, depending on the hardware.
alienjeff 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 09:54 PM
Torsmo? Conky?
Barry Kauler 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 10:46 PM
savepuppyd is potentially a light-weight alternative to Torsmo.
Q 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 12:28 AM
[blockquote] Well, I do think it time that the official barebones returned. As I have been rebuilding Puppy from scratch, in the form of RawPup, I do plan to release a barebones RawPup also.[/blockquote]

Thank you very much.hope dialup works on this new brilliant creation.
vern72023 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 01:33 AM
siundinf good so far barry
I am esp interested in the barebones versioon since I am one of the people who does remopve the bigger apps

George
pakt 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 04:49 AM
One big disadvantage of Xvesa you missed:

On certain laptops with i810-family graphics chips, the BIOS does not allocate enough video RAM to get greater than 640x480x16 graphics when running Xvesa (in my case: "VESA VBE Total Mem: 832 kB").

The Xorg i810 driver tells the BIOS to allocate more video RAM, allowing me to run at 1280x1024x16 on my monitor (VESA BIOS now reports: "VideoRAM: 65536 kByte").

kkpity (kkpity<at>gmail.com) 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 06:49 AM
I think other disadvantage that XVESA has is the keyboard configuration for other languages.

I just have success using Xorg for Portuguese accentuation.

kkpity


pakt 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 07:14 AM
I just experimented removing the whole /usr/X11R7/ folder (12 MB) and putting it in xorg_214.sfs (I'm working on a 214 puplet) and it works great.

That made me think - why not have zdrv sfs *always* mounted and include the /usr/X11R7/ folder in that (and any other seldom used files, e.g. setup scripts and binaries). zdrv always needs to be present anyway in case a module needs loading.

With zdrv always mounted, modprobe could be simplified again - no need for those complicated scripts to mount and unmount zdrv whenever a module is needed. The only drawback I can see is that we would loose a loop mount - but then again, doesn't one need to be reserved for when zdrv needs mounting?

Any thoughts?
pakt 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 08:05 AM
There is another disadvantage with my idea: if booting from CD - it wouldn't be possible to remove the CD while running Puppy...
Taavi 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 09:41 AM
As kkpity I also have to use Xorg to have finnish keyboard.
kirk 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 11:00 AM
Another Xvesa Disadvantage:


No Synaptics touch pad driver. If you have a sensitive touch pad, you'll go crazy with out it.


cb88 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 04:07 PM
how is it that my touchpad still works then? I know it is a synaptics

maybe it doesn't use the dirver or the driver is non dependant on xorg.....

my only problem with xvesa is that it gives me a corrupted screen after I exit X and the command line is rendered useless....

not to mention it becomes impossible to read the shutdown menus(I know them halfway by heart but others....)
kirk 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 05:46 PM
Your synaptic touch pad will emulate a ps2 mouse. Some work well, others not.

Xorg as a pet package might be fine.

Will this package include all of the libs and the xorgwizard?

I usually add the missing stuff to the cutdown version included in puppy anyway.


TobyRoo (dfreyak<at>yahoo.com) 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 10:33 PM
Another disadvantage-XVesa does not support Xinerama so cannot spread desktop over multiple monitors with multi head video cards. We use this setup at work and Puppy was the fastest to get it working under Linux.
Barry Kauler 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 04:17 AM
Xvesa does support xinerama, at least this one does, that I compiled from xorg 7.3. Probably the old one didn't, that we used in Puppy for the last couple of years.

My laptop has a Intel graphics chip ...um, what's it now, a 945G or something, and no problem with doing 1280x800. Is that memory assignment problem specific to a particular Intel chip? Maybe Xvesa has now fixed it.
pakt 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 05:29 AM
I have a similar Acer laptop to yours (same graphics chip) that I can test on and on that one I have no problem getting 1280x800 using Xvesa.

It is an older (2004) Dell Inspiron 510m with an Intel 855GM graphics chip that can't get more than 640x480 using Xvesa (tested again with 3.01). The cause of the problem is BIOS specific, ie, the way a particular manufacturer has written the BIOS code to assign (shared) video RAM to the Intel graphics chip. Afaik, this is the case with all of the i810-family chips, from i810 up to... what's the most recent? i965 is it? Acer's BIOS just seems to do it right.

As I recall, some Puppy users with i810-family chips could get up to 800x600 on their machines with Xvesa. It all depends on how much video RAM a specific manufacturer's BIOS allocates. Some machines have a setting in BIOS to increase video RAM - my Dell doesn't.

Xorg's i810 driver is capable of telling the BIOS to increase the amount of video RAM, something the Xvesa driver apparently cannot do.

You may recall that it was Bladehunter and I that convinced you to add Xorg to overcome this problem in the first place - Puppy 1.0.8?

Here is a link that discusses the problem: http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/845driver.html

Look under the heading "Why can't I get high resolution/depth modes?"
pakt 
Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 05:46 AM
I just checked Xorg.0.log on the Acer (running 3.01). The initial video RAM is "VESA VBE Total Mem: 7872 kB". The I810 driver then increases it to "65536 kByte".

As you can see, the Acer's 7872 kB initial video RAM is a lot more than the Dell's 832 kB.

SVG icon set 

Sunday, October 28, 2007, 08:34 AM
I have created an ion-set for RawPup. I used icons from the Reinhardt collection created by Dan Leinir. Mostly these are for the desktop and JWM menu, and they are all at /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps, so could easily be swapped for another set, such as those created by Zigbert.


Now, this is an experiment. The Reinhardt icons are just line-art, and I filled them with flat colors,just 3 or 4 different colors (using InkscapeLite!)). This makes them easily themeable. RawPup has the librsvg package (so does pup 3.01) and this has a utility 'rsvg-convert' which can convert a SVG image to PNG. So, a script could easily transform the colors in the SVG files as they are simple text files, then generate the set of PNG files at specific sizes (24x24 and 48x48 pixels).

I have not implemented this script, just done the groundwork for it. I don't know how it will look in practice, but it's an interesting space-saving idea.

There is a default set of PNG icons, to match the default GTK and JWM color schemes and the desktop image.
Pizzasgood 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 04:20 PM
Cool! This just keeps getting better! :RASPBERRY

Boot immediately into best graphic mode 

Sunday, October 28, 2007, 07:34 AM
Someone commented recently that he likes to boot Puppy off the CD and never save a session. It would be nice if Puppy could just startup and automatially make the best choices and have a desktop without going through the Video Wizard. Well, I've done that, at least it works on my laptop. In my case Puppy starts up in the 1280x800 native mode for my LCD screen. The only question asked at bootup is about keyboard layout, and as I have a US keyboard I just have to tap the ENTER key, next moment the desktop is loaded -- that's one great thing about Xvesa, it starts up just about instantly.

You will still get the Video Wizard if Puppy can't find a native mode for the monitor. LCD monitors have a native mode. Or, if Puppy does find a native mode for the monitor, if the video BIOS doesn't seem to support it, then also will get startup in a mode that is likely to work and the Wizard will appear.

Sigh. Much time was wasted this morning tackling spam. My blog was spammed, fixed that and hopefully blocked them -- these are a new type of spam messages, hope I can continue to block them.
Then, just to make my morning a truly fun-filled occassion, Ted Dog informed me that my puppylinux site has been invaded by porn pages. There is a vulnerability in the 'counter' directory of this blog, and I found 1000 porn pages there. I was unable to delete them all due to their file permissions, so I have posted an urgent request to Ibiblio (my host). I don't know how to fix that vulnerability -- I'm waiting on feedback from Ibiblio.
amadus 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 09:52 AM
It's great implementing this at startup.

I've found out that by using PKEYS on the kernel command line worked to bypass the kbd questionning. Is it possible to implement it for the Vesa resolution too?

(with vesa choice, it takes around 6-8 seconds to boot this way on one of my laptops, pfix=ram, of course booting from SD flash).

thanks

(SPAMS ARE REALLY A PAIN IN Z S!!!!!)

magerlab 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 03:06 PM
i had a problem in ubuntu and debian. they don't have a video wizard during install( or in ubuntu boot live cd) and my monitor is not recognized well so x window system crushed
so this wizard in puppy is the one thing i like
amadus 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 04:48 PM
Definitely the wizard is very helpful when we don't know the machine we're working on, so it has to show itself somehow.

But once we know it's characteristics, I believe, it's no need to have them rediscovered undefinitely each time we boot.
cb88 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 08:18 PM
this new thing barry is doing will fall back to the wizard if it is not able to tell what your correct resolution is....maybe people do not want thier resolution detected though...maybe set it so it does not automatically use say 1600x1200 cause that could be getting hard to read on a 15 in laptop...and so even have that resolution on that size screen
cb88 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 08:21 PM
that was hard for even me to read...

if a pc has a high resolution sreen say abouv 1280x1024 defalt to that as a max resolution and promt the user that higher resolutions are available... come to think of it is 1600x1200 the max resolution anyway? so maybe not an issue anyway...
Barry Kauler 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 09:33 PM
Mostly I'm thinking of LCD screens. They should only be run at their native resolution. Also, refresh frequency of 60Hz does not have noticeable flicker.
PaulBx1 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 01:10 AM
Have a boot flag to call up the wizard on boot, in case the automatic thing doesn't work and gives a non-functioning result? There should be some way to bypass the automatic stuff. At least until we are sure it never causes problems...

Sorry about my boot flag fetish. :RASPBERRY

Rounding up extra apps 

Saturday, October 27, 2007, 12:18 AM
I'm finalising the application choice for the experimental GTK2-only RawPup.

Thanks guys for getting freememapplet and blinky to compile with GTK2!

mhwaveedit-1.4.13 audio editor/recorder.
zmixer-0.2.1 audio mixer
gtk-chtheme-0.3.1 gtk2 theme chooser
gtk_theme_citrus_cut-1.0 a theme, cutdown by me
gtk_theme_stardust_zigbert-0.5 a theme created by zigbert.

Since it's all GTK2, I took a fresh look at how theming is accomplished. I am now following the correct practice of putting themes into /usr/share/themes.
cb88 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 12:26 AM
Im half inclined to say that the CE should be based on rawpup...with the full driver set of course

especially since 2byte seems to be having problems with gtk in puppy 3.00 that is kind of a bad sign not to mention the small but existent handful of slackware bugs 3.00 picked up...
nic2109 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 02:15 PM
If there has to be a choice between MUT and Pmount, then for me it's a "no-brainer". My laptop has a camera-card reader that doesn't register in MUT. On the other hand Pmount finds it every time. It's quicker too.

Nick
magerlab 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 04:48 PM
is it possible to add support for different languages in console?
magerlab 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 04:51 PM
there's a way for russian language( wich i'm interested more) but it don't work in puppy
we've almost localised puppy into russian
but console is still a problem
also gtkam crushed in puppy 2.16 when saving files
BarryK 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 09:09 PM
Problem!
I was testing the new GTK2 freememapplet and noticed the CPU was perpetually busy. Yes, it's due to freememapplet, it keeps the CPU going flat out for some reason. Blinky is okay.
magerlab 
Sunday, October 28, 2007, 01:44 AM
also why not having just browser and composer from seamonkey suite
and for mail have sylpheed?
It will save place i think
PaulBx1 
Monday, October 29, 2007, 01:15 AM
Apparently it was NOT sufficient to simply recompile gtk using gtk2.

Yet more apps for RawPup 

Thursday, October 25, 2007, 09:59 AM
These are new or upgraded for the new experimental RawPup:

Pschedule 0.3 gui for cron, developed by zigbert
Osmo 0.1.1 personal organizer, developed by Tomasz Maka, thanks to muggins for finding this
Gqview 2.0.4 image viewer, to replace GtkSee (which is GTK1)
mp 3.3.13 (I don't like the latest, 5.0.0)
Alltray 0.994 put any app as an icon in taskbar
Xsane 0.994 gui for sane scanner drivers
Asunder 0.9 audio CD ripper
vorbis-tools 1.1.1 has 'oggenc' needed by Asunder
gCurl 0.0.2 downloader gui for libcurl
dhcpcd 3.1.7 (dhclient did not work)
Gfilemanager 0.2.6 network (samba) file manager (to replace LinNeighborhood)
PicPuz 12 jigsaw puzzle game
gFTP 2.0.18 ftp client

I still wasn't able to compile libexif-gtk, needed for gtkam (gui for libgphoto, camera driver library). I've got the library in Puppy, but no gui for it.

I put in Asunder although we already have our own in-house app, PBcdripper. I'm not into CD-ripping so perhaps after this pup gets uploaded, testers can play with both and report back whether Asunder should stay or not.

The live-CD ISO file is now 71.9MB. Just a few more things to add.
Scott Warnick 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 10:57 AM
Please see my (lengthy, sorry) comment on the previous post on this topic, which was 'lots more apps for rawpup.' (I didn't know that there was going to be a second post on the same topic so soon.) The executive summary is that the next version of puppy should have different strokes for different folks. Smaller is better usually but not for all of us all of the time.
wolf pup 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 11:54 AM
so rawpup wont have ripperx anymore, can pbcdripper be modified to include joint stereo mode?
amadus 
Friday, October 26, 2007, 03:50 AM
great improvements I think.
is hplip (the driver for hp products) is included somewhere?
I don't know if cups handles 'All-in-one' office machines (printing+scanning+faxing...)

zygo 
Friday, October 26, 2007, 08:33 AM
Opera 9.50b for Linux i386 is available. Has it missed the boat?
cb88 
Friday, October 26, 2007, 10:14 AM
Texas Flood is almost done...

and the Forum is down..

It would be awesome if you could put Texas Flood in Rawpup given that it doesn't turn out too large which I don't think it will.

cb88
Dougal 
Friday, October 26, 2007, 04:40 PM
There are two threads on the puppylinux.com forum which should be removed:
http://www.puppylinux.com/forum/azbb.php?1189820316
http://www.puppylinux.com/forum/azbb.php?1193379902

Both are advertisements for Windows software.
Barry Kauler 
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 09:23 PM
Dougal,
Thanks for notifying me. I've deleted them. I get regular spam on this blog, that I tackle quickly, but I don't visit the developer forum that often anymore.

Sources for taskbar applets 

Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 07:54 PM
As mentioned earlier, it would be great if these could be converted to GTK2. Lior Tubi is the brilliant programmer who created them. Here are the forum announcements and sources:

Freememapplet: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=8239
Blinky: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=7474
PaulBx1 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 10:56 PM
I didn't realize these were just c programs. Any pointers to gtk and gtk2 docs? Google didn't help much. Just curious to see how tough the conversion would be.
PaulBx1 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 11:14 PM
Never mind, I found it.
DaveMoor (dave_moor<at>uk2.net) 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 10:57 AM
I'm new to this but if you change line 123 of v1.2 of freememmapplet to 'gtk_style_set_font(style, font);' then it compiles against GTK2.

I suspect my parameters to gcc are not correct because size of the applet in the archive is 10302 and my gtk2 version is 34677.

Hope this helps.
jcoder24 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 01:13 PM
Dave, did you strip the binary after compiling?
strip --strip-unneeded binary_file
DaveMoor 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 01:19 PM
Thats better the size has reduced to 11700 :-)

Thanks
DaveMoor 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 03:40 PM
I can compile the unpatched blinky version 0.8 at the top of that forum topic against gtk2 without any modification. The compilation command I used was:

gcc -O2 blinky.c interface.c usage-proc.c util.c -o ../bin/blinky \
`pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0`
PaulBx1 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 09:15 PM
There is apparently more to it than that, if you compare the tutorial for gtk and gtk2. For example, "gtk_signal_connect" turns into "g_signal_connect", and there may be some changes in the parameters of routines too. It is strange that the compiler did not complain about this...

Lots more apps for RawPup 

Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 11:37 AM
The 'devx' module works well. I wrote a script that created it automatically after T2 had compiled the sources, and it just needed a bit of extra work to finish off.

I installed the latest RawPup to USB Flash drive, and put the 'devx' file on it also. I booted it and used it to compile more applications. I compiled the following packages. Although they were already in Puppy3, I wanted to recompile for GTK 2.12.1 and also update to the latest versions.

NoteCase 1.6.9 (outliner)
SeaMonkey 1.1.5
Poppler 0.6.1 (PDF library, used by ePDFView)
ePDFView 0.1.6 (PDF viewer)
Geany 0.12 (text editor)
HomeBank 3.5 (accounting)
InkscapeLite 0.36.3 (vector editor)
Leafpad 0.8.12 (text editor)
ROX-Filer 2.6.1 (file manager)
Pidgin 2.2.1 (chat)
Isomaster 1.1 (edit isos)
mtPaint 3.11 (bitmap editor)

InkscapeLite is not a maintained project. I bumped up the version number from 0.36.2 as I had to modify the code to get it to compile.

So, I have added all the above to the ISO (except for Leafpad), and it is still only 71.1MB!!!

You may wonder how I managed to add that lot (SeaMonkey and ROX were there in the last ISO) and the size hardly went up at all. The reason is, previously I used SeaMonkey as compiled in T2, which had lots of rarely-used options turned on including IRC (which is redundant) -- I recompiled with less options, plus did a bit more tweaking.

Now, I need to find a nice little GTK2 calendar/diary, to replace Ical (which is a Tcl/Tk app).

The ISO has libgphoto (camera drivers) and sane (scanner drivers), but no GUIs for them. I was unable to compile libexif-gtk, which is a prerequisite for Gtkam, but I'll try again. Will also compile Xsane soon (GUI for sane). So, unless I find somewhere else to trim some fat, the ISO will grow a little bit more -- but hey, you don't have this stuff built-in to Puppy3!
cb88 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 12:01 PM
calendar thingie compiled by muggins looks pretty slick might be worth a look it is called osmo

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22917

way to go with the puppy linux limbo barry!... :-)


cb88 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 12:06 PM
forgot one thing could you please put in mp text editor in rawpup it has synax highlighting and everything in ~60kb one of my favorite apps right now...
wolf pup 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 12:39 PM
so rawpup doesn't have tcl anymore? can it be made into a pet package?
nic2109 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 04:28 PM
This all sounds great. What version will it be? This sounds like 4.0 to me. Will Puppy 3 still have a future?
John Dubery (jdubery<at>ukonline.co.uk) 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 05:27 PM
A couple of comments from a quiet puppy-walker
* this is all sounding good - puppy is not standing still (software emulating reality?)
* browsers - some important websites have significant browser restrictions, especially online banking. In addition to looking for minimum size I suggest going for maximum compatibility. Also, Firefox is the only Linux browser supported by many such sites (incl. my bank) - hence I suggest having it as an official pet to make such sites easily accessible to newbies
* applications suggestion - if you are GTK2, how about gthumb for a picture viewer (instead of what's on existing puppies) - I find it good and easy to use, it also can pull photos off cameras using gphoto; only question - don't know how big it is
cheers, John
BarryK 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 06:53 PM
cb88,
yes, just after I posted the query here, I went to the forum and saw muggin's post about Osmo. I wasn't able to access the source, but will try again.

nic2109,
the Slackware compatible puppy3 will probably continue, onto 3.02, but actually other puppies are also "Slackware compatible". It's a question of package versions and prerequisites. Generally, if we have a later version of a library, say GTK, then apps compiled for an older GTK will still work. Slackware apps have more dependencies, but Gslapt can handle that. In other words, Gslapt will probably work fine in RawPup.

John,
SeaMonkey is FireFox and ThunderBird. It's the same code base. There was some divergence awhile back, but the SeaMonkey 1.1 series went back to the same code base used to build the separate apps.
Gthumb, okay, I'll check it out.
alphasurfer 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 06:58 PM
Barry, Great Work As Always!!!!
Otto (ottod<at>hotmail.com) 
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 10:16 PM
For the calendar try KdePIM/PI, the PIM part of the KDE desktop sans KDE dependencies (just Qt): you get Korganizer, KAddressbook. They provide a portable version that runs on Linux and Windows. At http://sourceforge.net/projects/kdepimpi/

Springer 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 12:31 AM
I'm intrigued by these new developments, and while I don't agree with all of them, I can live with most of them, with one exception: Puppy *needs* Tcl/Tk - if for no other reason than that MUT requires Tcl and MUT is the only thing we have that really does a good job of groping around disk hardware, especially for USB disks. Pmount is pretty on the surface, but a bit ugly underneath, and doesn't do half of what MUT does - MUT is really an amazing piece of code - what would be great would be MUT's internal excellence with Pmount's pretty face.

Anyway, Tcl and Puppy have always seemed to be pretty linked to me - A distro that really uses Tcl's awesome leverage is one of the things that attracted me to Puppy in the first place. Remember, TCL really means "Try Coding Less" ;-)
klh 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 12:37 AM
I vote for osmo
craftybytes 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 02:05 AM
Barry - you seem to be having heaps of "fun" with this new tack for RawPup..))

I for one would be sorry to see Tcl not included - but if it can be done as a PUP/PET with all req'd dependencies - then this might satisfy those of us who wish to dabble with coding in Tcl..(heh..heh..oh what fun we do have..)..

Just a thought - what version of base kernel are you basing RawPup on BTW..?

Anyway - keep up the great work on both Puppy sets..!!

crafty.
.

Sage 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 03:11 AM
Already time to make some even more radical cuts!
In a project like this, don't respond to those who ask for more, only those who will be satisfied with less:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto
John Dubery (jdubery<at>ukonline.co.uk) 
Thursday, October 25, 2007, 04:01 AM
Barry,
yup I understand about the SeaMonkey and Firefox codebases; my point wasn't that one is intrinsically better than the other (wh