logoPuppy developer news:

4.00alpha1 to 4.00alpha3
left-arrow Older news

 arrow-rightLater news

Dingo 4.00alpha3

December 14th, 2007

Puppy Dingo 4.00alpha3 is available. To provide distinction from other releases, it has version number 393, hence the ‘devx’ file is ‘devx_393.sfs’. The live-CD is file is 80.26MB, which is rather “big”, but this build has the full ‘zdrv’ file. Download from here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.00-dingo-alpha3/

The main feature relative to the alpha2 release is the move to the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel, with radical changes such as SMP, kernel-level PCMCIA and the putting to rest of the /dev/hd* drive notation — see announcement about this kernel earlier in this blog. Thus, the main focus with testing this release will be how well does the kernel perform:
1. Boot on old and new hardware?
2. Recognise all drives?
3. Does PCMCIA work?

The usage of the 2.6.24-c4 kernel is only temporary and the final release will have 2.6.24 or 2.6.24.1 final kernel releases.

Drives
In /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE, the variable SATADRIVES now includes any IDE hard drives, as Puppy can no longer tell the difference. I will be doing a global change of that variable name. All internal hard drives and USB drives are now /dev/sd*, all CD/DVD drives are now /dev/sr*. Note, the SATADRIVES variable does not list any USB drives.

PCMCIA
tempestuous got me going with a package that provided the proper PCMCIA ‘pcmciautils’ support for the 2.6 kernel, instead of the old 2.4-based system that we have used in all previous puppies. Does it work though? If not, why not?

Xorg
Alpha3 has the Xorg drivers as well as Xvesa, however there is only a cutdown selection of Xorg X servers — look in /usr/X11R7/lib/xorg/modules/drivers. Your video hardware will most likely work with the ‘vesa’ server if there is no match, but most likely you will want a server for your specific hardware. In that case, grab the full Xorg 7.3 binary package that I have uploaded to ibiblio (in the Dingo alpha2 folder) and get your required driver out of it. If you have already had the ‘vesa’ server running, you might want to delete the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and xorg.conf.xxxx files before rerunning the ‘xorgwizard’. I would like to know if your specific server works okay and in particular does it need any other files. I will include more servers in the next release of Dingo.

There are lots of small notes… The frugal install with save-to-entire-partition is not yet fixed. The kernel has been patched with squashfs and unionfs, no other patches and is verbose when booting, no third party drivers compiled. No PET packages uploaded to ibiblio yet, so the PETget package installer will not yet work. I have put in a couple of the alternative proposed logos, just to see how they look.

As usual for an alpha, do not upgrade any pre-existing pup_save file (use ‘puppy pfix=ram’ at bootup), and it is for our puppy-testers, not for general release.


19 Responses to “Dingo 4.00alpha3”

  1. Sage Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 7:55 pm

    Interesting. GPartEd stalls until a FD (any) is inserted. Cfdisk not working, but sometimes it does this! If, with an IDE drive present, one chooses to install to internal IDE, it says no drive found, but if an internal SATA is selected, even though it’s an IDE PATA, installation proceeds normally. GRUB installation is quirky - had to do it manually first time. The nomenclature will need editing at some stage in all these menus. Failed to start up due to looping at

    Starting X……
    3 lines referring to /usr/X11R7/bin/xwin, lines 311, 312 & 341
    Exited from X….
    (To shutdown PC type…..) message
    We had this issue once on a previous recent release which turned out to be a simple fix? [But not for me!].
    Next - the acid scsi test…..

  2. pogo2008 Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    Hi Barry,

    used xorg on 2 computers, vesa on third. Errors on firewall:

    …iptables: Index of deletion too big
    Building firewall iptables: Invalid argument repeated 3 times.

    Also on all 3 computers recognized eth0 & claimed to find alive network & get DHCP

    but unable to reach the internet with seamonkey???

    All 3 worked with Puppy 3.0???

    Thanks

    Tom

  3. BarryK Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 11:14 pm

    Sage, yes, I should have mentioned that in the release announcement — if you use the Universal Installer, don’t bother with selecting to install to an IDE partition. Well, I already did state this, Puppy now cannot distinguish IDE hard drive from a SATA hard drive. I will be removing the ‘Install to IDE hard drive’ choice from the menu.

  4. Sage Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    So far, continued to fail to get the installed version running despite (feeble) attempts to edit or copy stuff from CD - beyond my ability level. Don’t know where to look.

  5. fmlynch Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 12:21 am

    No problems booting from CD. upgrades from a2. The Prism2_usb driver seems to be missing from ZDRF?

    F M Lynch

  6. Sage Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 12:42 am

    Cannot get connected. Static IP, everything double/quadruple checked - router ping OK. Neither browser or ibilio respond. All other machines active and functionally connected on same line via router and hubs. Haven’t seen this issue for a long while.

  7. plinej Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 2:24 am

    Is there a ndiswrapper module in the zdrv? Just want to be able to get online with this alpha. Just asking because I didn’t see one.

  8. cherriepuppy Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 2:58 am

    Well done barry and the puppy team, burned to cd on main pc (athlon 3000, ati9250 graphics,1GB ram), booted up puppy (pfix=ram), extracted the neomagic driver from the full Xorg 7.3 binary package and saved in /usr/X11R7/lib/xorg/modules/drivers. shut down pc saving session to cd.
    now the good bit….put cd in toshiba portege 7010 laptop and booted up using wake2pup, Xorg wizard asked to confirm lcd resolution, tested ok,ctrl+alt+backspace, done, puppy running fine. First time without having to mess around altering xwin and manually configuring Xorg.conf. this will be great for all puppy users with older toshiba laptops

  9. veronicathecow Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 4:22 am

    Success! Nice one Barry, with this new Kernel I get all my video modes (Still got the tearing of the screen problem that all linuxes get)
    Sound works fine, Internet fine, everything from a hardware point of view seems great. (Manual Frugall Install)
    Will try fast boot etc now.
    Many many thanks
    Tony on Intel’s D201GLY MB

  10. BarryK Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 5:31 am

    ‘ndiswrapper’, ‘prism_usb’: these are third party drivers, as stated in release announcement they have not been compiled.

  11. BarryK Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    ‘Firefox’ has started a forum thread for feedback on Puppy Dingo alpha3:
    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24534

  12. ly2101 Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    I use it on my computer with mainboard i440mx,cpu CR500,4M video card.
    It has better compatibility with old hardware than previous version.
    Thank you,BarryK!

  13. GeorgR Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 1:36 am

    I am writing on a PC with AMD690G Chipset and Puppy running.
    This is the first Puppy version booting on AMD690G without any problems and no need for special boot options.
    All drives are recognized.

    I am blinded by the yellow collor, but when looking out of my real window on to the grey clouds, I am really happy about the sun inside Puppy. ;-)))

    ASUS M2A-VM, AMD 690G, ATI SB600, ATI Radeon X1250, Audio: ALC883, LAN: RTL8168/8111

  14. capoverde Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 3:17 am

    Dingo’s first run today here. For me, too, it’s the first time I can’t get an Internet connection with Puppy - which is always my No.1 test.

    The setup wizard finds my ethernet card and sets it to work as usual - or at least so it seems; but neither SeaMonkey nor NetSurf can load any remote page… Will try harder. Only sure thing for now is that the .iso file isn’t corrupted (md5sum OK).

    Mainboard: ASRock 775i65GV with Celeron 2800, embedded RTL-8139 type ethernet card.

  15. Sage Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 2:51 pm

    Static IP connection, and serial modem connection according to Raman, is broken, capo. Cannot see the point of any further testing or comments until that is fixed! Distro building is a very skilled operation and Barry needs much more help with such core issues.

  16. veronicathecow Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    Hi, I have had problems with the firewall stopping Internet access completely. Please see the Main forum for details. Perhaps this is causing the problems capoverde and Sage are experiencing?
    http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24534&start=15

  17. Sage Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    Sadly, not. I’ve tried everything I can think of, including editing files, wholesale copying of files and folders from previous alphas, betas, 3.01 (although the Greg fix for /etc had some effect). Nothing works - this one is totally broken on all the counts I described and a whole bunch reported by others. This is a major concern, and like I said, Barry needs massive help from those who can.

  18. capoverde Says:
    December 17th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    Thanks Sage for sparing me useless tinkering. Anyway, the problem isn’t just with static IP: my connection is over DHCP.

    The wizard finds and sets up the net card as usual, which makes me think it might be a trivial problem with a wrong device name, such as would happen by trying to access a partition with the former “dev/hda” name instead of “sda”. But probably it’s too simple to be true, and already checked out?

  19. capoverde Says:
    December 17th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    I’m sending this with Dingo! Thank you Tony/Veronicathecow, in my case it *was* the firewall — which I didn’t even remember having activated. Connects OK without; no-go with it.

Modified volume control for Dingo

December 14th, 2007

I would like to thank HairyWill for providing a temporary version of his volume control applet. I announced this applet earlier in this blog, see that for links. The problem was that I thought the latest version, 0.6, uses a bit too much CPU time, so Will kindly added the ‘-bg’ commandline option to his first creation, v0.1, which has much less CPU usage, and this will be adequate for inclusion in alpha3.

MP3info, Pmetatagger

December 14th, 2007

MP3info is a program to edit ID3 tags in MP3 audio files. The package has both console and GTK2 GUI applications but I have only kept the former. Home page:

http://www.ibiblio.org/mp3info/

Plinej has created a GUI application to edit tags in MP3, OGG/VORBIS or FLAAC audio files. This uses commandline utilities, which is why I had to obtain the MP3info package. Jason’s program is called ‘Pmetatagger’ and is version 0.3. Forum page:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24291


3 Responses to “MP3info, Pmetatagger”

  1. Dougal Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

    I’ve been meaning to mention this in the forum, but keep forgetting: I downloaded the mp3info code and it only supports id3v1 tags.
    It would be better to use the id3info utility (part of the id3lib package) — the output is also friendlier and will make the code simpler.

  2. plinej Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    Thanks Dougal, I’ll mess around with id3info soon.

  3. plinej Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 10:22 am

    I posted version 0.5 with id3lib utils support for mp3 id3v2 tags. I also fixed some bugs so I recommend checking out this new version.

Script languages in Dingo

December 14th, 2007

I have agonised over this. The Dingo project was started as a total rethink of Puppy, built with only what is absolutely essential. I considered a Qt-only Puppy, but soon realised that there are far more GTK2-based applications, so chose a GTK2-only system. I threw out Tcl and PuppyBasic, which left only the Bash and Perl scripting languages. The GUI libraries Tk, Gnocl and GTK1 were removed, but libXaw is still there, for simple Xlib GUIs.

My thinking was that I would create the leanest Puppy possible, and in future others could bring out fatter puppies. I have even built up Xorg file-by-file, to create the smallest-ever Xorg package, without OpenGL, DRI — currently also with cutdown selection of input and video drivers. I am still planning to take some time off, probably in the first half of 2008, with continued but reduced involvement while I travel, and others can be creative and bring out fatter puppies.

A problem before was that I put stuff into Puppy just to please someone. This new lean Dingo will not please everyone, however I do see that puplets can be created with those extra things included, to satisfy those with particular interests. One of the main issues has been the scripting languages used in Puppy, and the murgaLua and Gtkbasic projects are so good that I feel really bad leaving them out — however, whichever way I look at it, I can’t justify putting them into the base Dingo system. Dingo has Bash and Perl, and basic GUI-builder utilities, and these have proven to be quite satisfactory.

So, that’s how I am positioning Dingo. When the final version gets released, I intend to release a ’standard’ Dingo which will have a selection of applications for normal use, like SeaMonkey, Abiword, etc. Also there will be a ‘barebones’ which will be just enough to get X running and get onto the Internet, and this can be the core for creating fatter custom puppies — either by remastering or using Unleashed.

Of course I intend to create PET packages of the latest murgaLua and Gtkbasic, so any PET application created with these can specify it as a dependency and it will also get automatically installed.

When Dingo is out and reasonably bug-free, I’ll take my break.


7 Responses to “Script languages in Dingo”

  1. MarkUlrich Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    I have no problem with your decision concerning GtkBasic :)
    Instead I could imagine that GtkBasic will become a part of EzPup, the addon that will add additional themes and wizards.
    My Configcenter makes progress, and it will be the base for a icewm configuration-tool.

    More important (very important) it would be, that you replace the english strings in your wizards with variables, that are definded in external .mo files, or at least in the beginning of your scripts.

    It is really a hell to modify them completely from new when you upgrade them, as it currently just seems to be the case with xorgwizard.
    I had started to localize it:
    http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23345
    So for the next Muppy, I have to start from scratch, what is very time-consuming.

    Apart from that, it is very interesting to see Dingo evolving :-)

    Greets, Mark

  2. BarryK Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 8:31 am

    Mark, I was editing my post while you posted a comment, so it has been modified slightly. I’ll create PET packages to make it easy to customise Puppy, including a Gtkbasic package.

    Regarding customisation of xorgwizard, that has some recent bugfixes, so I’ll be happy to cooperate with extracting the strings based on the puppy4 released version of xorgwizard.

  3. MarkUlrich Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    fine, thanks, if you could do that, I could try to backport it for Puppy3.

    Mark

  4. Vettephil Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

    “Also there will be a ‘barebones’ which will be just enough to get X running and get onto the Internet”

    This excites me and I think is the perfect way to go for a FOSS OS, allowing users to completely customize and setup their environment to their liking and only including what they see fit. Ever try to uninstall IE on Windows? ;-) Keep up the great work!

  5. GreatnessGuru Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 7:39 am

    “Dingo has Bash and Perl, …”
    What!? No Postscript?!

    I can’t get Dingo 4.0.0.Alpha.3 booted (see forum) to test for myself, but if a stock Dingo, ’standard’ or ‘barebones’, does include Postscript (Ghostscript…) please remember to mention that in your docs and “marketing campaign”, too. Ok?

    Thank you,
    Eddie Maddox
    Postscript fan

  6. rarsa Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 8:38 am

    It is really good to have a set direction. With that in mind is easier to contribute whenever we can.

    Some time ago I thought that the go forward was tcl, so I took the time to learn it. Now that I see that it is really Perl, I’ll take the time to learn it.

    Puppy is a really nice project and I don’t mind it being a moving target.

  7. BarryK Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 5:38 pm

    Yes, of course, Puppy supports Postscript. It’s a nice language in its own right, just tends to get forgotten.

    Perl is there not because I want it, but because it has to be. CUPS and ndiswrapper need it. The ’standard’ Puppy has a cutdown Perl, just enough to run these apps. We won’t be putting any Perl addons, like GTK plugin — anyone who codes in Perl can use the Xdialog and gtkdialog GUI-builder apps, just like Bash coders do.

Pburn, Pcdripper, Pfind, Pnethood

December 14th, 2007

All of these are updated. These guys all have an enthusiasm for making Puppy even more special. What really stands out with these apps I think is the very small size, as maximum usage is made of what is already in Puppy.

Pburn v0.4, a CD/DVD burner created by zigbert.
Pcdripper v3.0, a CD ripper created by plinej (previously pbcdripper).
Pfind v3.3, file and directory find created by zigbert.
Pnethood v0.5, to access Samba shares created by HairyWill.

Pburn and Pnethood need special mention, as these have been created to fill a void where we cannot find anything suitable. Yes, there are CD/DVD burner apps out there, but they either have enormous dependencies (like KDE) or are buggy and lapsed or partially-lapsed projects. For accessing shared network resources such as hard drives, especially with Windows computers, we have had limited choices, like LinNeighborhood which is a GTK1 application, and HairyWill has taken on the challenge of a replacement, which is Pnethood. Both of these projects have been very successful, and I can’t show enough appreciation to these guys.

Pburn forum page:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23881

Pnethood forum page:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23464

Pctorrent updated

December 13th, 2007

Plinej (Jason) is a consistent long-time contributor to the Puppy project and deserves recognition. As well as developing applications, he makes the time to help on the forum.

Dingo alpha2 has ‘Pupctorrent’ and ‘Pupcreatetorrent’, which are GUIs for ‘ctorrent’. That was version 0.9, not so long ago, but Jason has been busy improving it and it is now up to version 1.3, as well as a name change to ‘Pctorrent’ and ‘Pcreatetorrent’. He also created a mime-association for ROX-Filer. This new version will be in alpha3.

Read more about Pctorrent in the forum:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=14954


One Response to “Pctorrent updated”

  1. plinej Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    Barry, I also updated PBcdripper (renamed to Pcdripper) with lots of improvements.

    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=159680

    I made a simple id3 tagger for ogg, flac, & mp3 as well.

    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=159267

Freememapplet bug, want predecessor

December 12th, 2007

I am not using ‘freememapplet’ in Dingo, as after recompiling it with GTK2 (it’s a GTK1 application), I found that it uses a lot of CPU time, and ‘top’ shows it right at the top of the list. That’s version 1.2.2-1, and the source can be found at puptrix.org.

Instead, I’m displaying free memory at the top of the screen, with transparent background so it doesn’t interfere much with icons and windows. I already mentioned earlier in this blog that the text display changes to more detailed information as the free memory gets low. That fine to have the urgent message at top of screen, but I would still prefer to have the regular free memory display in the tray.

So, I got the source for freememapplet v1.0, compiled it with GTK2 and this behaves much better, ‘top’ shows it sitting just above blinky and below rox.

But, I would like to compare with the original free-memory applet that I developed. This was called ‘wmpupmem’ and I developed it by modifying a WindowMaker applet called ‘wmapmmon’, that uses only Xlib. Lior Tubi rewrote my program for GTK1 and freememapplet 1.0 was born.

I’ve been hunting through my archived DVDs, can’t find the source for ‘wmpupmen’, googling can’t find it either. Does anyone by any chance have the source?


5 Responses to “Freememapplet bug, want predecessor”

  1. pakt Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    Forum member ‘amigo’ just reported “I have a site with a few hundred GTK-1.2 apps”.

    I found the following in one of the sub-folders

    http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/amigolinux/download/DockApps/wmapmload-0.3.3/

    Could it be what you’re looking for?

  2. krumpli Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 10:02 pm

    could this be program:
    http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Monitoring/wmapmmon-19813.shtml

  3. BarryK Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 7:05 am

    No, guys, I want the source for my application, ‘wmpupmem’, as stated in the first post. I’ll hunt further through my archived DVDs, I must have it somewhere.

  4. krumpli Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 10:58 am

    Barry,
    Off topic, but in an earlier post you discussed media players. Below is link to a 6 part review of Linux media players.

    http://www.raiden.net/?cat=2&aid=345

  5. MarkUlrich Says:
    December 14th, 2007 at 6:24 am

    I added trayicon support to GtkBasic.
    I cannot serve you with a freememapplet unfortunately, as I am too busy at moment.
    Maybe next week.
    http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=160517#160517

    Mark

Xorg Wizard bugfix

December 12th, 2007

A couple of things fixed/changed.

When you test the video mode, a dialog box shows the resolution and vertical and horizontal frequencies, but sometimes the last two had an incredible number of digits to the right of the decimal point, for example ‘60.123456′. I’ve rounded that off to two digits.

Rerwin and Dougal have been helping people with laptops for which the Xorg Wizard either hangs or offers inadequate resolutions. They have worked out a fix, see this forum thread:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22873

I’ve implemented an equivalent fix, not the one I posted near the end of that thread as rerwin tested that and found it wanting. So, I made some more changes, and it will be in alpha3 for testing.


One Response to “Xorg Wizard bugfix”

  1. raffy Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    While in the subject of X and desktop, gOS has earned praise for its very user-friendly task bar:
    http://www.linux.com/feature/121151
    “The gOS iBar is located at the bottom of the screen and features quick launchers for many popular Web sites and services…”

    I suddenly recalled that this kind of desktop was already implemented by lvds in the Forum, in eXpand Barbie: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=17810 . Forum discussion is here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24422

Fastboot now faster

December 11th, 2007

This is very interesting. I reported about fastboot earlier, see this blog post:

http://puppylinux.com/blog/?p=26

With fastboot turned on, I was getting a boot time of 19 seconds, with Puppy installed on a SATA hd, full install, timed from making the selection in the GRUB menu to desktop fully loaded.

Well, exactly the same installation, but I compiled the new 2.6.24-rc4 kernel and when I rebooted I noticed it seemed to boot remarkably fast. In fact, everything seems faster. Anyway, I timed the boot, it is now 14 seconds. This includes DHCPCD network connection, well almost, as the desktop loads and there may be a second or two before Blinky shows an active network — which is dependent on how fast the DHCP server responds.


13 Responses to “Fastboot now faster”

  1. veronicathecow Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

    Great news Barry. See, we’ll get Puppy booting and ready before the power button is pressed eventually. Lets see, Capacitance sensor fitted to the computer chair….. Linux BIOS, Infinite Improbability Drive…

  2. veronicathecow Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

    Seriously though, when this is stable, what a great press release this would make! Get a CE Edition with additional stuff, O.O. Thunderbird, Firefox etc. I would be happy to do some press releases in UK. Perhaps we could compare Puppy boot up and running speeds on a machine that Microsoft consider inadequate for Vista with Vista on a current consumer machine including costs!

  3. raffy Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:17 pm

    Good news. :)

    Xandros in the eee is still the time to beat: 15 seconds. One or two Puppy Linux enthusiasts will receive their own unit soon and begin tests.

    Hey, Barry, why not exchange the other Classmate PC with an eee PC? Surely, the Intel manager who contacted you can arrange that.

  4. raffy Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    I mean, how do we know what “15 seconds” mean until someone from the Puppy community has done the tests…

  5. veronicathecow Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 12:40 am

    Hi Barry, just came across this in a mag. It’s not stable yet (See recent notes on web page) but it sounds very useful for Puppy flash system.

    http://logfs.org/logfs/

  6. cb88 Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 3:30 am

    barry I doubt you have seen this so here it is…. the eee pc running compiz!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biRzKj3XxCY

    most people are gonna want the 3D effects…. maybe the components of wNOP could be made into an sfs…?

  7. Dougal Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 4:45 am

    Raffi, I assume the idea of having two Classmates is so he can get mesh networking working between them.

  8. gnomen Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 5:19 am

    What about scrapping the whole init-system and go for eINIT http://www.einit.org/ It would be a major undertaking, but well worth it in the long run. I am currently trying it out on my personal desktop (not puppy). It is quite stable, and it really makes a huge difference. It would not surprise me if you could half the boot-time on our beloved puppy

  9. veronicathecow Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

    Hi Gnomen, looks interesting but there seems little activity on the site. (Last forum post 8 weeks 4 days ago by jyujin and few other posts) so will there be support? There are some other ideas like upstart
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart
    or search the main forum for turbo puppy for somer other thoughts.
    Cheers
    Tony

  10. bostonvaulter Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 6:48 pm

    Hey,

    I just received an eeepc recently and mine boots in about 20 seconds not including wireless.

    I’ve installed puppy to it, but not very well and haven’t enabled fast boot.

  11. veronicathecow Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 2:55 am

    Apparently this is supposed to be fast.
    http://www.yoper.com/
    Using the following optimizations

    0.) Performance patches from Con Kolivas, i686 2.6.7 kernel, reiserfs
    1.) All original sources, minimal patches.
    2.) Compiled with i686 against latest gcc (Did you try compiling for 686?)
    3.) Stripping
    4.) Prelinking
    5.) Latest gcc and glibc and other sources
    6.) Keep everything only dependent to what it really needs not what the ./configure happens to find.
    7.) Hdparm on install

    I believe texas flood boot operates by setting up CD to do a continuous read from continuous tracks, can a Puppy HD install do the same?

  12. penk Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 10:40 am

    FYI:

    I did it in 10 sec on Ubuntu Linux,
    (The X starts from 7 sec.)
    with modified InitNG and Yaird.

    Here’s the boot chart:
    ftp://mirror.nttu.edu.tw/livecd/PUD/misc/2007-12-02-21%3A38-bootchart.png

    penk

  13. veronicathecow Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 4:51 pm

    Hi Penk, that’s amazing. How did you do it and can any of that be applied to Puppy?
    I notice it’s only a 1.86 Ghz celeron so that even more amazing!

/dev/cdrom, /dev/dvd symlinks fixed

December 11th, 2007

Running my new 2.6.24-rc4 kernel without /dev/hd* devices, I found that the above symlinks were not getting set.

I examined /etc/rc.d/rc.local0 and found the code for setting those symlinks assumes /dev/hd* drives. So, I have generalised the code to recognise any CD/DVD drives. This code improvement is backwards compatible with older puppies.

Note, I’ve compiled Xfmedia, the XFCE media player, but haven’t tested it yet. My morning got taken up with the Great Gxine Saga, now I’m onto other stuff.

In answer to Dougal about reporting the Gxine bugs, I haven’t done so. Most likely the crashing bug can be fixed, but the lack of full-screen support has been an on-going saga — I did report this problem — ages ago, maybe 1.5 - 2 years — but it is still an issue. I seem to recall that after a version upgrade, full-screen stopped working, after a few more versions it was working again, but now it isn’t again. So, I’m not in any hurry to report it again. Also, there was a peculiar flickering that came in at some stage, the image suddenly has a kind of periodic flicker across it, but I never decided whether that was due to upgrading JWM or Gxine. But it’s interesting that I’m not getting it with Gxine 0.4.9 — but then maybe there were some particular circumstances that made the image seem flicker-free, and others will have to test and compare after alpha3 is released — at this stage I’m intending to put Gxine 0.4.9 into Dingo alpha3.


2 Responses to “/dev/cdrom, /dev/dvd symlinks fixed”

  1. BarryK Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    Heh, heh, I should keep a record of all the packages in which I have been forced to use an older version. Let’s see…

    pcitools v2.1.11
    bash v3.0.16
    cups v1.1.23
    gxine 0.4.9

    At one stage I was forced to use an older ‘crecord’ from cdrtools, but I think that is fixed now that I’ve moved over to the cdrkit package.

    In the case of ‘lspci’, the developer changed the output format which broke some of my scripts, and I have stubbornly refused to fix my scripts, instead keeping the older lspci.

    cups, well that is documented recently in this blog.

    bash, the 3.1.x series breaks some scripts. Fixable, but once again I can’t be bothered as I’m quite happy with v3.0.16.

  2. kirk Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:57 pm

    To get Gxine 0.5.11 to full screen, first maximize Gxine’s window and then hit ctrl-f. If you hit ctrl-f without maximizing the window, it just flickers.

    I’ve been passing “combined_mode=libata” when booting to get DMA working with my DVD. After doing this my DVD is /dev/sr0. I’ve been just symlinking /dev/sr0 to /dev/dvd and Gxine is happy with that. At least in 2.17 and 3.01. Sounds like dingo will be doing all that for me. Thanks.

The Great Gxine Saga

December 11th, 2007

This has taken me the entire morning, but I now have a version of Gxine that works reasonably well.

Gxine versions are really patchy, a later version does not mean a better version. I know this from previous experience.

The latest version, 0.5.11, crashes when File –> Preferences is chosen. Also, it doesn’t do full-screen — there’s just a weird flicker and it stays the same size. So, I went back, compiling old versions and comparing…

v0.5.10
Same problems as 0.5.11.

v0.5.8, 0.5.9
Preferences works, but still no full-screen.

v0.5.7, 0.5.6
Crashes at startup.

v0.5.2
Works ok, except doesn’t recognise my /dev/cdrom link to /dev/sr0 as being a CD drive. DVD plays ok though. No full-screen.

v0.4.9
This is the last of the 0.4.x series, and this one works! It has the same problem of not recognising the CD drive, and the control-panel in the Gxine window is a bit reluctant to render  — sometimes have to jiggle the window to get it  (volume control,  start/stop buttons, etc.) to draw. It does full-screen very nicely.  In fact, there’s something else,  I’m not sure about this but I think recent verions of Gxine have a bit of a flicker when playing video, which is not there in this version.

v0.3.3
The Gxine site does not have this, I have it as it was used a long time ago in Puppy. Has the non-recognition of the CD problem, full-screen works momentarily then crashes.

Well, well, I’m now playing a CD with v0.4.9. When I chose the CD, an error window came up with “Connection refused: Operation now in progress” but then it went ahead and played the CD. I can choose tracks too. Probably something to do with it being  ’sr’ device rather than ‘hd’ (it’s an IDE drive but I’m using the new 2.6.24-rc4 kernel).  It should be easy enough to hack the source to get rid of that error message.

I tested the web browser plugin from v0.4.9, it works.

I tested various media files. Actually,  Real Video support is not all that bad — I have three files locally for testing and MPlayer plays all three, Gxine plays two of them — both sound and video.


One Response to “The Great Gxine Saga”

crafty Says:
December 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

This might be O.T.. - but is it possible to keep the ‘/proc/ide’ folder and somehow symlink to the corresponding drive points in the new ‘proc/sr* (or whatever it be now called)’ folder - at least till Puppy with this new kernel gets fully “burnt-in” tested - maybe by v4.1 - v4.2..

OR if ’symlinks’ does not work - then maybe a script that can do the same..?

Just a thought..

crafty.

2.6.24-rc4 kernel

December 10th, 2007

Running a full hard-drive installation of Dingo, I have compiled the 2.6.24-rc4 kernel. With radical changes… the entire IDE drive support, which gave us our /dev/hd* drive names, is now gone, by setting CONFIG_IDE=n. Instead, all of the libata PATA drivers are enabled — all PATA and SATA drivers are selected built-in. This means that all hard drives will now be /dev/sd* and all CD/DVD drives will be /dev/sr*.

What else… yeah, this one will be welcomed by some, SMP (symmetric multi-processor) support is now enabled. I also set CONFIG_PCMCIA_LOAD_CIS=y to hopefully get PCMCIA working. Lots of exciting new wireless support — which is one of the reasons I wanted to go for this very latest kernel.

After compiling and installing the new kernel and modules, I crossed my fingers and rebooted. The PC has one IDE and one SATA hard-drive, one IDE DVD drive. Yep, booted up fine, except the DVD drive had gone awol. Ah, the ’sr_mod’ module needs to be loaded, did that and there was the DVD drive, it played a DVD ok also.

It seems pretty obvious that it would be best if ’sr_mod’ is built into the kernel, so I’m recompiling right now with that change.

Some scripts may be broken or partially broken, as the entire /proc/ide directory is now gone.

My plan is to release alpha3 with this 2.6.24-rc4, and anyone who has a special wish for a change in the kernel config may submit it as I’ll do one more compile of the 2.6.24-final kernel before releasing Dingo-beta.


11 Responses to “2.6.24-rc4 kernel”

  1. Sage Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    Need I ask?! Did bob9’s package ever arrive?
    Other distros, eg Sidux, with the new nomenclature all manage my old dinosaurs. But, then, DSL always did, even with the 2.4 kernels…..

  2. veronicathecow Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    Thanks Barry this will be great to try as I am suffering Puppy withdrawal symptoms.
    Please excuse my ignorance but this seemed a possible idea for keeping Puppy RAM footprint small but I would imagine it would require a number of changes to Puppy. For instance are all file systems needed or could some be loaded at the time access is requested, fat32, NTFS, Reiser (I assume most people are EX2 or EXT3. Perhaps this could be part of fastboot?
    Cheers
    Tony

    http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html

    “Enable the Loadable kernel modules support! With this option you can load/unload the device drivers dynamically on running linux system on the fly. See the Modules chapter at Section 3 . “

  3. BarryK Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    sage, no, I never received a scsi hardware package.

    Right now I’m running Puppy from a USB Flash drive with the new 2.6.24-rc4 kernel. It’s working perfectly, sound, everything.

    It was easy to fix the ‘probepart’, ‘probedisk’ and ‘init’ scripts to work with the new kernel (and retain backwards compatibility).

    Actually, I don’t expect any problems with other scripts. The ‘SATADRIVES’ variable in /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE now is not just SATA drives but a list of all internal drives, SATA and IDE. The Universal Installer should be easy to change to handle this unified system.

    One thing I don’t know about is IDE ZIP drives, where before Puppy loaded the ‘ide-floppy.ko’ module — there must be something equivalent. This will need to be fixed in the ‘init’ script in the initial ramdisk.

  4. Sage Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 8:15 pm

    I have emailed bob9. Jesse’s details in your PM box. Surprised you and he hadn’t been able to establish a rapport, although I think his legit. employ keeps him busy 25hrs/dy?
    Delete this if you wish.

  5. Dougal Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    I’d be very careful about using the latest kernel before the stable version is released and a few weeks go by: they made a truckload of changes this time around and the patches between rc’s seem to be pretty big, too.

  6. GreatnessGuru Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 10:40 pm

    Dougal Says:
    “I’d be very careful about using the latest kernel …”

    Well, I’ld be very careful, too, about using the latest Puppy…

    That is, we Initial Adopters know things will need fixing and tweaking here and there, but the Puppy and kernel developers have pretty much done their homework before they release their stuff. I cannot say that for all such projects.

    Good call, Barry. I look forward to giving Puppy 4.0 a spin. Perhaps a maintainance release a week or two later with a 2.6.24.z kernel and Puppy touchups would be nice, while you work on Puppy 4.1.

    Oh, if anyone wants to know, I have already decided that Puppy 4.x will be my “upgrade path” from this Mac OSX 10.3.9 system I’m currently using. I have a few legacy Pentium boxes ready to go. The later Puppy 2.x, 3.x, have done well on these. Thanks again, Barry.

    Perhaps a PPC arch Puppy 4 someday? What else am I going to do with my G3? Run Debian?

    Oh #2, I have a friend who is running Puppy 3.x on his Mac in a virtual environment of some kind. He likes it. Good performance.

    Thanks all,
    Eddie Maddox

  7. nic2109 Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 4:10 am

    Puppy 4 on on a PPC platform………….. now that’s INTERESTING.

    I too know of a G3 iMac that’s not up to MacOS X and is just gathering dust.

    The time is ripe for World Domination. Woof woof!

  8. Headfound Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Could we have ieee/1394 firewire support? I had to use Nathan F’s old unleashed package to get anything to work in 3.

  9. cb88 Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    barry i have been looking at directfb alot….

    they have ported GTK to it… I think you see where that is going :-)

    could you see if it will build on puppy 4.00? I am trying to build it in 2.15 with not much sucess….

    I am getting a whole bunch of error when trying to compile matrox gfx drivers…trying disabling gfx in ./configure ..OK compiles correctly now.

    as i understand it multitasking with directfb requires a special kernel module “fusion”….

    I am not really sure what to do to start it up other than that it might need to be passed as a kernel boot paremeter….

    anyway though you might get around to trying out directfb I know it would be a serious undertaking but worth the effort if it really saves as much ram as it claims to…. now i must study for physics test :-)

  10. cb88 Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am

    I forgot one thing… the xvesa man page suggests compiling against ulibc or dietlibc DigitalCrypto mentioned that apps compiled against them are compatable with Glibc… so that may be a way to lower requirements as well

  11. BarryK Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:51 am

    Dougal, yes, I would prefer to wait until v2.6.24.1 before bringing out the final Dingo.

Gxine …grrr

December 10th, 2007

As we have issues with MPlayer in Dingo, I thought that I would give Xine/Gxine a go.

MPlayer is working quite well, except for the disappearing windows with JWM — and I have had no response from the author Joe about this bug, despite two emails (one of them to his sourceforge email address, the other to the JWM mail-list). I guess that Joe is not into working on JWM right now, which is fair enough, considering that it is a free product. I’m quite frustrated, as there are other applications with bugs and I have emailed the authors, no response from anyone.

MPlayer itself has peculiar limitations. For example, the GUI does not have any facility for playing a CD or DVD, only for opening files. A right-click on either window does bring up a more complete menu with option to play a DVD, but no audio CD. However, none of the skins have a “play DVD” button — it seems to be a functionality missing from the skin interface. Also, the “File open” dialog in some skins does not work — I presume that’s due to not being updated for GTK 2.12.

I compiled Xine-lib version 1.1.8 and Gxine 0.5.11 for Dingo. Out of the box, Xine is hopeless with Real Media, files that MPlayer handled without any extra codecs, Gxine just would not play them, not even any error message. Then I selected “File -> Preferences…” from the menu, and Gxine gave a segmentation fault …that’s why the “grrr”. Yep, always gives a segmentation fault, oh well, so much for Gxine.

So, I’m back on MPlayer, it’s a case of choosing the product with less bugs, or non-fatal bugs anyway.

I have put in XfreeCD, a little GTK2 audio CD player, except that is also a problem as it won’t work on all systems. Unlike Xine and MPlayer, XfreeCD requires an audio cable from the CD drive to the audio card, which my laptop doesn’t seem to have. Sigh. Anyone know of a nice little CD player that does direct digital reading from the CD?


10 Responses to “Gxine …grrr”

  1. tempestuous Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    Yes, MPlayer is very gui-unfriendly. On the MPlayer developer forum some members even want to eliminate the gui!
    Part of the problem is that MPlayer is very sophisticated, and many options require a long command string. Take, for example, the command for Puppy forum member eden6000’s Digital TV tuner adapter, when he wants to tune analogue TV station 11:

    mplayer tv://11 -tv driver=v4l2:alsa=yes:audiorate=48000:amode=1:adevice=hw.1,0:volume=80:immediatemode=0

    Also, DVD navigation is a recently added feature for MPlayer which requires this command:

    mplayer dvdnav://

    (the libdvdnav/libdvdread libraries from MPlayer need to be installed first)

    It might be worth creating a script with this command, which is launched from the JWM menu.

  2. grumpywolfe Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 9:43 am

    Hi Barry

    I used xine and one time and liked the interface. I know that you have used JWM on puppy have you given any thought to Xfre. I used it with 3.1 and it was pretty good.

  3. MrPradox Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

    Hi Barry,

    have you considered the VLC media player? It’s very complete, robust and common even among Windows users…

  4. fwiffo Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    What about vlc?

  5. BarryK Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 8:17 pm

    I have just looked at the VLC “Features” page, and it lacks RealMedia support, so is no better than Xine and worse than MPlayer. Also, it needs wxWidgets or Qt4 which is a substantial size overhead.

    Xfmedia, the media player for Xfce, is a possibility. It does not require all of Xfce, just some libraries from Xfce, which does not add much to the size. It uses Xine, so once again has the limitations of Xine. But then, considering that Gxine crashes, Xfmedia is a definite improvement! I might consider putting Xfmedia in Dingo alpha3.

  6. Dougal Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 8:43 pm

    First, I hope you run Gxine in gdb and sent a bug report…

    The reason Mplayer doesn’t have the “play cd” option is that it’s a movie player… it’s supposed to be complemented with something like xmms.

    Xfmedia is a xine frontend, so you’ll still not have RealMedia support…

    What about Xine-ui, by the way? You can find a decent skin for it and then it’s not **that** awful (assuming it works)…

    A few months ago I tried searching for a replacement for XfreeCD and found nothing.

  7. cb88 Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 3:17 am

    The latest Xmms would make a good adition and john biles recently posted a plugin for xmms that improves CD playback…. and don’t forget Xmms resource usage will always be lower than gxine… how to make Xmms support .wma I am not sure but it is possible…..

  8. erik496 Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    xmms wma-plugins can be found in

    http://mcmmc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/

    it works for me in xmms-1.2.9 and puppy 2.16
    .

  9. tempestuous Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 4:55 pm

    How to make XMMS support .wma?
    Easy, compile the XMMS-WMA plugin from http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/

    Regarding VLC: it’s overrated … perhaps I said that on the forum once, twice, or ten times already?

  10. tempestuous Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Regarding Xine and its variants, xine-ui seems to be more reliable than gxine with fullscreen and various other windowing issues, but xine-ui does not have a Mozilla plugin.

Working with a small screen

December 9th, 2007

I have made an interesting discovery.

I’m testing the Xorg Intel driver on the Classmate PC laptop, and I can get it to run in the native 800×480 resolution of the LCD screen, but I can’t get a virtual screen with panning. I tried all sorts of things in ‘xorg.conf’, to no avail …but I do vaguelly recall some Xorg drivers have a problem with virtual screen and panning …then I came across a comment somewhere that the Xorg developers no longer support panning.

After considerable frustration, I turned to JWM and the pager mechanism. The main problem is the 480 pixels vertically — I really would like to have a virtual screen of 800×600, where the screen scrolls if the mouse pointer is moved to top or bottom of screen. However, failing that, a pager in the tray that is organised as 2×2 would be good. But, it seems that JWM only supports horizontal paging. Bummer.

I then studied the JWM changelog and found a new feature introduced with v2.0 — the windows inside the pager-windows (in the tray) can be dragged around with the right button. This enables quick access to windows that stick off the bottom and side of the screen.

But, there’s another advantage — JWM has a bug in that sometimes windows draw with the titlebar off the top of the screen, so cannot be dragged down by left-button-press-and drag in the normal way. However, right-button-press-and-drag inside the pager works nicely.

Um, well, “nicely” is not the right word. It’s a matter of getting by when there’s nothing better, in fact nothing else at all. It’s actually a crude mechanism, as a tiny movement of the mouse and the window makes a big jump. If I could drag the window up or down smoothly with the scrollwheel would be nice.

Note, I think the Asus eee has same or similar video chip? My  Classmate has a:

Intel(r)915GM/910ML/915MS Graphics Controller


5 Responses to “Working with a small screen”

  1. Pizzasgood Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

    You can usually also move things in Linux by holding [Alt] and dragging anywhere within their window. I haven’t used JWM in a while, so I’m not positive that it supports that, but I think it does.

    That’s not an obvious method though.

  2. Dougal Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 5:43 am

    Any idea when alpha3 might be ready?

  3. BarryK Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 7:50 am

    Pizzasgood, yes! thanks for that.

    Dougal, alpha3, I’m not sure. I want to recompile the kernel and turn on pcmcia plus maybe other changes to the kernel. Maybe another week from now. Ah, no, looking at my schedule, I really need to upload alpha3 by this Friday when I’ll have broaband2 access — well, I’ll see if can meet that deadline. That’s the 14th.

Database GUI for Puppy

December 9th, 2007

Guys, we finally have something. Puppy has two databases, the Berkely database and Sqlite3. What we don’t have is a GUI tool for creating and accessing a database. We have discussed options in this forum thread:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=18420

I mentioned a package, named ‘SQLiteDBMS, that is quite small and uses a web-browser interface, however I could not get it to work in Puppy. That was back around mid-2007. Yesterday, forum member ‘lgo AtM’ has reported that he has worked on the source and got it to run in Puppy:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21518

We need testers! Are you interested in a database application for Puppy? Then please help lgo AtM to find and fix bugs.

SQLiteDBMS home: http://sqlitedbms.sourceforge.net/index.htm


5 Responses to “Database GUI for Puppy”

  1. nic2109 Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 7:08 am

    I’ve not tried SQLiteDBMS on its own, but I have used XAMPP in Puppy and SQLite is part of that. In that guise SQLite worked for me, though I only used really simple SQL. My real use for it was to drive a Wordpress Blog hosted locally.

    The full XAMPP download is 52MB so is out of scope for a base Puppy. Would be good for a CE though!

  2. WhoDo Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    I’ve tried to compile SQLiteDBMS on my Puppy 3.01 system, but I keep getting a terminal compile error telling me:

    “configure: error: sqlite3 library is required by SQLiteDBMS. use –with-sqlite3=DIR.”

    Of course I have entered the appropriate directory /usr/bin, and I’ve checked at CLI that sqlite3 runs from that binary, but still no joy.

  3. MarkUlrich Says:
    December 15th, 2007 at 10:38 pm

    please try:
    –with-sqlite3=/usr/lib/sqlite3

    Mark

  4. WhoDo Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 8:11 am

    “configure: error: sqlite3 library is required by SQLiteDBMS. use –with-sqlite3=DIR.
    # ./configure –with-sqlite3=/usr/lib/sqlite3″

    Sorry, Mark. No joy, as can be seen above.

  5. MarkUlrich Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 10:25 am

    ok, you’re right.
    I now did this:
    extracted (found no source for Puppys older version):
    http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3.5.4.tar.gz
    ran:
    ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/Sqlite-3.5.4 –disable-tcl
    make
    make install

    strip ‘ed the files in bin and lib folders.

    now the dbms
    ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/SqliteDBMS-0.51 –with-sqlite3=/usr/local/Sqlite-3.5.4
    make
    make install

    strip ‘ed the files in bin and lib folders.

    renamed /usr/local/SqliteDBMS-0.51/conf/sqlitedbms.conf.sample to sqlitedbms.conf

    cd /usr/local/SqliteDBMS-0.51/bin
    # ./sqlitedbms
    ** Catalog files not found. Insert admin id and password for initialize catalog.
    Administrator ID:

    Now I’m too lazy to continue and read the faq ;)
    However, maybe it now will work with the old sqlite, or you had to create an additional dotpup for the new one.

    My results so far, extract to /usr/local/
    http://dotpups.de/diverse-tgz/sqlite-stuff-usr-local.tar.gz

    You might have to set in a console before you continue:
    export PATH=/usr/local/Sqlite-3.5.4/bin:$PATH
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/Sqlite-3.5.4/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    export PATH=/usr/local/SqliteDBMS-0.51/bin:$PATH
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/SqliteDBMS-0.51/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    Mark

Agave Americana in flower

December 9th, 2007

Scroll down through my blog to find the first snapshot, when this enormous stalk suddenly shot up. Now it is in flower.

agave


2 Responses to “Agave Americana in flower”

  1. hairywill Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    wow, big asparagus

    Barry, is there any chance you can leave the cifs module in the next zdrv. I’d like to experiment with using cifs in pnethood. If this works smbmount will be redundant and the cifs module can be stored in the zdrv rather pup_xxx.
    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=159310

    cheers, Will

  2. BarryK Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    hairywill, ok, done. It will be in alpha3, due out soon.

Desktop icon switcher for Dingo

December 6th, 2007

Well, it can be adapted for other puppies also.

The icons that appear on the desktop are all at /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps, so to are the top-level menu icons. The former are 48×48 pixels, the latter 24×24 pixels. What is new in Dingo is I have created /usr/local/lib/X11/themes, which has subdirectories with different sets of icons. Currently I have ‘Outline-svg’ and ‘Stardust’ subdirectories. The former has a set of SVG icons, the latter a set of PNG icons created by zigbert.

What my icon-switcher does is copy the icons from the chosen theme across to /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps. It’s a bit more sophisticated than that though. If the source-directory has any SVG icons, they are copied to the ‘pixmaps’ destination directory as 48×48 and 24×24 PNG icons, named appropriately — for example, ‘themes/Outline-svg/www.svg’ would cause ‘pixmaps/www48.png’ and ‘pixmaps/www24.png’ to be created. If the source-directory has a 48×48 PNG image, then it gets copied but also a 24×24 PNG image created — for example ‘themes/Stardust/www48.png’ will get copied to ‘pixmaps/www48.png’ but also scaled down and ‘pixmaps/www24.png’ created.

If anyone wants to add a new set of icons, just create a new subdirectory under ‘/usr/local/lib/X11/themes’ and the script will automatically recognise it.

The script is /usr/sbin/icon_switcher and is written in Bash with a gtkdialog GUI. Here’s a snapshot:

<REMOVED>

The images shown are just samples taken out of each theme.


11 Responses to “Desktop icon switcher for Dingo”

  1. lobster Says:
    December 6th, 2007 at 10:23 pm

    We have two other sets of superb icons that I hope there will be room for. The colourful classic Puppy set and the transparent icons in 2.15CE. Looks as if the SVG icons are evolving too. :)

  2. BarryK Says:
    December 6th, 2007 at 10:41 pm

    Lobster, reload your web page, I just fixed the button-widths and uploaded a new snapshot.
    Well, the SVG outline icons still need more work.
    Yes, the original colorful icon set is still very popular, so maybe should be included. I don’t remember what the 2.15CE icons look like…

  3. lobster Says:
    December 7th, 2007 at 12:39 am

    The first thing the majority of people do is change the look and feel. If this is easy and pleasing, then they are easily pleased

    Here are the icons I rather liked from 2.15 beta — they’re called glass
    http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/6985/stylemy0.jpg

    Here they are evolved in Ezpup
    http://tinypic.com/53hvhap.jpg

    Hopefully Warren still has a recommended set . . .

    What intrigues me about using SVG is the possibilities. Icons can be resized from one set. There is an animation potential . . . m m m . . . and yet they are very small and efficient

  4. raffy Says:
    December 7th, 2007 at 6:34 am

    Sorry if off-topic: could goosee.com/puppy be redirected to puppylinux.com and puppylinux.com link directly to puppylinux.com (same way puppylinux.com does now, perhaps as parked domain)? See puppylinux.org for a redirect script (FTP needed).

  5. nic2109 Says:
    December 7th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    Another off-topic post: where have the links gone from this Blog? (Known as the “Blogroll” in WP Admin). They were there at the top RH side yeterday, but have gone today.

  6. cb88 Says:
    December 7th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

    depending on your browser they may also be at the bottom….

    can’t the color of SVG icons also be easily changed? perhaps offer to also select the colors that make up the icons….

  7. raffy Says:
    December 8th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    SOS re puppylinux.org. I cannot access admin functions because of this:

    “Error 403

    We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for *URI_hidden*.php on this server.

    Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.

    Your technical support key is: 7c69-1310-1366-73cd

    You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

    If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact badbots at ioerror.us and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.”

    This has happened to me using two of my rather reliable domains, so it’s impossible to go past this screen.

    This is something for servage.net to check, especially for some services where puppylinux.org has been enrolled in the past. Thanks.

  8. nic2109 Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 5:52 am

    Another off-topic contribution: here’s a very favourable mention of Puppy in PC Advisor. Take a look Barry at http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=4&entryid=1460 and allow yourself a little glow of pleasure!

  9. raffy Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 6:32 am

    I’ve looked into the problem and this update seems to be the solution:
    http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/download/

    However, I still have to find out where Puppian has put those files (the older version). Servage staff (or someone with ssh access) can do it.

  10. mechmike Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    Here’s a slew of icons: http://www.downloadpedia.org/Free_Icons_and_Buttons

  11. jeffrey Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 5:48 am

    Thanks for the alternative icon set Barry.
    The original Dingo’s icons looked rather…
    …well, the new set will look quite professional.
    Much appreciated.

ChmSee CHM help viewer

December 4th, 2007

A few months ago I needed to view a CHM file, which is a compressed HTML-based help file format from Microsoft. The file was the FreeBasic User Manual, and CHM was (and still is) the only format available for download.

There were CHM viewers for Linux, but many dependencies. Until now. I have discovered ‘ChmSee’, which is a GTK2 application and the package uncompressed is 220K and it uses a library ‘chmlib’ that is only 24K uncompressed. It achieves this small size by using the Gecko engine in SeaMonkey. The authors are Yang Hong and Ji YongGang.

It compiled without a glitch, and I downloaded the FreeBasic CHM file and it works perfectly.

ChmSee project page: http://gro.clinux.org/projects/chmsee/
chmlib page: http://www.jedrea.com/chmlib/
Info about CHM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compressed_HTML_Help

I think someone recently asked on the forum about Microsoft LIT format — that is a modified CHM format. Here are various related forum threads:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21033
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4631

I’ve put this into Dingo and it will be in the next release, alpha3. Note, I have set the ‘application/x-chm’ mime-type in Rox and /etc/mime.types and /etc/mailcap.


One Response to “ChmSee CHM help viewer”

  1. Dougal Says:
    December 5th, 2007 at 3:44 am

    Something unrelated that’s worth looking into:
    http://lwn.net/Articles/260599/

When the pup_save gets full…

December 4th, 2007

ecomoney provides support for people who use Puppy. These tend to be less computer-technically-savvy customers, and when the pup_save file gets full they do nothing about it, which results in the pup_save file becoming unusable. ecomoney is doing a frugal install for them.

Basically, the customers need to be alerted to the situation — the little ‘freememapplet’ in the taskbar is not enough — and also told what to do about it.

In Dingo I do not have a ‘freememaplet’ in the taskbar, instead there is a message at the top of the screen. The advantage of this is it can contain any text, any font and color. What I have now done is enhance this with a prominent warning, bold black text on a red background.

The warning message varies depending on the PUPMODE. In the case of a frugal install with a pup_save file (normally PUPMODE=12), the warning will advise to delete files or run the ‘Resize personal storage file’ in the ‘Utility’ menu. This message is very prominent so cannot be missed, and is sufficiently intrusive that the user will want to follow the advice.

Note, the user can click on the message to make it go away, but if the free memory drops any lower it will come back. I have set the trigger point at 2MB free space in the pup_save — though, there could be more than one trigger point, with varying severity of warning.


6 Responses to “When the pup_save gets full…”

  1. crafty Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    Excuse the fr**ch - ‘about bloody time’ ..(he..he..he..)..

    This has been one of the biggest “newbies” bugbear for quite a long time - so finally getting it sorted out will hopefully ( or definitely - as my better half keeps telling me I should be more positive..hah..) make using Puppy for the “noobs” much easier..

    Great work Barry..

    crafty.
    .

  2. PaulBx1 Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    Is the message always visible on top of all windows?

    I sure would prefer to know the trend of things long before I’m down to 2MB. I also use freememapplet to decide when it’s time to clean up emails and such. I like to see 200MB there.

    Maybe keep both the new message for newbies, and freememapplet as well for us long-time users.

  3. BarryK Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 1:24 pm

    The free memory is always displayed at the top of the screen (or it could be elsewhere if that turns out to be better), normally green text with transparent background, so unobtrusive.
    It can be made progressively obtrusive as desired.
    It is not displayed at the top of windows.

  4. cb88 Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 11:19 pm

    perhaps, trigger at 8% of the pupsave is left or 100mb which ever comes first… that would probably be a good comprmise… In any case a percentage based warning would be more helpful/less intrusive since small pupsaves and very large pupsaves are used….

  5. nic2109 Says:
    December 8th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Sounds like a great benefit.

    I reckon that gentle warnings when below 10% free, strident ones under 5%; with difficult to ignore ones below 2% would be a good scheme.

    Also; don’t forget to use the correct size calculation as per the recent discussions over the size problems in petget…..

  6. ecomoney Says:
    January 4th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    Barry, many (many) thanks for sorting this out, its been a constant thorn in my side for a long time now. Happy this has been drawn to your attention.

Puppy 2.14 Revisited

December 3rd, 2007

Recently in the forum I contemplated updating one of the older versions of Puppy, most likely v2.16.1. The reason for that is that some people experience problems with later kernel and drivers, and some like the combination of applications and small size of a particular older version.

An “upgrade” would mean upgrading to later versions of applications (where possible), fixing bugs, and applying any improved bootup/shutdown scripts, refinements, hardware detection, etc, of later versions. Basically, the objective would be to “smarten it up” to give a closer experience to match recent versions (or even to enhance it in an entirely new way).

Anyway, it turns out that Dougal and pakt have been working on such an upgrade, but to version 2.14. This is not “official” in the sense that I am not involved, so all questions about it have to be directed to those guys. So, if you have a fondness for the older puppies and like the idea of a smaller size (69MB), give it a spin.

This upgraded Puppy is named “2.14R”, where the “R” means “Revisited”. Go to this forum thread for further information:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24082


3 Responses to “Puppy 2.14 Revisited”

  1. Leon Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

    1.) I manually installed 214R v1.00 using frugal install. As another forum user named ‘fudgy’ mentioned the file searching code at startup works surprisingly fast.

    The step of booting process between this two boot messages:

    ‘Looking for Puppy in hda1… hda2… hda5… hda6… hda7… hda8…’

    and

    ‘Using personal data file /p214r1/pup_save.2fs which is on partition hda5′

    takes less then 1 second. When booting to Puppy 3.01 or 3.92 from the same kind of frugal install it takes about 15 seconds or more.

    2.) I really like the option to mount and to unmount partitions from Rox. This is very nice improvement.

    3.) The Xorg Wizard from Puppy 214R v1.00 solved the problem with missing resolutions in display resolution list.

    We discussed the problem at:

    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1751954535&t=15382
    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=110886#110886

  2. downsouth Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

    I’ve done a few 2.16.1 remasters - latest being to run an Asus
    eee (typing on it now). Got 800×480 working but I’m using a
    usb flash & usb wireless, as Asus DVD & manual inaccurate.
    Anyway, 2.16.1 has been the most stable for me. My latest iso
    is 132 mb - with all the extras I want except OpenOffice.

  3. downsouth Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

    … now have a specific Asus eee version of 2.16.1 - 121mb, iso to be installed onto a USB stick and run from there (press Esc at first prompt). Wireless now going. Xvesa only. Available for seriously interested.

ssh-gui ported to GTK2

December 3rd, 2007

ssh-gui is a GTK1 application for making a SSH secure remote login. This application has been in Puppy for a long time, as well as another simpler SSH GUI that I wrote, named “Secure SSH telnet” in the menu.

ssh-gui has a page at sourceforge, however it hasn’t been updated for several years so I guess can be considered a dead project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssh-gui/

Once again, I modified the ‘Makefile’ and this app compiled against GTK2. I have created ’ssh_gui-0.7.1-pup1.tar.gz’ that will be uploaded to puptrix.org soon. This will also be in Dingo alpha3 (as well as Superscan — note, both of these apps are really tiny, only 20KB and 90KB).

Superscan ported to GTK2

December 3rd, 2007

Superscan is a GTK1 port scanner. It has been in Puppy for ages and not compiled for a long time …I couldn’t even find the source. Fortunately, I found it here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/amigolinux/download/Applications/Network/superscan-0.8/

Also fortunately, I only had to modify the ‘configure’ file and it compiled against GTK2. So, this is now in Dingo. I will upload the modified source, which will be named ’superscan-0.8-pup1.tar.gz’, to our source repository at puptrix.org soon. I’m accumulating a lot of new and updated packages for puptrix.

Xconsole

December 2nd, 2007

There was a question asked recently on the forum about how to monitor output to /dev/console while X is running. Many applications will log to /dev/console, which is the console that you see when you exit from X.

The Xorg package has a utility application for that, called ‘xconsole’, and I have added it to Dingo. It is in the ‘Utility’ menu.


One Response to “Xconsole”

  1. Dougal Says:
    December 2nd, 2007 at 7:39 pm

    New Rox just released.

Xorg vesa working

December 1st, 2007

Dingo alpha1 and alpha2 use the Xvesa Kdrive X server. This is part of the Xorg 7.3 package, but is separate from the “full” X servers. There are two PET packages in Unleashed that I created for this, ‘xorg_base-7.3′ and ‘xorg_xvesa-7.3′.

Now I am incrementally bringing in the “full” X severs. First up is the ‘vesa’ server. Despite the name, this has nothing to do with the Xvesa server. It is similar in that it uses the VESA video modes and is not hardware-accelerated. It differs from Xvesa in that it can use the various modules and extensions that are in the Xorg package (whereas Xvesa is a standalone product) — for example, the Synaptics touchpad driver.

I created another package, ‘xorg_xorg_base-7.3′, that has extra stuff needed to support the full X servers, and I put the ‘vesa’ server in it. I added this package, and now Xorg runs. It’s quite small, only adds about 1.3MB.

…like kirk, I’m very happy to have the Synaptics driver! (thanks for compiling that!)

While working on this, I discovered that the Xorg Wizard has a bug. A rounding-off error prevented my laptop running at 1280×800 and it ran at 1024×768. Fixed.

Next step, I’ll create packages for specific X servers, or maybe one package for a bunch of them.


6 Responses to “Xorg vesa working”

  1. lobster Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 11:32 am

    Good news :)

    The one bug developers always miss and dismiss (be honest they do not even regard it as a bug) is ‘look and feel’.

    It is the first one users see.

  2. raffy Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    Happy to hear about this basic package. For embedded systems, the usual chips are the AMD Geode, VIA Unichrome, and an assortment of SiS chips (see the Intel Classmate, eee and D201GLY2 board as examples).

  3. kirk Says:
    December 2nd, 2007 at 6:57 am

    Maybe just one big add-on package with everything. Would need the DRM modules as well if they’re not going to be in the zdrv. May also want to include a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf0 that has :

    Load “dri”

    in the Section “Module”.

    The extra Megabytes of package size would probably be worth it for the simplicity. Probably be a pet package ~25MB.

  4. tempestuous Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 12:02 am

    I installed the Xorg 7.3 package, and then proceeded to compile the latest MPlayer 1.0rc2.
    I had a lot of trouble with this compilation until I realised that the configuration script was failing to find libraries in /usr/X11R7/lib
    This command fixed the problem

    export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/X11R7/lib

    Can anyone tell me how I permanently set this, so I don’t have to run that command each time I power up?

    Barry, I made some suggestions about Puppy’s version of MPlayer on the main forum -
    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=157694

  5. kirk Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 2:41 am

    I think that’s in /etc/lld.so.conf. Think you need to execute ldconfig after editing that file.

  6. BarryK Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 6:23 am

    kirk: ok, have put in ‘load “dri”‘
    tempestuous: I think in /etc/profile.

Busybox updated

November 30th, 2007

There is a recent forum thread about the ‘adduser’ applet in Puppy not working. This is for Puppy 3.01 I think, which uses Busybox 1.6.1. Earlier puppies used a separate package named ‘tinylogin’, and in the forum discussion it was found that the ‘adduser’ from that old package does work.

I found mention by the developers that adduser has been fixed in Busybox 1.7, so I have upgraded Dingo to the latest Busybox, which is version 1.8.2.

Note that the initial-ramdisk (initramfs) still has an older Busybox, v1.4.1 I think, compiled statically with uClibc. That seems to be okay so won’t change it.


2 Responses to “Busybox updated”

  1. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    Does anyone have a email address for Hacao?
    I sent him a p.m. on the forum a few days ago, but he hasn’t logged in. I’ve got some questions about the Classmate!

  2. caneri Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    hacaolinux-AT-gmail-DOT-com should work.

    That’s how I stay in touch.

    Eric

Pmount rewritten

November 29th, 2007

I have completely rewritten pmount, the Puppy drive mounter.

You can find it here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.00-dingo-alpha2/

It is file ‘pmount.gz’. Gunzip it to /usr/sbin — it must be placed at that directory and must be named ‘pmount’ — rename the old one to hide it.

I have only tested this in Dingo alpha2.

To test mounting an NTFS partition, you have to get rid of /bin/mount — rename it to something else. You will see /bin/mount-FULL — rename that to ‘mount’.

I don’t have MUT in Dingo, but it was mentioned in a thread today where we have been discussing bugs in Pmount, that MUT mounted a NTFS partition read-write — one thing to be careful about though: if an NTFS partition is mounted writable by using the kernel NTFS driver, writing is not safe. The ‘ntfs-3g’ FUSE user-mode driver is required, and you can check whether this has been used by executing:

# mount

after the NTFS partition is mounted, and you should see the string “fuse”. If not, it is unsafe to write.

Testing of the new pmount invited.


19 Responses to “Pmount rewritten”

  1. plinej Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 11:18 pm

    Works fine for me, although I didn’t have any problems with the old one.

  2. boscobearbank Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 12:04 am

    Smaller is better. However, I get an ntfs-3g error when using the new pmount (and the old one too):
    The ntfs-3g driver was unable to mount the NTFS
    partition and returned this error message:
    shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
    mount: illegal option — i

  3. lluamco Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 12:49 am

    Using the new pmount, making it executable in /usr/sbin/pmount and renaming /bin/mount-FULL to /bin/mount, I get the following in puppy 3.01:

    When mounting an NTFS partition, rox opens its contents, but pmount does not register it as mounted. Also, when executing mount, “fuse” is not displayed. However, if an ext3 partition is mounted (pmount registers it OK) and unmounted, then the previous NTFS partition is registered as mounted and, execution of mount displays “fuse”.

  4. hairywill Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:23 am

    Works for me, but then it did before. Much more compact, if there are any bugs I’m sure they will be easier to find. I notice you’ve gone back to opening rox on a successful mount, I prefer this. You might consider these two edits to get the rox window to pop up in front of pmount. The first line I’ve included in each case is your code for context.

    echo “$PMOUNTGUI” > /tmp/pmountdlg.txt
    #hairywill
    if [ -f /tmp/pmount-launch-rox.sh ]; then
    source /tmp/pmount-launch-rox.sh &
    rm /tmp/pmount-launch-rox.sh
    fi

    [ $RETVAL1 -ne 0 ] && xmessage -bg red -center -title “ERROR: unable to mount $DEVNAME”
    #hairywill
    [ “$RETVAL1″ -eq 0 ] && echo ‘#!/bin/sh
    while [ ! “$PMOUNTUP” ]
    do
    PMOUNTUP=`ps | grep “gtkdialog3 –file=/tmp/pmountdlg.txt –center”`
    usleep 100000
    done
    rox -d “/mnt/’$DEVNAME’”‘ > /tmp/pmount-launch-rox.sh

    I don’t expect you to lave my name in :-)

  5. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 6:08 am

    “Smaller is better. However, I get an ntfs-3g error when using the new pmount (and the old one too):
    The ntfs-3g driver was unable to mount the NTFS
    partition and returned this error message:
    shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
    mount: illegal option — i”

    That would happen if you didn’t follow all instructions regarding renaming on ‘mount’ applications — did you do that also?

  6. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 6:24 am

    Luamco, I cannot reproduce your problem. One thing, in 3.01, do you have /sbin/mount.fuse.ntfs, mount.ntfs-3g and mount.ntfs-fuse symlinks? …I don’t think that will make any difference though.

  7. boscobearbank Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 6:43 am

    Barry, it’s not a renaming thing. I followed the instructions as best as someone who’s philosophy is “if all else fails, RTFM” can. I get the same error when I use my pristine Dingo alpha 2 CD and pmount or ntfs-3g itself.

  8. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    I have just updated the pmount script on ibiblio.

    A couple of bug fixes where xmessage might have caused a crash, now can run multiple instances of pmount, now the Rox window displays on top when a partition mounted (thanks hairywill).

  9. jb4x4 Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    THIS ONE WORKS!!! - Thank you !! (running v3.01) To better explain myself — I have a 15 partition drive with hda1 as a 100M boot partition. It always showed up as “.G” and would not mount - only showed an error of being a removable drive. This one works fine, shows correct size and mounts. BTW, nice touch with auto opening rox and the speed improvement.

    I also tried NTFS mounting, WITHOUT changing /bin/mount. The drive mounted and opened rox. I did not try any reads or writes though.

  10. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    boscobear, I found that the newer ‘ntfs-3g’ calls ‘mount’ internally, and as I had a script named ‘mount’ that also calls ‘ntfs-3g’, there was a weird situation. I have rolled back to the full mount program and that fixed the problem for me.

    If you type ‘which mount’ in a terminal, does it find the full mount program?

  11. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 9:17 am

    Works for me.

    I tried vfat, ext3, and ntfs. My ntfs was hibernated and so it was mounted read only, just as it should. I did get two red waring windows with different messages, though they both said about the same thing about the partiton be mount read only.

    Also,

    The init script will fsck my ext3 partition which adds 3-4 minutes to the boot time. I don’t think there’s any reason to fsck a ext3 partition.

    My ext3 partiton has been crashed countless times, sometimes because my battery dies, or a new game I’m trying locks-up. or I just decide to delete the pup_save file I’m using and then just hit the power switch. After about 6-8 months of doing this I ran a fsck on it:

    # e2fsck /dev/sda4
    e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
    /dev/sda4 has been mounted 321 times without being checked, check forced.
    Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
    Pass 2: Checking directory structure
    Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
    Pass 4: Checking reference counts
    Pass 5: Checking group summary information
    /dev/sda4: 89516/1938272 files (3.9% non-contiguous), 2322368/3899392 blocks
    #

    As you can see fsck had nothing to do.

    This is the first time I’ve been able to use Dingo much (thanks for the Xorg tarball). Seems very snappy! I really think your on the right path with T2. Looking forward to the Dingo - T2 build package.
    Keep up the good work!

  12. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 9:51 am

    jb4×4 wrote:
    “I also tried NTFS mounting, WITHOUT changing /bin/mount. The drive mounted and opened rox. I did not try any reads or writes though.”

    After it has been mounted, would you mind running ‘mount’ in a terminal and see if the string “fuse” is there in the ntfs entry.

    Then, test with the full /bin/mount program (replacing my mount script) and see if ‘mount’ returns the same info.

    …cause, I’m puzzled. I had to get rid of my ‘mount’ script to get rid of the weird error message and to get it to mount read-write.

    I’ve just had a thought what the problem could be. I think that my NTFS partition is “dirty”, whereas yours is probably “clean”, which affects how ntfs-3g handles it — which from previous experience does change with different versions of ntfs-3g.

  13. jb4x4 Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    Result WITHOUT changing mount–

    /dev/hdb1 on /mnt/hdb1 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other)

    After changing mount-full to mount– (original mount changed to mount1)

    “nothing” - (all other partitions still listed)
    Rox still auto opened with the filesystem, but pmount showed hdb1 UNMOUNTED.

    Note: I don’t believe I have ever tried writing to my NTFS partition with Linux (call it paranoia, I don’t want to bork it :) )

  14. jb4x4 Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    This is strange…. Still working with mount-full. I reported that pmount reported the NTFS partition (hdb1) as unmounted even after rox opened. If I mounted the save partition on said drive (hdb2, vfat) and unmounted it. When pmount refreshed, the NTFS partition (hdb1) showed as mounted…..

  15. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    Hmmm, I think I know what is going wrong. When ‘mount’ is executed without any parameters, which my pmount script does also, it returns the mounted partitions. However, the full ‘mount’ reads /etc/mtab, which perhaps is not fully up-to-date. The Busybox ‘mount’ ignores /etc/mtab and instead reads /proc/mounts, which is accurate.

    So, we can both try this: leave the full version as ‘mount-full’, rename my script as ‘mount-HIDE’ and rename ‘mount-BB-NOTUSED’ to ‘mount’.
    Do the same to the ‘umount’ application, that is, use the Busybox ‘umount’.
    Then, replace /etc/mtab with:
    # ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab

  16. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    Ignore my previous post!

    I have just understood things a bit better. The fundamental problem is that the ‘ntfs-3g’ program calls ‘mount’ — and if it the Busybox mount, passes a parameter that mount does not understand. That is the crux of the problem.

    One solution is to use the full mount, full umount, and leave /etc/mtab as a file. The full mount and umount will keep /etc/mtab up-to-date.
    This solution has a problem though, as if a script uses the Busybox mount/umount (by executing ‘busybox mount ….’) then /etc/mtab will not get updated.

    Another solution is that I fix my ‘mount’ script to recognise the passed param that is causing the problem. I’ll check that out now.

  17. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:50 pm

    Ok, I think it is fixed. I improved my ‘mount’ script. I’ll leave it at that, the fixed ‘mount’ and ‘pmount’ will be in alpha3.

  18. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

    I’ve uploaded the latest ‘mount’ script to ibiblio. Download that to /bin/mount.

    No other changes to alpha2 should be needed. Just the pristine alpha2, with the updated /bin/mount and /usr/sbin/pmount scripts.

  19. lluamco Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    Barry, the last versions of mount and pmount taken from ibiblio work OK. Thanks.

Complete Xorg binary tarball for Dingo

November 29th, 2007

For whomsoever might be interested, here it is:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/puppy-4.00-dingo-alpha2/

I compiled this in T2. It’s the complete Xorg, all the drivers, headers, etc. I’m wondering what is the best way to break this up into PET packages …maybe a base package, then packages for each type of video hardware? Or, create packages like we have in earlier puppies? If anyone, such as Dougal, feels motivated to play with this, go for it. This tarball expands into its own directory ‘xorg_complete-7.3′.


10 Responses to “Complete Xorg binary tarball for Dingo”

  1. raffy Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    Thanks, Barry, Yes, Dougal does wonders to the video wizard.

    It must be good to have a package for the Geode (GX466, LX800). For companion chip, it’s the CS5536 that is now being used. (Geode is used in the OLPC, specifically the LX700.)

  2. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    THANKS!

    I really haven’t been able to use Dingo much because of my touchy Synaptics/Alps touch pad. Drives me crazy. I found a patched version of the Synaptics driver and compiled it in Dingo. My sanity has returned! I posted the source and a binary here:

    http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=157037#157037

  3. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 9:42 am

    Tied to get DRI going in Xorg. All seemed OK until I tried glxgears:

    # glxgears
    glxgears: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: no version information available (required by /usr/X11R7/lib/libGLU.so.1)
    glxgears: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: no version information available (required by /usr/X11R7/lib/libGLU.so.1)
    Broken pipe
    #

    Did some googling, similar problems seem to come from using a different version of gcc than what the library was compiled with. Also I’m using the DRM modules from 3.01, assuming it’s the same kernel.

  4. BarryK Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 9:57 am

    “/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: no version information available”
    kirk, yes, you’ll get that message for any C++ app not compiled in Dingo. For me, it hasn’t stopped an app from running though.

  5. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Maybe I’ve got something messed up. Xorg is working. The log looks good, but the glxgears screen is blank. I’ll keep working on it. If someone gets DRI working please post.

  6. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    I compiled ATI’s latest fglrx driver in dingo, now all is well with DRI. The open source driver worked with my ATI X300 Mobility card in Xorg 7.2. Maybe it’s not supported in 7.3? The ATI driver does replace libGL with it’s own version and build it’s own DRM and DRI modules. Surprised the fglrx driver built with the kernel/gcc mismatch. But I’ll take it! Sorry to spam your blog.

  7. Dougal Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

    “I compiled ATI’s latest fglrx driver in dingo”

    How could you do that? ATI didn’t say they’ll be opening the code for it, just supplying specs for new free drivers to be written.

  8. tempestuous Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    With the proprietary ATi and nVIDIA drivers, just the DRM kernel module is provided in source code form. All other Xorg driver components and libraries are supplied in binary form. The installer script just checks what version of Xorg you have, then installs all binary files into the correct locations.

  9. kirk Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:52 pm

    tempestuous is correct, just fglrx.ko is compiled everything thing else is a binary.

  10. nic2109 Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 12:11 am

    Any chance of placing the compiled ATI driver plus the other binaries somewhere as a package, Kirk? Those of us with one of their cards need it, and we haven’t your skills!

JWM is cause of MPlayer problem

November 28th, 2007

All versions of JWM have a bug that causes a window to draw with the titlebar off the top of the screen. This only happens sometimes, rare enough not to be a nuisance, however it is happening much more when I am running in the 800×480 screen of the Classmate.

Starting MPlayer in Dingo, sometimes only one window displays. There are supposed to be two, the control panel and the video output. It’s strange, like a lottery which one displays. But, the missing one is still there, just off the screen, and right-click on taskbar can be used to move it onto the screen.

I tested with Openbox, and MPlayer windows display perfectly.

So, I have notified Joe, the JWM developer.

The reason I decided to test Openbox is because Nathan chose it for his Grafpup v2, so I reckoned he must have had good reasons. Does anyone know what panel application he has used? Is there any GTK2 panel/taskbar application?

I’m thinking that if Joe can’t fix the problem, I’ll follow Nathan and move to Openbox and a suitable tray/taskbar panel.
…I hope Joe can fix it though, as we have invested much effort in JWM, themes, config tools, plus familiarity with it.


21 Responses to “JWM is cause of MPlayer problem”

  1. Leon Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    The first thing that I’ve done after installing every new version of Grafpup was that I installed JWM. I also tried IceWM and some others window managers but didn’t found anything so simple and effective as JWM. Is it worth to change window manager because of the problem with starting MPlayer?

  2. disciple Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    Nathan used an old version of Lxpanel (of LXDE) that could use XDG menus (which current versions cannot). It is GTK2.
    Personally, I prefer JWM, but that is a pretty nasty bug. I’m lucky - I think I’ve only had it happen twice.
    Openbox and Lxpanel do seem a good fit with the GTK2 philosophy of Dingo :) But I think they are much slower on older machines :(

  3. disciple Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 7:00 pm

    BTW you might want to check Nathan’s blog. I seem to remember he was talking about doing something different for menus or taskbar for some reason.

  4. fwiffo Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    > Is there any GTK2 panel/taskbar application?

    I do know about

    - fbpanel: http://fbpanel.sourceforge.net/index.html

    - lxpanel: http://lxde.sourceforge.net/

    and just discovered

    - foopanel: http://foopanel.berlios.de/foopanel/

    which not only depends on python libraries (so isn’t as lightweight as the others) but also seems to be in its infancy.

    Finally I just discovered a really tiny panel, though without menus, launchers nor applets:

    - fspanel: http://www.chatjunkies.org/fspanel/

    Hope this helps.

    Cheers

  5. Henry Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 11:09 pm

    Here’s a problem I’ve noticed only through the 3 and 4 versions. Maybe it’s just me - I haven’t seen it in the forum - or maybe it’s a JWM problem ;-)

    I always keep a number of different personal configuration files for the usual reasons. It seems I used to be able to rename, move around, these files without any problem. Now it seems I have to walk on eggshells to avoid losing my pinboard customizations. If I rename a config or if I add or remove an sfs file, e.g openoffice, the pinboard has to be rebuilt. Surely this is not how it’s supposed to work? I have worked around it by keeping all pup_save.2fs files named just that but keeping them each in it’s own folder. True, you have provided a means to individually name a config on first save, but I still have the problem on subsequent incremental configurations. I suppose I could have said this in fewer words :-)

  6. BarryK Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    Well, probably Joe will fix JWM, …eventually.

    Openbox is nice, it has a GUI configurator which works in Puppy. I’ll make these into PET packages.

    A strange thought — maybe JWM could be hacked to only display the panel, and Openbox used as the window manager.

  7. kirk Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 12:51 am

    Barry,

    Nothing to do with JWM. Just wanted to mention that the link to this page from here:

    http://www.puppylinux.com/news.htm

    points to the old blog.

  8. cb88 Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 1:00 am

    jw