TazPuppy 5.0 rc2

[Terry H]

New frugal install on USB Flash Drive on Dell Laptop i3-5005U. Synaptics touch pad working well OOTB, just made minor adjustment to sensitivity and disabled tapping.

I am having major problem with getting sound to work. Previously changing asound.conf, to that from other puppies and I could configure sound. I tried multiple times to configure sound without changing asound.conf, but could not get any sound. I changed asound.conf, but still had no sound. I have no idea how to configure sound in beta 6.

Also Volume Control is listed as being included in Panel, it does not appear. I t also wasn't initially displayed in previous releases until after sound was working.

[mistfire]

@TerryH did you boot TazPuppy beta 6 on pristine state? Try to stop the alsa by typing this on terminal

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/pup_alsa<space>stop

Delete the /etc/asound.state
Then start the alsa

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/pup_alsa<space>start

NOTE: The alsa sound configuration file is now at /etc

Also this link will help
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ad ... chitecture

[Terry H]

@TerryH did you boot TazPuppy beta 6 on pristine state? Try to stop the alsa by typing this on terminal

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/pup_alsa<space>stop

Delete the /etc/asound.state
Then start the alsa

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/pup_alsa<space>start

NOTE: The alsa sound configuration file is now at /etc

Also this link will help
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ad ... chitecture

Yes it was a new clean install, as you had made changes to the 2 areas I had some difficulties on previous releases I wanted to check progress for these(alsa and synaptics).

I ran the stop pup_alsa, this had a side effect, it caused lxpanel to crash. I ran several times to confirm. After deleting asound.state and then starting pup_alsa, I ended up back at the same point, the start finds and configures the HDMI interface and I have the same setup created, without sound.

I was no further enlightened in configuring alsa by reading the alsa section in the Arch wiki.

[thinkpadfreak]

@Terry H

Sound defaults to HDMI on my machine, too.

To prevent this, I create /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf.

Code: Select all

options snd_hda_intel index=0
options snd_hda_intel index=1

This is based on the output of the following command:

# cat /proc/asound/modules
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_hda_intel

I wonder if creating /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf will be of help to you.

[Terry H]

@thinkpadfreak.

Excellent, that did it, sound now working with HDA Intel PCH being default.

Even after the information that you advised, I don't understand it. It's working correctly, so all is good. Thank you.


@mistfire.

The volume function keys (F1, F2, F3) are all functioning correctly also.

So thank you for another great job on this release. Everything tested so far running smoothly and lightning fast. Running palemoon linked from /mnt/home with 3 Tabs still only using about 250 MB memory.

[mistfire]

That was nice @thinkpadfreak. I modified the pup_alsa to add soundcard.conf on /etc/modprobe.d based on your idea. Right now Im dealing with autoconfiguration in a situation where video card setup not changed but the monitor changed.

[mistfire]

TazPuppy Beta 7 released

Changes:
* Autoconfig now works on display monitors
* Improvements for autoconfiguration of sound
* Some fixes on tazbox
* apulse is now added

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fEZx9L ... sp=sharing
Build kit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dVTmhA ... sp=sharing

[Terry H]

TazPuppy Beta 7 released

Changes:
* Autoconfig now works on display monitors
* Improvements for autoconfiguration of sound
* Some fixes on tazbox
* apulse is now added

I am unable to set up sound on beta 7, even thought this has the soundcards.conf, which matches the sound.conf previously provided by thinkpadfreak. I still can not get PCH to be used for sound.

With beta 6, as soon as I included the sound.conf, sound worked straight away. That is not happening with beta 7, for some reason.

[Terry H]

@mistfire It was identified in the bionicpup64 thread that some SD Card Readers within laptops are not functional in some Puppies. In my case I identified that 3 drivers related to rtsx_pci module required for the Realtek RTS525A pcie Card Reader were not included in kernel modules.

If it is not a difficult task, next time you compile a kernel could you please cater for this hardware.

Thanks in advance.

sh-4.4$ lspci -k
00:1c.3 Class 0604: 8086:9c96 pcieport
00:1f.3 Class 0c05: 8086:9ca2 i801_smbus
00:00.0 Class 0600: 8086:1604 bdw_uncore
00:1c.1 Class 0604: 8086:9c92 pcieport
00:03.0 Class 0403: 8086:160c snd_hda_intel
00:1d.0 Class 0c03: 8086:9ca6 ehci-pci
00:02.0 Class 0300: 8086:1616 i915
04:00.0 Class 0280: 8086:095a iwlwifi
00:14.0 Class 0c03: 8086:9cb1 xhci_hcd
00:1c.2 Class 0604: 8086:9c94 pcieport
00:1f.2 Class 0106: 8086:9c83 ahci
03:00.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8168 r8169
00:1c.0 Class 0604: 8086:9c90 pcieport
00:1f.0 Class 0601: 8086:9cc5 lpc_ich
02:00.0 Class ff00: 10ec:525a **** rtsx_pci ****
00:04.0 Class 1180: 8086:1603 proc_thermal
00:16.0 Class 0780: 8086:9cba mei_me
00:1b.0 Class 0403: 8086:9ca0 snd_hda_intel

[mistfire]

@Terry H I think we need to get deeper to determine the soundcard problem. I was thinking, what if I bring back barry's alsa soundcard which can be found on Puppy 4.X which allows to configure soundcard manually

About RTSX kernel module i recompiled now the kernel and it is now builitin (I will to release the fix pretty soon). My customized kernel has the following builtin kernel modules:
* IDE and SATA drivers
* Keyboard and Mouse drivers
* USB and Firewire drivers
* MMC, NVME, PCMCIA, and MEMSTICK drivers
* VESA and FB drivers

[thinkpadfreak]

Auto-configuration of sound cards seems to have worked for my machine.

At first boot, sound was not activated. But at second boot (with a save file), a speaker icon appeared and now sound is active.

However, I do not insist on auto-configuration. I am accustomed to creating the file /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf, because I have created the file for other puppies, too. I think sound configuration of beta 6 was fairly satisfactory.

[mistfire]

@thinkpadfreak I implemented autoconfig because of my experiences of using puppy across different computers with save file loaded. It will only trigger when tazpuppy detects changes on hardware setup such as changing video cards or display monitors when the computer booting up. This makes TazPuppy a truly portable OS.

[Terry H]

TazPuppy Beta 7 released

Changes:
* Autoconfig now works on display monitors
* Improvements for autoconfiguration of sound
* Some fixes on tazbox
* apulse is now added

I am unable to set up sound on beta 7, even thought this has the soundcards.conf, which matches the sound.conf previously provided by thinkpadfreak. I still can not get PCH to be used for sound.

With beta 6, as soon as I included the sound.conf, sound worked straight away. That is not happening with beta 7, for some reason.

I just booted to this beta 7 installation again. As mentioned in previous post, I had no sound when using beta 7. This time, the sound was working immediately on boot without any intervention. I have rebooted to confirm. Strange!

So I beleive the setup you had implemented in beta 7 is good.


Edit: I didn't see thinkpadfreak's post above, regarding sound configuration. I have no issue with having to manually include the modprobe script myself also, if that is consiered the best solution.

[smokey01]

@mistfire, I haven't had a look at TazPuppy for some time and I must say I'm very impressed. It really has that puppy feel about it.

I did notice a couple of things that possibly need attention.

All the below were tested in Qemu.

When selecting Menu > Desktop > Time.is then clicking on a city it drives the processor to the max.

Internet > TazWeb Browser produces "Error opening file: No such file or directory"

Internet > Midori produces error, see attached image tazpuppy.jpg.

There is a lot of duplication in the menus.

[Terry H]

@Terry H I think we need to get deeper to determine the soundcard problem. I was thinking, what if I bring back barry's alsa soundcard which can be found on Puppy 4.X which allows to configure soundcard manually

As per my previous post, sound is OK now.

About RTSX kernel module i recompiled now the kernel and it is now builitin (I will to release the fix pretty soon). My customized kernel has the following builtin kernel modules:
* IDE and SATA drivers
* Keyboard and Mouse drivers
* USB and Firewire drivers
* MMC, NVME, PCMCIA, and MEMSTICK drivers
* VESA and FB drivers

Wow, rcompiled kernel already. That is fantastic service. Thank you.

[mistfire]

@Terry H glad to hear that sound on your computer works

@smokey01 I made a boot test on beta 7 in pristine state on virtualbox. All it works fine. I think the issue lies on your virtualization. Try to boot it on real hardware or other virtualization software.
About the menus. The menu file contains at lot of possible category names. If the desktop file in /usr/share/applications has multiple categories then it will appear on different categories on the menu.

[step]

@smokey01 and mistfire, I tried Smokey01's test on Qemu running on Fatdog64. I can't confirm that TazBrowser and Midori can't open a local help file - for me both browsers showed the local help page. However, I can confirm the time.is issue, the site opened and showed the time, but the CPU shot up to 100%. Then I tested browsing various sites with Midori. Word lookup on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site locked the CPU at 100%. The VM is configured with 1 processor and 2GB RAM.

[mistfire]

TazPuppy Beta 8 released

Changes:
* Completely modular approach (kernel modules now resides in zdrv and firmware modules in fdrv for very convenient swapping kernel and its modules without repacking the main sfs file)
* RTSX kernel module now builtin to kernel.
* Some fine adjustment to the kernel.

NOTE: To swap kernel just replace vmlinuz of other puppies and put its zdrv file but rename it as zdrv_tazpup_5.0.sfs

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_miyPE ... sp=sharing
MD5 Checksum: 4b2d27a62cb415854e88675ad5cd84eb

Build kit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/180wodl ... sp=sharing

[mistfire]

@step I think the webkit engine was the responsible for 100% cpu usage. I wonder if there is an update in the slitaz repo for webkit

[Terry H]

New clean frugal install on Dell laptop Core i3-5005U.

The fdrv you use appears very old. I have Intel 7265 wifi card. It's not even catered for in fdrv, the iwlwifi firmware ends at iwlwifi-7260-7.ucode, this is from March 2014. There is no firmware for 7265 or later. I only load the fdrv to test. I normally don't load the fdrv, as I keep my own firmware and load it manually.

The firmware to cover the realtek nic is also not included in this fdrv, it stops at rtl8168g-3.fw which is also from 2014.

Code: Select all

sh-4.4$ dmesg|grep firm
Spectre V2 : Enabling Restricted Speculation for firmware calls
platform regulatory.0: Direct firmware load for regulatory.db failed with error -2
iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0: loaded firmware version 29.610311.0 op_mode iwlmvm
r8169 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for rtl_nic/rtl8168h-2.fw failed with error -2
r8169 0000:03:00.0 eth0: unable to load firmware patch rtl_nic/rtl8168h-2.fw (-2)
sh-4.4$ 

The sound was auto config on reboot without any intervention. That's great.

The rtsx_pci is good now. SD Card reader working.


This is another good step forward. System running very well. Thanks once again.


Note: time.is running in tazweb uses about 25% CPU. Even running from midori, was using about 10% CPU.