what is my attraction to puppy after all this time? puppy is probably the most remixed gnu/linux distro there is (except debian perhaps, either way puppy takes a more casual approach to the whole thing.)
pupray (it wasnt called pupray) is the same project that led to mkfigos and any other tools i use for remixing puppy (or other distros.)
but originally, the goal was just to produce an elaborate html table of puppy features per distro.
and i do mean elaborate. with a field for just about anything you could want.
the recent event that made me think of rebooting it, is that one particular user wanted to know why pidof X didnt work. pidof Xorg did, but it took me about 5-10 minutes to figure that out.
pupray can answer all sorts of questions like this and more-- and it can do it across distros.
one of the things that slowed down pupray before was the storage requirements.
ive figured out a way to make pupray far more modest in its requirements.
if youre still curious how it works, run pupsysinfo.
now imagine pupsysinfo as an html table instead of a gui.
now imagine instead of information about the computer, it focuses on information about the puppy cd:
1. kernel image
2. window manager
3. included software (highlights)
4. information about libraries
5. other included features (ones i think of, or ones you request)
ally has an extensive collection of old and new puppies:
https://ia801708.us.archive.org/isoview ... -puppy.iso
thats from 2003. note the lack of initrd and sfs. but we can still automate looking through that.BOOT.CAT 2003-07-09 02:36:49 2048
IMAGE.GZ 2003-07-09 02:24:40 19526010
ISOLINUX.BIN 2003-07-08 16:53:04 9396
ISOLINUX.CFG 2003-06-21 06:45:24 104
VMLINUZ 2003-06-10 09:15:40 1130790
dont need anybodys help with this, though id be very interested in feature requests.
thats not a promise to implement, though its a likelihood.
as for how to deal with size restrictions, thats going to be fun too. basically it will get file information on everything it can, then discard most of the actual files-- but not all of them.
then zip them up into an archive that can be copied/uploaded (and downloaded again) with more modest requirements. so if you want to keep icons and wallpaper or some config files from (MANY) old versions? it should make it easier to do that.
by the way, some newer versions of puppy (xenial for example) cannot get most of the files from that 2003 version of cd-puppy.
its a minix filesystem, xenial doesnt have a kernel module for that. grub does, refracta (from last year) does, void linux does not, older versions of puppy do.
i dont think barry stuck with minix filesystems for a very long time, but for those it is important that the program runs on a system that supports mounting it.
this is actually one of the things it can check for.
how to get the kernel version:
# file vmlinuz
how to check if the kernel supports minix (even if it is not found under /lib/modules)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/120 ... or-bzimage
# dd if=vmlinuz skip=`grep -a -b -o -m 1 -P '\037\213\010\000' vmlinuz | cut -d: -f 1` bs=1 | zcat | grep 'minix_fs' | wc -l
newer puppies use sfs, which is more reliable across distros.