Puppy Chihuahua Alpha5 iso now available

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tronkel
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Puppy Chihuahua Alpha5 iso now available

#1 Post by tronkel »

The latest Puppy Linux Chihuahua Alpha5 iso is available here:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/tronkel/pu ... irefox.iso

md5 checksum:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/tronkel/pu ... so.md5.txt

Out goes Firefox 2.0.0.13 - replaced by Firefox 3 Beta5 (Gran Paradiso)

This Firefox Beta5 seems a lot livelier than the Firefox 2 series especially as regards page navigation. Memory leakage problems have also been addressed as well as improvements to the interface.

I have altered some default settings in user.js to provide a minimum font size of 13 and DejaVu Sans is now the default font. The menu system and url bar are now larger and more readable as well.

You will notice a new red "stop" button in the icewin taskbar.
Prehistoric mentioned that he would like to have a way of stopping the internet network connection in an emergency situation. Presumably he is thinking of situations such as uncontrolled pop ups suddenly appearing. I can't say I have ever experienced this in Firefox - more of an IE thing, but there it is anyway. Clicking on the button will invoke a script in an rxvt console window. Choose item 1 to take the network down, or item 2 to restart it. It is set up for ETH0 as default. If your network interface is say, WLAN0, you need to replace ETH0 with WLAN0 in /usr/bin/killinternet.sh for example.

Another use of this script is if your hardware will not put the network connection up directly after booting from CD, you can click the red stop button, select option 2 (restart) and the network should then be up. Quicker than using the network wizard. It works like that on my system at any rate.

ttuuxx has built a dotpet of the latest Abiword version 2.6.2. It also contains Aspell plus various english aspell dictionaries plus the full plugins. It is also features document collaboration plus a neat presentation system - very swish. Problem is the size though - 40MB and therefore way too big for Chihuahua.

What I propose to do, is to build a Lassie sfs module that contains this latest Abiword and also the latest Gnumeric, which I believe ttuuxx has also just completed. This should be available within the next few days. As a stop-gap measure and also to save a bit of space, I have gone back to Abiword 2.4.5 with no plugins and have also included Planmaker as the spreadsheet - again for space-saving reasons. Since there is basic file-sharing already in 3.02Alpha, I have also removed Linneighborhood, Samba, and Pnethood. These can always be added later as dotpets if required.
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prehistoric
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Great!

#2 Post by prehistoric »

Thanks Jack!

I've had a couple of situations where I wanted to leave the net immediately, Barry had one himself when his site was hacked. Both cases were probably cross-site scripting exploits, which took us to places only set up to attack Windows systems. Can't count on that forever.

Aside from the name, the last Firefox 3 beta had memory leaks and compatibility problems with plugins. Noscript has been upgraded to fix the ones it had, and in hostile internet environments I find it indispensible. I like the smaller memory footprint in 3.

I'm distressed at the bloat creeping into abiword and have repeatedly felt like compiling it with flags for using aspell instead of the built-in ispell, because aspell is better at suggesting corrections, and because Opera and other applications use aspell. (I'm currently using aspell as an external spell checker for Sylpheed and find it acceptable, even with a clunky terminal interface.) Any application requiring ispell should be able to use aspell with a supplied wrapper.

Having multiple dictionaries for one natural language is a nuisance, in terms of keeping your own vocabulary in sync, and takes up another megabyte or so. I don't want most of that other 39 MB. (Now, if we could only talk Firefox and Opera into using compatible spell checkers.) I'll be watching for a minimalist fork of abiword which concentrates on fixing bugs.

My download should be finished now. I'll post feedback when I see the results.

Glad to see Chihuahua moving,

prehistoric

Added: Much improved! Still a few problems, including one that seemed fixed.
Booted clean, set timezone. First problem: screen blanks without warning and stays blank long enough for some people to push power button. Second problem: when it comes back up time has not changed! Need to restart X-server to get that. On reboot I went through a second bout with timezone.

Big problem: once again, shutdown led to hang with black screen and no way to save. On a later attempt, had a messed up image of a dialogue box, which would not respond to keyboard. This has to get fixed.

Learned that running Puppy Universal Installer on that first boot was not a good idea. Is there a hidden assumption that user will save a session before installing? Next, checked that I could save on shutdown first, before trying installer. At this point I'm booting off CD with files on USB flash drive.

Still don't like the press Enter if yes or anything plus Enter for no type dialogue. How about, e.g. "press Enter to keep the existing files on the device. If you're sure you want to wipe everything off the device and make a clean start press W then Enter."?

Still think some people will want to dispense with conky right off the bat. I install gkrellm and want to free up screen space. Others may not want to know that much, or may simply hate the way it messes up their girlfriend's picture. Problem: nothing visible identifies the on-screen display as the conky in menus; selecting the menu item starts conky, but gives you no more control if it is already running. This means you need to find the process and kill it, for this session. To keep it out of later sessions, you have to edit the script that starts it. All very mysterious to newbies.

Laptop problem: MU has added "modprobe thermal &" and "modprobe fan &" to rc.local on Muppy for laptops. There might also be desktops which need thermal or fan control. The battery module is already loaded correctly.

By and large this one is close, if not for that hang on shutdown. I've moved my mail and bookmarks to this version and and intend to use it for everyday stuff.

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Barry's solution, timezone, Flash, etc.

#3 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel,

Made this a separate post to get attention. Barry has decided to put the thermal and fan modules in rc.modules2, according to his blog. Just use boot configuration tool on a machine which does not already have them loaded.

Confirmed problem with timezone reappears. I keep finding myself in Perth. Found the wait with black screen after setting is until next click, which could be a long time if nobody knows. What's going on?

Added: removed link and created a new symbolic link from /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Eastern by hand. Now, works right.

What version of Flash plugin should we be using with this Firefox? I'm not having any luck.

You might take a look at the conky_IP script for a way to find the interface to stop when disconnecting from the internet. There's a cute hack for finding configured interfaces, which are placed in the DEVICE variable. Stop all of those and you are certain to disconnect.

Ask ttuuxxx what the deal is with calls to startkde. That doesn't look like a chihuahua desktop, or even Lassie, more like Clifford the big red dog.

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#4 Post by tronkel »

@prehistoric

OK that was a good idea to alter the killinternet.sh script to use a DEVICE variable that holds whatever the current network interface is (instead of a hard-coded default). It is a one-liner that can sit at the top of the script.

I haven't had a chance yet to test it using a selection of devices, but it appears to work OK so far. I'll include the altered script in the next alpha.

ttuuxxx thinks that the official flash plugin version for Linux is fundamentally broken. He's usually right! That's why I haven't included a flash plugin for Firefox so-far. I wonder if I should have go with the open source Gnash player. I've had a previous play with it and it seemed not bad. A slightly mis-aligned display frame though. That was a while back, so it's time for another look at this. Version 7 of the official plugin is another possibility. Used to be OK in earlier versions of Seamonkey at any rate.

I'll make a new symlink for timezone and include that in the next version.

I presume you are talking about Kirk's sfs for KDE. Try altering /etc/windowmanager to read "startkde" or maybe "kde"

I have also had isolated incidents recently with shut-down problems in both Chihuahua and Puppy Dingo. I think the common factor here is HotPup. The system might have problems with unmounting devices, thus causing shut-down to hang. Try disabling the HotPup daemon by renaming the /root/.xinitrc-hotpup-bk script back to .xinitrc and see if that helps.
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#5 Post by cthisbear »

Gnash player:

Some news.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::

" Open-source Flash rival "Gnashes" out "

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/26050

" Last week the Gnash development project released the first beta (release 0.8.2) of its GPLv3 SWF (Shockwave Flash) movie player and browser plug-in. The free player is designed for "computer, gaming, embedded, and consumer electronic devices," according to the non-profit Open Media Now Foundation (OMNow) funding the effort. Gnash is likely to use less memory and power than Adobe's Flash, which has seen fairly wide adoption on embedded devices despite relatively high resource requirements. "

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9454721484.html

Chris.

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prehistoric
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false alarm, hotpup, timezone, flash, etc.

#6 Post by prehistoric »

O.K. forget what I said about kde. I'm not using it, I just misread a script.

Your suggestion about HotPup seems plausible. I've also noticed a bug which can produce three hotpup flash drives when only two are installed. This appears to happen when the connector is loose and the flash drive is seen as being inserted twice. The old mount doesn't always go away and there's no way to unmount it. (No, that drive is not being used for pup_save.) And, shouldn't the drive icons change appearance depending on whether or not they are mounted? I'm having trouble seeing any difference.

The timezone script, as currently written may display a message about the screen going dark after the screen goes dark.

To disable conky without causing side effects (because of things possibly done in the conky script) I just set the number of times it updates in .conkyrc, to 1. This means it exits the first time it updates. If you want it to run forever, you set this to 0. If the menu entry for conky checked to see if it was already running it could alternate between on and off, instead of always launching conky. This would let people turn it off easily w/o editing configuration files, provided they know it is a system monitor called conky.

This brings up a problem caused by slick appearance. When I went looking for the menu entry for conky and gkrellm, after installing a couple things on the laptop, they had been moved to a System Status and Configuration submenu. But, the triangle which shows there is a submenu was not visible unless the cursor was over that entry. We should be able to tell which items have submenus, even on displays with somewhat limited color range. There is a wide variation in saturation visible on different flat panel displays.

Purely personal preference. I'm used to having the Shutdown menu entry at the very bottom of the menu, and don't think it would hurt anyone to have the Settings submenu above it. (Would Exit be a better name than Shutdown for this submenu?)

I continue to use this alpha routinely. So far, I haven't lost anything.

prehistoric

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Comparing Firefox 3 with 2

#7 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel,

I got the idea of installing Firefox 2.0.0.14 for comparison purposes. Renaming Firefox3b5 is only part of the problem here; /usr/lib/firefox and various mozilla files would produce collisions. Is having two Firefoxen as preposterous an idea as it looks at the moment? Don't waste too much time on the answer. If it is an ordeal, I'm ready to drop this.

prehistoric

Added: Now have Firefox 3b5 working with Flash 9.0.115.pet, well enough for me. The Flash 9.0.124 installer complains about glibc being out of date.

Disabling the HotPup demon stops those hangs on shutdown, but leaves us with the problem of seeing shutdown messages. Generally, when the X window system exits it shows a frozen screen with the background and cursor, or goes black. Once I got a corrupted console screen. No console messages readable at all.

I could have copied an existing pup_save file to get around that if it hadn't worked on another try. For people w/o previous experience trying to create that first pup_save file this is serious trouble.

Why not put the emergency Internet disconnect on the blinky right-click menu? That wouldn't take up any more screen space.

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#8 Post by tronkel »

@prehistoric

Should be quite possible to set up more than one firefox version on the same system. Good idea for testing and comparison purposes. I've had it working before. One version can be the default browser as on the live CD and the other can be put in say, /usr/local/lib/firefox and started via a desktop link.
Use 2 separate /root/.mozilla profiles. Install any extensions in the extensions folder in the firefox folders themselves and not in the /root/.mozilla profiles. I'll have a play with this if I get some time this week. Things are hectic at work at the moment.

I've got a system that can kill Conky from a desktop icon, no problem. I'll include that in the next alpha. Maybe a desktop icon could be used to kill the internet as well, rather than having to hack the blinky right-click call-back function. This would need a re-compile of blinky.

I'm working on a lassie sfs for the latest abiword/gnumeric packages. Not quite there yet due to what seems like whiteout file problems - what a pain.

Will have to scout round for the latest HotPup version. It might be less buggy. Barry says he is working on a version that uses udev. That will be interesting.

Keep me posted about how you get on with Flash. If it seems stable, I could include it in the iso.

Thanks for all the input. It all helps.
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prehistoric
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Flash and blinky

#9 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel,

I gave Flash 9.0.115 and Firefox3b5 a workout for a couple of hours, without problems. Watched dozens of YouTube videos, plus some news.

(Aitch has accused me of deliberately overheating his imagination. I'll bet I can't even discuss the weather without overstimulating him.)

I've asked Big_Bass what he did with the Flash 9.0.124 glibc problem in the Firefox 2.0.0.14.pet, and await an answer.

The more I think about it, the more it seems the Internet disconnect belongs with blinky. Both people and computers already associate network interfaces with it. We don't want to build everything into it, just add a hook to an external script. I could also call this script from a button on gkrelllm. When I'm on this old laptop, every piece of screen real estate is precious.

With an existing means to watch Flash videos, the pressure to install a regular Firefox has dropped. Right now, I'm trying to figure out the problem with Opera 9.27, where I had heard it was solved, and don't want to complicate the problem.

The biggest problem is still the exit from Xorg. I'm trying to think up some experiments that will give clues without having to understand everything going on.

prehistoric

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#10 Post by ttuuxxx »

Hey guys

I Like hotpup butttttt when I first installed it on 3.01 retro it changed the permissions on my harddrive to read only and for about 1hr I couldn't save on it, then after mount/unmount etc I was able to, Then when I would reset X all the icons would move to the top left corner of the screen on top of each other, Even when I ran the config program which let me select display on bottom of the screen, So After a few hours of mucking around with it, I uninstalled it. It was the latest one released, Oh well it works more like an alpha. I think its too soon to be jumping the gun and using it on any main releases. Well that what I think.
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#11 Post by tronkel »

prehistoric wrote:
The more I think about it, the more it seems the Internet disconnect belongs with blinky
I managed to recompile Blinky with a little hack that adds a menu item to the Blinky right-click context menu (kill/restart internet) and that starts the killinternet.sh script via a callback function that makes a shell system call to start the script. Wouldn't compile in 3.02 but did in 2.16. Seems to work OK in 3.02 though.

I wonder though, if I ought to just leave the red stop taskbar icon there as well - just in case Blinky gets killed after the internet has been stopped - there being no other obvious way to restart the intenet, other than by calling /usr/bin/killinternet.sh directly from the command line, or by clicking on it in ROX.

I'll include it in the next Chihuahua Alpha
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compile problem? network start/stop

#12 Post by prehistoric »

tronkel wrote:Wouldn't compile in 3.02 but did in 2.16.
This could be a bigger problem. Any clue about why it wouldn't compile?
I wonder though, if I ought to just leave the red stop taskbar icon there as well - just in case Blinky gets killed after the internet has been stopped - there being no other obvious way to restart the intenet, other than by calling /usr/bin/killinternet.sh directly from the command line, or by clicking on it in ROX.
Probably a good idea in the short term. For the long term, I think we want to leave a placeholder for blinky so that start/kill internet stays in one place and is associated with operation w/o requiring an explanation. How about a process launched at wm startup which calls the connection wizard if someone tries to start the internet before it is configured, and execs blinky when the connection comes up? Once the connection works, this becomes internet stop/start. Barry is talking about cleaning up some of the networking stuff, so this could be part of a planned change in the wizard.

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#13 Post by ttuuxxx »

or it could be placed in the start/menu basically under help that would be simple, Like "kill net" maybe with a scull and crossbones lol just joking about the scull thing.
Hey I just had a weird thing happen Firefox 2.0.0.14 the latest release just started munching memory, I had 480MB free in the taskbar and it kept going down and down, I wasn't surfing at all then it hit 0 free with a red background.
strange once I killed Firefox all the memory came back. And I reopen all pages from previous session and its not doing it now.
oh ya its not with puppy 3.02 either :)
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
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kill Internet, black screen

#14 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel,

The killinternet button just tries to kill the dhcp daemon, which only runs while dhcp is backgrounded, so I get an error message about no such process once the network connection comes up. Both blinky and gkrellm continue to show activity on the connection. This must be real because I'm using that connection to post this. Top doesn't reveal which process I need to kill, I'll have to follow the trail.

Added: An experiment with an exit and halt command revealed that halt does not trigger a write from RAM to pup_save, while reboot does. How long has that behavior been around?

@ttuuxxx,

We still have a problem with a black screen on shutdown, even without an actual hang. This is common to Chihuahua and FH retro. This makes the pup_save dialogue unreadable. I'm able to work around by exiting to prompt and typing commands or doing cntrl-alt-del.

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Re: kill Internet, black screen

#15 Post by ttuuxxx »

prehistoric wrote:@tronkel,
@ttuuxxx,

We still have a problem with a black screen on shutdown, even without an actual hang. This is common to Chihuahua and FH retro. This makes the pup_save dialogue unreadable. I'm able to work around by exiting to prompt and typing commands or doing cntrl-alt-del.
Thats strange I haven't had that problem, Has anybody else had it??? I'll look into it tomorrow and do some test. Its 1:13am here. :)
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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#16 Post by Lobster »

Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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