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prehistoric
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black/frozen screen on exit + i810

#21 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel,

Freemem tray applet is only part of the problem, there are still some race conditions between other Icewm processes and Xorg shutdown. One hack, not really debugging, is to insert a sleep in front of the command that actually kills X. If shutdown sometimes works correctly on this machine, the required delay can't be very much.

@AJ,

I have a slightly wild idea for an experiment. Have you tried running wNOP? If you can get through Xorg setup with any configuration, it will use that to get an initial configuration of proprietary drivers, including Intel's unified driver, which subsumes the i810 driver. Once that works you should be able to change resolution to your liking. I'm just curious about what will happen. This may yield clues about how to make i810s work.

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alienjeff
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#22 Post by alienjeff »

tronkel wrote:You can always ask for your money back if you are dissatisfied with the goods.
@ tronkel: Your diversionary tactic fails. The fact remains that the icewm "lite" being offered is NOT "light" at all, but instead quite the contrary. And bug ridden, I might add.
prehistoric wrote:I have a slightly wild idea for an experiment. Have you tried running wNOP? <snip>
@ prehistoric: Nope on NOP. Though I see what you're getting at, in "lite" of ttuuxxx and tronkel's responses (and lack of anything substantive) to my post, I'm more than a tad hesitant to participate in this, ahem ... team effort.
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gerry
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#23 Post by gerry »

@Tronkel: I know about lpr -P "printername". It does not work for me. The only time I can print is when the app gives a list of installed printers or "default printer". Abiword just gives "Generic Postscript", not the same thing at all. Except in Dingo, where the installed printers are listed and selecting my printer produces print.

I un-installed Ted, and had another go at installing it. This time it installed properly, but, there is no menu entry (there is in Puppy 214R and 301), so I have to start it from the console. At print time it offers "Default printer", and printing works OK. So printing works, the problem is in the way Abiword connects to the printing system.

Gerry

cthisbear
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#24 Post by cthisbear »

" And the highest resolution that would work in xvesa was 800x600 "

alienjeff:

I haven't tried this version yet but in your Bios....
have you set up a bigger video size?

I fixed up a Dell Optiplex SX260 last week, and tried Puppy 4 Beta
on it. I always use Xvesa myself...but I only got one screen size,
so I rebooted and changed the Bios setting.
I then had much more choice.

So I wonder if that works.

Regards .......... Chris.

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tronkel
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#25 Post by tronkel »

Alienjeff wrote:
Your diversionary tactic fails
I don't particularly want this argument to descend to a personal level, but I cannot let this go unanswered.

1. I would greatly appreciate it if you would not represent ttuuxxx's efforts as being in some way "deceptive". You clearly represented ttuuxxx's version of icewin as being in some sense "deceptive" (your words) as regards its size. Ttuuxxx's expanded icewin package weighs in at something under 3MB, whereas a comparable version, say MU's icewin-Ultra is something over 5MB compressed as a dotpup. EZPUP 3 is 42MB uncompressed. Given these facts, I think it's safe to say that ttuuxxx is fully justified in describing his package as "lite".

You yourself complained recently, when I made Fat Chihuahua that it exceeded the 100MB watershed. So please do not complain that ttuuxxx's version is bugged, when he is clearly doing such an excellent job of reducing Puppy's size - a feature that you yourself seem to highly cherish. I await your bug fixes with interest.

2. Nobody is claiming that any of this work (including any packages used here) is perfect, or conforms to any sort of "Software Quality Standard". Icewin, as with many other packages as used in Puppy, has loads of bugs. If you have any complaints or difficulties with this, why not get stuck in and help to fix them instead of trying to berate the efforts of others (on an ongoing basis). I for one do not accept your self-imposed "role" as guardian of Puppy standards in general in this forum - so PUHLEEZ give it a rest.

3. If you have such a good appreciation of what is right and what is wrong with Puppy at any given point in time - please do use your expertise to help to address and fix these problems instead of just complaining about them.

4. There are no guarantees - expressed or implied, with Puppy in general and the version I'm currently working on in particular, that any or all hardware is supported. If the software doesn't suit you, you're not forced to use it.

Tronkel
Last edited by tronkel on Sun 27 Apr 2008, 23:25, edited 1 time in total.

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alienjeff
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#26 Post by alienjeff »

Dear Tronkel,

In the immortal acronym of the long gone but dearly remembered Amish, "OFFS!"

My qualifier in the initial post was "In the real world..." Everyone knows, or should, that this isn't the real world. This is an illusion of bits and bytes and packets and bursts of data.

I am not a computer expert, nor do I play one on TV. I'm a half-assed quasi-power user reporting bugs. You two are the experts. You two are spearheading this CE. If you note my original post, I listed several problems with this alpha. Other than ttuuxxx's "works for me" reply and prehistoric's suggested ad hoc testing Xorg from within NOP, you've chosen to focus on my opening quip about this icewm faux-"lite."

Way to go!

v2.12 faithful,

Jeff
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tronkel
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#27 Post by tronkel »

Dear Alienjeff,

Although you did indeed qualify your statement by stating that you meant in the context of "the real world", the implication about ttuuxxx's work was more than clear. That's the whole point here.
You two are the experts
I cannot speak for Ttuuxxx, but I never have, or never wil, claim that I am an expert with any of this. So please do not assume that I possess this attribute. I do this simply as a hobby and to learn as I go along. We all have a ton to learn - me and you.

Having made the foregoing points, would still appreciate your input as a tester though. Puppy need all the testers it can get. That's where it can beat the likes of MS.
Life is too short to spend it in front of a computer

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ttuuxxx
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#28 Post by ttuuxxx »

I agree 100% with tronkel, If we had more people like prehistoric & tronkel this project would be further off. Icewm has had a few problems always, but what is does do is
- fixes the fullscreen issues that JWM can't do with Gxine, which makes 80% of Gxine complainers happy
- It gives very light eyecandy that just about everyone loves.
- themes are easily found and installed or altered
- Low memory resources
- stable
- Icewm is the only reason why I stayed with puppy in the beginning, 2.15ce was what finally sold me, I tried each of the 1&2 series but it was too windows 98 look and feel. So i just kept looking. That's why I took on this icewm lite version. I seen a need for for a small and attractive window manager.
The shutdown problems don't happen on my computers so its hard for me to fix a problem I don't have.
But if anyone finds a fix I would be more than happy to look at it:)
meanwhile I'll be looking for a replacement memory display application.
ttuuxxx
Ps keep up the excellent work tronkel
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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prehistoric
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black/frozen screen on exit

#29 Post by prehistoric »

@tronkel, ttuuxxx,

Still haven't managed to eliminate the problem, though killing the freemem tray applet does change probability. The difference in timing between reboot and shutdown is tiny, yet the behavior is different. Everything so far points to a race between processes in Icewm and the shutdown of X. The cases which fail have slightly more to clean up before exiting. Sticking a sleep 1 in a couple places didn't help. There may be an event looked for before the exit. I'm guessing there's a "deadly embrace" between two processes, but when it occurs I can't see it, and writing to a persistent file creates a new source of deadlocks. The situation is so bad I may have to think!

Second the motion to congratulate tronkel. Getting past the alpha stage always takes stamina.

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tronkel
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#30 Post by tronkel »

prehistoric wrote:
The situation is so bad I may have to think!
Don't give up yet, perish the thought - it can't be that bad! There's always another way! ...lol

Some time back, I tried putting sleep 1 or 2 into the icewin startup script, to see if the order of startup for Blinky and Freememapplet could be regularised. It was a waste of time. The idea of putting in a wait state somewhere else could be the answer though.

It may be that a delay needs to be introduced within the icewin code just before the point that icewin hands over control back to X on exit. This would also make sure that any threads spawned by icewin have also fully returned and exited. Would need to hack and recompile the icewin source for this.

Must go and buy in supplies of of my favourite think promoter. (Dark Chocolate) - just in case any thinking is needed here. Can't be too careful :D
Life is too short to spend it in front of a computer

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ttuuxxx
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#31 Post by ttuuxxx »

Hey tronkel

I found this tiny memory applet and was wondering if you could hack it up and basically remove a few of the resources and see if we could get it to work in the taskbar, the only 2 displays needed is the amount of memory and swap remaining. I'll keep looking for others, but really aren't many memory resource monitors for taskbars.
This one shows how much memory/swap you have and how much is used. click and run.
Attachments
bubblemon-dockapp-1.46-4.tar.gz
Ducks anyone???
(18.5 KiB) Downloaded 635 times
salmon-1.2.2-3.tar.gz
(27.61 KiB) Downloaded 629 times
asmem-1.12-1.tar.gz
(16.95 KiB) Downloaded 617 times
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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prehistoric
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another install and clues

#32 Post by prehistoric »

O.K. guys, I've just gotten a $25 Puppy box working. This one was mentioned in mechmike's thread about cheap Puppy machines. It has a 500 MHz Celeron, 128 MB RAM, an 8.4 GB HD and the Intel eepro100 ethernet adapter. The video is based on the i810E chip set. Unfortunately, for AJ, I can't reproduce his problem with the video wizard or network wizard.

This machine came with no floppy or CD drive, but removing the HD and installing Puppy 3.01 (full HD) on another machine was straightforward. Once I had confirmed that basic functions worked on the new machine, I did a frugal install of 3.02 alpha 6 by hand copying from a USB flash drive.

Now, we get to the interesting stuff. This time I got the problem Lobster reported of having all hotpup drive icons piled up in the upper left corner of the screen. I ended up turning the Hotpup daemon off and restarting X. Then I found a mysterious minature window in the upper left corner. I couldn't grab this because the window bar was too small, but I was able to select move on the right click menu. After trying several things I gave up and left it sitting next to the trash. When I brought ethernet up, this window moved to the tray and I realized it was blinky. I also noticed a second scrolling display on the bar I hadn't seen on my laptop. This turned out to be eth0. What was missing was the freemem tray applet.

On the laptop, I use a wireless interface (ra0 instead of eth0) and I always see blinky and freemem applet, but not the other scrolling display. At the moment, my tray icon for Opera is sitting where that was on the other machine. With both blinky and conky, I can't see justification for another internet display on the bar. I also suspect timing problems are connected with some combination of changing built-in displays and tasks like conky. The installation on the new machine has the same black screen on shutdown as the laptop. Once again, I was able to get around this by killing the Hotpup daemon and freemem tray applet, then exiting to prompt before doing a reboot. This gave me a console displaying the save dialogues so I could create the first pup_save file.

I think it fair to say this problem will turn up on many relatively slow machines. The clue about non-deterministic behavior at start up, as well as shutdown, suggests it is tied to processes run by Icewm and the changing displays on the bar.

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alienjeff
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#33 Post by alienjeff »

ttuuxxx wrote:<snip>...the only 2 displays needed is the amount of memory and swap remaining...<snip>...This one shows how much memory/swap you have and how much is used. click and run.<snip>
So I started writing an uncharacteristically constructive reply with Geany. As the day wore on and the rain wouldn't seem to let up, I decided to take a nap. Whilst I was unconscious:
prehistoric wrote:<snip>With both blinky and conky, I can't see justification for another internet display on the bar.<snip>
...which dovetails nicely with what I had started writing about before falling into the arms of Morpheus. But first remember the key words in ttuuxxx's and prehistoric's posts are needed and justification, respectively.

I've been happily married to Puppy v2.12 for just shy of 18-months -- a veritable eon in the world that is Puppy Linux. In that time, my desktop has gone through a number of changes. And being a faithful adherent of JWM suggests spartan leanings. JWM does what I need with a minimum of system overhead, does so better with some personal tweaks, and has remained my WM of choice. I've tried half a dozen other WMs and always come running back to JWM.

I don't sit down at the computer to be dazzled to orgasm by desktop themes or such eye candy. I'm either surfing the Internet, doing some email, writing an editorial or article, managing my website, or fiddling with some configuration settings. Please note the verbs in that last sentence. They are action verbs. The computer is a tool to accomplish, and hopefully expedite, tasks. Work. The jobs at hand. The computer -- this tool -- should make the tasks/work/jobs easier to accomplish than by using its non-electronic and analog counterparts.

But I don't give a rat's ass about a hammer with a decorative handle or a screwdriver that audibly announces how many rotations and in which direction I've turned a screw.

Oh, we can fit all manner of fanciful functions electronically into the computer tool. With SMT (surface mount technology) and LSI (large scale integration), the size of the home computer tool has gone from a suitcase size box down to the diminutive dimensions of the Mac Mini.

Putting widesreen LCDs aside for a moment, what has generally remained constant in size, though, are desktop monitors. With nimble Linux operating systems and enough RAM, our computer tools are multitasking monsters from which we feed all the video output to a single monitor screen with a finite amount of real estate.

Virtual desktops "spread out" the work by "virtually" providing more desktop space. However, the taskbar is the constant, and there's just so much room to stuff information on said taskbar. Other than the remaining space for active app panes, here's what's crammed into the stock v2.12 taskbar (from left to right): menu button, show/hide desktop button, two virtual desktop panes, blinky's active network traffic icons, freememapplet's memory amount display, mini-volume.tcl's speaker icon, xload's active CPU graph, and minixcal's clock digital display. Whew! Talk about a blivet!

My own taskbar is quite simple. Since assigning a hotkey for the menu function, I've been able to remove the menu button from the taskbar. I found little use for the show/hide desktop button, so it was also removed. And since adding Conky, I've removed blinky, freememapplet and xload from the taskbar. These changes leave my virtual desktop panes, the mini-volume speaker icon, minixcal's clock -- and more room for active app panes.

Before someone jumps up and screams, "but you can't see the Conky display when you're running an app full screen," I'll admit that's true. However, one has to ask oneself just how important is it to see "Blinky" or "freememapplet" or "xload" in the taskbar 100% of the time?

In that I have five virtual window panes, which works well for my computing tasks, there's usually one free virtual window that makes access to Conky's display a simple hotkey away.

There's a tipping point where the desktop stops being a utilitarian workplace that is pleasing to the eye and turns into some sort of ostentatious cluster of clutter. Know where the tipping point is and design accordingly.
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gerry
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#34 Post by gerry »

I get the ikons superimposed on the top row-

Left Ikon- dvd on hda10 on floppy on file
Next ikon- home on help
Next ikon- hda2 on mount
Next ikon- hda3 on install

Intel Celeron 600MHz, 256MB RAM

And sometimes, but not today, the top left is a little window.

Gerry

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ttuuxxx
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#35 Post by ttuuxxx »

Hi I made a new icewm theme I call it SteelDiamondPlated its one of my larger themes 228kb lol anyways here it is
ttuuxxx
Attachments
SteelDiamondPlated.pet
(46.17 KiB) Downloaded 619 times
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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prehistoric
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more testing at 500 MHz

#36 Post by prehistoric »

Last night I gave alpha6 a grueling workout on that small machine, displaying YouTube videos of various weather angels. (This is enough to keep my eyes on the display for a significant length of time without totally shutting down higher mental function. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.)

There were a couple of instances where the video hung, (cause undetermined,) but, overall, the Big_Bass Flash Player 9.0.124.pet seems to be working with Firefox 3b5 and Chihuahua alpha 6. What became clear was that 128 MB RAM was not enough for video on a frugal install even with the 500 MB swap partition to hold inactive pages. I've had better luck with 3.01 on a full install and I'll try a full install of 3.02 to another partition so I can directly compare performance. I also intend to install 512 MB RAM to see the difference in performance. If there is a huge change, we'll need to reexamine the memory footprint.

A new problem on this machine was the volume control. It was very slow to launch, probably because the code was swapped out. This led me to click repeatedly, launching several instances. Not good, we need a check for a running instance.

There was no quick and simple way to adjust master volume, which is important when changing videos with uncertain audio. The pre-existing volume control on JWM takes care of the basics without a lot of overhead. We need an equivalent under Icewm.

The black/frozen screen on exit continues to show up on slower machines. It is non-deterministic. Even on the 500 MHz machine, I occasionally get a shutdown with a console I can read. Various hacks done to bypass problems are not the same as solving concurrency problems. Mysterious problems will keep cropping up until we find and address the cause. The way forward is not to make problems less likely, but more likely, so they are easier to find. (I've done consulting where months of effort by clever people dedicated to hiding problems was the most serious obstacle. Fortunately, you can use the same people to solve this. Here's an old professional's secret weapon: when everyone screams, "Don't touch that piece of code!" you are getting close.)

Overall, I think testing on low-end machines is vital to discover unacceptable overhead before we get committed to a program. A 500 MHz machine with 128 MB RAM and a swap partition on HD is not yet described as minimal. Running on machines with different speeds also reveals hidden assumptions about timing which produce bugs that are really hard to reproduce and fix.

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ttuuxxx
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#37 Post by ttuuxxx »

That's what my problem is, my slowest machine is 2000MHz hmmm I might have an older motherboard in the garage, funny I'm going to rip apart a 2000MHZ machine just to downgrade it to 400MHZ to try and fix this shutdown/reboot problem, LOL

Oh well you do what you have to do for the better good of the community. :)
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

slvrldy17
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#38 Post by slvrldy17 »

Gave Chihuahua a bit of a workout last night - for an Alpha release it shows great promise. My test machine is based on an Intel D201GLY board with 1Gb of RAM and a salvaged 30GB laptop IDE hard drive. Boot was from an external DVD RW drive connected via USB. Monitor is a 15" generic LCD running at 1024x768x24.

Getting the proper refresh rate for this monitor took a bit of fiddling with the tweaking controls in Xorg - it needs a 56Hz refresh rate to work properly - once set it works OK for the session but for some reason the settings aren't being retained in the save file. Had to redo them with each reboot. And not all of the reboots were due to the problems with Gxine described below.

Network setup worked well and the SIS chipset was recognized OK. Firefox in its new form looks good and appears to work OK. I'll try downloading a package or two later.

Gxine works OK for playing a music CD - had to play with it some to play a movie DVD though - and once in full screen mode any attempt to go back to "normal" results in a hang that forces a shutdown to resolve. Haven't tried running music files (WMA and MP3 mixed) yet from a separate hard drive - I'll wait on that.

Overall I'm impressed - its been awhile since we had a good community edition of Puppy and I really prefer one with Firefox over Seamonkey. I'm looking forward to the Beta releases.
Always give without remembering - always receive without forgetting.
Alice

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tronkel
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#39 Post by tronkel »

slvrlady wrote:
had to play with it some to play a movie DVD though
Gxine has not been working well in Puppy for a long time. On the hardware I have here, it won't play DVDs at all! Shows that there are still hardware compatibility issues to be resolved - but that's on old story with Puppy as well. For reasons of its small size I have stayed with Gxine for the CE edtion. The alternatives to Gxine are a lot bigger and also have their own problems anyway - different from those in Gxine, but problems nevertheless.

There are also Xorg issues that need fixing as well. I believe Barry will be revisiting the Xorg package at some point in relation to Puppy 4 - so I'll try out any solution in Puppy 3 that becomes available.

These outstanding issues apart, Chihuahua is starting to look as if it is going in the right direction. It will get to a stable version eventually, but needs lots of TLC - but that's computing for you.

In the meantime enjoy.

Tronkel
Life is too short to spend it in front of a computer

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tronkel
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#40 Post by tronkel »

@prehistoric

Sorry haven't replied for some days - been busy with other stuff.

Yours and slvrldy's posts above are making me think that the kernel version is critical on older hardware. If I get a mo over the next few days, I'll build a retro version of the current Chihuahua Alpha 6 using the 2.6.18.1 kernel, and see what gives. Might just help with your shutdown problem and slvrldy's Xorg bug.

I managed a compile of the current stable icewin version yesterday so that's not a problem if it turns out that a hacked icewin is necessary.

Real-time systems are programmed using semaphores and monitors to control process threads. That's what might really be needed here. At the moment I don't know how to implement a semaphore within Bash, but I'd imagine it's possible. Have to research that one.

In the meantime, thanks for all the input.
Life is too short to spend it in front of a computer

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