Chihuahua Alpha6 plus Lassie_Office

[jonyo]

I've gone back to xvesa. Though I have a cursor now when selecting Xorg with the fix, I now have the original prob where when the 'pute is left for some time, when I get back, at random, the cursor is gone making shutdown difficult at best.

Runs very well with xvesa.

Checked it out a bit but ran across mostly old stuff. Any news on nvidia drivers?

Installed the latest Seamonkey form the official site to usr/lib & works good.

Also installed the latest FF 2.14 from the official site, extracted it to use/lib & think may have messed up the beta FF..but FF2.14 is working good. Starts with the original browser icon but ended up putting another link to the desktop that also fires it up.

I'll start another save file to see if I have that password prob with beta FF.
Not sure but don't think I tinkered with the password settings.

Must say that i've not ever had better response or speed on the net using the rt2570 driver with the wusb54g linksys usb adapter, though it rakes ~ 8 steps to fire up on start.

[prehistoric]

@Jonyo,

If that problem returns when you are running with a SW cursor something very strange is happening. Next time it happens would you mind using the keyboard to bring up the main menu and select restart X? If it suddenly reappears, we will have a clue.

Problems with configuring nvidia drivers have me running tombh's wNOP on one machine, (GeForce 3, 1 GHz Athlon, 1 GB RAM) even though the Compiz/Fusion eye candy isn't my cuppa. It works remarkably well. Tom would be the best reference for a how to.

[RR Koothady]

Dear Tronkel and Others who are striving to make Chihuahua better...

I have been trying to remaster a Puppy with XFce over the last few days. My objectives were three:

1.XFce renders Indic Fonts perfectly (JWM and ICEWM do not)

2.Install Firefox 3.05b - since this is the only browser in Linux that renders Indic fonts correctly

3. Install Abiword 2.6.2 - since this version renders Indic Fonts correctly and the earlier versions do not.

I tried remastering Standard 3.01 Puppy. I removed Abiword2.4, jwm and ROX Filer using PizzaGood's PetBeGone. Didnot remove Seamonky as I had read somewhere in this forum that this might cause seriuos dependency problems. Installed XFce4.41, Abi2.6.2, Firefox 3.05b and SCIM for inputting Indic Languages and all the available Indic locale files. Remastered. ISO size was about 120 MB. When I booted using this remastered ISO - all the pdf files that I had in my system were being shown as executable files and I could not open them. Then I resorted to a remaster without removing ROX and JWM - ISO was 230meg.Reboot using this showed the same above problem.

Then I went around scouting for XFce Puppies. Had trouble in downloading DCL and Dragon Puppy. Downloaded Happy Linux, NOP r6, Lobster's Shard (based on NOP r1).

Happy Linux has Seamonkey browser. This is a beautiful XFce Puppy - but I could not remaster it without facing the above problems.

NOP r6 and Shard - Opera could not be removed. Hotpup Removal from NOP-r6, remastering with the above softwares - yielded an ISO of around 180 megs, but alas ... when I rebooted - it opens a "Standard JWM-ROX Puppy" and not the "NOP XFce r6"!

Then tried Lobster's Shard. Remastering was without any problem. But I could not remove Opera and XaraLX. Remastered ISO was 230megs. Surprisingly I faced no problem with this remaster at all. (Note: I didnot remove ROX and JWM in this). Pdf files that were showing as executable files in the earlier remasters were not facing the problem now. A working Indic XFce Remaster, though 230 megs heavy!

Tried Dingo yesterday. Alas! ROX Filer crashes when the script ""/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/immodules/im-scim.so" "scim" "SCIM Input Method" "" "" "" is placed in "immodules" file located at /etc/gtk-2. (This is an essential script necessary for making SCIM available in all the Gtk apps.)

I tried Chihuahua today. What a beauty this is! I have all the softwares preinstalled in this. Removed HotPup. Could not remove Conky. Removed Planmaker. Installed latest Gnumeric. Had ROX and ICEWM intact - as PetBeGone doesnot show ICEWM in its menu!

Installed all the above Softwares. Then installed OSMO (Tamil version) too. Remastered. Wow! The final remaster is just 130 megs! And it boots without any problem whatsoever!

As for Firefox - palying flash files from youtube - this is not a problem. I downloaded libflashplayer.so file (version 9.0.124) from the Adobe Flash website and placed it in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins folder. Restarted Firefox 3.05b. And it plays the flash files nicely.

Firefox is saving passwords perfectly for me.

I have some minor issues with this remaster though. I shall put them up in this thread shortly.

One interesting observation: ttuuxxx's ICEWM's button and mouse icons are being used in my XFce remaster too!

I wish to thank and congratulate all you guys!

Cheers! Please keep it Up!!

Ramesh

[alienjeff]

@RR Koothady

Next time put a little more effort in auditing your screenshots before posting.

Hint: look at the browser/YouTube window ...

[prit1]

Tested the latest A6 today and noticed that my network did connect once and then went down. I tried rerunning network wizard several times, but network is not working anymore. This uses RT2500 module for wireless connection. This works fine now in Puppy Dingo.

I could not find Gnumeric? Is it present? I thought it might be as Abiword is there. I love the look of this community edition.

[tronkel]

@prit1

Purely for reasons of space I didn't include Gnumeric in the Chihuahua ISO. I used Planmaker instead since it's a lot smaller. Idea is to keep the basic Chihuahua ISO under 100MB

You can though, download a 21MB sfs file called Lassie_Office_302.sfs that contains both the latest Abiword 2.6.2 and the latest Gnumeric. You could also try wolf_bones_301.sfs. It contains the above plus Firefox 3 Beta5 plus Thunderbird with Enigmail as well. Just rename it to wolf_bones_302.sfs if want to use it with Chihuahua. It was originally intended for Wolf Pup but should also work OK in Chihuahua. You can download these from:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/tronkel

Since I can't test wireless networking with my Chihuahua set up at the moment, I can't help with this very much. I have also had wireless issues with a 3.01 based Puppy on the Classmate PC that Caneri helped me to solve. The RT2500 module may need to be blacklisted and replaced with an updated version. I wonder if you could perhaps extract the module from Dingo (older kernel version 2.6.21.7). That could well solve the problem.

[tronkel]

@ramesh

Glad you like Chihuahua. Still a lot of work to do to it, but it's getting there.

I wonder if you might be better off trying to re-vamp Chihuahua using Unleashed, rather the doing remasters. I haven't used remaster very much , but as as far as I remember, there can be issues as regards removing unwanted stuff from the ISO. Seems to be a bit hit and miss, and could be time-consuming as well.

You can search the forum for tips on how to use Unleashed. Well worth the effort. You'll have much more control and end up with a much better-functioning ISO that way.

[RR Koothady]

Thank you tronkel. I shall start building one from the unleashed from now on.

Thank you AJ for your suggestion. I wanted to show the background wall paper, file icons, panels of XFce, plus Gnumeric, Abiword, and Firefox. That's why the windows were placed in a way so that the final image could show all I had desired.

Ramesh

[gerry]

@RR Koothady- before AJ comes back, I think you missed his point, which is that one of your windows appears to showing pornography.

Gerry

[ttuuxxx]

Dear Tronkel and Others who are striving to make Chihuahua better...

I tried Chihuahua today. What a beauty this is! I have all the softwares preinstalled in this. Removed HotPup. Could not remove Conky. Removed Planmaker. Installed latest Gnumeric. Had ROX and ICEWM intact - as PetBeGone doesnot show ICEWM in its menu!


I have some minor issues with this remaster though. I shall put them up in this thread shortly.

One interesting observation: ttuuxxx's ICEWM's button and mouse icons are being used in my XFce remaster too!

Ramesh

Hello
really you don't have to remove icewm its only 700kb and the shutdown menu button is like 50kb or so, well under 1mb
as conky goes, don't uninstall it, I tried that in the past and my system became unstable, best to just to delete the startup lines.
if you have any problems just shout.
ttuuxxx

[prehistoric]

It appears my frustration with video content on the web has led RRKoothady astray. Trying to understand a foreign culture over the Internet is not easy, still less when you have no idea which things are deliberately skirting the edge of cultural norms.

The video in his screenshot is at the end of the link hidden in my post above. It is a joke, not actual pornography. While others find this arousing, I keep wondering if she might be related to Serleena. Strange things show up in singles bars.

Caveat Videor. (Let the viewer beware.) or, possibly, Caveat Videora.

[prehistoric]

@tronkel, ttuuxxx,

After celebrating an apparent victory over the black/frozen screen problem on two problem machines, I was happy until I tried another install on a new flash drive. Insignificant changes in timing produce a "frugal" install which shows the problem most of the time, even after I make the changes which seemed to fix it before. It could be due to a defective drive, but, if so, it is a very peculiar defect, showing up only in very special cases.

I need to strip Chihuahua down to a minimum and add things back in one-by-one to find the culprits. Even the default Icewm configuration is too complicated. I'm also going to put an installation on a 350 Mhz P II, to see if that makes things worse. For debugging purposes, worse is better.

[ttuuxxx]

@tronkel, ttuuxxx,

After celebrating an apparent victory over the black/frozen screen problem on two problem machines, I was happy until I tried another install on a new flash drive. Insignificant changes in timing produce a "frugal" install which shows the problem most of the time, even after I make the changes which seemed to fix it before. It could be due to a defective drive, but, if so, it is a very peculiar defect, showing up only in very special cases.

I need to strip Chihuahua down to a minimum and add things back in one-by-one to find the culprits. Even the default Icewm configuration is too complicated. I'm also going to put an installation on a 350 Mhz P II, to see if that makes things worse. For debugging purposes, worse is better.

Wow prehistoric your really dedicated to this, Excellent Job, I wish we had 10 people like you. My icewm package isn't all that complicated, it has only what is needed to show blinky and freememory, and a couple of themes, sure try a untouched version, but we will be back in the same boat once we put blinky and freememory back in
LOL I just looked at icewm in gslapt for dingo need to get 21MB and after unpacking 79MB of diskspace will be used, And thats without blinky of freememory LOLOLOL or nice themes. Like my 700kb packages has, LOL its worth fixing.
ttuuxxx

[jonyo]

@Jonyo, If that problem returns when you are running with a SW cursor something very strange is happening. Next time it happens would you mind using the keyboard to bring up the main menu and select restart X? If it suddenly reappears, we will have a clue.

Had a few lockups when I tried this before (requiring power button to get out) in setting up xorg with the fix, sometimes it just went straight to the desktop & seemed to bypass restarting xorg. The lockups occurred when after x successfully restarted from the menu, then wouldn't respond at the command line.

I'm not quite setup to try too much on this setup right now. Have quite a bit of time invested in xp & ~ 5 pups, & haven't sorted out a full backup yet plus the HD is near full so have to sort that all out first.

I'm a little leery when I have lockups in pup where I also run xp (particularly with no backup) cos I ended up with a boot prob in xp (disk error on boot) once after dealing with a lockup in pup. Only happened once when locked up in pup setting up the rt2570 driver in muppy.

I'm pretty sure though that on one attempt at restarting xorg, the cursor reappeared.

I didn't find fiddling with xorg easy without a cursor & was mostly stumbling about trying to apply the "true" fix. In the end, ended up with xorg.conf.new file in root. though there were a few in the right place ..at one point.

[prehistoric]

Only happened once when locked up in pup setting up the rt2570 driver in muppy.

This matches one problem I've had with the rt2500 driver. When I reboot, I get a trap and stack trace when modprobe loads that driver. Turns out the device has a real eeprom to hold some parameters, even when you change OS and remove the hard drive. I would like to disable this so I could debug the rest of the system, but, so far, hacking the pup_save file hasn't allowed me to complete a boot. This can't be the entire problem, because the other problem machine doesn't even have wireless.

One clue, I'm running the same system now from a different kind of flash drive without problems. We could have problems with the unionfs and different drive speeds. Even so, we should be able to separate these problems from X problems. If your cursor really came back after an X restart, there may be a bug in unionfs. The other possibility is RAM which has a soft error at long intervals. If you have a stand-alone memtest, I would run that for some time, just to be safe.

[jonyo]

Are you talking the new rt2500 native driver in dingo that as I understand replaces the rt2570 native driver? Or a win rt2500 driver?

There have been many reports of the native rt2570 driver locking up 'putes solid on setup, in recent pups at least, & ought to be sorted out.

Haven't figured out trying the enhanced rt2570 pet & maybe that's supposed to deal with it.

I'll do further tests with the cursor when properly setup & check out the mem in the meantime.

I'll try out chihuahua on some other 'putes too.

Not able to d/load anything with petget. All ends up like this:

- FAILURE: netsurf-20071008.pet was not downloaded successfully

[prehistoric]

@jonyo,

I am using the native puppy 3.01 rt2500 driver on the laptop.

Before I test Dingo much there I'll need to free up yet another flash drive.

Not able to d/load anything with petget. All ends up like this:

- FAILURE: netsurf-20071008.pet was not downloaded successfully

I've seen that too. I didn't report it right away because the pets I was looking for weren't on ibiblio and I was downloading them myself.

@tronkel, ttuuxxx,

I'm posting this from that 350 MHz test machine, using 3.02 alpha 6. This configuration is weird, it just happened because of other tests: 350 MHz PII, 312 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, Matrox G450, and a 22" LCD. The CD drive on this machine has problems, but it generally boots alright once it succeeds in mounting the CD.

Now, here is a new problem; when I booted off the CD with "pfix=ram" it worked, but three attempts to do a frugal install on HD failed because it could not mount the CD to copy from. I ended up copying from flash drive, but the important point here is that P.U.I. repeatedly died w/o an error message when it had problems finding files to copy. It also reported the target partition was mounted read-only, right after I had copied files from another partition to it. Could be HotPup strangeness. I had set the flags to disable the daemon w/o restarting X because the first time I did this I got a black screen hang.

That's the problem I came here to chase, but it gets in the way of debugging other things.

Added: Jack, could you tell me why you put that exec in Icewm startup? I'm looking for clues.

Later: Just got gray's NOP 3.01r6 installed on another partition for comparison purposes. Surprise! Part of the trouble I associated with this alpha shows up when I try to exit and create a pup_save file on that system for the first time. Now, here is a bizarre clue: what program asks me, "Show all 1190 possibilities? (y/n)". (Can't claim that is letter perfect, this is from elderly memory.) That identifies one process trying to use keyboard input after I exit X.

I had expected Xfce to be slow on this machine, but with sufficient memory it behaves better than Icewm, i.e. fewer unexplained delays. HotPup, as modified by gray, seems to have more acceptable behavior. On Chihuahua alpha 6 I've turned the daemon off while I'm fighting the X problem. On NOP 3.01r6 it seems pretty usable.

[prehistoric]

@tronkel, ttuuxxx,

After much foolishness, including a trip across town to get a DVI to VGA adapter, I replaced the LCD panel with a 17" flat-screen IBM CRT. Now, I don't have the tight restriction on refresh rates which stopped me from using xorg. Xvesa was responsible for many problems which remained after I applied the fixes in reboot, shutdown and restartwm scripts. The slow machine behaves pretty well. Now, the laptop which seemed to be over the problem is back to a black/frozen screen on exit from X, most of the time.

This is not to say the experiments have been a failure. I have some really strange clues to concurrency problems under Icewm. I had set conky to exit the first time it updates, because that disabled it with the fewest changes in other things. I have been using gkrellm to monitor activity and launch it from the startup directory. Blinky, freemem tray applet and the activity displays to the left of the clock on the bar are unchanged. HotPup daemon has been disabled for the duration of this skirmish.

Note: Conky is a problem on slow machines. This may be due to a crude video driver for a fairly powerful card, or, more likely, it is caused by the way conky redraws its display every time it updates. On this 350 MHz machine I'm using now, updates are set to 5 seconds. When an update occurs the material from conky visibly blinks off and reappears. This is distracting. Conky does not use double buffering to draw updates, but recreates its display in the visible frame buffer, gkrellm is currently updating 4 times a second on the same machine, w/o problems. All its "krells" use a single process.

My first clue of something passing strange came when the message about not unplugging a flash drive grabbed the window previously used by conky. Repeatedly restarting the X system showed other examples. In one case the window occuppied by conky had the label blinky, in another it became gkrellm, even though gkrellm remained visible and active. My change to conky was minimal; allow it to come up and then exit the first time it tries to display. This only required changing a 0 in .conkyrc to a 1.

The pile ups of icons in the upper left corner keep happening, though all except blinky seem to get untangled. On slow machines pile ups are more likely than on fast machines. I'm still puzzled about the number of displays I should be seeing on the bar. On this laptop, I see one moving display to the left of the clock. On the 350 MHz machine I see two. Originally, I thought this was caused by a different screen size, but with both screens set to 1024x768 the installations remain different. I'm not aware of editing any configuration files or doing any operations on the bar, though I could always have hit something by accident. My guess at this point is that one of my tray items is on top of another.

Icewm still has concurrency problems.

Added: I had a look at Icewm manual and found a relevant quote. I have added some italics.

If you wish to run the whole IceWM suite (WM, background changer, Docklet support, and startup/shutdown script handling), use the icewm-session binary instead of pure icewm. Note that this is not a complete Session Manager but a helps only to automate the startup.

First make sure that you choose the correct X startup script in your home directory. For most distributions the file $HOME/.xsession is honored by startx and X Display Managers like kdm. On RedHat, the $HOME/.Xclients may be used instead. In all cases, choose the one recommended by your distribution and make sure that there is no concurency between the X startup scripts.

Anyone want to tell me how this thing has been hacked?

[alienjeff]

Test system:

HP Pavilion XE-736
Celeron 600
i810 mobo video
256M RAM
256M swap partition
Dell monitor

Problems:

1) trapezoidal display on CRT monitor running Xorg - vertical span too much; bottom horizontal edge nearly full span; top horizontal span much reduced; somewhat like an inverted keystone for an arch except top and bottom are straight and perfectly parallel.

2) xvidtune can correct nearly perfect, but config saves are not persistent.

3) limited resolution when running xvesa

Tonight's marathon test:

Downloaded these ISOs: 2.15CE, 2.16.1, 2.17.1, 3.00, 3.00retro, 3.01 and 3.01retro.

Extracted files from ISOs, an ISO at a time, booted as frugal, noted Xorg video display.

Findings:

Xorg "test" button anomalies aside, the display on the monitor was fine all the way up to and including v2.17.1 - with v3.00 being the start of the trapezoidal display problem and carrying through all 3.xx series; standard and retro, as well as Dingo v4.00 Final.

Snooping at the command line revealed:

for v2.12

Code: Select all

# Xorg -version

X Window System Version 7.0.0
Release Date: 21 December 2005
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 7.0
Build Operating System:Linux 2.6.18-inside-sandbox i386
Current Operating System: Linux pavilion 2.6.18.1 #1 Sat Nov 11 07:52:06 PUP 2006 i686
Build Date: 08 August 2006
        Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
        to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
#

for Puppy v 2.17.1

Code: Select all

# Xorg -version

X Window System Version 7.0.0
Release Date: 21 December 2005
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 7.0
Build Operating System:Linux 2.6.18-inside-sandbox i386
Current Operating System: Linux puppypc 2.6.21.5 #1 Sat Jun 23 21:16:21 PUP 2007 i686
Build Date: 08 August 2006
        Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
        to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
#

for Puppy v3.00

Code: Select all

# Xorg -version

X Window System Version 1.3.0
Release Date: 19 April 2007
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 1.3
Build Operating System: Slackware 12.0 Slackware Linux Project
Current Operating System: Linux puppypc 2.6.21.7 #1 Sun Sep 9 02:29:54 GMT-8 2007 i686
Build Date: 09 May 2007
        Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
        to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
#

Conclusion:

Something got seriously b0rked in the building of Puppy v3.00 as related to i810 video. It's either one of these, or combination thereof:

1) Xorg -version from 7.0.0 to 1.3.0 (I don't understand the version numbering methodology here).

2) kernel build, compile and/or change from 2.6.21.5 to 2.6.21.7

3) change from build operating system Linux 2.6.18-inside-sandbox i386 to Slackware 12.0

And this is about as far as I can carry this for tonight.

Thoughts from The Gurus? Can Barry's moles in Intel possibly offer any insight?

[ttuuxxx]

Test system:

HP Pavilion XE-736

Problems:

Findings:

Wow all I can say is "Great investigative work AlienJeff, 2 thumbs up"
ttuuxxx