New Puppy

[Lobster]

Barry announced his retirement more than two years ago.
The transition continues.

What will the new Puppy be like?

Puppy is always different.
So that will stay the same.
One criteria has worked.
The only structure tried and working
is one developer in charge.

I say developer
because Puppy is an OS primarily.
Someone has to know and understand
and make the decisions after due consideration.

However areas of expertise and specialization are
feeding back into the main project.

What advice would you offer?

[ttuuxxx]

Advice I would offer is, Keep it slim and trim, Update some of the 16x16 icons which look dated, possibly with tango.
Keep it under 100MB, If we are talking dingo, you could fit Gimp & Inkscape for about 7mb. pet still well under 100MB.
Find out why flash full screen works on other distros and not puppy.
Give everybody respect.
Continuously work on wireless and other problems.
Seek out new application.
Organize your developers and offer projects / fixes.
Promote puppy on the world stage.
Generally oversee day to day business/Goals-short and long term.
Most of all HAVE FUN!!!!
ttuuxxx

[Lobster]

Most of all HAVE FUN!!!!

Good plan

[darrelljon]

My overwhelming feeling is Puppy needs to become multiuser.
Some people have strong feelings on replacing Seamonkey with Firefox 3. I think it might help but compared to going multiuser, I'm only vaguely interested in replacing the browser.

[Trobin]

For my two pennies, there should be a chief developer. One who can keep Puppy moving forward along the same line as in the past.

Is there anyone, already on board, who can step in when Barry is finally ready to move on to other projects?

[ttuuxxx]

My overwhelming feeling is Puppy needs to become multiuser.
Some people have strong feelings on replacing Seamonkey with Firefox 3. I think it might help but compared to going multiuser, I'm only vaguely interested in replacing the browser.

I've been a firefox supporter from day one, Even On my wife's MS PC the default browser is Firefox and has been for a long time. I personally feel that a this point of time FireFox3 is a bit buggy and isn't mature enough yet. In the future possibly it would/could be the right choice. Things like flash are choppy etc, plus I've used it for a couple of days and it it crashed a few times. Right now Mozilla is updating series 2 until Dec. also Series 3, I would guess that Series 3 would get a lot more stable stable when they can focus on just one version.

Multi-user with multi-permissions would first have to be developed, The best person for that job is leaving, nobody knows the inner workings as well as Barry does, That would take a lot of testing and basically would bog down a key developer, It could be possible if we sourced out new developers or asked Barry for one last favour
ttuuxxx

[gw]

Hello all,

For me a new Puppy could be :
- a simplified and unique Community version based on the latest developpements of BK (with only the most frequently used applications + Wine). All the rest could be installed as external PET packages on request.
- a boot disk with the possibility to boot Windows or Puppy Linux, so that people can forget it in the CD/DVD drive (to be always ready to do a Puppy demo). I've tried with success the method described here : http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16950. I find this approach very confortable.
- a nice splash screen insteed of the boot messages which terrorise the Windows users.
- this derivate (community) version could be a commercial version distributed at the same way as Tupperware distributes its products, with a percentage of the earn given to a foundation to can collect some money for the developpers and other guys who provide bandwith, etc..... It could also be an interesting job for students to earn some money and could perhaps spread the Puppy Linux project into companies.
- this version would be in English with different teams producing a translation PET in their respective languages with a help manual.
- 2 versions could be produced "Light" (for instance without Java and OO.org for old hardware) and "Pro" for companies or recent hardware (with Java, OO.org Gimp, ...). One or two service packs could avoid to produce a new version too frequently (an MS user does'nt change his OS every 3 mounths and the companies don't like to do that too frequently).
This could perhaps help BK and other developers to concentrate on the developement versions and earn some money for their work and charges with a light pressure.

It's only an idea.
A+
--
gw

[alcy]

I think improvement needs to be done in :

1. The Developer Environment :

Well, the devx_*.sfs gets most of the work done *usually*, however, its not complete. For example:

a. Yesterday only I required the Objective C compiler for compiling an application, which should've been built into the GCC provided by the devx_400.sfs file, but it wasn't. I had to compile another GCC , which although is a good thing, since I compiled the latest version 4.3.1, but still, my work was delayed considerably.

b. The qt libs installed by default when using the devx_400.sfs don't seem to work most of the time, for most of the applications I have tried. Hence, that I needed to compile, which again was good, but probably not that good for people (experienced and amateur linux users, alike ) new to Puppy.

Although, many distros don't provide the complete development framework by default, I think it would be nice to incorporate it into Puppy (in the form of, probably, an altered devx file, that could be displayed as an option on the main Puppy download page) given the current status of organization of the .pet packages ,the (in)efficiency of the Package Manager (or maybe just the servers that host the packages), and the need for compiling applications from scratch quite often.

2. Interaction of Puppy with users

The usual minor issues with the messages displayed by Puppy like the ones displayed by the Package manager, not being polished or slick enough, and general issues with handling and working with sfs files , path manipulations, installation scripts etc . could be dealt with.

As of now, these are the only major issues that come into my mind.

[dogone]

Forgive me guys, as I'm a bit out of my league with this but...

Do you suppose we could interest Barry in devoting some of his "post retirement" time towards the creation of a Puppy development environment? The pieces of this already exists but I'm talking about something more unified and more complete (oh, think of the scripts Barry must have!), a tool set that makes developing new and alternative Puppies easier - very much easier. More people might then get involved. No one can read Barry's mind, but I can think of few gifts more important to the future of Puppy.

Were Barry free to add to and enhance such a tool set over time, his contributions to Puppy would be on-going while he remained safely out of the line of fire.

[drbongo]

I don't think that Puppy needs any major changes! It is a pretty good basic operating system as it is. Once 4.1 is finished and any final bugs are removed we will have a very stable, flexible GTK2 OS with a fairly up to date kernel. All it will require is bug fixing and updating from time to time. Puppy is a core OS, there is no need to add lots of bells and whistles - this is what the package manager and remastering script is for. Many people will always use puplets because they want more apps, but this is the beauty of puppy. No distro can match all users needs - I believe Puppy should continue as Barry envisioned it.

The community can fix bugs - we would need someone who can recompile the whole shebang from time to time, with any updates etc using T2. There is no reason why Puppy could not continue like this for several years.

If people believe Puppy needs a major overall, then maybe we should have an experimental variation, that will take risks and make major changes, but we would still have the core stable 4.1 series to fall back on. I just don't think that we should fix something if it ain't broke, nor change for the sake of change or to be fashionable. As long as Puppy can boot on a wide variety of hardware, from SD cards, USB pens etc then it is fit for purpose.

My long term hope would be that puppy or one of its derivatives was picked up my a manufacturer on a mini laptop like the eeepc, and sold as the default system.

drbongo