Newbies - Puppy needs YOUR help too!

Booting, installing, newbie
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theotherjeff
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Joined: Fri 26 Jun 2009, 15:08

Installation to HD

#61 Post by theotherjeff »

It's a pretty distro and runs slowly-enough-for-demo-mode from the CD on my old junk. I only wish it would properly install its GRUB exactly the way Ubuntu does. After following the onscreen defaults and typing whatever suggestions it has about boot partitions, it reboots into nothingness - something like a bootloader not found. Teen Puppy would attract so many more users if only it were easier to install without SuperGrubDisk, RTFMs or forums.

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spongedaddy
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#62 Post by spongedaddy »

Hello all,

Call me an enthusiastic Puppy newbie.

Over a year ago I burned CDs of both Puppy 4.0 and Xubuntu 8.04. After about a year of trying to get Xubuntu to do what I wanted and becoming increasingly frustrated with its poor performance, I stumbled upon my Puppy 4.00 CD (I had somehow lost it). I dropped it into my drive and away I went.

What a revelation! After a week of working off the live CD, I said farewell to Xubuntu and installed Puppy (full HD install) on my old Dell OptiPlex (Pentium III Coppermine/512 RAM/wireless network). As a 49-year-old ex-IBMer, current web developer/technical writer and editor/coding apprentice, I've never had a computer experience that had me amping to get home from the office to play with my computer.

Thanks to this great forum, I've got devx_400.sfs installed and am compiling successfully. Fonts are next.

So, yes, as a newbie I would certainly love to help in any way I can. I know just enough C (and Perl and PHP and BASIC) to get in trouble ;) , but I'm pretty darn handy with documentation. Any suggestions for a good starting point would be appreciated.

Many thanks!!

johnheav2
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri 26 Jun 2009, 19:39

Suggestions...

#63 Post by johnheav2 »

Puppy is absolutely ingenious, and I am recommending to friends who fight w/ their PCs contstantly over malware. I think with just a little tweaking, it would be much more widely used.

We need a way to understand the file system. May of us cannot conceptualize how the various folders (mnt/lib/etc/) relate to one another, and what they're for. Perhaps it would advantageous to hide those from view that users *typically* do not need on a daily basis, as Windows sometimes does, with the option of making them visible if needed. Just an idea.


The pup_save file behaves strangely, at times. Mine often grows although I've added no packages, and I don't know how to prune it back. Can anyone explain this?

Which leads to my last point. I've yet to find any *clear* documentation on how puppy works. Not in Linux-speak, but in terms the average user (who is coming from a Windows paradigm) can understand.

But again, what a great package. Thank you for all you developers do. This is a tremendous distro.

ec.matter
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat 27 Jun 2009, 17:04

#64 Post by ec.matter »

Installed 4.2.1 to a USB stick last night. Everything works. No complaints.

rookiet
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed 17 Jun 2009, 06:21

I hope puppy linux will be more beautiful

#65 Post by rookiet »

win7 is beautiful,hope puppy linux can be the same.

As the puppy's fonts not looks good,I have spent lots of time to study and reset the fonts.But the effect is not as good as ubuntu.

I took the snapshot in puppy,then opened in winxp,surprisingly,it looks very good.

Why?

StOlEnDeStInY
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri 26 Jun 2009, 09:44

#66 Post by StOlEnDeStInY »

I don't see any package which could help me join a Windows domain as a Puppy Linux user.. In Ubuntu we could use Likewise, I cant see a solution in Puppy Linux and that is giving me second thoughts about installing Puppy..

Benboom
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu 02 Jul 2009, 16:10

Re: Suggestions...

#67 Post by Benboom »

johnheav2 wrote: The pup_save file behaves strangely, at times. Mine often grows although I've added no packages, and I don't know how to prune it back. Can anyone explain this?
Ditto. I'm a new user and I am having a hard time figuring out this one too.

I am not an experienced linux user; the only feedback I feel comfortable giving (beyond the fact that I really, really like Puppy overall) is that the documentation is pretty incomplete; much (if not most) of it is written by and for people who really understand linux. And I am intimidated by people who respond to "ignorant" questions curtly with things like "do a search and don't waste our time" when the fact is that when you don't really understand what you're searching for it can be difficult. I have found several answers to my questions here, but usually it is not by searching, it is by tediously going through threads; how many people are going to do that?

But I reiterate: Puppy has absolutely transformed an old Fujitsu C2210 laptop I was given last week because "it's too slow". I have an old Mac running Ubuntu (Jaunty) so I know a little bit about it and I tried that on the laptop and it was horrible: wait, wait, wait for a terminal window to open, and forget about opening a browser! Puppy is wonderfully quick and with SeaMonkey2 and Flash 10 it plays videos very nicely on the old Fujitsu, which has only 256 megs of ram.

I'd put first priority on better documentation.

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mikeb
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#68 Post by mikeb »

I don't see any package which could help me join a Windows domain as a Puppy Linux user..
I don't use it myself but pnethood in the menu is for accessing windows on netbios/samba

mike

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mikeb
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#69 Post by mikeb »

win7 is beautiful,hope puppy linux can be the same.
look around the forum at all the window manager and theming options...you can make puppy look like anything

mike

hardly a competition..we are dealing with productivity not impressing non technical buyers

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ecomoney
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#70 Post by ecomoney »

This thread has turned into a goldmine of information of how Puppy can be Improved. Thank you very much to everyone that has taken the time to reply and give their suggestions for positive improvement. Every Puppy Developer should read this thread for ideas to more productively spend their time.
Puppy Linux's [url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=296352#296352]Mission[/url]

Sorry, my server is down atm!

pupfan
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon 06 Jul 2009, 23:11

four must's for beginers

#71 Post by pupfan »

A friend and I have been discussing what Puppy should have for it to really take off in popularity. The first that we agreed on was it had to auto mount and ether play audio CDs or put up an easy to understand menu. The next was it needed to do the same with DVDs. Number three, It should have non computer wording to walk a newbie through getting on the internet. It's easy enough for us, but for people new to computers the wording will just confuse them. We also believe it needs to be easier to install. When my friend and I first played with it we had a hard time installing it. I know it's a no brainer, you have to make your ext partition and swap file before installing but we were new to Linux and didn't know that. One other thing that would have been number 5 but has been taken care of is photos. If you ask new users, most of them will tell you those five things are what they want a computer for. We are big fans of Puppy and we want to see it number one. The things we like about it is it's small size and the fact that it runs in ram which makes it very fast. We are not geeks nor will we ever be, Just too old, but we sure do like Puppy. Thanks Barry and all you guys who help out.

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mikeb
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#72 Post by mikeb »

The first that we agreed on was it had to auto mount
friend of yours ecomoney? :D

by the way automounting and autorun is one of those well know major security flaws of windows...just pop a virus on a usb sick or cd and voila

have fun....

ooo and chuckle as wine wipes yer mbr as you try out a new game and forget that c:\ is automounted and you are running as root. .. or maybe a virus worms it's way in there from IE running in wine.

or simply wipe yer windows install as you get to learn about linux.

There are sensible reasons why manual mounting is chosen.

And windows does not auto unmount..complain to them

mike

ps
the fact that it runs in ram which makes it very fast. We are not geeks
sounds geeky to me :D

pps you can have a partition mounted at boot if wanted

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pooklaroux
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Location: Columbus, Ohio

#73 Post by pooklaroux »

I'm not a new new newbie to Puppy or Linux, but I am always helping other people with their older computers, and one way I do that is by burning them a disk of Puppy, and getting their old PC to bark like a new one.

I do email and blogs, and forums like this mainly. I don't personally do myspace, or facebook, or second life, or even instant messaging (actually I hate that. i had to have ICQ for a job and I've hated it ever since.) I visit you tube rarely. My biggest problems have been figuring out how to open a docx file, and printing. I love CUPS, BTW!

What the people I help generally want to do is email, surf the web, look at pictures online, watch videos on you tube, watch dvd's in their pc (if they have a dvd drive) listen to music, hook up their ipods, one person wanted to make ringtones for her phone. I never did figure that out. Ditto with the ipods. Also, it seems like you tube made some kind of upgrade recently, and some of the people I helped came back and said "Ican't watch videos anymore" -- and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that yet. Something about flash 10, I guess.

Anyways, a puppy or puplet that does all those things in a one or two clicks way would be a major evangelistic tool for me.

ragaman
Posts: 186
Joined: Sun 14 Jan 2007, 12:55

#74 Post by ragaman »

Open Office Writer 3.x can open docx files.

To view Youtube videos, update flashplayer to version 10. Just search this forum. There's a .pet lying 'round here somewhere.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 33&t=27978 There's the thread on Flash 10.

My greatest headache with Puppy so far has been network printing. I've ran Puppy for months without printing. Any print job is sent to my other machines through pnethood. I wish Puppy would just autodetect network printers and then ask the user for permission to set them up. Saves us hours of futile tinkering.

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ecomoney
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#75 Post by ecomoney »

Hi MikeB, no not a friend of mine, just someone who has made the same observation. :D

The latest puppy 4.2.1 has had the flashplayer upgraded so it works with Youtube out-of-the-box, and it also (after much pain I might add) opens .docx in Abiword. You can get it at www.puppylinux.org

Ive used GtkPod for ipods

http://www.gtkpod.org/screenshots.html

Puppy Package here

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=25819

pooklaroux, I think you make another important observation, "Computer Experts" such as ourselves use different websites/programmes to most less-technical out there (pun intended), and this is where other linuxes have difficulty reaching the mainstream....if the (volunteer) developers have no need for an app/service/website support, then it doesnt get developed. :cry:

Here at Puppy we do try a lot more than most linux's to accomodate.
Puppy Linux's [url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=296352#296352]Mission[/url]

Sorry, my server is down atm!

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mikeb
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#76 Post by mikeb »

To view Youtube videos, update flashplayer to version 10.
I don't quite understand this...I can still watch you tube with flash 7.
3 advantages...faster ,the video can be saved/watched from /tmp and no stability headaches.
The update to 10 is a suggestion as far as I see mainly to limit saving vids as they are downloaded to memory rather than disk. So you tube still leaves users with a choice :)

Ecomoney...I recommend you don't ignore security advice.
Wine hq recommend not running as root as it carries over some of the vunerabilities of windows.
Indeed pop round if you are in the south east. :)

mike

StOlEnDeStInY
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#77 Post by StOlEnDeStInY »

ragaman wrote:Open Office Writer 3.x can open docx files.

My greatest headache with Puppy so far has been network printing. I've ran Puppy for months without printing. Any print job is sent to my other machines through pnethood. I wish Puppy would just autodetect network printers and then ask the user for permission to set them up. Saves us hours of futile tinkering.
I have been running it since the last two weeks and loads of tweaks.. No result. Result: IT won't be implemented on my office computers.

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mikeb
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#78 Post by mikeb »

If the machine with the printer is running a server version of windows then network printing can be done by ipp which is very straightforward

mike

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rcrsn51
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#79 Post by rcrsn51 »

If the machine with the printer is running a server version of windows then network printing can be done by ipp which is very straightforward
Please provide details. It might be the solution to this problem.

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mikeb
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#80 Post by mikeb »

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2 ... print.mspx

a starting point.
I believe windows uses a non standard port ie not 631 but cups can handle that.
Once setup cups should be able to talk to it .. probably need a local ppd or talk postscript.

The other way round ie printer on linux machine works by using the adobe postcript driver and ppd on windows clients.

mike

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