TEENpup 2009 Legacy available for Download

[ttuuxxx]

so that pet is the updated installer/grub

Just to be clear does that modify not just the grub-installer but the Puppy universal installer as well? If it does then I'll certainly give it a try. If not then I doubt it can help as I don't need to install grub at each puppy install to boot.
Dave

Yes both of them are included.
hope that helps.
ttuuxxx

[davesurrey]

Hang on ttuuxxx, how can I use a pet to improve the install of a puppy when it needs to be installed in the first place to use the pet.

[ttuuxxx]

lol what came first the chicken or the egg, lol
no-no-no this would be installed maybe in future 2.14.1x versions cd's, but for now just save it to your hard drive, boot up live on teenpup, install the pet and try to install it.
ttuuxxx

[davesurrey]

lol what came first the chicken or the egg

Egg-zactly!

Okay I tried this and I'm afraid it didn't change anything.
I then deleted 214X4, the other Puppy 214 based install on this disk and am happy to report that Teenup installed (frugal) perfectly.

So it looks as if it's to do with having more than one 214 on the disk.
Will try to work out how to fix this tomorrow.

Dave

[kethd]

TEENpup 2009 is a very impressive bundle, a wonderful big fat pup, filling a 700MB CD. (Is there a good over-view summary guide to the Big Pups? There are so many puplets that we need a pupletwatch to sort them out...)

I tried it out on a fairly modern computer: 2800MHz Pentium 4 ASUS P4PE (2003?) 1GB, no HD. Probably more modern than the target user for TEENpup, which might be an older slower computer with less RAM but running from HD instead of CD.

The goal of TEENpup is "easy complete", and sometimes it takes "easy" a little too far. A special strength of Puppy is that because start-up configuration involves some manual choices it works reliably on a very wide range of hardware. Fancy, more automatic distros are great when they work, but harder to use when they guess wrong. For example, standard Puppy starts by asking for a mouse choice. TEENpup bypasses this with a PS/2 mouse, which means it may not work with older hardware and a serial mouse. Is there a boot parameter to control this, to specify a serial mouse?

With 1 GB RAM, the whole big pup_214.sfs is loaded during the boot. It only takes a few minutes, and mostly makes for a good fast responsive system. But with no additional swap space, it seems all too easy to run out of RAM later browsing in seamonkey, and have the whole system bog down at 100% cpu or even lock-up and freeze. It is odd to experience 1GB being "not enough" -- you'd think that there would be about 256MB free, and that should be enough to do a lot! And it would be great if browsers were intelligent enough to not ask for too many resources, in relation to what is available. Anyway, one hopes that there is a boot parameter to ask TEENpup not to load the sfs into RAM, to run from CD instead?

I was surprised and impressed that the start-up Xorg script defaulted to offering the ideal 1360x768 (ATI R200 Radeon 8500DV with Toshiba LCD TV) -- even better than current Puppy 4.x which defaults to offering 640x480 but does list 1360x768. Since TEENpup is based on 2.14, it was not surprising that 1360x768 did not actually work, but came up as 1024x768. But it is disappointing that the start-up list does not offer 1024x768 or 800x600 alternatives, just basic 640x480. And that once TEENpup has booted into the desktop, there does not seem to be any easy way to switch to other resolutions -- just very geeky Xorg config edit stuff.

Being a big fat pup, TEENpup often has many ways of doing the same thing. Which is mostly good -- if one way does not work, or doesn't work the way you want, there may well be alternatives. The default drive manager-mounter is Pdrive 027, but MUT and Pmount are also available. Pdrive is mostly OK, but got into a confused state where it could neither mount nor dismount some USB drives -- and no drive icons were present either. Pmount was able to recover the situation. USB automount is turned on by default, which can be disconcerting. It does seem possible to turn it off. It auto-mounts a USB drive immediately at the time it is plugged in. But does not mount USB drives that are already plugged in during boot!

As with any new system, there are lots of hidden gems. Try right-clicking anywhere and everywhere to discover handy features.

I was delighted to see the cpu% graph desktop widget. If there were also one for net traffic, we would finally achieve the basic level of functionality any modern OS should have. The bars monitoring RAM usage are nice, but it would be good to also have a parallel graph of remaining RAM space.

The built-in VLC was able to handle most of my sample-media tests, together with the included Real Player after a little install dialog. It seemed a little odd that mp3s default launch to something other than the mp3 player. And that the mp3 player has the "feature" I've experienced in other pups that if you close the app without stopping the audio, the audio continues, with no obvious way to stop it. (Solution: re-open the app, stop the play, then close the app.) Although Real Player is autolaunched for most appropriate media types, .ram files are not properly associated. They do play properly with right-click, open-with, Real Player. But there does not seem to be any user-friendly way to teach the system to remember this association -- just the old-school too-geeky process. There also seemed to be a general problem with volume level in some cases -- it seemed like the audio was being played "too loud" for the output hardware, and distorting; solution: set the volume down at about 10%.

The nice 4.2 Pwireless connection tool does not seem to be included. Instead there is Wireless RutilT which does not work in this case. #dmesg shows RaLink Device unknown RT61 Vendor=0x1814 Product=0x0301. The same wireless PCI card works fine in Puppy 4.x. Plugging in a network wire worked fine after manual DHCP, and later boots auto-connected DHCP some of the time.

Jpeg images open by default in GPicView 0.1.7, which sadly is the standard rather than the customized Puppy version, so no slide show features. Showimg is available, which does a good job showing automatic slideshows of a directory. The main slideshow tool offered is KuickShow, which unfortunately does not have an auto-sequence mode. The wonderful little command-line tool qiv is present, which can easily do an auto slideshow of a directory, for those comfortable with a CLI, as long as the images have already all been rotated properly.

XnView 1.70 is included, which is one of the main reasons I originally became interested in trying TEENpup (for lossless rotation). But it is not properly integrated with handling the various media types. And trying to do a simple auto slideshow of a directory is much much harder than it should be.

There often seems to be a philosophical conflict between "easy accessible" and "good for experienced users". The TEENpup design philosophy seems to be extreme "easy accessible". All main menu items are listed by just generic function phrase. Good luck guessing where XnView is hidden! Hint: nothing to do with graphics or photos. I just can't accept that the system GUI has to be either too-dumb or too-hard. I don't see why each menu item can't list both the function phrase *and* the actual name of the program, like regular Puppy does mostly. If some feel that this would be too scary for some newbies, how about an easy master mode switch on the desktop? Start-up mode would be function-phrase only, one click would add the actual names of the programs, and one more click would be program-name only. It would also be handy to have easy click access to all the desktop applications in one master combined list, alphabetical by name, so that if you knew you wanted XnView, there would be a very simple way to just find it under X.

Quibbles and glitches aside, TEENpup is a fine collection of integrated useful software. It is very tempting to want to help smooth some of the little rough edges... Are there are similar complete full-CD puplets that are 4.x based?

--- test hardware ---
Puppy 4.2.1 says:
eth0: Broadcom 44xx/47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet
Chipset ATI Radeon 8500 AIW BB (AGP) found

4.2.1 PupScan PCI interface information:
DESCRIPTION: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller
VENDOR: 8086 DEVICE: 24c5 KERNEL MODULE: snd-intel8x0
DESCRIPTION: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T
VENDOR: 14e4 DEVICE: 4401 KERNEL MODULE: b44
DESCRIPTION: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
VENDOR: 1814 DEVICE: 0301 KERNEL MODULE: rt61pci

[svgt]

Hello,

I managed these odd starting error messages. I compared the md5sum of download site and my iso-file and the burned cd. Download site and my iso-file were equal. But there were differences with several CD-RWs. K3B shouts that there is something wrong with the original iso-file. In the end the third burned CD-RW was running through with success.

I use the fresh installed TeenPup. I get no broadband connection with PCMCIA. And the system does not recognize a CF-card in an PCMCIA adapter. In the last Puppy Release both were no problems

I hope for a solution.

Regards
Svgt

[john biles]

Hello kethd,
Thank you for what could almost be called a "review" of TEENpup 2009 Legacy.

To kethd and others trying TEENpup, well basically TEENpup is a one man show. I work fulltime, have a young family and try and spend around 20 hours a week on TEENpup.
The time it would take to try and integrate all the applications into one cohesive whole is greater than the free time I have. So there are some ruff edges I would have preferred to have smoothed over but there comes a time when you have to say enough, release this thing as it will be next year if you don't.

I felt that the menu wording would work better for some and worst for others over the standard Puppy layout and stick by it. I will refine the next TEENpup with your thoughts and others in mind.

What is more surprising to me is the number of Hardware related problems users are having. I can't remember this many users having this much trouble when Puppy 2.14 was first released. It's for this reason that work has started on the next release of TEENpup and it will be based on Puppy 4.2.1 or newer.
OH, before I forget, kethd TEENpup has always been created as an install to Hard Drive version of Puppy that can run live. I too have 1GB's of RAM on my main PC so i always run my test versions installed to HD. This is one other reason why I planning an under 300Mb version of TEENpup as the next release.

[davesurrey]

Hello John,
I am sure I'm not alone in marvelling at the quality of TeenPup, but when you say it is a one-man-effort then it's doubly impressive.

Yes there have been some issues with installation/booting. Myself I have had similar error/boot messages as svgt and others but only when I had another puppy 214 on the PC. The solution for me has always (so far at least) been to take off any other 214's and then Teenup has behaved itself. I have read some where on the forum that this is a know issue of 214 or was it 2-series?
When I have more time I'll look into this to see if there is any work around.

In the meantime thanks for the hard work. It was worth it.
Dave

[SergMarkov]

How to switch keyboard layouts, including switching to the Russian layout (selected at startup) in English?

[cheggers]

Hi all, great Pup, really like it but can't get online with it !!

Am currently using MacPup but wanted something for my daughters that had almost everything to prise them off windows.

Alas the Steve Parker script

http://steve-parker.org/speedtouchconf/

I used to get me online with 4.2 and subsequently MacPup doesn't want to play.

Anyone got any clues ?

[RawEnergy]

Hi ya,

Like many others I love the work which comes out of the TEENpup kennels.
I notice with Puppy there seems to be two main ways of connecting to the internet when using a broadband connection. Those like occuring in Muppy work fine with my system.
Acer 3.6Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 230Gb HDD, 128Mb Video. Host system Win7rc, Favourite puppies TEENpup2009, Muppy0084, ChurchPUPrc2 etc running as Live CD/DVDs.

TEENpup (and several other puplets seem to use a different method). TEENpup tells me there is NO connection to the net. I go to the "Network Wizard" and it shows that TEENpup can't find my ethernet card.
I select the SiS190 option (I have also cycled thru all of the drivers listed), but while it says that the driver is already loaded it still does NOT detect the card.
I'd love to use TEENpup but without an internet connection it doesn't fillful my needs.

What I am doing wrong, or NOT doing that I should be. HELP.

Thx.

[john biles]

Hello cheggers,
Can you please supply Hardware details as well as how your trying to connect TEENpup to the internet. For Example; Broadband, Dialup or Wireless?

Just remember TEENpup 2009 Legacy is based on the older 2.14 version of Puppy and not the current 4.2.1 version.

[ttuuxxx]

Hi john Tempestuous update/compiled a wack of Ethernet/wifi driver and had them on a page, I think around page 20 of the 2.14X thread, also Mu has 2 pages of drivers, These might be handy to have the links locally. Just an Idea
ttuuxxx

[cheggers]

Hi, thanks for coming back ...

Anyhoo, am currently running Puppy 4.2 off a Live CD, saving the 2fs file to hard drive, on an old Dell machine, 256MB RAM.

As I mentioned before, I used Steve Parker's speedtouchconf script to get me online with my Thomson Speedtouch 330 USB Modem. I tried each of the suggested microcodes (alcaudsl.sys, KQD6_R204.zip, mgmt.o & rev4fw.zip) until I found the one that worked (rev4fw)

After downloading TeenPup I moved all Macpup files offline so as not to get TeenPup confused and went through the same process; booting into Teenpup with devx_214.sfs and that got the speedtouchconf script working but it crashed out saying there was no microcode in the folder even though the rev4 etc file was there - i tried again with all the other microcodes but got the same result.

Alas I'm stuck with this modem as I'm not in a position to go to ethernet, router or wireless connection.

I'm obviously a bit of a newb but am willing to have a go at most things, am still nipping back to windows as I can't get get_iplayer to work either so its not the end of the world but it would be nice to get online with TeenPup.

Many thanks for your time

[ttuuxxx]

run the program via command line and post the error here
ttuuxxx

[cheggers]

Hi, thanks again for coming back ...

I ran the script as advised and got this ...

If you have any problems with this script, mail me
(steve at steve-parker dot org) with the files
/tmp/speedtouch.txt and (possibly) /var/log/messages for diagnosis.
ERROR: Cannot find microcode
Please place a copy of the Microcode in this directory.
This could be :
- the speedmgmt.tar.gz file from http://www.speedtouchdsl.com/dvrreg_lx.htm
- mgmt.o from speedmgmt.tar.gz
- alcaudsl.sys from the Windows software (Eg C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ALCAUDSL.SYS)
- a .ZIP file (eg ZZZP1.ZIP) from the Windows software
Due to the license, you must obtain this file for yourself.
sh-3.00#

The microcode I used for 4.2 and macpup is in the same folder.

I also looked at the speedtouch.txt and got ...

Starting speedtouchconf.sh script
Version 2.0_12-June-2006
Sun Jul 12 22:44:43 PUP 2009
Called as ./speedtouchconf.sh from /initrd/mnt/dev_save/speedtouchconf-27-Jun-2006
Linux puppypc 2.6.18.1 #1 Thu Feb 1 23:05:39 PUP 2007 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
ERROR: Cannot find microcode

As I say, I'm not too hot on all things Linux so once again and most grateful for all your help and advice.

[earth]

I've been a Linux Hobbyist for about five years, and have tried out at least 30 different distros during that time. On my HP Pavilion a220n, there's always been one or two flaws in every distro, including Ubuntu, that made me wipe it from my hard drive & try another. Ubuntu doesn't recognize my DVD player. SUSE won't play media files from MSNBC. Mint throws off my BIOS clock, etc, etc. Puppy Linux almost worked but won't play HULU movies in full screen. VOILA! TeenPup does it all!!!! And I luv the prominent clock in the upper right-hand corner of the screen! Great work!

[john biles]

Hello earth,
Thank you for your comments, I hope TEENpup continues to be useful for you.
As with any Linux Distro, some Users will like yourself find TEENpup to be compatible with their Hardware and needs while others with experience lots of problems like those who have posted problems here.

To those who are experiencing problems, Sorry!! Hopefully when ¨TEENpup 2010 Mini¨ which is based on Puppy 4.2.1 is released in September all going well you will find a more compatible Distro for your hardware.

[ttuuxxx]

John I wouldn't worry much about it, Teenpup as you've expressed in the past is made for older rigs, If people install the latest wifi modems in a 2006 OS base, who's to blame for the fault? The user for not understanding that the backend is for older rigs, not the latest and greatest. Your 4.2.1 in sept sounds interesting, but If I was, I would build everything in packages or like on a dummy file system, oh you can get one of those dummy file systems at the repo, its basically a puppy file system with all the directories but contain no files, I forget where I seen that, I think pizzasgood made that up.
Anyways the reason for building it that way is well, if you want to use say 4.17 which by that time could be 4.19, It has a better backend but right now its a bit buggy, but being built in a dummy filesystem, you could just drag and drop all you new software/changes all at once and have a new teenpup in minutes. Well just an idea. Kind like how a sfs works.
ttuuxxx

[john biles]

Hello ttuuxxx,
A lot of the work that was done for TEENpup 2009 Legacy has been transfered to the up coming TEENpup 2010 Mini which has saved a lot of time. So in my way of doing things, I should be able to update TEENpup´s base with each new release. TEENpup 2010 Mini will be based on Puppy 4.2.1 and future releases will depend on what´s available at the time which best serves TEENpup´s needs.
ttuuxxx I value your input, suggestions and knowledge, so keep the comments coming.