Adventures with Woof

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Iguleder
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Adventures with Woof

#1 Post by Iguleder »

I made 2 wooflets: both use all 4.3's default packages, kernel 2.6.25.16 and 2 extras:
- desk_icon_theme_stardust
- gtk_theme_stardust_zigbert

The first wooflet was supposed to be an all-in-one wooflet with all modules for maximal hardware support, while the second one was supposed to be a smaller wooflet with all uncommon modules and components removed.

First wooflet: all modules, nothing removed, nothing stripped
- Kernel 2.6.25.16
- SCSI drivers
- "Other" framebuffer modules
- All "exotic" modules
- Seperate zdrv, included in ISO
- Libraries not stripped

Second wooflet: no modules, everything removed, everything stripped
- Kernel 2.6.25.16
- No SCSI drivers
- No "other" framebuffer modules
- All "exotic" modules removed
- Seperate zdrv, included in ISO
- Libraries stripped

The end results:

First wooflet:
- pup-430.sfs: 81 MB
- zp430516.sfs: 24 MB
- pup-430-SCSI.iso: 108 MB

Second wooflet:
- pup-430.sfs: 92 MB
- zp439516.sfs: 9 MB
- pup-430.iso: 104 MB

So ... "bigger" is smaller and better?

The better choice is the first one ... I guess. It's better for older hardware and more-generic hardware.
- Puppy itself occupies only 81 MB, compared to the second's 92 MB.
- Supports SCSI.
- If you run it and understand that you need the extra modules, all you have to "pay" is extra 4 MB over the second wooflet's size. If you don't have any exotic hardware, you can get a 81 MB wooflet, with a smaller memory usage and faster boot.

To test my theory, I made third and fourth wooflets: same as the first and the second, respectively, but this time with kernel 2.6.30.5 and analog modems removed. Same story.

Third wooflet:
- pup-430.sfs: 82 MB
- zp430305.sfs: 25 MB
- pup-430-SCSI.iso: 111 MB

Fourth wooflet:
- pup-430.sfs: 93 MB
- zp430305.sfs: 6 MB
- pup-430.iso: 102 MB

We've got 1 and 3 - the heavyweight guys with all modules, and 2 and 4 - the smaller and less compatible competitors.

So ... If I make a size comparison ... (ascending order, from left to right):
pup-430.sfs: 1, 3, 2, 4
zp430xxx.sfs: 4, 2, 1, 3
pup-430.iso: 4, 2, 1, 3

Time to analyze the results.
- Wooflets with more modules have smaller pup-430.sfs's.
- Wooflets with all modules removed have smaller zdrv's, but that's understandable ... water is wet, less modules occupy less space.
- Wooflets with all modules removed have smaller pup-430.iso's. Again ... 1 and 3 contain heaps of modules, that's understandable.
- Wooflets with 2.6.25.16 are smaller than wooflets with 2.6.30.5. Not such a big difference.

So who's best?
- Generic hardware, old: 1 without zdrv
- Generic hardware, new: 3 without zdrv
- Exotic hardware, old: 1
- Exotic hardware, new: 3

That means that the most functional wooflets are 1 and 3, 2 and 4 seem quite useless.

Now, let's be stupid. I'll give the first place 4 points, second - 3 points and so on, so we can decide who's the winner, the childish way. It's unfair, I know.

1: 4+2+2 = 8
2: 2+3+3 = 8
3: 3+1+1 = 5
4: 1+4+4 = 9

So the winner is 4 (with 9 points) - which is very similar to 430-small.iso by Barry. Unlucky bet ... my favorite was 1.
However, 1 and 2 are very close ... there's a 4 MB difference between their ISO's, but a huge 11 MB difference between their pup-430.sfs's.

(Wrote this from my flash drive 1-wooflet) :wink:

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Lobster
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#2 Post by Lobster »

Have you ever created a puplet?
From early alpha and beta testing, I thought the process of
creating a wooflet (yep a distro of your very own)
was very easy - and I am notoriously inept. :oops:
(ask any fish)

How long did the process take you?
I seem to remember, it took me an hour or two.
Simple instructions all the way through 8)

Did you follow this:
http://puppylinux.com/woof/index.html
or some other info
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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Iguleder
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#3 Post by Iguleder »

Downloading all the packages took about 2.5-3 hours. the ./3builddistro step takes about 10 minutes ... although all the woofination was done on the .25.16 kernel, so it used only 1 CPU (I have a dual-core CPU). It's much faster on .30.5 with SMP.

I read the Woof pages long ago, but they're kinda outdated, so I had to dig inside the scripts.

Woof is really easy, but it needs some GUI to be fully accessible to newbies. Just a xdialog script with "enter the distro name", "enter the version", etc', and a pupget-like dialog for packages.

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clarf
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#4 Post by clarf »

Very interesting read Iguleder, Should be added to Barry's Woof documentation.

Do you know, why a stripped wooflet has a larger pup-430.sfs file?

ndujoe1
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#5 Post by ndujoe1 »

I like your message title, different, scary :)

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playdayz
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Is there a help thread for Woof?

#6 Post by playdayz »

I had a problem with Woof--as I was following the instructions--but I just put it on the back burner, but now I guess I will ask if anyone knows what this means (or I will go to the proper place to ask):

I changed the distro specs to "ubuntu." and then executed 0 and 1. The download took quite a while (~1.5-2+ hours, I wasn't timing) and I got some new files in the Woof directory that look like lists of ubuntu packages.

However, when I went to execute 2createpackages what happened was that first I got the message "preprocessing...." for maybe 10 seconds and then I went right back to the prompt.

From the instructions at http://puppylinux.com/woof/index.html I cannot see what I did wrong. Will appreciate any advice. thanks.

I was in 4.3 with Woof alpha 9 (from the 4.3 directory). 16GB disk space--1GB pup_sav; the Woof folder is in /mnt/home so should have 15GB; 512MB ram.

I did not do this because I was in Puppy 4.3 and assumed it applied to previous versions: "You must be running in a Linux environment. The Linux distro that you are running right now may have inadequate or missing 'dpkg-deb' and 'lzma' utilities. This problem also applies to Puppy Linux <= v4. Place 'support/dpkg-deb' into /bin and 'support/lzma' into /usr/bin, replacing any other versions (first run 'which' to check they aren't existing elsewhere)."

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Iguleder
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Re: Is there a help thread for Woof?

#7 Post by Iguleder »

clarf wrote:Do you know, why a stripped wooflet has a larger pup-430.sfs file?
I guess it's because it leaves modules inside it ... that's the only reason I can think of. :)
When you keep all the extras, I guess it moves them and other modules to the zdrv. Not sure about that ... gotta explore zdrv for that.

:idea: (Adventures with Woof II: Wonders of ZDRV?)
playdayz wrote: However, when I went to execute 2createpackages what happened was that first I got the message "preprocessing...." for maybe 10 seconds and then I went right back to the prompt.

From the instructions at http://puppylinux.com/woof/index.html I cannot see what I did wrong. Will appreciate any advice. thanks.
I first built Pituch (my custom 4.3 :wink: ) on 4.2.1 (with lzma PET installed and devx), then booted it. In both 4.2.1 and 4.3 I did NOT copy dpkg-deb and lzma or whatever it was.

Woof worked out-of-the-box on 4.3, without any additions, just plain 4.3. For the stripping option in the end of 3 you also need the devx.

Use the woof-20090917.tar.gz Woof - here.

It's meant to be used with Puppy as the compatible distro, because all the other package lists are not modified, maybe it will still work, but you may face kernel panics, trouble with some applications ...

:idea: (Adventures with Woof III: The Clash of COMPAT_DISTROs?)



By the way, I'm currently experimenting this wonderful thing. I want to try to woofify a 2-series Puppy for my flash drive to replace or live in peace with my dear Pituch. ttuxxx is already working on improvements for the 2 series, maybe I'll try to make my own "branch", who knows ... it's for personal use, but maybe someone will want it.

I'll do some silly experiments with series 2 too, no worries :)

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ttuuxxx
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#8 Post by ttuuxxx »

well be warned the 2.18 woof has about 6+ dead file links, So you have toedit them out or replace them and, it downloads the wrong kernel for it, its very buggy to get working, took me awhile to figure it out, 5 series is much easier to use the first time,
ttuuxxx
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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Iguleder
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#9 Post by Iguleder »

(OMFG!!! It's ttuuxxx! I'm your fan!) :shock:

Yes, I know that, thanks.

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BarryK
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#10 Post by BarryK »

I'm finally getting some time to read forum posts!

It has been quite a while since I used Woof to build anything other than from the Puppy 4.x "compatible distro" packages. I do need to do some testing of the Debian, Ubuntu builds, etc.

Regarding a GUI for Woof, I have just made a brief post to my blog about that. Yes, it is underway!

I expect it to be a lot more than just a basic GUI. I want it to be useful for newbies as well as for the most advanced users.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

alex12
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#11 Post by alex12 »

BarryK wrote:Regarding a GUI for Woof, I have just made a brief post to my blog about that. Yes, it is underway!

I expect it to be a lot more than just a basic GUI. I want it to be useful for newbies as well as for the most advanced users.
Thanks BarryK.

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