puppy2alpha available for testing

[Guest]

Testing should be done by experienced users but when i read about certain features i had to try it because i'm having hardware problems with other vesrions.
with that out of the way (and also to have an excuse for the following stupid question) :
I used linld to run it because i don't have cd burner and it went well but i thought Mr.Barry said it will have both modems packages already installed?! well i had to mount the drive where i have saved and tested and it worked .
To get to the point ,i saved settings then when run it again and tried to get few files and documents from the drive i started it from (hda1)
it was mounted with this line (/inited/mnt/dev_save)
here comes the stupid question:

How do i access hda1 with the files i had ?
sorry if my question is not clear but what do you expect from a noob

[BarryK]

I tried to use the new puppy on a couple of usb drives formatted as fat32 using syslinux and while it did pick up the vmlinuz and initrd.gz it then failed to find and load the pup003.sfs and tried to abort but just hung
one of the messages was that it was trying to load in mode 1 which struck me as odd
Is it a firm requirement that the usb drive be formatted as a "superfloppy" with ext2/3 because if that is the case then that is a showstopper as far as my needs are concerned
maybe I could try partitioning the one of the usb's but i dont really want to do that

No, superfloppy is just another option.

Did you put "PMEDIA=usbflash" into the syslinux.cfg file?

Yeah, mode 1 is wrong. That means nothing was found, no pup_003.sfs,
and only the tmpfs ramdisk exists in the unionfs layers.
In the PUPMODE variable, each bit is a flag. If pup_003.sfs is found, that will change PUPMODE to 1 + 4 = 5.

[edoc]

I read somewhere that there was a possibility of replacing Sylpheed with Seamonkey or whatever is the followup to the Mozilla Suite.

Rant Mode On
I HATE Sylpheed!
It is ugly, incompatible with other E-mail apps, lacks common settings by
default (e.g. autocomplete of addresses), forgets settings (e.g. when threading of E-mails is toggled off it somehow gets turned back on), etc.

Even more importantly my wife
HATES Sylpheed!

I really don't want to lose her long suffering toleration of the hardware foibles
of various Linux distros over many years because of an unfriendly E-mail app. in Puppy.

So I plead for a more user friendly Internet suite in Puppy2. ;-\

Thanks! doc

[kethd]

First try of Puppy2alpha / 0.0.3 / 2.4.31-lck1
LiveCD 15feb06

tested on K7S5A mbd, AMD Duron 1GHz
256MB, no hard drive
NEC ND-3540A DVD burner (using CDs)
built-in sound intel8x0? SiS? C-Media?

*PAUSES
There seem to be some short test pauses in the boot process. Fine -- but it would be nice if pauses always allowed <ENTER> to force immediate continuation.

*KEYBOARD SELECTION
It still forces the same old keyboard selection menu, with the apparent azerty default. Since I boot over and over to test, with no persistent configuration, it sure would be nice to cut down on keystrokes and let me just hit enter to get default us-qwerty, or any usable english-qwerty.

*SOUND ???
I have never used Puppy Sound. We are moving forwards. Sort of.
Now the boot process claims to find:
intel8x0 00:02.7 Class 0401: 1039:7012 (rev a0)
ALSA ? but when it sequences through the config scripts, it gets to a point where it says it is going to play a test sound, and then aborts silently. Trying the wizard later gets the same result.
The usability of the sound later is somewhat. The snack applications seem to work, and gxine does have some sound. But the player that launches from an audio CD pretends to play with no sound output, and no volume control.

*XORG video
Xorg still seems to work. Defaults seem OK. But the test desktop used is the old version, not the new p2 version. And for those of us who will be doing this over and over, it would be nice to be able to just say "go ahead with these settings" instead of having to validate/test them again every time we boot.

*** inside the desktop ***

*HELP - HOW TO WRITE PROGRAMS
The BusyBox link is malformed. Change BusyBox.htm to busybox.htm.
The C/C++ section at the end looks to have carried over obsolete references to pup001/usr_devx details.

*NO vi help?

*RAMDISK
The default ramdisk on a 256MB system is just half. Which leaves 61MB free. Which is painfully not quite enough to hold the iso of the next version of Puppy for burning. Which forces work-arounds painful for newbies. Please increase the default ramdisk size for 256MB systems -- to something like three-quarters.

*BURNISO2CD
I used 107 to burn 2a onto CD. Then I tried to used that 2a to burn another 2a. Did not work - Burniso2cd tried and failed early in the burn. I could not read the messages because the script immediately went on to the next screen, probably thinking things were fine. Where is the log file? Users needs those messages to stay on-screen if there are any problems. I looked in dmesg, /var/log/messages and /tmp/xerrs.txt. Those might be interesting, but not the same as the messages during the burn attempt.
Also, it seems like the messages always say "BURN-Free is ON. Turning BURN-Free off". Why is this feature turned off, and what if you wanted it on?
(Since I hate to burn coasters, even on CD-RW, I will probably not try to burn again in p2a until I hear of successes from others. And when a CD-RW is burned just slightly at the beginning, is there a way to erase just that little part, or does the whole CD have to be erased always?)

*GPLAYCD
It is very easy to stick in an audio CD and launch GPlayCD. But there is no volume control, and no sound at all comes out on this test system. The CD does pretend to play.
It is very weird that once Puppy decides an audio CD has been loaded, the mount tools seem to refuse to even try to mount it manually.

*GXINE DVD PLAYING
Put in a DVD and gxine is easy to launch to try to play it. The video seems pretty good to someone with no experience playing DVDs on computers, but there does seem more jerkiness than there should be. 1GHz should be enough horsepower to play a DVD smoothly!? The sound is worse than the video. It is pleasantly surprising to have sound at all, but it is jerky, and sometimes badly out of sync with the video.

*HOW PUPPY WORKS
This is a critical resource, and it is great that it is being kept up to date online. It would be good to include it within Puppy too, at least the text. I can't quite make sense of the new mode numbering -- octal? base3.14159...? And trying to cover all of new and old Puppy together is too large and unwieldy for one web page -- better to break in two.

[cherriepuppy]

hi got pupp2 hd1 insttall on toshiba portege 7010, boots up ok but had to use xorgconfig to set up video due to usual neomagic graphics chip. seems quicker than 107. like others i have got probleml with ndiswrapper not working.

cherriepuppy

[Lobster]

I read somewhere that there was a possibility of replacing Sylpheed with Seamonkey or whatever is the followup to the Mozilla Suite.

Rant Mode On
I HATE Sylpheed!

I think it is excellent for what it does. Compact and very fast. It is in Puppy "Singer" 1.0.8 beta

Would the Seamonkey option be better? It is more complete and robust. However from years ago (using it with Netscape) I can also say that after a few months emails can be lost. Outlook Express did this too and I eventually swapped to Eudora (in Windows this is) and then Foxmail and finally Thunderbird.
If Thunderbird is being backported and developed into Seamonkey then all well and good - assuming it is robust with heavy usage. How robust it is will take time to know. It is also (I suspect) that the problems with losing email were to do with Windows file structure or similar kludgery and NOT the email program.

I feel Sylpheed is great for slim Pups and occasional usage but the difficulty of playing about with the filters means for a lot of email a more working program is required.
In principle Sylpheed is right for Puppy. In practice the Seamonkey built in option may be better long term with Sylpheed as a .pup as MU has also intimated.

[vern72023]

Did you put "PMEDIA=usbflash" into the syslinux.cfg file?

that worked i did get a succesfull boot and save so .... but real slow off my usb like 4mins 20secs compared to 55sec for 1.07 and the shutdown times were just as long
Other item is that during the boot it said that it was looking for more .sfs files but it did not oick up the usr_more.sfs that was in the root of the device.
would these need a different naming convention.

Lastly seamonkey blew out for me - most of the extensions and themes on the mozilla site fail with incorrect versioning - and RSS is not working at all - in fact seamonkey is a very poor relation to firefox and thunderbird and would be the first thing to go

[flavour]

I was quite anti-Sylpheed at first, wanting the 'standard' Thunderbird, which I can use in both Linux & Windows environments.
However, I've found it meets my needs just fine
- runs very fast & is a perfect Puppy-fit.

I would vote for base Puppy including Sylpheed & Firefox, with Thunderbird as a PupGet option...

F

[Marv]

Another hand up for Sylpheed. It works will, loads quickly, and does what most people need for email. A very good fit for puppy.

[edoc]

I was quite anti-Sylpheed at first, wanting the 'standard' Thunderbird, which I can use in both Linux & Windows environments.
However, I've found it meets my needs just fine
- runs very fast & is a perfect Puppy-fit.

I would vote for base Puppy including Sylpheed & Firefox, with Thunderbird as a PupGet option...

F

I think we have to accept the reality that our reality is not that of the
average user who has been conditioned to XP or Apple, they will not
gladly tolerate apps that require high levels of user tweaking.

Sylpheed is an app for geeks. We can work our ways around it but not
expect non-geeks to.

Firefox/Thunderbird or Seamonkey or Opera are for the average user.

If Firefox/Thunderbird or Seamonkey or Opera are easily available via
a Pupget then Puppy is good for geeks and regular users alike, otherwise
the acceptance of Puppy by the average user will be impaired.

IMHO, YMMV ... doc

[Nevermore]

just gave a fast try to puppy 2.0 alpha and it works fine.
it takes a bit longer to boot but once booted is alot faster.
only thing, i didn't see that much difference

[Flash]

Good job, Barry. I've only given it a quick try but Puppy 2a works fine for me. Skype quit working in 1.0.8 and still doesn't work in 2a, but now Gizmo does work and so far I like it better than Skype. It's louder, and voicemails are included in the price (free.) I hope 2a works well as multisession DVD.

[guest]

I am happy with Sylpheed, except it sounds like some horrible genital disease.

[Nathan F]

I just installed Puppy2alpha to my old Compaq with a 200MHZ Pentium MMX and 48MB RAM. Running great but there were problems installing Grub. Grubconfig took all the values and then froze on the 'working' message indefinately. Retried with the same results. I had to reboot with my Vector disk and reinstall Lilo to get a working boot from HD.

Overall very pleasing, however. Sound working now and video working at 800x600 using Xvesa, Xorg was a no-go on this machine (not surprising). I used Pup-be-gone to remove a bunch of applications and manually removed Seamonkey in favor of Opera, which takes about half the time to start. Runs about the same speed on a full install as my old 104 installation did, which is a great deal faster than anything else could. I've got it cut right down to essentials now. Unleashed packages seem to install just fine using Pupget, removed cleanly using Pup-be-gone. I'll do some testing on uninstalling using Pupget but I'm thinking this will need some revision for Puppy2, as things are removed from /root/.usr currently (which doesn't exist in Puppy2).

It was also working quite well from the live cd. Not much performance difference that way since most of it was cached in my swap partition instead of physical memory.

Nathan