4.4 Pre Alpha test run

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technosaurus
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#21 Post by technosaurus »

re: alsa-streamtuner - libmad needs to be added as a dependency to the package - fixing the dependencies is a big todo list since many packages are missing them ... also pmusic has had significant improvement since 4.2.X and more integrable into the desktop

re: freemem and space - you will find those in Pwidgets (I think?) and they can be turned on or off (alternative is to edit .jwmrc-tray to have them swallowed)

Switching the theme is available in Zigbert's new PCC, but I haven't played with that part much. Yes the terminal and geany are backwards from the traditional setup. Which style is prefered - "backwards", traditional, 4.2.1 style or Barry style?

re: notecase, I had forgotten that I recompiled notecase with text highlighting support (not really much gained there). I can recompile without gtksourceview since geany already has text highlighting and nicoedit was the only other program to use it AFAIK.

re: woof build. I played with woof again last night and it seems to be difficult to use local pets... is there a way to tell woof to use a local repository (a.k.a. a directory full of pets?) it seems silly to upload them so I can download them -- is hiawatha the best answer?
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#22 Post by Béèm »

technosaurus wrote:
Béèm wrote: If builds start with 433, why is yours 431? Is it temporary? Why not pup-4312.sfs if you needed a reference point?
In short, yes it is temporary... thus "Pre" Alpha. I have recompiled almost all of the core software and many of the core libraries that will be needed to update others and needed to confirm non-breakage and hopefully non-regression.

Jemimah has informed me of a fix for abiword browser issue for builds with gtk-2.14+ ... need to make a firefox symlink to defaultbrowser I had tried setting the BROWSER environment variable as documented and required in 2.6 to no avail.... this is great news, since it takes me a whole day to build in 4.2 and I borked up the spell check last time due to the outdated enchant.
That's the answer I was hoping for.
I'll try to test in a closed environment, thus using fully psubdir.
I think in this way there is no confusion possible about the pup-431.sfs with the one I have already.
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#23 Post by technosaurus »

regarding the psubdir parameter - I have been using it as long as I can remember without problems... is there any reason that it should not be included by default for a frugal install?
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#24 Post by Jim1911 »

Psubdir works for me and I always have at least 7 different frugal pup installations.

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#25 Post by technosaurus »

I uploaded a DEV pet and DOC.sfs and NLS.sfs if anyone is interested

I would really like to see a patch to woof to allow DOC>DOC and NLS>NLS (their own sfs) instead of having to send them to null (discarded) unless they are explicity put in the pup or devx sfs via the DOC>EXE or NLS>DEV in the config

http://puppy-development.googlecode.com ... LS_431.sfs
http://puppy-development.googlecode.com/files/DEV.pet
http://puppy-development.googlecode.com ... OC_431.sfs

note that these are only for the packages that I have added or updated
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#26 Post by technosaurus »

notecase fixed
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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#27 Post by Lobster »

Which style is preferred - "backwards", traditional, 4.2.1 style or Barry style?
I prefer something in the menu system
that evolves from existing Puppys into Dpup (part of Puppy 5)
for a variety of reasons, including ease of use and support

My new Radeon card was recognized and supported (HD 4350)
from the start :)

Sound worked and overall everything felt as if it had a solid working basis. For example the control center :)

Added link to this thread on 4.4 'Woofy' wiki page
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy44
Last edited by Lobster on Fri 26 Feb 2010, 07:32, edited 1 time in total.
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#28 Post by DaveS »

The really dark themeing should be an option, but not the default. It is much harder to see if your eyesight is a bit poor or aged, and could cause problems for those who are colour blind. On a technical note, the brighter the screen, the more the pupil stops down and the sharper the perceived image. As an optician, I showed both options to a random sample of patients with less than perfect vision, and all could see the 'normal' 4.3.1 more easily.
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#29 Post by Béèm »

As for the psubdir usage:
I use the Lin'N'Win method and some 20 puppies are in the ntfs partition in their respective directories.
I don't want to use nts, just for the boot only.
So my pupsave files are on a different fat partition.
If I use constantly psubdir I write to ntfs and the pupsave's are separated, which I don't want.
I didn't have a problem to boot without psubdir=. I just to have take care that if same pup-xxx.sfs files are used, the correct one is available in /mnt/home.

Having said that here my experience so far with this pre alpha.

I boot with pfix=ram for a first time.
I never got the questions about keyboard, timezone, locale, and graphic environment (xorg - xvesa)
Don't know if this intended.
When the desktop came up (after the install phase) I was in 800x600 xvesa. Could change to 1024x768. But still xvesa. Didn't try yet to use xorg via xorgwizard (if this still exists)
Then I found out my keyboard was wrong so I had to use the control panel (a nice one) to set my keyboard to Belgium.
From the menu I couldn't start programs like rox, rxvt, seamonkey and much more.
I can go to rox via the home icon, so I can browse the file system.
From rox I could also open a terminal and start seamonkey.
Network configured ok with pwireless2 so I am able to type this now with 4.4 pre alpha.

So not being able to use the menu system is a real show stopper.

The second one is that at shutdown I never got the panel to say yes I want to save to a save file. (even if I booted with psubdir=) This is a long outstanding issue for quite some people as I have read in the forum. I directly get the message: Session not saved.

I know how to create an empty pup save, but this isn't the normal way of operation.

I hope there are solutions for this issue.

EDIT
Well well.
I did ctrl-alt-backspace and typed xorgwizard
I got the msg: keyboard be doesn't match the xorg layout. report to BK.

So I changed to us.
I got the msg: keyboard us doesn't match the xorg layout. report to BK.

So unable to configure xorg apparently.
My Thinkpad R40 has a ATI Radeon 6500 controller.
No support for this one?
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#30 Post by Jim1911 »

DaveS wrote:The really dark themeing should be an option, but not the default. It is much harder to see if your eyesight is a bit poor or aged, and could cause problems for those who are colour blind. On a technical note, the brighter the screen, the more the pupil stops down and the sharper the perceived image. As an optician, I showed both options to a random sample of patients with less than perfect vision, and all could see the 'normal' 4.3.1 more easily.
All developers need to read and heed this advice.

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#31 Post by Béèm »

Béèm wrote:As for the psubdir usage:
I use the Lin'N'Win method and some 20 puppies are in the ntfs partition in their respective directories.
I don't want to use nts, just for the boot only.
So my pupsave files are on a different fat partition.
If I use constantly psubdir I write to ntfs and the pupsave's are separated, which I don't want.
I didn't have a problem to boot without psubdir=. I just to have take care that if same pup-xxx.sfs files are used, the correct one is available in /mnt/home.

Having said that here my experience so far with this pre alpha.

I boot with pfix=ram for a first time.
I never got the questions about keyboard, timezone, locale, and graphic environment (xorg - xvesa)
Don't know if this intended.
When the desktop came up (after the install phase) I was in 800x600 xvesa. Could change to 1024x768. But still xvesa. Didn't try yet to use xorg via xorgwizard (if this still exists)
Then I found out my keyboard was wrong so I had to use the control panel (a nice one) to set my keyboard to Belgium.
From the menu I couldn't start programs like rox, rxvt, seamonkey and much more.
I can go to rox via the home icon, so I can browse the file system.
From rox I could also open a terminal and start seamonkey.
Network configured ok with pwireless2 so I am able to type this now with 4.4 pre alpha.

So not being able to use the menu system is a real show stopper.

The second one is that at shutdown I never got the panel to say yes I want to save to a save file. (even if I booted with psubdir=) This is a long outstanding issue for quite some people as I have read in the forum. I directly get the message: Session not saved.

I know how to create an empty pup save, but this isn't the normal way of operation.

I hope there are solutions for this issue.

EDIT
Well well.
I did ctrl-alt-backspace and typed xorgwizard
I got the msg: keyboard be doesn't match the xorg layout. report to BK.

So I changed to us.
I got the msg: keyboard us doesn't match the xorg layout. report to BK.

So unable to configure xorg apparently.
My Thinkpad R40 has a ATI Radeon 6500 controller.
No support for this one?
Just in case I want to create an empty save file, what is the correct name?
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
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problems

#32 Post by bigpup »

Beem,

I think a lot of your problems are being caused by start-up seeing saved files and SFS files, from other puppies you have, and using them for settings. The indication of this is your statement:
I never got the questions about keyboard, timezone, locale, and graphic environment (xorg - xvesa)
The second one is that at shutdown I never got the panel to say yes I want to save to a save file.
You say you stat with puppy pfix=ram, but are you sure this command is being followed?
I boot with pfix=ram for a first time.
I just booted with no saved files or SFS files, on my computer, and I got none of the problems you had.

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Color Themes

#33 Post by bigpup »

bigpup wrote:
Zigbert,

In Puppy package manager:

select configure package manager
select update now
see download databases

The font and background color, make it very hard to see the wording in this screen.(download databases)

Is your color themes causing this?
It is very clear that Barry and zigbert does agree in many things, but the design taste seems to be somewhat different. YES, my color-scheme causes this. Smile

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#34 Post by Jim1911 »

So far this distribution has been very stable, although right now it is hard to distinguish it from Stardust-011.

Problems noted:
1. Drive icons do not show up on the desktop, although appropriate boxes are selected using the Control Center.
2. Only generic icons are showing for file, my_links, and Drives on the Desktop. The trash icon is correct.

Please consider adding the capability to Mouse/Keyboard Settings in the Puppy Control Center, an option to turn the NumLock key on/off.

Thanks,
Jim

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#35 Post by technosaurus »

There were issues with the drive icons piling up that I couldn't fix right away, thus drive icon instead.
The icons get built automatically at boot and can have issues if you have a pupsave file... zigbert is working out issues with the stardust installer. We should probably set a preinstalled icon theme to avert this any input on a default icon theme?

Some people wanted the full homebank with all of the libofx and openSP dependencies, but they ended up being huge. I finally grokked it down to a 660kb pet by compiling them statically. I don't know if it is any better or worth the more than tripling in size.

here is an example file to test:
http://homebank.free.fr/public/example_file.tar.gz
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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Re: 4.4 Pre Alpha test run

#36 Post by Lobster »

technosaurus wrote:I am announcing the initial Pre-Alpha release of the 4.4 CE for testing and comments.
Noob warning when testing Always boot up with puppy pfix=ram - to not mess with your other save files/installation

This is very much about the look and feel
- it may be too early for that . . .
:oops:

4.4 pre-alpha came as quite a shock to me as it was radically different
and there was no way to make it familiar
The menu arrangement was different
The wizards had gone
- burniso2cd had gone (I hope it returns as it is simple to use and works)
The recent experimental woof build 4.3.2 from Barry was far more familiar
- I believe the intention is to use 4.3.2 to build the first Alpha from
Possibly the new kernel compile when available?

Personally I turned off the pwidget bar - never having found it useful
(I know a lot of people like it)

What I did like and was very impressed with was the ability to
have Ati radeon drivers running right from the start
and I hope the Nvidia graphic drivers work in
any new kernel compile that Barry plans on his return

Also there was a consistency (heavy reliance on the control panel to run the missing wizards)
and stability that is very promising at this stage.

The wbar on the top with the ability to change the mood/theme
is very much simpler than the convoluted access to the desktop
sometimes required
- it was cute - I liked it :)

However (again this is personal) I prefer the icons on the desktop and in Dpup I do not use the wbar
even though at first I thought it a great feature
and always turned it on in Dpup

Another two features
I am glad to see use of one browser. Quite often I find MU's subset Browser used for reading HTML is distracting and I need the power of the full browser.
Also be interested how others who make extensive use of pdf feel about using Abiword - this makes perfect sense to me . . .

I hope those comments are useful
- they are not meant to criticise the excellent Pwidget and other preferences people have - just my personal impression
:)
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#37 Post by 8-bit »

I want my desktop drive icons back!
The control panel options for them do NOT work.
Also, how do I get the original background color back in geany and rxvt?
Black does not cut it for me.
I left that when I left the DOS environment.
There should also be a working option to have or not have desktop icons.
Some with fancy desktop background images would just as soon not have icons on the desktop.
But some of us do.

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#38 Post by ttuuxxx »

Quote"+ Pmusic (- aqualung)"
Hmmmm CE versions in general are a bit larger than main releases, Usually they have extras that most users will enjoy, Pmusic is not a good replacement for aqualung, BMP by far is the better choice, If you like I compiled it on 4.31 for Stardust http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 070#388070 Which includes Tap and ladspa, below that post is mp4, and on the next page is WMA plugin.

If you want the sources they are located http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 4679c8d411

I personally like desktop icons, Never had the time for wbar type applications or Widgets etc, I think anything that takes resources and is covered up 99.9% of time is a waste of resources.

Also Where is the mandatory screenshot ???

gcolor2 is really handy for anyone who does graphics, and puppy has a lot of users who do graphics.

Uget by far is the best GUI for wget, there's even a seamonkey plugin for it :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/201 <---SM2

Quote"update Rox without the running as root message " You have to manually edit the C code to do that, Its pretty easy :)

didiwiki well some people really like that application, I've never really used it but still include it to keep the masses happy :)

Also wouldn't 4.3.2 be the best base for this ? http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewCat=Puppy&p=2 It would be like continuing 4 series, since Barry only made that version as a one off.
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Puppy 44

#39 Post by tronkel »

Nice work - awesome really.

I like the look of the un-cluttered desktop minus all of the usual Puppy standard icons personally speaking. The dark look seems to be ubiquitous over many linux distros at the moment.

Initially had problems getting the Ralink WLAN card recognised. The rt73usb module was loaded all right, but did not get recognised by the standard network wizard at all.

I downloaded Jemimah's latest Pwireless2 and installed that. After getting rid of older profiles and also starting with a fresh pup_save file, Pwireless2 then saw the card interface as wlan0 and displayed the wireless access points OK. After acquiring the DHCP IP lease it the seemed to work ok. Big kudos to Jemimah for Pwireless2 (and Puppee - I use it all the time for work).

The three desktop icons disappeared on booting from a pup_save. Hardly urgent at the moment. Better left to the point where the final Woof tree is frozen when these little niggles can can get sorted out all at the same time.

The look of the desktop reminds me of WhoDo's final Puppy 4.2 to some extent - so that project has played its part as well.

How do you explain to Puppy newcomers what version is better to install? Huge choice nowadays - and growing.

edit: The ATI Radeon driver worked fine with my Radeon 3450 series card. This is a BIG help - so well done.
Last edited by tronkel on Sun 28 Feb 2010, 10:59, edited 3 times in total.
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#40 Post by technosaurus »

@ttuuxx As for Pmusic vs. any other defaultaudio player - it has the best integration with Puppy's desktop environment and a growing set of features - I definitely prefer bmp to aqualung (I also prefer audio to automatically start playing and not have a tray icon for every file that was ever opened) In fact in Seamonkey I have aplay set up as my default audio player, because I don't want to bother with any controls while I am browsing (however I realize that I am probably in the minority on that issue)
gcolor2 can go back - I don't want to stunt any progress in graphics, we still need a default theme and background
Rox running as root - I guess I could just remove it altogether as before but it seems like it was intended to be set up to turn on and off (with rox -u), but the off side was never finished for root - but maybe it is just a redundancy
didiwiki is fairly small so it can come back too - I saved more space than I thought with my recompiles and image optimization with optipng
speaking of optipng it will be new to the DEVx and maybe patched into the new2dir script if I can figure out a good way to do it - it saves several kb per gui pet. I will probably include rdfind also for puplet creators to check for duplicate files.
I am using woof-tree as the future base - still working things out for newer packages that require new templates and redoing some patches that were not incorporated yet

As for popular favorite programs - firefox, bmp, openoffice, java, qt, sdl, etc... I will adapting the part of web desktop to point to choicepup style sfs and pet packages for those and hosting most of them (<100MB ones) on the google code site for easy installation without even having to use petget.

since petbegone no longer works with woof builds- we need to put together a script that will list all of the files in a .pet so that we can rm -f $oneline (for oneline in package.files) I just haven't had the time to bash it together - volunteers welcome.

the desktop icons started piling up again so I commented out the fixpuppypin and pupeventfrontend in /root/.xinitrc and temporarily added the single pmount icon - in the future the drive icons will be turned off and on similar to how glipper is now (turns on if a hidden file exists)... this could be applied to all auto-starting daemons such as cups, pwidgets ... even rox (for the really lowend machines)
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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