Introducing PULP - 125 MB Puplet for older hardware

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
Message
Author
sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

battery monitor

#201 Post by sindi »

My DELL Inspiron 8100 does not work with the Pulp battery monitor (apm) - I get a blank terminal window with no information in it.

I wrote a script /usr/local/bin/bat which is
cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/bat

My 8100 has no battery 0 so I used BAT1. You could have a bat0 and bat1.
(I think the floppy drive can theoretically be exchanged for another battery).

What file do I edit to replace the script that tries to display apm battery status when I left or riight click on the little picture of the battery at screen top (tray?). How about the ones at screen bottom?

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

xine works where mplayer does not

#202 Post by sindi »

Mplayer was working on my Compaq Presario 1200 AMD-K6 3D 375MHz laptop
then suddenly no longer worked (missing /dev/dsp as with the DELL).
Download xine for Puppy 4 and associated packages and xine works but
only as GUI. Is there a CLI xine usable with Pulp/Puppy 4.12?

User avatar
Colonel Panic
Posts: 2171
Joined: Sat 16 Sep 2006, 11:09

Re: Pulp 0.1 with maestro3 driver; browser memory

#203 Post by Colonel Panic »

sindi wrote:DELL Inspiron 7000 and 8100 mplayer cannot find
audio device /dev/dsp so no sound. Both use maestro3
(I don't recall which ess chip - es1988 and others
use this ALSA driver for sound and modem).
I had to install xine to use for mp3 playing.

HP Pavilion n5415 uses the same driver, and mplayer works.
DELL and HP may use different ess chips.

Someone reported that ALSA driver has a bug starting in
kernel 2.6.24 but mplayer won't work on the DELLs in
pulp (2.6.21.7) or puppy with 2.6.30 kernel, for
their machine (with 00.0d.0 elspci -l output, whereas
the HP has 00.08.0 - did not check the DELLs yet)

Anyway, be prepared for mplayer not to play ALSA sound
with maestro3 driver, on certain laptops.

I have added lynx and links2 and nano to pulp.

Which battery monitor program do we have, and how do
I figure out what the other programs are linked with
the other icons at the top?

I installed both seamonkey (2.0.14) and Firefox 6
outside the file system - just unpack to /mnt/home
and run from the directory (cd /seamonkey then ./seamonkey).
Takes a bit longer to load (but pulp probably boots faster).

Seamonkey can be set to store its cache outside
the puppy/pulp file system (preferences, advanced, cache).
Does the save file load into memory? If not, this is
irrelevant.

Firefox6 uses a lot of memory (in /root/.mozilla/firefox)
to store information about fraudulent websites - turn off
that feature in preferences, security - uncheck 2 boxes -
about reported attack sites and web forgeries and delete
urlclassifier3.sql (it can get huge). Firefox 2 (bon echo)
has this feature greyed out (turned off) already.
Advanced, general, override automatic cache management,
delete history on exit. (Firefox 2 Advanced, set Cache size).

The firefox directory is now down to 8MB including addons,
from nearly 50MB, with cache cleared.
Thanks for the advice here Sindi. I'm posting from Flock right now (which was based on Firefox) but have unchecked some of these boxes anyway.

BTW, I believe I remember you from the Basic Linux site. Amazing distro for old computers wasn't it? Hope all's well with you.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#204 Post by greengeek »

Sindi - it sounds as if you have managed to update quite a bit of pulp 0.1

Any chance of posting a new iso somewhere for me to download and trial?

many thanks

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

Pulp 01

#205 Post by sindi »

I don' t have a new iso, just my save file for pulp which changes the original sfs file. I have made different changes to pulp on various laptops. Some of the files are outside the file system (browsers). It is rather a mess. Can you just follow my postings and make your own customized version? Pulp boots much faster than Puppy.

I was just able to unthrottle the speed in Puppy 4.3.1 using a cpu frequency tool which pulp does not have. Anyone know how to add it to pulp? DELL laptops have (had, anyway) a clever setup in which the laptop and the power supply had to recognize each other (OEM power supply required) and if either chip (or maybe wire) went bad, the computer speed is throttled to minimum. My D600 runs at 40% of maximum speed with pulp but 100% with puppy 4.3.1, now that I have reset the min to the max CPU speed.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

cpufreq

#206 Post by sindi »

Used to unthrottle speed of a DELL D600 with hardware
problem. See my posting related to the D600 and unthrottling.
Two modules and one script that echoes the correct cpu speeds
to some files in /sys/. Back from 600MHz to 1600MHz.
Windows requires some huge slow programs to accomplish the same.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

/root/Startup

#207 Post by sindi »

/root/Startup contains a README.txt
then another ./Startup with README.txt
which should be deleted.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

pulp xpdf segfaults

#208 Post by sindi »

/usr/local/etc/xpdfrc supplied with pulp looks by default for fonts in
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts

pulp has /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts which is a symlink to /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1

It also has the required fonts in /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts

The AbiSuite fonts that are duplicated in /usr/share/fonts could be
deleted to save space, and symlinked to the other fonts.

One fix for the segfaulting xpdf is

mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript
mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
ln -s /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
(And probably get rid of /usr/share/ghostscript unless something else uses it).

Or you could edit xpdfrc by removing the # in front of all the lines pertaining
to fonts and deleting /local/ (change to /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts)

or changing /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
to /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1
or to /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts

When I edited xpdfrc, xpdf (run from an rxvt) no longer complained
about not being able to create Times New Roman, but it still segfaults.
Any ideas?

I tried installing xpdf 3.02 but after downloading it, I can't find it.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

pulp and pdf files

#209 Post by sindi »

A workaround for xpdf segfaulting (on a D600 DELL) even
after fixing the fonts in xpdfrc, is pdftoppm
pdftoppm filename.pdf > filename.ppm
(or look up the switches for converting to mono .pbm).

View with xli (or convert to gif and view with browser)
xli is showing me only the upper left part of the image.
??

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

pdf viewing in pulp

#210 Post by sindi »

Install gPDF extension in Opera 11 (Opera 12 seems not to play Youtube) which uses Google Docs to display pdf files (quickly). Said to display other Google Doc formats as well such as ppt and docx.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

xpdf

#211 Post by sindi »

xpdf 3.01 (2005) no longer works properly, or segfaults,
on many pdfs (pdf 1.6, increasingly common)
I don't know why pulp uses such an old version. 3.02 is
2007 and supports pdf 1.6 and 1.7

Download 3.03 (Aug 2011) from
ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdfbin- ... .03.tar.gz

17MB download at 26K/sec contains binaries (static for
motif and freetype) for bin64 and bin32. xpdf is now 9MB

Contains also pdfimages, etc. and doc files.

pulp has all the dependencies, and it worked on a pdf that
3.01 scrambled.

First I tried Google Docs pdf reader, which worked as badly
as 3.01.

epdfview binary that I found online requires gtk+ 2.6 and
we have 2.0

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

Opera 12.10

#212 Post by sindi »

Pulp uses glibc 2.6 - can it be upgraded to glibc 2.8?

Opera 12.02 youtube is broken. I waited for the bugs to be fixed in 12.10 and today tried 12.11. It requires glibc 2.8, as users of Puppy 4.31 and many other linuxes are complaining of at the opera forum (they should have waited until version 13 to break compatibility, people say). I switched to pulp from Basiclinux so I could use Opera newer than 9 because glibc could not be upgraded without a newer kernel, which I never managed to compile usably.

Youtube works in 11.52 - but keeps restarting videos after you have watched for half hour or so and the fix is to restart Opera. A youtube downloader would fix that problem but I don't have a fast enough connection to download long videos. Any other ideas how to use Youtube with older Opera? SMPlayer for Windows can be used to view Youtube directly without a browser.

After exiting Opera, Alt-F1 does not work until you click on the menu first.

User avatar
Colonel Panic
Posts: 2171
Joined: Sat 16 Sep 2006, 11:09

Re: xpdf

#213 Post by Colonel Panic »

sindi wrote:xpdf 3.01 (2005) no longer works properly, or segfaults,
on many pdfs (pdf 1.6, increasingly common)
I don't know why pulp uses such an old version. 3.02 is
2007 and supports pdf 1.6 and 1.7

Download 3.03 (Aug 2011) from
ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdfbin- ... .03.tar.gz


17MB download at 26K/sec contains binaries (static for
motif and freetype) for bin64 and bin32. xpdf is now 9MB

Contains also pdfimages, etc. and doc files.

pulp has all the dependencies, and it worked on a pdf that
3.01 scrambled.

First I tried Google Docs pdf reader, which worked as badly
as 3.01.

epdfview binary that I found online requires gtk+ 2.6 and
we have 2.0
Thanks for that Sindi, I didn't know there was a 3.03 version of Xpdf. I'm downloading it now.

BTW, I remember you from the Basic Linux forum; you're a translator aren't you? I hope all's well with you.

I have fond memories of Basic Linux btw; with Opera 5 added it enabled me to do pretty much everything I wanted to do back then even on a Pentium 100 with 32 MB of RAM.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

glibc upgrade

#214 Post by sindi »

I found several links to deb packages for glibc 2.11 in puppy forums but they are all broken. Has anyone successfully upgraded glibc to 2.8 or later in Pulp, which comes with 2.6? Opera 12.02 is the last version not requiring 2.8 or later.

I cannot figure out which package to use from the Deb site.

sindi
Posts: 1087
Joined: Sun 16 Aug 2009, 13:30
Location: Ann Arbor MI USA

Yahoo mail with Pulp 01

#215 Post by sindi »

I recently hinstalled pulp on a friend's 233MHz Compaq Prosignia after
upgrading the memory to 158MB (I added a 128MB DIMM) so it could run
something other than Win98. First I tried the Puppy 4.31 LiveCD and
there was not enough RAM to run a browser. Pulp uses a lot less RAM so
I installed it instead.

Opera 10.63 works with yahoo mail. I did not try 11 or 12.02 (12.10
needs glibc 2.8), assuming they would use more memory. I tweaked Opera
as suggested at several sites to use less than the 117% of RAM it was
using at Yahoo. It now starts off using only about 50% of RAM. First,
boot it with:

opera -nolirc -noargb -nomail

argb - 32-bit visuals (I also set pulp to use 16-bit color)

lirc - infrared control (what does this have to do with browsing?) not
sure what if anything nomail does - not check for mail? (If you don't
have mail set up this may be irrelevant)

Turn off animated gifs, sound in web pages, set RAM cache to 4MB instead
of automatic, limit to 2 simultaneous connections instead of 8, etc.

(Search on "Opera less RAM").

I logged in and poked around a few times and used block content to keep
opera from displaying the ads. There were different ad providers each
time I logged in. Opera 10 does not do extensions (such as adblock).
Enable plugins only on demand (content) stops Yahoo from playing flash
movies, which the friend hated and which waste RAM. Set Opera site
preferences (advanced, content) to accept cookies from Yahoo then set
Opera not to accept cookies. (Add any other sites you want to log into
such as paypal or ebay).

Opera 11 is using about 100MB of memory at the yahoo login page, on a
newer computer with pulp, so might also be usable.

The friend has no home internet access (phone line is so poor quality it
won't work at more than 14.4K so DSL not possible and AT&T refuses to
change the wires, township won't allow cable TV/internet, no cell phone
reception), but a nearby public building has free wireless internet.
This is the friend's only laptop. He had been driving 3 miles each way
to the closest library to do email and can now walk 10 minutes instead.

User avatar
technosaurus
Posts: 4853
Joined: Mon 19 May 2008, 01:24
Location: Blue Springs, MO
Contact:

#216 Post by technosaurus »

Opera 9.27 static qt3 seems to be the best option for low ram systems (with unneeded locales removed it is only ~6mb package), but there is better news... Netsurf is adding javascript support (via spidermonkey). Once it stabilizes a bit more I'd like to build a static version of its xcb port (that 1 doesn't even need gtk2 and can even be built to work outside of x also in the console) it should only use a fraction of what opera does.
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].

anikin
Posts: 994
Joined: Thu 10 May 2012, 06:16

Re: Yahoo mail with Pulp 01

#217 Post by anikin »

sindi wrote:I also set pulp to use 16-bit color
Hi sindi,
Could you please, enlarge a little bit on how you did that? I'm interested in everything related to lowering RAM/resources consumption, so any further tips/links you may have, will be greatly appreciated.

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#218 Post by greengeek »

technosaurus wrote:Netsurf is adding javascript support (via spidermonkey). Once it stabilizes a bit more I'd like to build a static version of its xcb port .. it should only use a fraction of what opera does.
That sounds interesting. A stable, lightweight browser supporting https and js, teamed up with a standalone youtube file downloader would be a nice round-off for Pulp. (Don't want a flash plugin - they seem to be too weighty for small machines)

User avatar
technosaurus
Posts: 4853
Joined: Mon 19 May 2008, 01:24
Location: Blue Springs, MO
Contact:

#219 Post by technosaurus »

greengeek wrote:(Don't want a flash plugin - they seem to be too weighty for small machines)
The standalone flash players are much lighter for whatever reason (< ~50MB) and thus far lightspark, gnash and swfdec are only partial implementations. For flv, there is always the small version of vlc (I also patched mplayer to restore the gtk ui)
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].

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

Re: Opera 12.10

#220 Post by greengeek »

sindi wrote:Opera 12.02 youtube is broken... I switched to pulp from Basiclinux so I could use Opera newer than 9

Youtube works in 11.52 - but keeps restarting videos after you have watched for half hour or so and the fix is to restart Opera. Any other ideas how to use Youtube with older Opera?
Hi Sindi, are you committed to version 12 Opera? Using Pulp03 I am able to view youtube videos by using the Opera 11 available here:

http://www.412collection.co.uk/internet.php

I haven't tried the Opera 12 offered there yet.

Post Reply