Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[ahoppin]

Last night Puppy was a bit naughty.

I have a full installation of Lupu 5.25, with lots of tweaks. I was running Cool Edit under Wine and it crashed, taking Xwindows with it. I was unceremoniously dumped back to the shell prompt. I restarted xwin and it happened again. So on a whim, noting that the prompt suggested I could type xwin, xwin jwm, or xwin something-else-ending-in-95 (Openbox, I guess, which I was pretty sure was the default), I tried typing xwin jwm. I got jwm, which I expected. And xwin crashed again.

I tried rebooting. This time Puppy came up in what appeared to be Openbox. The programs I tried seemed to run fine.

But all my "taskbar" icons except the clock had vanished. Refreshing the taskbar (Menu->desktop->settings->Fbpanel refresh menu and tray) made them appear for a moment, then they vanished again. The desktop switcher application (WM Switcher) wouldn't work, either.

Worst of all, I couldn't shut down, reboot, restart X, or exit X from the menu. None of these menu items had any effect. I couldn't find a way to do a clean shutdown! Opening a console window and running poweroff or reboot froze the system, reminiscent of Windows 98 on a bad day.

I finally hit the hardware reset key. Then to be safe, I loaded a Puppy CD into the CD drive, booted puppy pfix=ram, and ran fsck -f on my root file system.

Rebooted. Rebooted again at the prompt grousing that Puppy couldn't run fsck on the root FS (even though I'd just done it). Puppy rose from his slumber, still showing the same taskbar / shutdown behavior.

I finally sorted the taskbar / shutdown menu problem by running Cool Edit again and deliberately crashing xwindows, then restarting it with the xwin jwm command. Then I was able to use WM Switcher to get back to Openbox and from there all was fine (except for the fact that I can't multitrack two 3-hour pcm files in Cool Edit).

My best guess is that something got twisted when I requested jwm at the xwin startup, without using the WM Switcher to change the environment.

Anyway, what this tome is leading up to is that I couldn't find any documentation for the (must be) hundreds of scripts that provide Puppy's unique personality. In particular, I wanted to look at that desktop switcher script. However, I couldn't even find docs on what script is linked to that menu item. Heck, I couldn't even find information on how Puppy's menus are implemented, though I'll swear I saw it on this board somewhere, months ago.

Linux itself is supremely well documented. I can find out about any command with a simple "man <command>" request in a console window. But that doesn't seem to work with Puppy scripts. In fact, even the name of the actual command run from the menu isn't easy to determine.

Do these Puppy script documents exist? Where would I find them?

Thanks for the help.

[L18L]

[ahoppin]

That's a start. Thanks!

[Lobster]

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LucidHelp

[Sylvander]

1. Do you make backups of your Lupu-525 full install when all's well?

2. I don't now use any full installs...
But when I did, I used Xfe and snap2 to backup the Puppy files to a folder somewhere handy [an external HDD methinks].

3. And used Xfe to restore Puppy to "wellness".

[ahoppin]

1. Yes, I have some backups on an external usb drive. I also backup now and then to a usb thumb drive.

I would have restored from a recent backup if I'd had to. Fortunately it was less time consuming than that.

2. I have a simple backup script that checks to make sure the destination directory is valid, then runs cp -xRvdp on a list of directories in root (omitting ext3 /user and a drive with several vfat partitions).

3. Haven't had to restore yet, but it's only a matter of time. :)

[npierce]

[ahoppin]

Thanks for the help!

BTW, a bit off topic, but I haven't had any more problems with Cool Edit crashing X Windows since I changed video cards.

I had been using a Radeon 9000 with Lucid 5.25, and had noticed some odd quirks. The tabs for different pages in Gnumeric worksheets turned black when I ran the cursor over them. Similar things happened in the setup on QTWeb. And in some Windoze programs under Wine, the title bars of subwindows didn't refresh properly.

In noticed that these things did NOT happen when I was running Wary 5.11 on the same machine. They also didn't happen when I ran Lucid on another machine of the same vintage with a Radeon 7500 card.

So I downgraded this machine to a Radeon 7500. Presto, video quirks gone, and no more Cool Edit / XWindows crashes.

So, if anyone else is having problems with an ATI Radeon 9000 under Lucid Puppy 5.25 (or possibly 5.28), you might try a different video card.