Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jrb · Last edited by jrb on Fri 19 Jul 2013, 09:52; edited 7 times in total

Recently I was asked to setup a home theatre center using an older Pentium 4 computer and a Sony 40in crt televison, theoretically high definition. I managed to find an old video card with DVI port which connected to the TV. I thought I had it made. I started with Slacko 5.4 and it worked in 640x480 but when I played a video file with Gnome Mplayer there was a major lag between lips and sound. Confused

I started trying other Puppies with same results until I tried my old barebones431 with the ch4-gxine-0.5.9b.sfs. Ran perfectly full screen with no hesitation.

barebones431-jrb1.0.iso

precise-5.4.3-barebones-0.2.iso

racy-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso

wary-5.3-barebones.iso

wary-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso

wary-5.3-BABYbarebonesXvesa.iso

The wary-5.3-barebones.iso is a sleek 83MB. A bit larger than barebones431 at 65MB but hey, time marchs on.

Edit: I just uploaded wary-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso which is the same as the other except I ran it through the babybuilder in woof. This stripped out 17MB of drivers and modules, very impressive BK! Cool

Comes in at 66MB. However if this one won't run on your hardware you should use the larger model.

Edit: I just uploaded racy-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso. This one comes in at 68MB thanks to the magic of BK's babybuild and XZ compression which I forgot to use before. As above it may not run on your hardware (although it runs on all of mine).

Edit: I just uploaded wary-5.3-BABYbarebonesXvesa.iso. This one only has the Xvesa video driver but it boots right to desktop, no fooling around with the Xorgwizard.

I took a few liberties. I included a few right click options that I find essential, edit-sfs, untar pet, sfs-load, run_in_terminal, dir2pet, dir2sfs, dir2tgz. I also made leafpad the default texteditor, its actually a smaller less dependent one from Puppy4. There are two icons to the left of the menu button on the jwmtray which restart and shutdown. And I modified PPM so that packages you download will get stored in /root/Downloaded_Packages which you can move to wherever you want and link back into /root.

Ive had a lot of fun playing with these two. Im using a portable version of FreeOffice which resides in a folder on /mnt/home so I have rewritten /usr/local/bin/defaultwordprocessor to

musher0 · Posted: Thu 24 Jan 2013, 01:06 Post subject:

Hello, jrb.

Thanks for this. I'll try to make your barebones wary into a base for databasing -- and see what happens !
Have a great day !
BFN.

musher0

jrb · Posted: Thu 24 Jan 2013, 14:21 Post subject:

greengeek · Joined: 20 Jul 2010 Posts: 2102 Location: New Zealand

jrb

gcmartin · Joined: 14 Oct 2005 Posts: 3645 Location: Earth

Sounds like a good project. You promote several ideas here which are good references.

You share how to setup the system for running to your TV. And you share how to take some Linux applications and running them without the system knowing about this (which is what the PPM attempts to track).

On your issues with video I have to ask your thoughts on

Was the issues you found with sync being one of the player package you were using or one of codecs?
And, instead of juggling distros, would a better suited video player have provided adequate results?

I ask that because something akin to CPU usage or akin to OS behavior when driving video is something you may have seen which made you look for other distros to drive the TV.

But, this is a very good project that has usefulness in using TVs with PUPs being the source for the media that is played. I sure others, too, find this useful.

One other question about how to get the TV to "show" your stream from the TV:

Did you have to simply connect the cable or was there a channel on the TV or ??? (Since it appears that you may have used a DVI cable for video and audio cables for sound.)

Trying to determine if you had to do something at the TV to "tune" to the PC for the PC's content.

Thanks for what you are showing us, @JRB; thanks. Smile

musher0 · Posted: Thu 24 Jan 2013, 23:02 Post subject:

jrb · Posted: Fri 25 Jan 2013, 15:09 Post subject:

jrb · Posted: Fri 25 Jan 2013, 15:10 Post subject:

I just uploaded racy-5.3-BABYbarebones.iso. This one comes in at 68MB thanks to the magic of BK's babybuild and XZ compression which I forgot to use before. As above it may not run on your hardware (although it runs on all of mine). If that's the case just use the larger barebones build.

Enjoy, J

e_mattis · Joined: 20 Dec 2012 Posts: 102 Location: Williamston, SC

Thanks jrb, this is something i've been looking for to find for a while now! Much appreciated!

Very Happy

KUDOS

E

jrb · Posted: Mon 28 Jan 2013, 00:06 Post subject: Barebones Precise543

I've just uploaded precise-5.4.3-barebones-0.2.iso. Hope it proves useful. Very Happy

Cheers, J

greengeek · Joined: 20 Jul 2010 Posts: 2102 Location: New Zealand

Hi jrb, I am trialling wary53BABYbones (EDIT: silly me, its actually RacyBABYbones I'm using) and am looking for a suitable mediaplayer to view flv files. Most of the ones I tried to load from the PPM are asking for xine.lib (and or others too..)
Do you have any recommendation for a lightweight flash player?

jrb · Posted: Mon 28 Jan 2013, 10:56 Post subject:

Tote · Joined: 19 Jan 2012 Posts: 217 Location: South Wales

Hello jrb, thanks for these new versions to 'play' with. Using Racy baby barebones, posting from it now. Working really well. No problems.

Thanks again!

dWLkR · Joined: 23 May 2007 Posts: 39

nice work!

what about flash-videos on this machine? does it work without stuttering?

could you please try to watch this video (in fullscreen) from the german site rtlnow.de?

ty!