Puppy Professional just for business

Using applications, configuring, problems
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hendrikus
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#21 Post by hendrikus »

hendrikus wrote:
I would like to see some printscreens of your ProfessionalPuppy
While I was typing you allready post them.... very nice screens.... A XP like theme would be even nicer.... Why not just using the original OpenOffice logo's, they have a professional look, the OpenOffice suite is allready become popular as a reliable replacement for msoffice.

GuestToo
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#22 Post by GuestToo »

A XP like theme would be even nicer
this screenshot is a typical XP theme for Icewm

the screenshot is on this page:
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PedigreePuppy

i think it was a package i made, but it could have been AlienX, he made a lot of theme packages for Icewm

this package was hosted on the goosee.com server, and those packages were lost when Puppy moved to new servers

someone could easily make a new package ... though you really just have to download a theme from Freshmeat or KDE Look etc etc, unzip it and copy it to the right place, like /root/.icewm/themes

http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/925/
http://www.kde-look.org/?xcontentmode=18

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Rhino
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#23 Post by Rhino »

Hendrikus,

I'm uploading the iso to MU, but before I do too much, I would like to get his "stamp of approval". I just tinker with Puppy, and am not a programmer at all. MU may have some suggestions for this as well.

I can certainly add in an XP-like wallpaper or maybe even an OO.org wallpaper, but I just have to be sure about the licensing.

I included GimpShop since it is a very capable alternative to Photoshop and many businesses need powerful graphics manipulation.

To remove all of the programming tools that are included in puppy would require me to build a custom puppy from source (or so I think). Even with that, I don't think removing most of those tools would provide any significant savings in space. I'm also not sure what removing things would do to the operation of Puppy. It might be best for me to comment them out in the .jwmrc file so they don't show up in the menu. That would provide a very simplified menu.

If MU finds it suitable for sharing with no major glitches, we might consider this iso an alpha version to build upon. Please check out the iso and provide suggestions for the next release.

Thanks for your input Hendrikus :-)
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Pizzasgood
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#24 Post by Pizzasgood »

i think it was a package i made, but it could have been AlienX, he made a lot of theme packages for Icewm

this package was hosted on the goosee.com server, and those packages were lost when Puppy moved to new servers

someone could easily make a new package ... though you really just have to download a theme from Freshmeat or KDE Look etc etc, unzip it and copy it to the right place, like /root/.icewm/themes

http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/925/
http://www.kde-look.org/?xcontentmode=18
I have these themes, if any of them are missing from the mirrors:

Abby.pup
Blue4ever.pup
deedlit-Aqua.theme.for.IceWM.pup
Dragonfly.theme.for.IceWm.and.Gtk.pup
Elberg.and.SilverXP.Themes.pup
G2-Aqua.theme.for.IceWM.pup
ice.keramik.pup
icewm_silvervista.pup
icewm_theme_icevista2.pup
Liquad.Theme.for.IceWM.pup
RevolutionX.pup
Simple-tri.theme.pup
Sticks.Theme.pup
TrueCurve.theme.for.IceWM.pup
win31.pup
XPDE.pup
yet.another.MacOS.theme.pup


You shouldn't need to recompile anything to remove packages. Just don't include them when you use Unleashed, or use PupBeGone to get rid of them before remastering. Some of them are needed by other things, so those would be trickier. The best way is to only remove so-many at a time, and keep track of which ones they were. Then test it to see if it still runs before proceeding.

All those little techie items in Puppy are indeed very small. Disabling them in the menu would preserve them in case they're ever needed (Boy Scout Motto: Be Prepared), and still clean up the appearance. Removing them would save a small amount of space, but unless you are going for a mini-linux, you probably would hardly notice it. A megabyte or two is very appearant in a 30 MB iso, but not so much in a 70+ MB iso. If it has OO and Gimpshop, we're probably talking 100+MB iso.
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#25 Post by Lobster »

Also consider

1. CUPS - printing
2. IceVista theme from GuesTtoo - IceWM
3. XP professional theme being developed by Gliezel
4. PSI - Puppy Software Installer from MU
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
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Thanks

#26 Post by raffy »

Very nice, Rhino. I will certainly try it.

BTW, does that include Java? It seems that when using random transitions (or animations, in general?) in Impress, OpenOffice asks for Java.
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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edoc
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#27 Post by edoc »

Lobster wrote:Also consider

1. CUPS - printing
2. IceVista theme from GuesTtoo - IceWM
3. XP professional theme being developed by Gliezel
4. PSI - Puppy Software Installer from MU
Please also consider

A. An improved pdf viewer
B. A reliable djvu viewer
C. OO is critical for business and non-profit acceptance
D. A database to interface with MS Access is important
E. Complete and reliable Internet multimedia support
F. Reliable interface to PDA's, cellphones, & digital cameras
G. Reliable networking with MS systems
H. Support for more printers (CUPS is great!), include Samsung lasers

The absence of these features have caused Linux to be rejected by several
businesses and non-profits with whom I am familiar.
[b]Thanks! David[/b]
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Rhino
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#28 Post by Rhino »

General summary of wants/needs:

-Simplify menu, but leave programming applications intact. If you will be programming you can edit and set up your own customized puppy anyway, so no need to include some of those in the menyu system for Puppy Professional.

- Make the menu system a little more like XP as far as its organization.

- IceWM with several professional and especially XP themes. Would this be preferred over XFCE4 or in addition to XFCE4? I don't see much reason in removing JWM since this distro will be really large anyway.

- CUPS:(I have not tested it. Is it working well enough for inclusion?)

- JAVA:I have played with Impress a little bit and have not noticed a problem with the slide transitions. But it could be included as well, just so everything works out of the box.

PDF Viewer: The viewer in Puppy seems to work fairly well, what other one could we include?

RutilT also needs to be included since WAG appears to not work well in 2.02. After using RutilT in MeanPuppy, I'm hooked :-)

The iso I made and gave to MU was already at 228MB :shock: If we include JAVA (+80MB), I think CUPS is large as well, we will be pushing 300Mb. I think we should try to keep Puppy professional small enough that it can fit on a 256MB USB key. Is there a way to use compression on this such as John Murga did with MeanPuppy.
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edoc
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#29 Post by edoc »

Rhino wrote:- CUPS:(I have not tested it. Is it working well enough for inclusion?)
CUPS has come a long ways and had made it possible to communicate with hundreds
of printers. I can hardly imagine trying to promote Puppy to a business only to say
that they cannot use their printers.

CUPS or some associated app needs to be expanded to manage printing to pdf and to
recognize the very popular and inexpensive Samsung laser printers.
Rhino wrote: - JAVA:I have played with Impress a little bit and have not noticed a problem with the slide transitions. But it could be included as well, just so everything works out of the box.
Puppy-Java has come a long ways as well. Many apps and web pages use Java and
again many businesses would reject Puppy without a sound implementation.
Rhino wrote: PDF Viewer: The viewer in Puppy seems to work fairly well, what other one could we include?
As others have noted, and I have also experienced, the pdf implementation in Puppy
needs a lot of work. It often fails to communicate with the printer, has trouble with
documents created using newer versions of pdf, one cannot cut and paste from pdf
into non-pdf documents, etc.

There is a thread here:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... sc&start=0
discussing the needs and options.
Rhino wrote: RutilT also needs to be included since WAG appears to not work well in 2.02. After using RutilT in MeanPuppy, I'm hooked :-)
I was also delighted by RutiT! Made wireless possible with my laptop's internal nic.

I have downloaded and tested Puppy 2.10Beta on a desktop as an Upgrade to 2.01
(had to back out of 2.02 due to multiple unresolvable bugs). So far it plays nicely. Will
Puppy Professional will be optimized for the imminent release of 2.10?

doc
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marksouth2000
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#30 Post by marksouth2000 »

edoc wrote: A. An improved pdf viewer
B. A reliable djvu viewer
C. OO is critical for business and non-profit acceptance
D. A database to interface with MS Access is important
E. Complete and reliable Internet multimedia support
F. Reliable interface to PDA's, cellphones, & digital cameras
G. Reliable networking with MS systems
H. Support for more printers (CUPS is great!), include Samsung lasers

The absence of these features have caused Linux to be rejected by several
businesses and non-profits with whom I am familiar.
This is somewhat bizarre: "Absence of these features".

While Puppy may not give you all of those yet in its humongous 70Mb (and a lot of it already is there), there are several distros that already give you all of those and much more. D is provided by OO so is redundant. G is overconstrained. You can have networking with MS systems, and you can have reliable networking, both is asking too much.

I can't think of many businesses where multimedia support matters a rat's rear to anyone, except at TV or sound companies, but maybe my limited experience (I've mostly worked with education, government, and finance) blinds me to that one.

hendrikus
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#31 Post by hendrikus »

edoc wrote:
CUPS has come a long ways and had made it possible to communicate with hundreds
of printers. I can hardly imagine trying to promote Puppy to a business only to say
that they cannot use their printers.

CUPS or some associated app needs to be expanded to manage printing to pdf and to
recognize the very popular and inexpensive Samsung laser printers.
In my business point of view opinion it's no problem to buy a printer from the 'supported printer list', I just bought a new printer for the same price as my IT guy cost per hour. Lets be realistic, even I'm living in Indonesia I'm able to buy me a nice pentium4 systems with enough memory, I buy a flashdisk 512Mb for the same price as a good lunch.

Important is that the Puppy Professional is still plug&play, system independent. History becomes future again, company critical applications are more and more weboriented like the old reliable Digital and IBM mini systems. The web is accepted by the audience, so I need a workstation with a webbrowser and some supporting office applications. OO is perfect.... Don't put too much in it, it's not difficult to install additional packages....

Hendrikus

hendrikus
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#32 Post by hendrikus »

marksouth2000 wrote:
edoc wrote: A. An improved pdf viewer
B. A reliable djvu viewer
C. OO is critical for business and non-profit acceptance
D. A database to interface with MS Access is important
E. Complete and reliable Internet multimedia support
F. Reliable interface to PDA's, cellphones, & digital cameras
G. Reliable networking with MS systems
H. Support for more printers (CUPS is great!), include Samsung lasers

The absence of these features have caused Linux to be rejected byseveral
businesses and non-profits with whom I am familiar.
This is somewhat bizarre: "Absence of these features".

While Puppy may not give you all of those yet in its humongous 70Mb (and a lot of it already is there), there are several distros that already give you all of those and much more. D is provided by OO so is redundant. G is overconstrained. You can have networking with MS systems, and you can have reliable networking, both is asking too much.

I can't think of many businesses where multimedia support matters a rat's rear to anyone, except at TV or sound companies, but maybe my limited experience (I've mostly worked with education, government, and finance) blinds me to that one.
I'm working on a Puppy based server concept and put two IT guys on it to develop this..... I like the idea to have it plug & play.... indeed, it's hard to get people on Linux.... I follow the confusing struggling of Linux, too many distro's, nearly all the same, but not one is really fitting to company needs, so they only find their way in dedicated solutions like webserver, some fileservers. The problem is

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VariEze
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#33 Post by VariEze »

I'm really impressed that anybody would even try to replace XP in a business enviroment with Puppy. I help out with the computers at a local office, and would never dream of trying to get those users to change over. Unless Puppy could be made EXACTLY like XP, there would be riots at the office, and no bill gates to blame, only me. I use linux for the unseen things, like the backup box and the router. I'm watching this thread, I'd sure like to see how close to XP Puppy can be made to look, and how the users take to it.

--Karl

marksouth2000
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#34 Post by marksouth2000 »

The it's going to be hilarious when the users discover that the Vista interface has been heavily mangled, and is quite different from the XP one, which was different from Win2k which was different from Win98 which was.....

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#35 Post by GeoffS »

I don't think it has been mentioned:- Puppy has to be made CrossOver Office friendly. Yes you can run Wine but CrossOver takes all the hassle out and does things I can not make work using bare Wine.
For US$30 CrossOver is a bargain. I think it will require a little co-operation between Codeweavers and the Puppy community to make it work.
It solves a number of the issues mentioned.
PDF - just use Acrobat if the Puppy solutions are inadequate.
QuickBooks runs perfectly.
Many little Windows programs can be just installed and they run.
Word and Excel work perfectly, if you must use them.
I'm not sure about MSAccess, I still have to do some testing. I have a couple of quite large MSAccess applications which should test it. There are many business applications developed in MSAccess. The real test for all MSOffice applications is the use of the inbuilt Basic.
With all this, don't let Puppy slow down. The beauty of Puppy is to be able to turn on your computer and have it working before you have managed to arrange the pens on your desk :D
Geoff

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Lobster
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#36 Post by Lobster »

If you wish to consider commercial software

use WP textmaker-fe (Pupget)
and spreadsheet planmaker-fe (pupget - free version has only 256 cell usage)

http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofw_en.htm
They are bringiing out a Linux version - give them some encouragement
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hendrikus
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#37 Post by hendrikus »

VariEze wrote:I'm really impressed that anybody would even try to replace XP in a business enviroment with Puppy. I help out with the
computers at a local office, and would never dream of trying to get those users to change over. Unless Puppy could be made EXACTLY like XP, there would be riots at the office, and no bill gates to blame, only me. I use linux for the unseen things, like the backup box and the router. I'm watching this thread, I'd sure like to see how close to XP Puppy can be made to look, and how the users take to it.

--Karl
You are totally right, I would not even think about when I worked in Europe... thats true. Indonesian companies/government buying new pentium4 systems for let say $500, till now it's filled with illegal copied software. This has to be changed at this moment, Microsft is doing regulary surveys over here what means that they have to choose, or buy WindowsXP+Office for $500 or choose something else witch is doing the same in company perspective.

The company critical software is running on a intranet webserver, either the mail, calendar, document management and others. For the company it's important that they use a good performing webbrowser.

I deal with company owners, not with the users, I don't care if some games not running on Linux. I provide tools for doing simply their job without wasting time being a system manager for their PC system.

It's hard for Puppy to become the friend of the end-users, or it has to be an Linux freak. Puppy could become the friend of the business owners because the security, centralization of data, stability and plug & play facility, and important, they don't depend on IT people and system managers.

Hendrikus

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Rhino
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#38 Post by Rhino »

I will release an early proposal for Puppy Professional that could fairly easily be hammered into many of the things that are wanted here.

Changes from Puppy Office 2.02ce:
-new icons for desktop, menus, and some mimetypes.
-Gimpshop
-XFCE4 and JWM can switch back and forth from the menu in XVESA or Xorg
-XDG menus in XFCE4 and puppy wallpapers are available
-Open Office buttons on JWM tray and XFCE4 tray
-Added Opera Browser
-Gxine extra codecs
-changed JWM activity monitor to blue rather than red
-several wallpapers in a variety of tones
-Open Office Impress templates
-LTris

Still to add or change:
-XFCE4 to IceWM with themes
-CUPS
-RutilT
-Simplified menus
-Java-I'm very concerned about space with this and not sure how it can fit in 256Mb with all that is already there...any ideas?
-browser themes for seamonkey and Opera
-fix browser home pages
-wifibeta.pup ?

I will not put this on the announcements thread since it should just be considered an early alpha version so we can hammer this thing out with Puppy Professional being quite large, but very nice

I would like some feedback on this to make sure everything is OK so far. My big concern is the size and how it works on your machines.

Mirror1:
puppyprofessional202.iso
md5checksum

Mirror2:
puppyprofessional202.iso
md5checksum

Thanks for the hosting MU and TedDog!!
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#39 Post by GuestToo »

i seem to remember that when i made a few XP Icewm theme packages, that i modifed the themes slightly ... for example, i didn't like the start button in one theme, so i used the button from another theme, and maybe the wallpaper from another theme

i like the Aqua themes ... but some themes have actually used screenshots from a Mac to make their buttons, apparently, which might not be quite ethical ... i don't know about the XP themes

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jam
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Linux Corporate Use

#40 Post by jam »

At work Microsoft has done a good job on it own of selling Linux to our high ranking execs. Awhile back when the Melissa virus was running wild our network administrator was forced to take down the Windows servers/workstations for fear of contamination - yes we were running anti-virus software on the Windows network but he was justifiably paranoid that one of our wandering laptops could infect and bring down the Windows network, and he also wanted to make sure the Anti-Virus vendors had correctly updated the virus definitions.

Meanwhile our Linux-based point of sale clients and backend AIX server running our ERP/POS software continued humming right along, happily ringing up sales and totally immune to the attack. That incident alone, not to mention the steep cost savings in software/hardware costs, were enough to guarantee a future for Linux. Besides the work I'm doing with Puppy at home, I'm also involved in a pilot program at work using Puppy, very similar to what this thread has been undertaking and the work being done at home complements this project. However, we are focused on using a minimalistic version of Linux and keeping bloat to a minimum while maximizing functionality - we'd like for our custom Puppy to run in RAM with <= 128 Mb memory. Therefore, KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice are out and AbiWord, Gnumeric, Wine, and UltraIceWM are in. Puppy is able to cruise our corporate intranet at lightning speeds and bring up all of our MS Excel/Word and PDF documents, and multimedia is easily handled via Mplayer. With Mark's latest release of the Software Installer, installing new software in Puppy is easier than ever. Just today during testing I had one of our accountants bring over one of his most complex Excel spreadsheets to see how Gnumeric 1.6.3 could handle it. His jaw practically dropped when he saw the speed at which Puppy brought up the spreadsheet, and all his formulas and formats were preserved.

I already have a highly customized version of DSL(Damn Small Linux) used in our live production environment for our point-of-sale terminals. It loads right from a CD and once loaded runs completely in memory. We also have this CD distributed to our stores running Windows clients just in case the hard drive fails or they manage to corrupt their machine installation, but eventually we will be standardizing completely on Linux across all our stores.

The cost savings and uptime are staggering, and we are able to recycle our "old" hardware, thus prolonging hardware expenditures for years. We also waste less computing cycles by not having to run anti-virus/spyware programs, which also directly impact the wear and tear on the hard drive. As an added benefit, by using Linux we also don't have to concern ourselves with legal expenses involved in BSA software audits and legal challenges.

One other issue our Help Desk runs across continuously is store personnel who bring in their own software from home and load it onto their Windows machine. Although our store policy strictly prohibits this, we often get MS Windows workstations sent back to our corporate offices which for some "unknown reason" are non-functional. It usually takes our Help Desk 4-5 hours to restore the machine to its original state, plus the cost of shipping the machine back and forth. With Linux we can restore a local machine in 6 minutes flat, and if the machine is at one of our stores, we can restore the machine remotely in a few hours after the close of business. Meanwhile, store personnel can use the customeDSL Live CD to continue running the POS program under Linux until their hard drive is restored to its original state. The Linux POS workstations run a custom version of the older ClusterKnoppix, and have the DSL Live CD as a backup in the event of hard drive failure.

At my place of business the Linux distros we use are DSL, ClusterKnoppix, and CentOS with Puppy already on the scene making a splash. Since we have IT staff onsite, our software licensing costs are $0, although we do make it a point to donate to open source projects to provide funding in the event we decided to use the products to run our business. Puppy is now in our pilot phase, and I'm looking to roll it out to a test audience at work in a few weeks. At the same time, I have another target group for my home project with similar goals of OLPC. Thus, both projects are complementary and the work I do with one benefits the other. Since all the software is open source, there is no conflict of interest.
Jam

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