Fatdog64-620beta2

[Ted Dog]

Thanks for the info Jamesbond, slackbones would be ideal to build from since kernels & EFI are same. Had no problem booting EFI grubs version in intel Macs, just using the boot area directly.
Hope BK will jump on the hybrid dual bootable iso methods you use. I would also like to know how to re-roll iso files could you post script/command line used.

[JustGreg]

Fatdog64 Beta 2 boots without a problem under UEFI on my Compaq CQ58. I am still getting random x server start up failures with the CQ58. I am using a save directory on an ext4 partition with raedon driver. It appears the mode switching is not happening correctly. I am starting it with the nox option now for testing. The strange thing is Fatdog 611 does not have the problem.

I thinking of trying to place Grub2 into a higher text mode than 80 by 25. Mostly this is just to see if there is any change.

[nooby]

Have patience with an old noob.
I know I have asked somewhere
but fail to find it now.
Suppose I buy one of the new notebooks
that sell in Sweden them are made by
Acer using their "Sister or Daughter" company
Packard Bell name. They have UEFI and MsWin8
and now when Fatdog has full UEFI support
with it's own Certificate that sound great.

But I also want to boot Slacko and Lupu
on that computer.

Does the certificate that Fatdog use allow for triple booting
on the Ms Win8 FS or does one have to make a separate partition
or are all of it frugal install?

It is Wednesday today and I plan to buy one coming Sunday
or next Friday. So would be cool to know if it works.

[JustGreg]

Nooby,

At this time, it appears that only Fatdog64 supports UEFI. The kernel needs to have UEFI support added and to be digitally signed for use with shim and UEFI. I know Slacko does not have these features. Additionally, Slacko is a 32 bit architecture and not 64 bit like Fatdog. I can not speak on LUPU. My advice is to wait at least another six months and hopefully, UEFI support in the various Puppies will be available.

Additionally, the low cost laptops are a "pain" to use with Linux. They are designed and built for Window$ 8. Window$ 8 does not like sharing with any other non Micro$soft operating system. My solution on the Compaq was to completely replace the hard drive and start from scratch by eliminating Window$ 8. UEFI boot is working well (thank you very much JamesBond and Kirk). But, there are still a few "oh by the ways" due to the new hardware items (graphics and wifi).

I hope this helps.

[rcrsn51]

@JustGreg: How does UEFI affect booting from CDs or USB devices? Will these devices boot automatically, or do you have to turn off UEFI in the BIOS?

[JustGreg]

Upon searching the web, I found the radeon driver freezing at the x server start up is a known problem. I did find this one tip:

Code: Select all

Intermittent Freezes/Lockups due to AGPv3 running at 8x 
Try forcing X to set AGP Speed to 4x 
File: /etc/X11/xorg.conf 
  Option "AGPv3Mask" "0x00000002"
This goes into the "Device" section for your graphics card in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 

I do know there is no real device section in fatdog64 xorg.conf. I can add one to try to this "fix". However, I am concerned that it would cause more problems than it fixes. Any thoughts on this approach? Thanks in advance for any help.

[prehistoric]

No obvious problem with Fatdog 620 beta 2 on an Asus M2NVP-VM motherboard with dual-core Athlon II 5200+. This is my regular email machine, so I haven't done too much hard testing on it. I don't want it to fail.

Your problem here is that Fatdog 620 beta 1 is too damn stable. After I installed my archaic Sylpheed email, FireFox browser and Skype I stopped fooling with the OS because it was working fine. I moved my files from earlier versions to take advantage of the improved support for the nVidia embedded graphics with the current nouveau driver.

I've tried booting on a new machine with Asus F2A85-M Pro motherboard, which has a UEFI BIOS. At this point I'm running with secure boot off. (I've tested that machine with Windows 7 Home Premium, but do not have a permanent Windows installation. I'm avoiding Windows 8 like the plague.) If I attempt to use the non-UEFI DVD boot option on that machine I get a hang which tells me nothing. Choosing the UEFI version of the SATA DVD drive from the boot menu works.

The graphics on that board are provided by the processor, an AMD A10-5800K with Radeon HD 7660D graphics. This did screw up on initial boot, but trying again with the option for problematic Radeon graphics works. I haven't gone far enough to try custom AMD drivers, and I don't yet have a Radeon HD 7670 card to see if the dual graphics works as advertised. (Incidentally, the Radeon HD 7670 is simply an OEM version of the Radeon HD 6670. I'm waiting for prices on the ones with GDDR5 memory to drop due to increasing competition. The embedded graphics engine has 384 stream processors, while the combination of APU+HD 7670 should have 864 stream processors. At present there isn't enough difference in price compared to an HD 6770 to make dual graphics worthwhile.)

More when I have tried secure boot.

[nooby]

Nooby,

At this time, it appears that only Fatdog64 supports UEFI.

The kernel needs to have UEFI support added and
to be digitally signed for use with shim and UEFI. ...

Much appreciated.

Duh as we say over here Now when you explain it
then it makes sense. How could I fail to grasp that
easy and logical way to see it.

Maybe that answer what Rcrsn51 ask too.
The usb would not get accepted to boot
unless it had the Certification in place
but if one go into boot and shut of the secure boot
then most likely it would boot?

I only guess.

[ally]

gparted only seeing 'main' hdd on my machine

I have a lenovo t61 with second hdd in caddy which it does not see, also does not see usb drives

gparted starts without drive selection screen

[rcrsn51]

gparted only seeing 'main' hdd on my machine.

In the upper right corner of the Gparted screen, there is a drop-down list of the other drives.

[ally]

ok, this is embarrassing!

really must learn to use this better.........

[JustGreg]

Rcrsn51 and Nooby,

The regular CDROM iso does work with UEFI. The first use will require "shim" to be registered with the UEFI BIOS using MOK manager. The first test version of fatdog64 discusses this here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=83402

It also provides information on how to make a boot USB flash drive with fatdog64.

There is additional information with posts on the first beta of 620 here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84372

These two should be able to help you out.

If you are going to keep Window$ 8 and just want to try fatdog64, then the easiest way is the CDROM and make a save file on a hard drive partition. You will have to the BIOS boot device selection to select the CDROM over the hard drive.

I hope this helps.

[nooby]

gparted only seeing 'main' hdd on my machine.

In the upper right corner of the Gparted screen, there is a drop-down list of the other drives.

thanks I did not know that info either.
Much appreciated you shared that knowledge.

Thanks Greg.

What I still miss is the info if the UEFI allow me
to do a frugal install of Fatdog on the internal HD?

I got the impression one need to resize and do a full install?
I could ahve misunderstood some text read in haste.

[GKM]

Hi there,

I am quite happy with Fatdog, and look forward to the Fatdog 64-620 GA. Using it with satisfaction starting from the Fatdog 600 beta's, as I could not find any other 64bit operating system around that could do what I wanted without too much hassle. In a benchmark I also noted a speed increase of 25 percent when moving from Fatdog 601 to 610/611, probably due to the newer kernel.

Given the included software for browsing/editing/etc..., it is apparent that the developers of Fatdog aim for a complete system for the newbie Linux user, and I guess Fatdog does an excellent job at that. Certainly less and less hiccups occur, but these do not bring down the entire system at all, at their worst they require a restart of the X-server. In my brief experience with Fatdog 620 beta 2 no hiccups happened yet, so that is good news. Naturally, there is room for some minor improvements.

It is surely possible to eliminate some user interface inconsistencies, such as the double clicks required in the control panel, and the single click standard in ROX. As I am unaware of any main stream graphical user interface using single clicks (my position is that currently no Linux distribution can be considered main stream), I suggest to adhere to the double click standard system wide, as it makes it easier for other users to migrate to Fatdog. More experienced users will be able to switch to a single click interface in ROX anyway, as it is clearly marked in the ROX options menu.

On the other hand, when reading the forum entries, I get the impression that a lot of Fatdog users wish to have a fully customizable Fatdog, i.e. no a priori installed software, perhaps except for at least one workplace shell. If my impression is correct, then it would be advantageous for those users to have the option to uninstall all the a priori software through the pet package manager, and place copies of that software in the pet repositories. My personal preference is to have a local sfs/pet package repository, as my workstation has enough storage space, but is generally disconnected from the network. Maybe even use two tiny iso's, one with the base Fatdog, and one with a few/all pets or sfs's, although that might not be convenient for all Fatdog usage scenario's.

About the UI inconsistencies, some .desktop icons do not work as expected, e.g. when AppRun -xlocknow is executed nothing happens, although it does work when that text is replaced by xlock. I have not tested all icons, but when I find others I will post them if kirk and jamesbond desire it (thanks for fixing the xlock password issue, I have been using it since 610..., should have perhaps reported this minor icon issue earlier). Also the Application Launch bar in the LXpanel can not automatically find all icons which e.g. the right click menu can, i.e. in the new Fatdog 620 beta 2 it does not find control panel, which it previously could. Strange enough some third party software of which the icons did not automatically appear in Fatdog 611, now do appear in fatdog 620 beta 2. The problem with those icons appeared to be a different spacing in the .desktop file as compared to the .desktop files that did work.

As a final minor improvement, as long as new Fatdog releases occur with the reasonably high frequency as they do, it might be useful if, at first use of the new system, when shutting down for the first time, Fatdog explicitly provides the (USB/multisession/...) user the option to edit the boot configuration file to point at the new savefile location such that the old and new Fatdog OS can coexist, and also with the opportunity to cancel shutdown completely. I know it is possible just to not click yes or no, and then continue working in the new Fatdog, using the savefile argument builder from the control panel and so on, and perform all necessary actions to make sure that one can have a good boot menu. Okay, with regard to this latter improvement, maybe I am just lazy, but I guess that newbie users may not figure that out immediately, and either have a few unnecessary reboots before finding out how it works, or give up altogether, because the last time I did not need to incorporate a waitdev for my 16GB USB 3.0 stick to be ready to use the savefile was in Fatdog 600rc (maybe pmount is faster than the current mounter?). Also note that when running from RAM with a savefile, then usually at shutdown everything is saved to the savefile, but I noticed that when the savefile is full, it is reported during shutdown, and then mentioned that one should move data elsewhere, but one does not get any opportunity to do so. Personally I did not suffer any data loss this way, but I guess a warning is in order, together with an opportunity to do something about it, i.e. cancel/pause shutdown until the storage problem is resolved.

It has become a really rather long post and it is generally better to make one post per issue, but it is all meant as constructive criticism to obtain an even better, and perhaps a slightly slimmer, Fatdog.

Apologizing in advance for the fact that I have practically no experience developing a Linux distribution, and understanding that the developers kirk and jamesbond already invest a lot of time in Fatdog, which I greatly appreciate, I nonetheless hope that they find these comments useful/constructive enough to share their view, or maybe even implement one or more of my suggestions?


Regards,


GKM.



N.B. Below are two questions not about Fatdog 620 beta 2, but as there are a few experienced Linux users present at this forum, I will place it here.

1) Did anyone get forward/backward search for TeX/LaTeX to work with Geany and Evince in Fatdog? Currently I use TeXstudio instead, which does work great if one manages to get the poppler-qt wrapper to work, but it is a hassle. If there are other Fatdog and TeXstudio users which managed to also install the optional phonon library for watching video in pdf files, then maybe they could post about that. I know I should write down what I did to compile it when I install the Fatdog 620 final, and maybe even try to create a pet, and all that, but a complete TeXlive install is quite big and although one might introduce TeXlive as sfs and TeXstudio as a pet, I guess the people using LaTeX will use a near complete install of it anyway.

2) I see that Fatdog has Xournal which I may use for writing sketches, but is there any proper handwriting and/or voice recognition software for Linux such that I may write/dictate with automatical conversion to a text file of computer readable format?

[jamesbond]

Thanks for the info Jamesbond, slackbones would be ideal to build from since kernels & EFI are same. Had no problem booting EFI grubs version in intel Macs, just using the boot area directly.
Hope BK will jump on the hybrid dual bootable iso methods you use. I would also like to know how to re-roll iso files could you post script/command line used.

Ted Dog, this is the command used to build Fatdog in UEFI mode (assuming directory ./iso-root contains the files). I have not checked whether xorriso supports UDF.

Code: Select all

xorriso -dev fatdog.iso \
-volid "FATDOG_LIVE" \
-joliet on \
-compliance iso_9660_level=3 \
-map iso-root / \
-boot_image isolinux dir=/	 \
-boot_image isolinux next \
-boot_image any efi_path=efiboot.img	 
isohybrid -u fatdog.iso

Upon searching the web, I found the radeon driver freezing at the x server start up is a known problem. I did find this one tip:

Code: Select all

Intermittent Freezes/Lockups due to AGPv3 running at 8x 
Try forcing X to set AGP Speed to 4x 
File: /etc/X11/xorg.conf 
  Option "AGPv3Mask" "0x00000002"
This goes into the "Device" section for your graphics card in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 

I do know there is no real device section in fatdog64 xorg.conf. I can add one to try to this "fix". However, I am concerned that it would cause more problems than it fixes. Any thoughts on this approach? Thanks in advance for any help.

Greg, try to put that under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-gpudriver.conf (this is the file that is created by xorgwizard) like this:

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
    Identifier             "Device0"
    Driver                 "radeon" #Choose the driver used for this monitor
    Option "AGPv3Mask" "0x00000002"
EndSection

And see whether it works.

But I also want to boot Slacko and Lupu
on that computer.

EFI Grub2 included in Fatdog64 is capable of booting any kernel (not only UEFI kernel). But whether such kernel will run on Win8 machines - I can't say because I don't have such machine.

What I still miss is the info if the UEFI allow me
to do a frugal install of Fatdog on the internal HD?

It does, however you must do it very carefully. There is a beautifully written guide on this subject by kirk, it's part of the FAQ in the Fatdog iso.

I got the impression one need to resize and do a full install?

No. Fatdog does not support official full install (although it can be done - if one is careful, and it isn't without bugs).

[kirk]

What I still miss is the info if the UEFI allow me
to do a frugal install of Fatdog on the internal HD?
It does, however you must do it very carefully. There is a beautifully written guide on this subject by kirk, it's part of the FAQ in the Fatdog iso.

It's also here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... drive.html

But don't do a frugal install on secure boot with beta2, I forgot to sign the kernel

You can do a frugal install on secure boot if you use grub with refind, because grub is signed and the signed grub will load a unsigned kernel. But it would be a easier to wait for final.

[nooby]

Much appreciated James Bond.
Don't get me wrong now.
The following is no criticism at all.
I only share how the complications begin.

Hard drive (frugal) installation of Fatdog64 on a computer with UEFI and secure boot.
...
Step 1)

You will need some space on your hard drive to create a couple of new partitions. Boot into Windows and then:

I trust you use the term frugal correct here

That means we would need another term or some qualifier
that makes a distinction between frugal install after having done
the partitions you describe there.

When I use the word frugal boot I try to avoid the word
frugal install because install obviously can include making
partitions while frugal booting from Hd to me means
one really leave it totally frugal partition or any changes at all
The only thing one do is to place the iso or the files
in a directory on the HD and then reuse the ordinary
boot by adding in the choice of one more OS at boot time.

So what you describe here I would only do on an old computer
and not on one with the two year warranty. If one do partitions
on it then warranty is gone down the drain.

[kirk]

When we say "frugal" we mean to install the initrd, kernel and any other sfs file just as they are, not extracted. A full install would be a traditional linux install which would mean extracting the files from the sfs that is inside the initrd and any other sfs files you might use. We don't support or recommend full installs.

So what you describe here I would only do on an old computer
and not on one with the two year warranty. If one do partitions
on it then warranty is gone down the drain.

This is very strange to me. Hopefully that is their only restriction on adding software, but I guess you might want to check.
It is possible to do a frugal install without adding partitions. You can use the same fat32 boot partition (ESP) that Windows 8 uses, as long as that partition has at least 215MB free. But you MUST disable hibernation in Windows 8, aka Fast boot. If you don't then the fat32 boot partition will become corrupt. To disable hibernation open a terminal as the administrator in Windows 8 and type:

Code: Select all

 powercfg -h off     

If you are going to try this, it's also a good idea to make a copy of all the files on the ESP in case you accidentally didn't disable hibernation.

[jamesbond]

So what you describe here I would only do on an old computer
and not on one with the two year warranty. If one do partitions
on it then warranty is gone down the drain.

This is very strange to me. Hopefully that is their only restriction on adding software, but I guess you might want to check.

That is indeed very strange. In my previous experience with Windows (up to Windows 7), one can resize partitions and add as many partitions as one wish - in fact, one of the touted Windows 7 feature is to ability to shrink NTFS partition (so you can add another one). Even when one tries to restore to "factory default" using either "recovery partition" or "recover discs", all the the recovery software I have used (from XP days to Win 7) has the options to either
a) "format only the C: drive and re-install Windows, while keeping other partitions unchanged", or
b) "remove all partitions and reset to default factory-default partitions"
But I haven't bought any Win8 machines and I don't live in Sweden, so the rule of the game may be different now and there

[nooby]

I have to make a phone call to get my take confirmed
but that is how I did hear them last time I made a call.

I have now made the call.

The first guy told me it would lose the warranty.
When I told about how it works in other countries
and ask him to talk to his Boss he promised to do
that and came back and confirmed that as long as
I don't change the recovery then most likely they would
not ditch the warranty but that they have bad experience
of what people do so they try to discourage any kind of
booting into something else by default but legally they
can not forbid only warn how easy it is to fail if one do it.

So you guys are right but at same time you have told me
that it is not an easy thing to do for total noobs one need
to know where one are on the computer so one doesn't
mess up that fast booting thing.

Today is Friday and but on Sunday
I'll a car have a driver that can take me down to town
and the Reseller havel a Packard Bell Laptop to sell to me
that have Celeron M1000 CPU and it has 8GB DRAM
and 750GB HD and win8 installed and should be kept.

And I want to install FatDog but total frugal not changing
any partitions at all. so I guess me ahve to read the FAQ then.

Packard Bell is almost same as Acer so most likely that
this computer acts like the cheapest of the Acer 15.6 Laptops.
with win8

Or a PB Desktop named IMEDIA S2110 that one
maybe a better buy due to big screen in the price
24" LED screen So maybe I buy that one. Also wn8
but better CPU? AMD Dual Core Model: E1-1200