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Puppy related raves and general interest that doesn't fit anywhere else
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Eyes-Only
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Joined: Thu 10 Aug 2006, 06:32
Location: La Confederation Abenaquaise

Many thanks my friends!

#961 Post by Eyes-Only »

Many thanks my friends, JamesC and seaside, for the invaluable info you gave me re: "Porteus menu.lst grub line". I've copied them down and I'll be making a download of v-2.0 soon ( most likely before the sun sets ) as I've always been tempted to play around with it since it's come out.

Seems as if I've run nothing but Puppy for the past two years or more - nothing at all wrong with that of course!! - yet "back in my day" I used to be one who played with a couple of distros a week "just for fun" all the while still maintaining Puppy as my defacto default ( and damn proud of it I might add! 8) ).

@nooby: Yesterday I'd called that distro you'd helped me with "nimbus 2000". Talk about a wrong reference! :oops: Anyone familiar with the "Harry Potter" series should've immediately have picked up on that one! lol! No, that distro was "NimbleX" and "Nimble 2008" ( I just now remembered, "Duh! You CAN use Google to find distros!" LOL! ). Recall that one Nooby? It too was a fork of SLAX, and a very promising one at that, whose claim to fame was the "online .iso assembly page", i.e. "Pick whatever you wanted for apps in your NimbleX distro, press a button, wait several minutes... and the online generator came out with your very own unique .iso file completely made-to-order!

Nooby? I believe if you look at the Porteus grub lines and the ones for NimbleX/2008, you'll find them remarkably similar? And if I also recall, the creator of that distro had corresponded with you for quite some time and you had learnt quite a bit from him about distro building and maintaining? I could be wrong and thinking of another forum member...

( Sidenote: Just now checking the NimbleX forum and the last post there was from the owner back on August 22nd, 2012 where he had come out with a NimbleX 2012-b. Reading said post now... http://forum.nimblex.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4166

Again: Thanks JamesC and seaside for your help as I very much appreciated it!

Cheers/Amicalement,

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"

[ Adenda: @JamesC: Thanks too for mentioning the MiniNo project as I'm finding that quite fascinating as well! While I find a "small distro" to be rather large at 640+megs, their orginal 1.1 version isn't too bad at 420-some-odd megs. I guess we'd call that a "medium-weight"? lol! Well, by todays standards that's still incredibly small, eh? :wink: ]
*~*~*~*~*~*
Proud user of LXpup and 3-Headed Dog. 8)
*~*~*~*~*~*

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nitehawk
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Location: West Central Florida

#962 Post by nitehawk »

Colonel Panic wrote:
Either Solus or Mint Debian sound like what you need; both Debian-based but loaded with applications. Not sure about the dialup support though.

Failing that, there's Swift which is based on Mint Debian. Only thing is, I don't think it's any better specced than AntiX which you've said isn't enough for you.
...yes,...I had thought about Mint Debian (heard a lot of good things about it). But doesn't it only come with a huge desktop environment? And dialup would be a pain to set up. I will take a look at Solus. BTW,..I have a DVD of that SnowLinux (number '3' I think). It didn't even have Gimp,...nor any signs of dialup support of any kind. I tried to use my old Debian stable DVDs to load PPPConfig onto it,...but it wouldn't acknowledge the Debian DVDs at ALL!!! (was a no-go).

I have actually managed to get CrunchBang to load the Debian DVDs in Synaptic (to use as a repository). I added the Lxde desktop from the DVDs,....only to discover that CrunchBang does really funny stuff with Lxde.

All your files in your /home get splashed out on your Desktop. LOL! Ah well,...everything else works pretty well for now (until I find something else Debian-based).

EDIT: About Antix.....
I have a wide monitor (1366x768) on my main computer. Antix (M11) wouldn't recognize that resolution. The info said that one has to "create your own xorg.conf. Otherwise,...Antix seemed OK.

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Colonel Panic
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#963 Post by Colonel Panic »

nitehawk wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:
Either Solus or Mint Debian sound like what you need; both Debian-based but loaded with applications. Not sure about the dialup support though.

Failing that, there's Swift which is based on Mint Debian. Only thing is, I don't think it's any better specced than AntiX which you've said isn't enough for you.
...yes,...I had thought about Mint Debian (heard a lot of good things about it). But doesn't it only come with a huge desktop environment? And dialup would be a pain to set up. I will take a look at Solus. BTW,..I have a DVD of that SnowLinux (number '3' I think). It didn't even have Gimp,...nor any signs of dialup support of any kind. I tried to use my old Debian stable DVDs to load PPPConfig onto it,...but it wouldn't acknowledge the Debian DVDs at ALL!!! (was a no-go).

I have actually managed to get CrunchBang to load the Debian DVDs in Synaptic (to use as a repository). I added the Lxde desktop from the DVDs,....only to discover that CrunchBang does really funny stuff with Lxde.

All your files in your /home get splashed out on your Desktop. LOL! Ah well,...everything else works pretty well for now (until I find something else Debian-based).
Hi again nitie,

I can't remember how much RAM you have available on your machines, so I'll just go from my own experience.

Mint Debian is pretty big but I was able to run it (just) in 512 MB of RAM. The last version of "standard" (i.e. Ubuntu-based) Mint I was able to run in 256 MB of RAM was Mint 5 (Elyssa), which is probably too old to be useful now.

At the moment Solus is based on Gnome 3 but tweaked to look and behave like Gnome 2, which I think is at least as big as Mate or Cinnamon (which Mint Debian uses). The new version of Solus (the 2 series) is meant to have a desktop all of its own, but I don't know what that one will be like.

What I generally do if I want a lighter desktop on a Debian-based distro is install xfce4, but I suppose on dialup that would take a long time.

Here's a thread about dialup options in Mint;

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=175&t=53893
Last edited by Colonel Panic on Mon 18 Mar 2013, 19:21, edited 2 times in total.
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.

nooby
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Location: SwedenEurope

#964 Post by nooby »

James C wrote:Might want to check out GALPon MiniNo.
http://minino.galpon.org/en/about

Wheezy with LXDE. I've only done a little live testing but everything appeared to work.

Code: Select all

Minimum  requirements
Minimum requirements for daily use, including web surfing:
1.0 GHz processor
256 MB RAM
3,6 GB hard drive

Minimum requirements for a desktop, with little use of the web:
500Mhz processor
128Mb RAM
2,5 GB hard drive
I only tested it "live" on USB using IsoBooter by rcrsn51
so not same as a real install. It lacked the Adobe Flash in browsesr
so I ditched it and tested another one.

LXLE a variant of Lubuntu.
LXLE - Lubuntu Extra Life Extension - A remastered LTS release

that one is a bit big 1.5GB but it did work good using the IsoBooter
and only using it live. it change html files and save the changes on the
NTFS HD and it has both Firefox 19.0.02 IIRC and latest Chrome browser.

Adobeflash worked without any need for download and install.
booted rather fast too. so maybe I keep it.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

nooby
Posts: 10369
Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#965 Post by nooby »

Thanks for kind words Eyes-Only . Yes I tried out NimbleX
for some years ago. I where active on his forum but I only
learned to boot it frugally and get Swedish going and a save file.

Not anything else as I remember. I felt sorry for him that his forum
had too few Mods so the spam was often heavy so I guess him gave up?

I will test both Slax latest and Porteus latest but the problem for me
is that they are so similar that they want same boot directory?

I usually try to rename boot to slaxboot and porteusboot
and it may help but how to separate the save file I don't know?
Slaxsave and Porteusave?

I used to know these things some two years ago but start to lose memory now.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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PeterRJG
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#966 Post by PeterRJG »

I run Pupply Slacko from a USB stick, but I actually have Windows 7 and Fuduntu 2013.2 installed on both my laptop and desktop and dual boot between both.

Recently I've tried Zorin-OS 6 and didn't see the big deal with it, Kubuntu 12.10 and got tired of KDE's way of doing things and lastly, Ubuntu 12.10 and found it bug-ridden, particularly with fonts inside windows, that would blur and artifact. Really, if Ubuntu is the big boy of Linux and the first one most newbs see then I wouldn't be surprised if they all go ugh and go running back to their Macs and Win 7 machines. Terrible first impressions.

But Fuduntu is my choice of distro at the moment. It's clean, it's simple and it looks good. It's midway in the resource stakes, a 64-bit install will use about 350Mb of resources at boot time. Heartily recommend it.

Edit: made it an attachment.
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Fuduntu default desktop
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nitehawk
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Location: West Central Florida

#967 Post by nitehawk »

Colonel Panic wrote: I can't remember how much RAM you have available on your machines, so I'll just go from my own experience.
..my main computer (Dell Optiplex GX270...(P4) has 1G ram
Dell PIII ...512M
HP Vectra PIII ..512M

I just threw VectorLinux 7 back on the Dell PIII,...but it sure is acting "sluggish" . Seems to take a second or two to open any apps. Racy Puppy just flies on that thing. Actually,...for some reason, Racy (and Quirky 1.4) work a LOT better on my PIIIs than Wary does (?)
And just plain vanilla Slackware 14 runs a lot better on the PIIIs than Vector does as well. Disappointed in Vector.

My brother (a retired electronics tech) has mentioned that he has a nice IBM P4 (3Ghz,...maybe about 2 or 3 G ram) that he wants to give to me,..since he has much bigger and powerful machines (and no longer needs it).

I am sure that 'puter could run Mint Debian. (Would be nice).
Actually,...my dear brother just gave me a box of older hard drives he no longer needs, too (he just got several "Trillabites" (sp?) hard drives. So I am now blessed with about (3) 165G HDs,...(1) 125G,...and (5) 40G HDs. ooooooh,...fun, fun!

starhawk
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#968 Post by starhawk »

Terabytes ;)

For everything and everyone EXCEPT hard drive manufacturers (and HDD rated capacities, becuase of that)...
1 bit = 1b = 1 or 0 (but not both at once!)
1 Byte = 1B = 8 bits
1 kiloByte = 1kB = 1,024 Bytes
1 MegaByte = 1MB = 1,024 kiloBytes = 1,048,576 Bytes
1 GigaByte = 1GB = 1,024 MegaBytes = 1,048,576 kiloBytes = 1,073,741,824 Bytes
1 TeraByte = 1TB = 1,024 GigaBytes = ... = 1,099,511,627,776 Bytes

For hard drive manufacturers (and HDD rated capacities, because of that)...
1 bit = 1b = 1 or 0 (but not both at once)
1 Byte = 1B = 8 bits
1 kiloByte = 1kB = 1,000 Bytes
1 MegaByte = 1MB = 1,000 kB = 1,000,000 Bytes
1 GigaByte = 1GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 kB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes
1 TeraByte = 1TB = 1,000 GB = ... = 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes

In order to better pander to the HDD companies, several people have invented an entirely new set of Metric-style prefixes. How deplorably special of them.

Those go...
kibbi = x1,024
Mebbi = x1,048,576
Gibbi = x1,073,741,824
Tebbi = x1,099,511,627,776

[rant]
This is particularly irritating because the only reason that the HDD companies have done what they've done, is to delude the technologically ill-informed (unfortunately indeed this is most of the population) into thinking that they're getting eg 80 GB of space on a hard drive when they're getting 80,000,000,000 Bytes rather than 85,899,345,920 Bytes. (80,000,000,000 Bytes is a touch more than 74.5GB, done properly!)

It's just cheaper for these companies to write "we reject what mathematics and technology tell you and define for ourselves that a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes even though it's not really that" on the side of the box, and hope that people either won't notice or won't care -- or will chalk it up to "actual formatted capacity will be smaller" (also on the side of the box) rather than simple plain old greed on the part of the company. It's just sick the ways that people get ripped off in the technological realm, and sicker that most times they don't even know it's happening...
[/rant]

nooby
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Location: SwedenEurope

#969 Post by nooby »

Latest Slax is not bad at all. Sure it uses KDE or what name that have.
I am not so used to it but apart from that Slax works find on my level.

It sets up the save or Persistent changes automatically and AFAIK
it do it on the HD if you boot frugally from that one and it run in root
automatically too it seems. Terminal says root and you can save changes
on edited text files just fine.

if there where no Puppy around I would use Slax or Porteus them
rather similar.

But I agree that for those that can handle the standard Debian
them have a bigger library of programs to chose among?

Slax is small so easy to have on a small cheap USB if one need to
do rescue on friends computers. But Puppy due to it's many
applications built in from scratch is still my fave.

I used this code to boot on NTFS but there may be better ones.

Code: Select all

title Slax 
kernel (hd0,0)/slax/boot/vmlinuz vga=773 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 rw printk.time=0 slax.flags=perch,xmode
initrd (hd0,0)/slax/boot/initrfs.img 
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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drongo
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Location: UK

SI prefixes

#970 Post by drongo »

@ starhawk,

Yes it is extremely annoying but the HDD guys are using standard SI meaning for those prefixes. You don't get 1024 metres in a kilometre you get 1000.

You could argue that the computer guys messed things up by re-using the SI prefixes with binary values. I'm pretty sure SI predates electronic computers (not sure about Babbage though).

Then again binary numbers existed before SI units but were those prefixes in common use before SI used them? The original Greek numbers were presumably base ten not binary?

I find it more annoying with USB sticks for some reason.

bugman-2.0
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Location: Nearly North Dakota.

#971 Post by bugman-2.0 »

I very much want to try something like Menuet or Kolibri or Minix some day. But not today...

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d4p
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#972 Post by d4p »

@ nooby,

Some why I like porteus:
Fully NTFS support and other formats.
Easy, small and quick remastering base on modular.
Multi modules on diffrent containers and load it which one you like.
Fast booting.
Of course root access

nooby
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Location: SwedenEurope

#973 Post by nooby »

d4p latest slax 7.0.8 seems to be set up like that too.
Save changes automatically and works on NTFS
and are root when booted. If I get it.

Porteus forum may be more active then Slax forum though.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

nooby
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Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#974 Post by nooby »

Embarrassing self admitting my failure :)
First I had success managed to get Mageia going
on USB using IsoBooter by Rcrsn51 method.

That one did not have Adobe Flash so could not see local TV
so I ditched that one and tested Maniaro instead. an Arch thing
but being Arch it is very alien. I had no idea how to start up FF

I mean Firefox why is that so hard to do on manjaro?

So I deleted that one too and now will test Sparky Linux
and see if they allow AdobeFlash and have Firefox.

sparky failed to get my Nuvoux driver so no desktop
it got into some loop that only hard reboot could handle.
Maybe it would work if one know how to tell it to use the right driver.
I am too lazy to look it up though.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

nooby
Posts: 10369
Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#975 Post by nooby »

Solyd XK Linux OS seems to work good as "Live" if one use
rcrsn51 IsoBooter then one can open files on HD and edit
and save and one don't have to be root at all no need for sudo
or anything. Which is surprising. The browser is FF18 and it has
Adobe Flash already working. video works with VLC
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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Colonel Panic
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#976 Post by Colonel Panic »

nitehawk wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote: I can't remember how much RAM you have available on your machines, so I'll just go from my own experience.
..my main computer (Dell Optiplex GX270...(P4) has 1G ram
Dell PIII ...512M
HP Vectra PIII ..512M

I just threw VectorLinux 7 back on the Dell PIII,...but it sure is acting "sluggish" . Seems to take a second or two to open any apps. Racy Puppy just flies on that thing. Actually,...for some reason, Racy (and Quirky 1.4) work a LOT better on my PIIIs than Wary does (?)
And just plain vanilla Slackware 14 runs a lot better on the PIIIs than Vector does as well. Disappointed in Vector.

My brother (a retired electronics tech) has mentioned that he has a nice IBM P4 (3Ghz,...maybe about 2 or 3 G ram) that he wants to give to me,..since he has much bigger and powerful machines (and no longer needs it).

I am sure that 'puter could run Mint Debian. (Would be nice).
Actually,...my dear brother just gave me a box of older hard drives he no longer needs, too (he just got several "Trillabites" (sp?) hard drives. So I am now blessed with about (3) 165G HDs,...(1) 125G,...and (5) 40G HDs. ooooooh,...fun, fun!
Excellent! That IBM machine would run Mint Debian with no problem and those extra hard drives would be useful too.

I'm posting from Vector 7 at the moment as it happens. It probably is slow compared to Puppy Racy et al., but I think it's pretty fast compared to some other distros and certainly compared to Windows (even XP, never mind 7).

I don't think Vector is as big an advance on Slackware as it used to be though. When I first used it in 2006, Slackware was hard to set up whereas it's a lot easier now. so Vector's "competitive advantage" is a lot less now IMO. You do get quite a nice XFCE interface with Vector though and the Quick Picks package manager is quite good too.
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.

nooby
Posts: 10369
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Location: SwedenEurope

#977 Post by nooby »

http://distrowatch.com/7773
"The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 201303. Highlights: Update Pack 6; MATE 1.4 and Cinnamon 1.6; installer improvements (graphical time zone and keyboard selection, support for installation on multiple hard disk drives, slideshow, webcam and face picture support); device driver manager; Plymouth splash screen. LMDE in brief: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a semi-rolling distribution based on Debian 'Testing'. It's available in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants as a live DVD with MATE or Cinnamon. The purpose of LMDE is to look identical to the main edition and to provide the same functionality while using Debian as a base."
Mate and Cinnamon are big are they not?
Why do people like them? What is better?

the iso is about 1.2GB so one need a 2 GB USB
if one want to test it using IsoBooter.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

nooby
Posts: 10369
Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#978 Post by nooby »

When Linus Torvalds studied computing at his University
in Finland they used Minix as a the test OS to learn from

Him got interested in how one set things up and
Linux Kernel got created.

Minix is still used as a tool for to teach students.

Would be cool if one could get it booting on USB
has any of you tested and can share how to set it up?

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue ... 18#feature
http://distrowatch.com/minix
The latest release of MINIX, version 3.2.1, comes with a number of important improvements. The MINIX operating system now supports dynamically linked libraries, system performance has been improved, new hardware drivers have been added to the project and the userland utilities have been updated. Perhaps the most promising feature available to MINIX users is a ports system which assists administrators in compiling and installing third-party software which might otherwise only be available to other operating systems such as NetBSD.

The MINIX operating system can be downloaded as a 256MB compressed image. Once this file has been downloaded it can be expanded to its full 680MB size, still small enough to fit on a CD. The big hurdle to using MINIX is hardware support. Despite the addition of new drivers being accepted into the project, getting the operating system running can be tricky. In addition, MINIX does not yet have 64-bit support for Intel machines nor does it feature ARM support, though both are being actively developed. I tried MINIX on physical hardware and in VirtualBox without any luck. I was able to get the small operating system running inside a QEMU virtual machine and there I found MINIX ran quite well.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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nitehawk
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#979 Post by nitehawk »

Colonel Panic wrote:
I'm posting from Vector 7 at the moment as it happens. It probably is slow compared to Puppy Racy et al., but I think it's pretty fast compared to some other distros and certainly compared to Windows (even XP, never mind 7).

I don't think Vector is as big an advance on Slackware as it used to be though. When I first used it in 2006, Slackware was hard to set up whereas it's a lot easier now. so Vector's "competitive advantage" is a lot less now IMO. You do get quite a nice XFCE interface with Vector though and the Quick Picks package manager is quite good too.
Actually,....I think the problem was not with VectorLinux 7,...but with my old Dell PIII. I just put Vector back on my main P4,...and it's doing just fine!
Vector is my "Go-To" distro. When I get sick and tired of trying other distros...(or they just don't work like I want them to,)...I always seem to just go right back to Vector. I was running Slackware,...but Vector is so much easier to set up and get running. I like Debian for all the apps and software,....but I'm spoiled to Vector and Puppies.

...and I'm not holding my breath about getting that nicer IBM computer,...as my brother forgets about what he promiced at times :lol:

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Billtoo
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Other Distros

#980 Post by Billtoo »

I installed the 64bit Linux Mint 201303 "Debian" on my laptop.
It's looking nice, I can still boot Fatdog64 from an SDHC card as well
:)
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