Puppy Professional just for business

Using applications, configuring, problems
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Lobster
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#81 Post by Lobster »

Thanks Rhino, Thanks Richard,

I am happy with whatever name you choose
but decided to use Puppy xp on the wiki
after a License fee required distro called Linux XP
(from Russia) went right to the top of Distrowatch.
Wow. Good luck Rhino, have a fun weekend.

We will get some more publicity for the beta . . .
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Rhino
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#82 Post by Rhino »

richard.a wrote:
Puppy in Vesa sadly won't do better than 800x600x16, or at a push 1024x768x8 bit;
Have you tired using Xorg rather than VESA?

My parent's computer has just onboard acceleration (no fancy graphics card) and I had the same problem with VESA using Puppy 2.02...horrible colors and resolution. I was able to reboot and run the Xorg Wizard and it ran just fine at 1024x768x16 or maybe even 24...can't remember exactly.

Thanks for the help :-)
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richard.a
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#83 Post by richard.a »

This double posted.

Could a mod please delete this post, thanks?
Last edited by richard.a on Sat 30 Sep 2006, 00:00, edited 1 time in total.
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#84 Post by richard.a »

Lobster wrote: ... but decided to use Puppy xp on the wiki after a License fee required distro called Linux XP (from Russia) went right to the top of Distrowatch ...
I rather like the splash screens shown on following that up.

We are going to need something like that, too, as well as a graphical user manager, aren't we?

Interesting to note that one of the screencaps shows the FreeBSD version of the "bliss" desktop wallpaper, and they are using (I think) the everaldo (that guy is brilliant imho) icons - or maybe the crystal ones.

Done some more checks on that other P3 550 I have, uses an external Nvidia 32Mb PCI video card and all three versions I looked at romp along with 1600x1200 loading fine (except for my eyesight!), so there was something funny on the Pavilion's internal video when associated with Puppy in Vesa mode. I tend to use Vesa rather than X-Org for simplicity.

A personal wish would be to see the Acrobat Reader (rather than GS) as default on any product aimed as "Professional" or "Office" or marketed as an XP replacement.

Edit
I think the Sane and XSane stuff should also be part of these packages, because I suspect there would be few office environments where scanning isn't undertaken.
/Edit

There seems to be occasional (not always) difficulties (on all of these three "office" type distros I've tried) over the removal of the CD so that a music CD or a DVD can be played. I wonder if this is fixable in a config file somewhere? It doesn't seem to be there on standard puppies.

Looking more closelyat Gliesl's distro, perhaps her pointer focus could do with being changed as default, as it follows the Unix standard whereas I think the target market would be confused with that method.

I remember in the Windows95 "Power Tools" add-on from the development team, there was the Unix style focus offered, but I've never seen a Windows user use it. I know some (myself included) tried it, but preferred the click to focus (and stay focussed) method.


Perhaps gliesl should consider doing a recompile for the benefit of those who don't use the US keyboard? ... doesn't worry me personally, but European keyboards might present a difficulty when booting it for the first time, live.

I'll post those comments in her thread, but include them here for a comparison. I still like the "look" of what she has done best lol :) But that's me :)

I've also modified the "Shut Down" section of the menu to conform to the Windows habit of placing a "Log Off" section above it. The code I've used is here, and it has worked in every instance I've tried it...
<Menu label="Log Off" icon="shutdown24.xpm" height="16">
<Exit confirm="false" label="Exit to prompt" icon="prompt16.xpm" />
<Restart label="JWM restart" icon="mini-windows.xpm"/>
<!-- <Program label="xxx restart" icon="mini-windows.xpm">restartwm jwm</Program> -->
<!-- <Program label="Fvwm95 restart" icon="mini-windows.xpm">restartwm fvwm95</Program> -->
<!-- <Program label="iceWM restart" icon="mini-windows.xpm">restartwm icewm</Program> -->
<Program label="X restart" icon="mini-x.xpm">restartwm</Program>
</Menu>

<Menu label="Shut Down" icon="shutdown24.xpm" height="16">
<Exit confirm="false" label="Exit to prompt" icon="prompt16.xpm" />
<Program label="Reboot computer" icon="mini-turn.xpm">exec /usr/X11R6/bin/wmreboot</Program>
<Program label="Power-off computer" icon="mini-stop.xpm">exec /usr/X11R6/bin/wmpoweroff</Program>

</Menu>

I also tend to annotate files as to when last modified, like many folks do with web pages. A good habit learned when working on complex drawings. I've taken to using a format like this on the jwm config files, and placed near the top so you don't have to scroll through the whole file to see what remarks have been added :)
<!-- Last modified 0850 Saturday 30th September 2006 -->
Just a warning though, you can't do that with the jwm tray config file, not sure why. But don't mess with that one :D

Hope this all helps, it's pretty verbose I'm afraid. But that's my middle name lol!

Richard in Australia
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Puppy is very close to a practical desktop for business

#85 Post by The Major »

I read the various threads on making Puppy "good enough" to be used in a business situation. If we put aside our theological comments about Linux vs Windows for a moment and look at the platform we have, it's very close in many respects. I work as a management consultant and programme manager, and Puppy Linux is my system of choice at home, and used in a lot of my work too.

After trying a lot of widow managers and "tweaking", I have come back to Barry's base platform i.e. Seamonkey, JWM etc because it's efficient. All the developers involved should be very proud of their work. I've expanded the base system to include the things I need to do my job - and these include applications that some people never use, e.g:

Open Office
Freemind
Ganttproject
Gimp

I also use Crossover for the same reason I use Puppy. It works. I find that Office XP is the best version to use, and I only really use Powerpoint for work. Word Viewer and Internet Explorer are needed occasionally when nothing else will work (e.g. my internet banking). Here's a screenshot of my desktop, showing what Windows applications I use. I find K3b a great CD / DVD burner.

Most people at home or in business only use a few applications. However, let's recognise that Windows has won the corporate desktop, and focus on where open source software can win in niche markets, for example, not-for profit organisations, charities, schools with budget challenges, local government, small business, developing countries .... mmm some niche. But that's not my battle.

I used to use Ubuntu, and that's probably a serious contender for large organisations. Personally I find it too cumbersome after using Puppy, BUT, they have really thought about making it easy for the end user e.g. automounting drives and adding printers. What we have is a great application, and in my opinion, it's good enough today for small businesses or sole traders as well as home users.

NOW, one final request. Does anyone know how to configure CUPS to link to a printer on a Windows home network? Do I choose http, ipp or lpd? If you know and can post the answer (or point me at the exact thread), you will be my friend for life.

Ian

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#86 Post by Auda »

Try this: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... ight=samba
Sorry I dont know about cups. I use this at home to print on a couple of old lasers and by the look of the last post it will work for a printer connected to a windows machine.
Let us know if it works.

Auda[/url]

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Springer
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Finding out about Puppy innovations like ProCE?

#87 Post by Springer »

Is there ANY place to find a list of all the Puppy-based distros? Given the complete lack of usable structure on this wiki, it's next to impossible to find out about things like the various Community Editions - It was only after stumbling across one of those and looking for an update that I found out about Puppy Professional CE, which is pretty close to what I'm looking for.

There REALLY needs to be someplace with even just a simple list of links to the various Puppy-derived distros. (I realize technically they're all variations on the "Puppy Linux" distribution, but for the sake of argument here, I'm defining anything that comes on its own ISO as a "distro".)

This is why I hate completely free-form wikis: unlike wikipedia or the like, there's no structure or organization at all, so after a while, it becomes virtually impossible to find anything, even if good stuff is there *somewhere*...

This is a serious problem, one that I have seen nearly kill some other good Linux projects, including the once best-in-class and now hopelessly outdated and chaotic Contribs.org SME server (formerly e-Smith Linux).

BTW - I have Puppy 2.20CE loaded on an alternate HD for my old ThinkPad 570E, and so far, I'm about to decide that it's only the 2nd Linux desktop of the dozens I've ever tried over the past decade that could actually be a reasonable alternative to Windows. The Pro version looks like it might be even better, and since MS is dropping W2K support, I'm going to consider making the change, although only Windows fully supports the 560/570 series' rather extreme 2-stage docking modularity.

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#88 Post by richard.a »

Springer, a quick reply if I may.

I agree, I stumbled across puppy completely by accident, and found the same.

I tend to save pages as I see them, into a directory that's accessible on my LAN for the same reason - can never find things a second time... and search facilities even on forums are unbelievable bad in many cases. Maybe I just haven't got the hang of forum searches lol!!!

I think while links between a multiplicity of sites is great, it makes locating the answers to problems next to impossible in some cases.

This is not a criticism of a bunch of dedicated volunteers. Just a by-product of such a scenario that can easily happen.

Same, to a lesser extent, with PC-BSD which is another like of mine. Nearly got into hot water there for suggesting closer collaboration :(

BTW I've put a bot into #puppylinux on irc.undernet.org, to see if there's any interest.

Gotta run, back a lot later

Richard in (South) Australia
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#89 Post by Rhino »

I'm getting very close to releasing a beta version of Puppy 2.1.0 Professional Edition. I ran into a few problems with getting Java to work properly on the remastered cd's. I'm making progress though. So far, this version will be quite nice looking with a lot of cosmetic changes that should be favorable and possibly incorporated into the "real" Puppy. I tried to standardize many of the icons on Puppy applications, but I'm still not finished yet. I think an iso should be available for testing in a day or two as long as everything works as planned.
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#90 Post by Lobster »

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Java on remastered iso

#91 Post by The Major »

I'd be interested in understanding how you preserve Java after a remaster. I had created my own version of Puppy that I use on a daily basis, which is a form of Puppy Professional (basically to be a quick recovery disk), and although the java folder structure was preserved - I placed it below root - I still had to download Java again to make evrything work.

This is a minor irritation, but I'd like to learn how to do it properly.

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Preserving Java

#92 Post by jam »

The Major,

If you remaster using Dougal's new remaster script it should preserve your Java install. My remaster contains the latest Java 1.5.0_08 release. You can get the latest remaster script below. It only seems to work soothly with Puppy 2.10

Remaster Script Thread:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... t=remaster

There are some customized settings related to my distro, such as browser and desktop settings which it did not preserve, so I wrote a short script to copy them to /root during the remaster process.
Jam

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#93 Post by Springer »

[quote="Lobster"]I believe this commercial project evolved from Hancom Office
http://product.thinkfree.com/purchase/pc_tfo.html

anyone try them?

Not in a long time, but ThinkFree predates HancomOffice by many years. ThinkFree was the *original* online office suite, and has been around for the better part of a decade now (I'm pretty sure I was using it in 1997-2000), although both the product and the company have changed more than a little since then. I quit using it when my needs for collaboration lessened, and ThinkFree tried to go to a pay-per-month-of-access subscription model, so it just wasn't worth it to stay with it, even though it worked quite well. It's free again, but my old login doesn't work, and I've not bothered to get a new one, now that I use OpenOffice for a larger and larger portion of my work.

Like Berkeley Softworks' GEOS (which was a very usable, if necessarily basic Mac-like GUI OS and App suite for the Commodore 64 - something that should impress Pupsters!) , ThinkFree is one of those righteous hacks that inspires simply because it does what was previously believed to be impossible. ThinkFree is Java-based, with all the good and bad attendant with that, but without the slowness usually associated with Java apps of any non-trivial size. I used ThinkFree office many years ago on 150-300 MHz win 95/98 boxes and it ran surprisingly well - not as fast as MS Office, but not slow, either, and it was definitely usable for all documents short of serious power-user complexity.

AFAIK, ThinkFree was the first truly cross-platform office suite that had usable support for reading and writing MS Office files, even if somewhat limited.

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#94 Post by Rhino »

Java works great on my laptop that I'm using to remaster the CD. However, getting Java to work properly on a remastered CD has proven to be frustrating. I have tried both remaster scripts with no luck yet. I can get the Java plugin to work fine with SeaMonkey, but to get Java apps to run or to get it to work with OpenOffice seems kinda tough. I'm sure there is something I am missing here. Dougal's remaster script worked well, but still didn't get Java going as had been reported previously. I copied the /root/jre1.5.0_06 folder and contents to the remastered CD along with the hidden .java folder in /root. Any ideas? If anyone knows how to get Java working on a remastered Live CD , please let me know.

On a related note, I had considered just adding the Java installer with a desktop link so one could easily install Java if you wanted it, therefore keeping the iso quite a bit smaller. However, I tend to think Java should just work right out of the box.
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#95 Post by GuestToo »

you may need to add lines like these to /etc/profile or /etc/profile.local, if you haven't already:

export JAVA_HOME=/root/jre1.5.0_06
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME

so you can run java apps by typing:

java -jar a_java_app.jar

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Re: Preserving Java

#96 Post by Dougal »

jam wrote:There are some customized settings related to my distro, such as browser and desktop settings which it did not preserve, so I wrote a short script to copy them to /root during the remaster process.
And why have you not posted them on the remaster-script thread?? :?

I discovered the /root/.jwm directory, added that... I want to make a proper (not testing) post with an updated version soon.
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Some say your toes
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#97 Post by Lobster »

The correct numbering is 2.10 (even though this is unconventional)
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy210Professional

Project leader is Rhino (who has adapted this page)
Will there be a 2.02 and 2.10?

Would this be a suitable online presentation facility?
http://slideshare.net/login

Puppy Pro is already a 'Community Edition'
would you like me to design a logo?
(I have Xara again)

What name?

Puppy Pro
Puppy XP
Puppy Professional CE

?

How goes it?
Last edited by Lobster on Fri 06 Oct 2006, 00:35, edited 1 time in total.
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#98 Post by Rhino »

I am uploading the iso for the beta release to MU right now along with the md5 checksum, so hopefully we can check it out soon and fix things like the name
:oops: if necessary.

I have learned quite a bit through this process, but I have also nearly reached the extent of my current linux abilities. I'm VERY INTERESTED in what people want this version to have included, and I've tried to include as much as possible and keep to a reasonably small size (222Mb currently).

I did not make it look "exactly" like XP, Gliezl already did a magnificent job with her Professional version which is very nice. I just tidied up JWM quite a bit and tried to make the icons a little more uniform between different applications, such as MU's wallpaper changer, the puppy package downloader, the Seamonkey theme, turma, and most importantly ROX have similar icons now to give a little more organized look to the whole OS.

The other task that I could not figure out was the inclusion of a fully functioning JRE in the remastered live cd. I could get the bowser plugin just fine, but not the JRE. If anyone wants to (I'm begging) take the iso and try to figure it out for the final version and let me know what to do I would be very grateful. My fix was to include the Java installer (17 Mb) so that Java can be installed, or at the very least the browser plugin.

As far as the name goes, it doesn't really matter to me. I have called it Puppy 2.10 Professional so far, but I will add the CE part to it for the final version. Puppy Pro CE might distinguish it a little bit better from Gliezl'a version though.

Hopefully, this version will have much discussion and input about the necessary fixes before we release a 2nd beta or the final version.

I will post the links to the iso very soon!

Thanks!
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#99 Post by Lobster »

Look forward to it

here is an image using Xara and kept simple
Image

requested wiki page in private message deleted (have to be admin to delete page)

have used the full name but without CE (too much IMO)

:)
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#100 Post by richard.a »

Lobster wrote:Project leader is Rhino (who has adapted this page)
Will there be a 2.20 and 2.10??
I would suggest that the reason that 2.02 should be used in that specific product is because it is based on 2.02 of the PuppyLinux distribution, because this is to me the logical way with version numbering.

Should his next major recompile and ISO burn go to 2.10, then should not this distribution be called 2.10ce as well? This retains the important information of which version it is based on, as well as minimising the risk of butchering the files inside the pupsave file with an upgrade?

Just my thoughts, having worked (many years ago) on R&D of ground-to-air weaponry :)

But I've been mistaken in the past too, lol.

Been playing with the XOrg video configuration on one of my intel-powered mobos in Aptiva cases, the 810 chipset. I can now get 1600x1200 quite comfortably, thanks for whoever gave me the tip about using it to replace the XVesa poor res up till now in those.

Also I got Xfce working nicely in XOrg, although both window managers needed resolution reduced to 1200xwhatver because the text under the icons is still too small.

Question - how do you resize the desktop/pinboard icon text? Seems unaffected by global text size it seems, also right click on the icons doesn't give the answer?
Rhino wrote: hope to be rolling our a new PuppyPro based on 2.10 this weekend. I dropped XFCE and just included JWM at this point, but I did quite a bit of menu customization and simplification as mentioned in previous posts. Very Happy
How's the 2.10 version going? any chance to try it yet?

Please don't drop the Xfce choice... it is a very ergonomic alternative for those who might like it. If I may suggest, keep the default to JWM for the benefit of those who would feel "at home" with it :)
Image

Here are some more, doing a comparison... and full sized ones can be seen in the directory listing if you backspace in the url bar to see it :)

xfce_menu640.jpg
jwm_desktop640.jpg
wm_menu640.jpg
My goal is to keep it under 256MB so it can fit on a USB key (although that may prove to be quite slow) ...testing will be required.
Excellent idea, although I've been battling with an USB pendrive and following all the links I have to work out why/whynot.

Slightly off topic...I have three, actually. a 64Mb one with the contents of my personally burned Windows boot disk and the windows tools like partition magic, ghost, etc. That's the only one of the three that appears bootable. I also have a 256Mb one and a 1Gb one. All will read and write, but none will boot in BIOS except the 64Mb one!! Wierd. Anyone got any ideas?

This is a great vision Rhino, Lobster, and others. Thankyou for your hard work, guys, and Lobster I love your very stylised text above :)
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