How to use AOL Dial up in Puppy

[oldaolgeezer]

Firstly I want to thank everyone for all their efforts to bring Puppy to the PC world.

For the two or three (probably older) people who still use WINDOWS AOL daily, I might mention the following success story:

On WINDOWS AOL go to the web page: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... dialup+aol

scroll down and download: Filename Penggy4Puppy.tar.gz
Filesize 652.94 KB

(In my Puppy, I choose to avoid the LINUX winmodem issues by using an external serial port modem and the Puppy modem Wizard.)

Then booting up Puppy, I made a directory in /usr called penggy_AOL_stuff and copied the Penggy4Puppy.tar.gz over to it (from the WINDOWS directory). I changed to that directory and un-tar-ed the Penggy4Puppy.tar.gz file.

I wrote the following script file to "spray" the various penggy files and directories around (and then edited the three files mentioned at the end of the script) and after running penggy and then clicking on SeaMonkey, success on Puppy 2.01 !

# run this script to install penggy into the proper PUPPY directories
#
# we expect to be in /usr/Penggy_AOL_stuff/Penggy4Puppy
#
#
# "guilex" & "guile-tools" go into /usr/bin
cp -p guilex /usr/bin
cp -p guile-tools /usr/bin
#
#
# contents of "lib" directory go into /usr/lib (contents only, not whole directory)
cp -p lib/* /usr/lib
#
#
# whole directory "guile" goes into /usr/share
# mkdir /usr/share/guile
cp -pr guile /usr/share/guile
#
#
# "penggy" goes into /usr/sbin
cp -p penggy /usr/sbin
#
# whole directory "penggyx" goes to /usr/share, then rename it to "penggy"
mkdir /usr/share/penggy
cp -pr penggyx/* /usr/share/penggy
#
#
# whole directory "penggyz" goes to /etc, then rename it to "penggy"
mkdir /etc/penggy
cp -pr penggyz/* /etc/penggy
#
#
#
# Last step is configuration. Quite many options are available here.
#
# You need to modify your configuration files and make them look like as
# follows :
#
# In /etc/penggy/aol-secrets put your AOL account(s) information :
# [YourScreenName] [YourPassword]
# [AnotherScreenName] [AnotherPassword]
# ....
#
# In /etc/penggy/phonetab put your AOL dialup number(s) :
# [YourAOLDialupNumber]
# [AnAlternativeOne]
# ....
#
# The file /etc/penggy/penggy.cfg is self-documented but the most commonly
# used options are:
#
# screen_name = [YourScreenName]
# # auto_reconnect = yes
# # daemon = yes
# modem_device = /dev/modem (Note : If this doesn't work, you might
# want to try /dev/ttyS0)

[Pence]

Can you get Aol Video Player to work with Puppy? When I go to aol.com and click on a aol (on demand)video, I get this...
http://i10.tinypic.com/44rk6jd.jpg
I don't have aol dialup,but I do use their free email.

[oldaolgeezer]

Pence:

I'm sorry to say that I don't even try streaming video or audio play back because any dial up connection is rather slow even on WINDOWS.

Some comments:
When I tried penggy's SeaMonkey AOL dial up on Puppy, and tried to view videos from AOL.COM, I got the message:

"We're sorry!

Your machine does not meet the minimum system requirement in order to view
the AOL Video Player:
System requirements:
Operating Systems:

* - Windows 2000
* - Windows XP
* - Mac OS X v10.2 and above,
etc."


I also noticed in another puppy topic, in http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... deo&t=2688
There is a discussion of the difficulty with viewing video (and sometimes
audio) from various other web sites, such as: http://news.bbc.co.uk

It seems, at the present time, Linux (and Puppy) will have difficulty handling each and every one of the numerous video and audio data formats that currently exist in the world of WINDOWS oriented web sites.

[Corsequoy]

Thanks oldaolgeezer for your instructions.

I did as you said until the raising of the terminal window, and then each time the terminal complained about something I put it right until I finally just got -

Removing stale pid file /var/run/penggy.pid

The modem (external) dialed but I got no message about tunneling or any indication that I may be connected so I just launched Firefox and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had a good connection.

The only problem, if it is a problem, is that I can not find a way to close the connection except to use the Kill Process from the Ice WM quick launch menu.

Sorry if this is a daft question, I am new to all this, and have not yet fully read into the matter, but what is the best way of getting details of the connection, ie. speed.

At the moment using Puppy 1.0.8 HD installed, I also use 1.04 and 2.12.

Thanks, Pete. (Corsequoy)

[amish]

hi, and thanks for your howto regarding puppy and aol. i hate seeing aol tie people to windows, and although it would probably be best if they just dropped aol, better to drop windows than keep both

i wanted to mention that many or even most linux distros do not by default support windows media and the like, either for ideological reasons, or to save space. ubuntu won't do mp3 and mpg without adding codecs but will do ogg sound, puppy will do ogg sound, mp3 and mpg, but doesn't do codecs for extra windows media, etc, to save space. you can install these, and then a lot of things will work. Sometimes, even then, sites won't- but some have more luck than others on the first try, unless i'm mistaken.