Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[bwongchaowart]

This may seem like trivial information to experienced Linux users but this post would have saved me some time and trouble, so it might help someone else.

Some time ago JohnMurga posted an older version of Vim compiled with minimal features
(http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=53&highlight=vim). The advantage of that, naturally, was a small binary, but since I love Vim, I wanted an up-to-date version with a richer feature set. I don't have a compiling environment for Puppy set up (that would, of course, be best), so I downloaded the latest Slackware Vim package. At the moment this is version 6.3, patch level 85, compiled two weeks ago. I got this from http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/ap/vim-6.3.085-i486-1.tgz.
It needed libgpm (http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/slackware/slackware-current/slackware/a/gpm-1.19.6-i486-6.tgz).

Installation was self-evident: I put libgpm.so.1.18.0 into /usr/lib/ and the Vim executable into /usr/bin/. To save space, I placed the Vim runtime files into a squashfs which I mounted onto /usr/share/vim/. Then I needed to make a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 to /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1.18.0.

For some reason the default history setting was 0, which meant that there was no command line history, so I had to add "set history=20" to .vimrc. (I haven't checked the other settings yet -- adjust as necessary.) Otherwise, it seems to work, although I haven't tested it rigorously. I'm using Puppy version 1.0.4 and the library versions are not exactly the same as Slackware's; I don't know if this is a problem but Vim hasn't done anything unexpected yet.