(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jakfish wrote: ...Xubuntu 13.10 heaven. Love the fast XFCE and its tweakable nature, and Ubuntu of any flavor does well on the C720's specs of 2GB RAM/16GB SSD.

I spent a bit of time playing with Xubuntu 13.10 recently, and agree completely - tweakable, stable, fast and efficient as all get out - and with the sizeable Ubuntu repo, can rather easily be made into about anything one wants or needs. My favorite "big" Linux distro. Can't wait for the LTS 14.04 release next month!

Typical of Xfce releases, it seems, in that it looks really bland OOTB until you get in and tweak a while. I don't quite understand why "they" do that - develop a system around a desktop that has the potential to look and function so nicely - yet release it appearing so blah, so ordinary on first boot...?

Also spent quite a fair amount of time with a Mint 15 Olivia (Mate) install. On one hand, I love it (quite fast/efficient, great look and "feel", full-featured and generally easy to use and setup) - but on the other hand, there always seems to be either some obnoxious bug/glitch that raises it's ugly head (Synaptic sometimes crashes system, for one), or else I uncover an obvious, useful and common feature that's simply missing (like no thumbnail support in the default Caja file browser, for example). A number of things that spoil the impression of an otherwise great, well laid-out OS.

Bob

How does one do what you refer to there?

Hacked the macine to accept xubuntu?

Moat wrote:

jakfish wrote: ...Xubuntu 13.10 heaven. Love the fast XFCE and its tweakable nature, and Ubuntu of any flavor does well on the C720's specs of 2GB RAM/16GB SSD.

I spent a bit of time playing with Xubuntu 13.10 recently, and agree completely - tweakable, stable, fast and efficient as all get out - and with the sizeable Ubuntu repo, can rather easily be made into about anything one wants or needs. My favorite "big" Linux distro. Can't wait for the LTS 14.04 release next month!

Typical of Xfce releases, it seems, in that it looks really bland OOTB until you get in and tweak a while. I don't quite understand why "they" do that - develop a system around a desktop that has the potential to look and function so nicely - yet release it appearing so blah, so ordinary on first boot...?

Also spent quite a fair amount of time with a Mint 15 Olivia (Mate) install. On one hand, I love it (quite fast/efficient, great look and "feel", full-featured and generally easy to use and setup) - but on the other hand, there always seems to be either some obnoxious bug/glitch that raises it's ugly head (Synaptic sometimes crashes system, for one), or else I uncover an obvious, useful and common feature that's simply missing (like no thumbnail support in the default Caja file browser, for example). A number of things that spoil the impression of an otherwise great, well laid-out OS.

Bob

I agree. I find this frustrating as well. Xfce works really well as a window manager IMO, with plenty of features and yet modest system requirements compared to either Gnome or KDE, but the themes it comes with are very bland and uninspiring; one set of pale and washed-out colours after another.

Other news; I've recently installed Slackel 5.0 Openbox, which is based on Slackware (hence the name) and I'm impressed with it; like Puppy, it provides a full set of lightweight apps such as abiword, gnumeric and Midori and has quite an attractive interface.

I think it's a good choice for a lightweight distro for people with older computers (like mine).

Thanks for reminding me to look into latest Shackel. Intersting.

I already have tried out the Community effort for building Slax
a custom made version which many like and their forum at
proteus Porteus? I wlwasy forget the real name.

Porteus 3.0 just released.Available with KDE 4,LXDE, MATE, RazorQT and XFCE.

http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3185

Porteus LXDE or Porteus xfce? Which one would you guess
find easier to use or making less demands

My latest text of Porteus is way back in 2012?
Porteus-Wheezy from 31 Dec 2012? Is a bit odd.
Did they have no release during 2013?
or me very lazy

I feel for testing these new versions too.

nooby wrote:Porteus LXDE or Porteus xfce? Which one would you guess
find easier to use or making less demands

Hi nooby -

I think you'd probably like either one, but LXDE might be a little easier to tweak because it generally is simpler and has fewer feature choices than Xfce (although LXDE still has plenty of useful, well thought out features available).

But both are great lightweight desktops!

And too - Xfce includes neat composting effects (transparency, window shadowing, etc) that I find are fun to play with and can make a very nice looking, pleasant-to-use and highly functional desktop. LXDE does not have composting effects, but is a little lighter on memory use.

The new Porteus is at the top of my list of the next distro to try...

Bob

Still running PCLOS MATE on my backup linux box.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/

[james@localhost ~]$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 3.4.70-pclos1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 22 16:15:40 CST 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Bob very friendly of you I take a look this afternoon most likely
I am bound with Doc visiting me to look at some med things my stomach.

So I start out with LXDE then being easier on my poor brain to grasp.

nooby Shackel is calling you if your stomach and your brain and your doctor allows it

three times only and the shovel and the penguin and most of all the rabies shot

Upgrading from Win8 (which I find almost unusable) to Win8.1 today (5-6 hours, huge licence aggreement), I immediately found my system, which had just downloaded and installed the huge upgrade, now unable to connect to the internet. And help is just a internet connection away.

Happily, Knoppix 7.2 still connects to the Internet.

I can't use Puppy on this Asus laptop (don't buy ASUS, is my advice to all - they are crooked to the core, at least in Canada, and totally incompetent to boot) because I'm still unsure what I have to do to get it in shape to conform to UEFI . Knoppix has that pre-arranged, so I just had to make some annoying steps every time I boot up - hold F2 key down immediately on reset or restart until phony UEFI BIOS menu appears, select Boot devices, and rearrange to make generic USB 1st (every time!), then go to Save&Exit, and select Generic USB (don't ask why, otherwise it boots Windows anyway).

Update: after rebooting to Win8.1, getting the same connection problem message, and letting the Win diagnostic examine my network connections, I was told that:

1. MSN.xxx wasn't responding

2. that the Windows Defender firewall was preventing my connecting to the Internet

Meanwhile I notice that news I didn't ask for or want is being displayed in a slideshow on the screen...

Good thing too, because Windows help didn't give any clue as to what needed to be done to the firewall settings. I guess it was right for part 1. However, I do recall that on the first failure to connect, I couldn't get Google or anything else to come up. And here I am, without having had a chance to do anything to fix it...

Sooooo confidence building.

BTW, this is my first posting online with IE in at least ten years (and hopefully, the last for the next ten years also)

Two things in your report get me scratching my head, otropogo:

1) - since when is a whinedose* version considered a distro?
2) - why would someone who already has one of the best distros installed
on the computer want to install a whinedose* on same computer?

No doubt you had to do it at gunpoint? Or maybe you suffered a concussion?
Or it's a case of PTSD? In any case, my sincere condolences.

musher0
~~~~~~~~~~~~
For those who wouldn't already know:
* a whinedose is a computer OS that whines if you don't feed it its daily
dose of anti-viruses and updates.

I had the same problem with a Win-8 Asus laptop. Even with the machine configured as legacy bios, I could install linux and complete the setup, but when the machine rebooted, grub was not displayed and the machine defaulted to windoze. I took the Asus machine back and bought a faster HP win-7 laptop with the refund...

I think ASUS is good for home made computers, but the prebuilt ones are problematic (but not nearly as much or a problem as HP and DELL).

nooby wrote:Porteus LXDE or Porteus xfce? Which one would you guess
find easier to use or making less demands

The latest version is awesome, you will like it ... and LXDE takes the cake, as the lightest, easiest and less demanding.

Porteus=> boot/doc/requirements.txt wrote:Memory requirements for LXDE
------
128 MB to run Xwindow
256 MB to be able to use copy2ram cheatcode

Memory requirements for MATE
------
256 MB to run Xwindow
512 MB to be able to use copy2ram cheatcode

Memory requirements for Razor
------
256 MB to run Xwindow
512 MB to be able to use copy2ram cheatcode

Memory requirements for XFCE
------
256 MB to run Xwindow
512 MB to be able to use copy2ram cheatcode

How is Shakel related to Proteus then?

I wonder what menu.lst they suggests?
This code boots to a installation guide that wipes out the HD
seems they don't want people to do frugal install.

Porteus 3.0 Mate.
Here's the menu.lst I'm using on an ext4 partition.

Thanks James

On an older Porteus from 2013 Dec 30 something
this one boots fast and the OS works as expected. I am using it now at time of writing. Will try to boot your code too soon .

Edit here is what goes wrong with latest 3.0 version.

I dont seem to have the needed Porteusv3.0 x86.64.sgn file.
It ask for it and when it does not find it then it refuse to load and boot.
Where do I find that file?

Here I am using Centrych OS Have already forgotten
what that OS is based on. Is it a ubuntu maybe.
Has any of you great experience of using it?
I am totally new to it. Fail to even to spell the name.

nooby wrote:

Code: Select all

title Portdeb (sda1/portdeb)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel (hd0,0)/porteus/boot/syslinux/vmlinuz noauto copy2ram from=/porteus2014/ changes=/changes.dat
  initrd (hd0,0)/porteus/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz

I dont seem to have the needed Porteusv3.0 x86.64.sgn file.
It ask for it and when it does not find it then it refuse to load and boot.
Where do I find that file?

nooby, it's in porteus subdirectory, I htink problem is in your grub entry, which one is correct subdir porteus or porteus2014 ? if you boot kernel and initrd from porteus then your from=/ parameter should also be porteus, no?

BTW I just booted 2 different versions of porteus (both 3.0 but different isos choosen from their desktop wizard.) I like the approach of building and downloading custom iso.

I like the modular approach and choice of apps in lxde version is incredibly similar to puppy's, with libreoffice and firefox iso is about 340 Mb
I also tried razor-qt version because I never used that desktop enviroment, choice of apps I got in ~175 MB iso is great -gimp, vlc, qmmp, qbittorrent, unfortunately I haven't included browser.
razor qt seems slick and good.
QT is indeed powerfull framework although I don't normally use it.