(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

tinker wrote:The latest recommended debian distribution for the pi comes with four different files in /boot:
arm128_start.elf
arm192_start.elf
arm224_start.elf
start.elf

These determine, somehow, the amount of memory out of the 256MB total that is allocated for regular use, as opposed to graphics use. You copy the desired file over start.elf and reboot, to change the allocation. I think it defaults in this release to 192. I switched to using 224 to get more memory for applications. Top now reports 220,592 kib memory total.

Puppy sap comes with only one file that seems to give a memory split at 128MB, at least that's close to the number reported by top and hardinfo.

Does someone know how to create a "Start" file for puppy that gives applications more memory?

I did check the file sizes on debian versus puppy sap, and they're different. I didn't want to just try one of theirs.

UPDATE: I copied the debian arm224_start.elf file over barry's start.elf file and now I get about 220MB total memory in puppy sap. So, it seems they are compatible. Chromium seems to run better with more memory.

My Dad kindly let me play with his Pi, so I bought myself a 16GB Class 10 Samsung SDHC card - probably overkill but it was a really good price...

Still early days, this is actually the first day I've used SAP Alpha 4, but so far so good!

I'm pleased to see that the comprehensive software bundle I've come to expect from Puppy is present and correct here too. Dad's Pi experience thus far has been with Raspian (IIRC) and an early alpha port of RISC OS 5. From what I've seen, the former is somewhat... spartan.

I'll not comment too much on Chromium other than to say that it seems to work and I assume I'm imagining the sense of someone watching over my shoulder.

With regard to printing, setting it up was simply a matter of connecting the Canon i865 and going through CUPS in exactly the same way as on any other Puppy. Dad watched while I printed the test page, and took it down to show Mam.

Had a few lockups,but can't be sure whether it had crashed or whether I was just impatient.

Tried updating PPM but got a stack of syntax error messages while it was processing the package lists.

Just tried loading the email client from the pinboard icon, and an error window popped up saying "GnuPG is not installed properly, or its version is too old. OpenPGP support disabled." I don't use PGP so can't comment on whether there is actually a problem. Having clicked OK, Puppy then proceeded to work through setting up Slypheed for the first time. I can't be sure until I've checked my Puppy installs on the main PC, but something seems odd with Slypheed too. Could just be the version number.

Over all, so far, this seems to be a remarkably accomplished Alpha!

[Edit: clarified sequence with email]

Hi people

I have been waiting a long time for the default raspbian for the Pi to bring out an OpenGL accelerated video driver.

Does this version of SAP that is the current release have OpenGL accelerated driver yet? Can it run glxgears?

i would fire up the Pi i have and test it but im using all my sd cards for developing a Pussy equivalent for the Pi...

If it works in Puppy already then i might release a game orientated Puppy that also contains alot of music and video software instead of waiting for raspian to release a driver and using raspbian to make the Pussy OS with all the fancy stuff that i have promised everyone. The server version of Pussy for the Pi is already available:
http://www.thepussycatforest.info/pussy-pie

other than server stuff i do actually believe that the Rasp Pi could be turned into an open source games console similar to the Playstation 1 and 2 with 1 game on each SD card and the game is executed automatically when a very bare OS has loaded up. With the fancy dhcp ethernet auto detection of network settings the user wouldnt have to worry about net connection stuff and could just put the sd card in the Pi, and it would load the game and you could be online playing multiplayer fps games without the user ever having to worry about OS stuff.

However, my hands are tied with no OpenGL driver

sickgut wrote:Can it run glxgears?

Yes, after installing mesa-utils from PPM, it works. Not sure, mesa-utils is needed or it's because glxgears is included.

You can also boot from a usb hd, meaning you need a small sd card with partition 1 and the other partition you can move to a hd or usb stick. You only need to change the path and maybe the file system type in cmdline.txt.

Or maybe you like Berryboot?

HTH
Rolf

rhadon wrote:

sickgut wrote:Can it run glxgears?

Yes, after installing mesa-utils from PPM, it works. Not sure, mesa-utils is needed or it's because glxgears is included.

You can also boot from a usb hd, meaning you need a small sd card with partition 1 and the other partition you can move to a hd or usb stick. You only need to change the path and maybe the file system type in cmdline.txt.

Or maybe you like Berryboot?

HTH
Rolf

Any idea of the score that glxgears gives you? im trying to determine if its running at accelerated speeds. I would presume a score of less than 200 would be unaccelerated, can you tell me what text glxgears outputs?

sorry to be a pain, my new sd cards are in the mail

Glxgears is running with ~85-87 fp5s.

rhadon wrote:Glxgears is running with ~85-87 fp5s.

cool

thankyou very much for your time and effort, this info gives me exactly what i needed to know. it seems that while OpenGL is supported as in it actually works, it isnt running at an accelerated speed. Looks like i have to wait until this issue is sorted out proper. I dont think there is any linux that runs OpenGL accelerated on the Rasp Pi yet and that is disappointing because its advertised as having a super kick ass GPU but the problem is we cant actually use the GPU.. The Quake 3 demo is a little misleading as it has a custom driver included in the Quake 3 demo package for the Rasp that actually makes it run at accelerated speeds, and normal reason would tell a normal person watching the Quake 3 demo playing at a reasonable frame rate on youtube videos that OpenGL is there and working as it should, when infact it only works for that program.

Once again, thankyou for your time and effort.

I haven't seen much traffic in this forum topic lately, and I haven't seen any recent mentions about the pi in Barry's blog. Does anyone know if there's going to be any further development of this version of Puppy?

@tinker and all

*I think* that Barry hasn't the time at the moment to pursue the raspberry pi. He is busy with x86 Precise build and then wants to move to a Wary/Racy update.

Then he has his Odroid-X sitting there gathering dust which he mentioned in his blog he is keen to get developing a puppy for that. That work will be very significant as it's arm processor has much in common with the current batch of tablets doing the rounds at the moment.

Don't despair. I did some preliminary work on a Debian Wheezy build which also paved the way for woof to support Raspbian.

At some point, it is my intention to get back into Pi (Raspbian based) development. However it appears the whole batch of pets that make up the framework don't quite work right with armhf. That means they will need to all be recompiled in Raspbian.

This development may be two fold, depending on my time. I am keen to pursue xfbdev as a possibility for an alternate xserver. Xorg is too heavy for the Pi. Half of it's available RAM and a good chunk of it's processing power go to pleasing Xorg. Also, I believe there is a lot of other overhead that may be able to be cut. This will be a fork development, but as I said it's time!

*side note. It will ease the burden if anyone runs Raspbian to compile some pets but not yet. I am working on optimising the cflags to get the most efficient binaries possible. This will be the topic of another thread in the not too distant future. Anyone want to donate a spare Pi? I know someone that may be able to help (no promises). PM if interested.

I have a very modest experience compiling things, but I have a R_Pi with Raspbian installed and would be willing to give compiling some .pets a try.

I probably will need some "How do I do this..." sort of advice. And some info on how to get to the source files.

When you have optimized the cflags let us know.

eowens2 wrote:I have a very modest experience compiling things, but I have a R_Pi with Raspbian installed and would be willing to give compiling some .pets a try.

I probably will need some "How do I do this..." sort of advice. And some info on how to get to the source files.

When you have optimized the cflags let us know.

The biggest problem is not breaking the raspbian install. make install DESTDIR=/some/path is a possible solution to that. I have compiled a few but I'm a little busy with slacko and in the next 2 weeks real life. Over the southern summer I will get a bit more time for this. I also want to set up a server for Pi files.. in the works.

I'll get back soon with some optimised cflags.

Hi

I´m a new owner of a Raspberry Pi, ver. 2, 512 Mb.
Got it work with the Wheezy, but not really happy with it, would like to use Puppy, as I run that on some other computers.

So I downloaded the Alpha4, unfolded under Windows, transferred to the SD card with the utility - but it´s not booting. When I look at the content of the SD card with Gparted, the first FAT partition is OK, the second (claimed to be ext2) is corrupt.
So I downloaded again, run unxz and dd to write it on the card, now both partitions are ok, there is also a swap partition, they are readable - but the Pi just does not do anything when I try to start it up.
The red LED comes on, the green flickers a second - and that´s it, nothig more happens.

Any advices? What do I do wrong?

I have a 512M Pi board too, and it didn't boot Puppy alpha4 either.

So I downloaded the latest Raspbian from the http://www.raspberrypi.org/ website, and after writing the image to a second card and seeing that it would boot fine, I copied the boot files ( I think it was just bootcode.bin at first ) to the Puppy card. Puppy booted then but didn't see all 512M ram and wouldn't power off completely.

Then I decided to try updating the kernel and all the other boot related files. Since Puppy is set up differently than Raspbian I didn't try to run rpi-update itself, but I copied the kernel images, start.elf, start_cd.elf, fixup.dat and fixup_cd.dat from this zip file https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/ ... master.zip to the boot partition of the Puppy card and the modules/3.2.27+ folder to the /lib/modules folder on the root partition of the Puppy card. I didn't copy anything from the vc folder in the zip file because I don't think Puppy uses any of it, however I did have to copy some files from Raspbian's /lib/firmware folder to Puppy's /lib/firmware folder to get my wifi dongle to work.

As for the second partition having errors, I think it has something to do with ext4 or special file system options. When I tried to mount the second partition of the Puppy card on another computer running Puppy by clicking on the partition icon it refused, but mounting it from the command line worked fine.

Puppy will run on the 512M Pi, I'm posting from it now.

EDIT: bootcode.bin is in the zip file, you only need to download Raspbian if you need something from /lib/firmware.

Thanx Woodenshoe,

I actually came to that with the bootcode.bin myself, and got Puppy to boot, but not much more. Also can't use the WiFi, I'll try to find what I need to get it work. Also I'll try your ideas to copy those files you mentioned.

The problem I had with the second partition came from the Win32diskimager. When I copied in Linux with dd, then it did work without any problem.

If you got any further with the PupPi, please give us your ideas, I am an eager listener! (for example: Flash player / Youtube in the provided Chrome?)

My wifi dongle worked in Raspbian so I did a lsmod from the command line to figure out which kernel module it was using.

Although it wasn't listed in Puppy's network module list I could load it by clicking on the "More" tab and then on the "Specify" button, but it still couldn't find any new interface.

I thought I saw some kind of error message during boot up before X came up so I exited X ( you could ctrl+alt+F1 to see the boot messages and ctrl+alt+F4 to go back to X ) and that was how I found out that the kernel module for my wifi dongle couldn't find one of its files in the /lib/firmware directory.

I copied everything from Raspbian's /lib/firmware directory to Puppy's /lib/firmware, probably overkill, and then my wifi worked.

EDIT: I had already copied a Raspbian kernel, see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 256#665256

Apologies coming in a bit late here due to delivery delays & co! Pupradio BBC 4 works just fine from the default settings, which I don't understand because FP isn't possible yet on this device and Auntie is even further behind the pack than me? So how is PR setup and how should URLs be saved in the preset box? Never got added stations to respond in regular Puppies - obviously missing something important which I couldn't find in 'Search'. All this becomes more pertinent without access to FP. Incidentally, the sound quality is superb (presumably off the digital stream?) even on small cr*p powered speakers; can't wait to push it through something decent.

I dont know if everyone has heard about this community funded board which is due to ship this week. The pre-order price was 49 dollars but not sure what the final price will be for the different models. It is an open source project so the circuit diagrams are available too.

Cubieboard http://cubieboard.org/

Pictures
http://cubieboard.org/2012/09/02/some-p ... ubieboard/

A10 processor running at 1Ghz
DRAM 512M or 1Gb
on-board 10/100 ethernet
SATA
2x USB
HDMI
VGA pin outs
touch panel connector pins

So, if you need more power, this may be one to consider.

I cannot get one this week because I am going away for a while but when I come back I hope to get one of these. They look good.

VGA pin outs

interesting that they have this. I note that Farnell/CPC has introduced an HDMI-VGA converter this weekend for twenty quid plus VAT. RPi should've had it as default - I don't buy their explanation; there's going to be megaloads of vga-only kit around for decades yet. Moreover, experimentalists are more likely to use an old monitor or TV initially rather than the family TV. As for schools, they should be setting a good example of recycling old monitors rather than sending them for landfill. Not everyone is a public(US=private) school Oxbridge graduate like Eban!

ocpaul20 wrote:I dont know if everyone has heard about this community funded board which is due to ship this week. The pre-order price was 49 dollars but not sure what the final price will be for the different models. It is an open source project so the circuit diagrams are available too.

Cubieboard http://cubieboard.org/

Pictures
http://cubieboard.org/2012/09/02/some-p ... ubieboard/

(....).

WOW!!!

This would be REALLY something to put a Puppy on! I have some plans to control an Arduino with an RPI, but maybe I should reconsider and change it to Cubieboard!
It all depends if there will be any proper SW to it.
More info, anybody?