(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Springer@

I support what Pizzasgood had to say about multiple copies. With very few exceptions, there are either very good reasons or a significant split in preferences. It's surprising how many Puppy users have stayed with JWM, despite the availability of Icewm. There are even some still using Fvwm, believe it or not. The next Puppy will probably be a toss up between Icewm and Xfce, the way things are going with our younger generation of Puppy's.

No-one would rather see the demise of Xvesa than me, but for sheer compatibility with lots of older hardware, its unbeatable. I have machines that simply won't boot with Xorg, and Xvesa is the only choice. Some even drop back to 320x200 and 4 colours for crying out loud! I just couldn't configure them without Xvesa. As soon as I get them running I can bump up the resolution and colour support, but seldom can I move them up to Xorg - not yet.

Themes, backgrounds and icons are my Ace in the hole, so to speak. When I get desperate for space to meet a size target, they're the first things to go. That said, I don't want to lose what will be, I hope, a Puppy showpiece for those outside the community, and more themes, etc does help convey the idea of getting more bangs per buck.

Have you tried Fox calculator in Puppy 2.15CE Beta1? I don't know but maybe that's the one you've been looking for. Just a thought.

Pizzasgood@

I had planned to drop JWM from the Beta1 to see what sort of reaction it would bring. Trouble was, it was almost not worth the hassle because of its size! I want the CE to be a unifying experience for the community - something we can all be proud of together - so leaving in JWM for its many devotees was really the only choice. It will be revisited before Final if the community wants it so, however.

Doesn't matter to me either way. In fact, the only reason I dropped it from Pizzapup was to save me from having to maintain/support it.

Two reasons someone might prefer JWM are that you can scroll the mouse on the title bar to roll up the window, and you can roll the mouse on the desktop to change desktops. And on a slower computer, it's probably faster than IceWM, though I doubt by much.

In respsone to Springer:
strip out xorg and you loose the ability to change refesh rate ect...
stripout xvesa and puppy won't run on strange hardware or many emulators. So IMHO keep them both.

cb88

What can I say that I didn't say in my first post in this thread?

Removing 100 small things makes no diference. Ooops, I had already said that.

I agree, Rarsa. But I also see Lobsters point of clean menus.
In 2.15beta, there is 3 filemanagers, 2 cd-rippers, 3 burner programs, 3 backup-programs, 2 file finders, 2 grep-progs, 4? texteditors...
Choices are nice, but...... there is a petget.

zigbert wrote:I agree, Rarsa. But I also see Lobsters point of clean menus.

A) I don't remember this thread being about clean menus. I remember it is about trimming fat.

B) Geany is not a text editor is a development environment. It is not categorized correctly. That leave us with Leafpad and MP plus that other small editor I don't remember the name which is the one included in initrd in case something goes really wrong.

The worst thing that can happen when having two editor entries in the menu is that you always choose one and ignore the rest. I think that we should not patronize "new users".

I haven't read a post from a new user saying that they got confused with three calculators but I've read people saying that "other people" may get confused. That big brother attitude may even be ofensive to some "new users".

Right now, for all the calculators we have, there's still not one that does RPN (HP-style, the standard in business and finance (because of the HP-12C), and also favored by many of us engineers.)

xcalc can run in TI mode or RPN (HP10C) mode ... trouble is, xcalc is a bit buggy in rpn mode

see my xcalc wrapper dotpup, which runs xcalc in 5 different styles, including colours, large fonts, and rpn mode: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16040

you can use dc on the command line, for rpn calculations

# dc -h

# dc 2 3 \* p
6

# dc
2 3 * p
6

i have hp67, kalc, and rpncalc installed on my machine

Good ways to trim fat ... avoid needless duplication

no, as has been said, when you have a 100 meg distro, and you remove 200k or so, you still have a 100 meg distro ... but you definitely have less functionality ... the 80/20 rule also applies here (80% of the bloat is from 20% if the apps)

do we really need FOUR text editors?

yes

if Puppy does not boot properly, it might be useful to have a text editor available ... e3 is only about 10k compressed ... 100 megs minus 10k = 100 megs

mp is a powerful and useful text editor for general purpose editing in command line mode

leafpad is a simple and useful general purpose X application ... it is the text editor that i use most of the time

Geany is more than a text editor, as rarsa says, it is a development environment. ... personally, i use leafpad more often

remove all 4 applications, and you still have a 100 meg distro ... with considerably less functionality

note: my xcalc wrapper is not installing a new application ... it is just running xcalc, which is already installed in Puppy, using the fonts and configurations that are already in Puppy (well, i added an alternate colour configuration for the TI calculator, and i added the TI colours to the RPN caclulator)

I haven't read a post from a new user saying that they got confused with three calculators

Erm,... I get confused. I never liked any of them though, so I just use a real calculator. My only confusion was in remembering which one was which though. I didn't see the options and say, "Oh no, what do I do? Too complex!" I just opened them all then made my decision.

Leafpad starts much much faster than Geany, which makes it better when just opening plain text. Geany has tons of great features for coding (syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts for multi-line commenting, auto-indent, geometric select, function collapse, function listing, etc.) It's very small anyway. Keeping it adds much more functionality than weight, it's worth it.

Even xmms is only 1.5 MB decompressed. After the filesystem compresses, it probably adds at most 1 MB, probably more like 0.8. Thats enough that the overlap with Gxine becomes nagging, but not too much. It's much faster to start, and more friendly to use. Reason: it doesn't support video. Replacing it and Gxine with a unified solution would require that unified solution to start as fast as xmms, or save a significant amount of space (more than .8 MB in my opinion).

That said, I'm all for dropping Gxine for something nicer. I'm no videophile so I couldn't offer suggestions. I do know that I've never liked Gxine though. Does VLC offer the same functionality or more in the same space or less? If so, add it (keeping xmms unless VLC fits the conditions of the prior paragraph).



As for bootsplash, Puppy's boot scripts are pretty different from most distros. To enable a third party bootsplash would probably take a great deal of work. I once began looking into that, but decided it would be easier to just make a Puppy specific bootsplash program. There is a working beta in the cutting-edge forum (named "Pebble"), which I worked on in the fall. It's not the best implementation by far, and lacks the ability to have animation, split screens, or change to text. I don't even know if it works with the newest Puppies. But it worked back in 2.02.

I have plans to start fresh with a better design that will make the above features possible. I just haven't gotten to it yet. For one thing, it will require C/C++, which I hadn't used in years and am re-learning now. I'm to the point now where I could start on it. My first goal is to get Pizzapup 3.0.1 done, then I'll finally start in on it.

Puppy does support a brief splash when booted from the CD, which is currently used to display optional boot parameters. It can display images too. It only lasts until the kernel and initrd.gz are loaded though, then is replaced by boot-text (which is where my bootsplash will kick in).

I guess it's not important, but I thought the Linsta gtk-theme was a little to big for me, so I tweeked another. I haven't checked the size of LiNsta in 2.15CE beta, maybe it's stripped, but original is is 226kb compressed. H2O-Stardust is 12kb.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16203

Thanks to all who replied. It's good to know that at least in most cases (and especially X) there really *are* reasons for having multiple solutions.

That said, I have some pretty old and crufty hardware, and I've yet to have to resort to Xvesa - anything I have that has enough RAM to run Puppy has display hardware modern enough to use X.org. (I suspect that if I tried to put Puppy on my old Libretto 50J, that I'd have issues, but with only 24 MB RAM, it's not really a Puppy candidate, so it'll keep running Mandrake as my "portable NAS server".)

As for themes and such - I still think ONE REALLY GOOD ONE beats a choice of several mediocre ones. There's a reason Apple doesn't ship themes...

zigbert wrote:I guess it's not important, but I thought the Linsta gtk-theme was a little to big for me, so I tweeked another. I haven't checked the size of LiNsta in 2.15CE beta, maybe it's stripped, but original is is 226kb compressed. H2O-Stardust is 12kb.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16203

Ooohh...I like it! Will make it the default for Beta2 if I can get it to work. At the moment selecting it just causes the default to start, and it is in an entirely different format. Can it be made compatible with both GTK-1 and GTK-2?

Cheers

WhoDo wrote:At the moment selecting it just causes the default to start, and it is in an entirely different format.

Strange, I just copied the H2O-Stardust directory to /usr/share/themes/.
I have only used it in JWM. I'll hope you make it.
This is my /root/.gtkrc-2.0 I have no idea about gtk1. There is so few gtk1-programs left in Puppy, that I haven't give it a thought. The only gtk1 programs I use is gtksee and Turma. It is maybe a little too early to skip gtk1, but my crystal ball tells me that it won't live forever in Puppy.

Would it be a good idea to include the Endeavour 2 file manager in 2.15CE instead of Rox_Filer? Endeavour has a built-in image browser that might be a good replacement for GTKSee, thus saving space. I have tried it under 2.14 standard. It runs like greased lightning and is more stable than Rox 2.5 which can fall over when reading large directories such as /usr/bin. Also faster than Thunar I would say. I tested the Endeavour dotpup on my old Compaq 400 MHz PC and I was impressed with the speed. See what u think.

There is a dotpup of Endeavour 2 for Puppy Linux available at Wolfpack here:
http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/
Dotpups are everywhere now!

While you're there, have a look at the Icewin menu program too. Might also be handy for 2.15CE.

My latest Icewin options GUI dotpup is here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16241

If we have no Composer (with Firefox or Opera browser choices) can we have this please
http://www.unverse.net/whizzywig-cross- ... ditor.html

first suggested here
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 7366#27366

In reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage and that v2.15CE Standard is in beta, isn't there a features freeze in effect?

As for HTML editing, there are text editors that can be used. Many of us code away with the likes of notepad, e3, smalledit, Leafpad and Beaver. Yes, I know they're not WYSIWYG, but you can stick Leafpad editing HTML in one workspace, your browser of choice in an adjacent workspace, and with adept use of the save and refresh keys get a great generation scheme - and a bit of an education, to boot.

However, if the community insists on piling on post-beta apps and features, I'm curious what the size difference is between BlueFish, an old standby, and WhizzyWiz.

Editorial: WhizzyWiz's "Cross browser" reference is pure, anesthetic techno-babble. Write your code, validate with W3C tools and forget it. It's the job of browsers to properly render validated code. To wit, http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

alienjeff wrote:In reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage and that v2.15CE Standard is in beta, isn't there a features freeze in effect?

Yes, there is a freeze in effect for Beta2/RC1. That said, development is still in process for the requisite web_215.sfs plugin that should contain Firefox/Thunderbird/Java/Flash9/Bluefish(and/or Whizzywig)/Azureus, etc.

alienjeff wrote: As for HTML editing, there are text editors that can be used. Many of us code away with the likes of notepad, e3, smalledit, Leafpad and Beaver. Yes, I know they're not WYSIWYG, but you can stick Leafpad editing HTML in one workspace, your browser of choice in an adjacent workspace, and with adept use of the save and refresh keys get a great generation scheme - and a bit of an education, to boot.

Agreed. There is also Geany-0.10.2 which will handle the task admirably, for those who don't need wysiwyg capability to help them actually cut code.

WhoDo wrote:Agreed. There is also Geany-0.10.2 which will handle the task admirably, for those who don't need wysiwyg capability to help them actually cut code.

I have always used a notepad type application plus a separate browser, starting in MS Windows 3.1 days

I use an only slightly better app than notepad now, which is an Ozzie product called FlexEd32 which I believe is no longer in existence.

The idea of using two desktops and switching is the way to go imho, Windows never provided it, and even with add-on utilities, the resource usage was bad.

Go for it