Cheers sc0ttman,
I thought I would try and muddle my way through some feedback on Akita5. Still 2 weeks of skool "holidays" remaining (!) so in desperation I thought I'd lego together a new games and multimedia 'entertainment' system for them from the bits and pieces I have around the house, and try your latest puplet. Well, due to cpu and ram deterioration issues, plus a sprinkling of IDE cable fails, I managed to whittle it down to a third trainwreck that seems to be staying alive:
1) The testbed - EP-MVP3C2 / 500MHz (AMD)K2-6 / 256MB RAM (here's the full horror:
http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/epox/ep-mvp3c.htm)
...but I've added a 2-port USB2.0 PCI card, an Ensoniq ES-1371 soundcard+gameport, and in keeping with my cannibalistic interests in modularising components efficiently as possible- the HD is a 2Gb SD-card on an IDE adapter, and I have a library of avi movies on a USB caddy with a 250Gb ATA formatted with NTFS. In theory, if the machine goes 'ping' in a way that it shouldn't I can flip the latter 2 components immediately into another system. This Frankenstein is plugged into a big LCD TV as a monitor.
2) The machine is the ultimate in Net-nanniship and is not connected online. We don't have the bandwidth to share with the kids at present, so they have to miss out on FRIV and other flash-rich sites, meantimes. This makes it harder to upgrade via PPM and dependency checking as I've had to ferret everything from the online desktop elsewhere in the house, via USB flash drive. (sorry, "ferry" everything. But I have been through your repository like a dose of salts, sc0ttman - thanks especially for all those games!)
3) INSTALLATION. I used gparted to format the SD-card as ext3 and made a 512MB swap for it (I normally use only 256MB but I thought doubling that would help general running performance. Am I correct in thinking that?)
I've always stuck with GRUB1 for my frugal installs/dual boots on other machines, and this is My First Grub4DOS experience. Strange - even though I'm sure I was opting for a full install via the Universal installer, Akita installed frugally. I might have to wipe and start again...
Not your fault, but I have never been able to get a correctly-recognised install with the Universal installer's "USB-FLASH" pmedia coding in the menu.lst. I inevitably get this weird "pup_420.sfs not found" error unless I change the entry to "pmedia=idehd". Perhaps my mod here contributes to strange pmount /icon behaviour with sda0 showing up as a floppy, and often residual ghosts of mounted USB drives from previous sessions (not just restarting X, even after rebooting). I note too that I can't change my pmount preferences, e.g. have all detected drives shown on one page. Is this only a glitch for me?
4) Akita5 Wouldn't recognise the NTFS-formatted usb caddy until after some number of reboots and after installing an ntfs-3g pet from shinobar's puppy4 repository. (Even after install I was frequently getting a "NTFS-3G probe: Device is missing" error dialogue, but it's gone now.) Alas, I see now from your notes you're working on the VLC issue as nothing I tried was able to get a movie opening.
5) I installed FF7 and Standalone Flash11 player from your repositories, (via my usb-shuttling) but FF7.01 gives a string of missing dependencies, and I get a "browser library" error for the flashplayer. Maybe I should have installed the browser first (!) and got the dependencies hunted down early. We have quite a collection of swf games downloaded via the 'Games' thread of the puppy forums, but they'll have to sit pretty for a while...
6) Hmmm tried to install My First Linux Joystick. No luck as yet with the Quickshot QS-189, doesn't seem to be picked up by your joystick.daemon (joystick.pet?) even after I edited modprobe.conf to enable joystick=1 (that is, gameport=on). Think that *might* have lost retrovol in my attempt, and I can't get it back showing on the tray even after trying all the alsa wizard options (the original wizard keeps dropping out, too). I've been hunting around for solutions for correctly configuring the gameport on the ES-1317, but it's not a big deal for me at the moment.
7) Java. Went with shinobar's most recent pet, but then remembered that I should have tried ttuuxx's version with 'jar' files opening automatically via his exec bin he included (for numbkins like me). I've got a string of "little" jar game files (ignoring the java overhead for the present) I'd like to provide the kids.
So, in closing it seems that I'll have to wipe for another tilt at a full install, paying closer attention to your (great) 4-stage install options (how can I find and run those again like the desktop preferences, perhaps?). Again, this setup is just a stopgap so when the replacement CPU arrives for the larger project (maxed out ASRock K7S41GX mobo) I can just slot the SD card over. And while I'm in the real world - the kids received for Christmas a "mancala" boardgame which they are crazy about. Could you consider adding that ancient African strategy game to your repository (other names and variants include awari, wari) - championed by muggins (
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 1520dffc72,
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=19809,
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 4da3901540 he was puppifying a tlc version that has been updated since the issue was last visited on these forums
http://www.nongnu.org/awale/. I think it would be a worthwhile addition re your earlier post of games suggestions,
Many Thanks!