[CLOSED] Fatdog64-720 Beta [1 Dec 2017]

[belham2]

Tried these two menu.lst entries, and Fatdog64-720 with the monster initrd refuses to boot.

You can get the monster out of the Bismarck http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... nitrd.html


Hi James!

Gonna try your suggestion and pull the .sfs out, and then see if she'll boot 'frugally".

That Bismarck was one hell of a ship...until she went down, that is

[jamesbond]

Also check what version of grub4dos you have. There are many versions of grub4dos, not all of them are equally capable. I just tested creating an ISO that boots using grub4dos; and it works nicely. I used grub4dos version 0.4.5c (dated ca 2014).

[belham2]

[UPDATE]

OH MY FRIGGGGGGGGGIN GOSH........

...on a hunch, I let the laptop, which is only 5 yrs old, has a reasonably fast Core i3 Intel chip, with 8GB ram, and a SSD drive, and i let the original 'frugal' install sit and the cursor blink as it tried to start its fat a## up........

As I was working on another machine, to extract the .sfs out of the Bismarck initrd, about 17 minutes passed, and suddenly the 'frugal' install laptop decides to init and boot.

Good heavens, Fatdog team, what in heck are trying to do to your loyal sailors on the good ship Fatdog?

17 minutes to friggin' 'frugal' boot.

You now take the all time record for driving users insane, lol

Hope I can make this faster, as I am NOT gonna wait 17 minutes every time I boot.


Dang........it may be time to row away in my dingy from Fatdog

[SFR]

17 minutes to friggin' 'frugal' boot.

Hey Belham

I believe you've already got a way to work around this problem:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 361#901361

Still, it's incredible bad luck that all your machines have this thing with FD.

Greetings!

[jake29]

@Billtoo: Try kodi_17_3_avahi_0_6_32-2017.09.03-x86_64-35.sfs available in SFS Manager. It works fine for me.

@jamesbond: Only quirk I have noticed with this beta so far is that /root/Desktop does not appear to influence or reflect actual Desktop.

[Billtoo]

@Billtoo: Try kodi_17_3_avahi_0_6_32-2017.09.03-x86_64-35.sfs available in SFS Manager. It works fine for me.
.

Hi jake29,

That's the SFS that I used but the problem was that I didn't include the 32bit libs when I installed the proprietary Nvidia driver.
I uninstalled and then reinstalled the driver with the 32bit libs and kodi works fine now.

I've lost the panel at the bottom of the screen so I may have to start from scratch to get things right.

Thanks.

[LateAdopter]

Hope I can make this faster, as I am NOT gonna wait 17 minutes every time I boot.

I prefer the method jamesbond described in his lightofdawn blog that doesn't need as much space.

Click on initrd to open it, move fd64.sfs and kernel-modules.sfs out somewhere safe, rename blank.sfs to kernel-modules.sfs - click to repack initrd.

That is from memory, so E&OE. Hopefully jamesbond can point out anything I missed.

Then I use the three bits for all of my fatdog 710 copies running from an SSD or USB SDcard.

[belham2]

17 minutes to friggin' 'frugal' boot.

Hey Belham

I believe you've already got a way to work around this problem:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 361#901361

Still, it's incredible bad luck that all your machines have this thing with FD.

Greetings!

Hi SFR (and James/Kirk/Step),

I know, right? Thanks for linking that, SFR. I actually did remember & had found it late last night, and followed everything again. Now FD64-720 is back to about 30-40sec boot time.

Maybe I need to get a new machine, and come into the 21st century?

But, seriously, if I have this trouble on a 5 yr old Core I3 Vaio laptop with an SSD and over 8GB of Ram, just who in blue blazes is your guy's target market for Fatdogs?

To not sound too cranky, lol, because me luvs my Fat dog(s), even when they drives me nutso, but perhaps you guys need to re-think this thing just a tad in terms of releases. Slow boots, and always laying that at the feet of the user saying "...well, your BIOS (or some other thing) is holding you guys back..." ....boy, oh boy, young fellas, how about some respect (help me here, Sage!)

My stuff is NOT that old (the other machines are Athlon X2s, 2.8Ghz, 6-8 years old, and they ALL display the same thing). And they boot everything under Linux's Sun, pups too, likcety-split. Even those two monsters from the deep, OpenSUSE and Fedora, are 20-30sec boots across my machines. But put me a new Fatdog in? Heck no, the young fellas are trying to put me in a casket, 6 feet under

To cut to the chase: doggone it, james/kirk/sfr/step, you guys are not playing nice!! Release a small init version if you have to. I'm already an old codger, and making me feel I am surrounded by everything else old (i,e. my equipment) when I excitedly grab a new FD version is, to borrow a youngin's phrase, 'seriously messed up'

I have half a mind to sail this Bismarck you pound down into the pup waters and shoot you all upside your buttocks and see how uz like that!! Boom, boom, you young heathen creatures...make a small init version so it boots fast!!!

[mavrothal]

The default brightness (40) was kind of low I think but I guess this depends on the hardware one uses.

I don't set the brightness at boot. That must be what the kernel choose by default.

OK.
Shouldn't /etc/brightness.conf takeover at some point though?

I still find strange that at first reboot after you make a savefile, asks again for language/keyboard/time etc setup that were set on the first (from CD) boot.

The rationale is that when you do a pristine boot, you are probably just:
a) testing whether you like Fatdog or not
b) fixing stuff

In which case, you probably don't want to be bothered by having to answer questions you probably don't care of.

Once you've decided that Fatdog is there to stay (and create a savefile/savefolder to keep your personalised settings), that would be the good time to ask for the initial settings.

I see the point but if you are booting with a savefile in place I guess it means you consider it a keeper.
Maybe instead of going through the setup again by default, ask first or at least provide an explanation before restarting the setup.
Otherwise looks like that the settings did not stick, which is not a good second impression

[Billtoo]

I started over and installed to the hard drive of my Acer Desktop:

# sh inxi -bw
System: Host: fatdog64-e81 Kernel: 4.14.2 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Openbox 3.5.2 Distro: Fatdog64 Linux 720
Machine: Device: desktop System: ACER product: Aspire M5620 v: R01-A4 serial: PTS860X0348050CF642700
Mobo: ACER model: G33T-AM v: 1.0 serial: 00000000 BIOS: American Megatrends v: R01-A4 date: 12/19/2007
Battery hidpp__0: charge: N/A condition: NA/NA Wh
hidpp__1: charge: N/A condition: NA/NA Wh
CPU: Quad core Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (-MCP-) speed/max: 1603/2403 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GF108 [GeForce GT 430]
Display Server: X.Org 1.19.5 driver: nvidia Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz, 1920x1080@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GT 430/PCIe/SSE2 version: 4.3.0 NVIDIA 387.34
Network: Card: Intel 82566DC-2 Gigabit Network Connection driver: e1000e
Drives: HDD Total Size: 500.1GB (0.7% used)
Weather: Conditions: 28 F (-2 C) - Overcast Time: December 2, 8:57 AM EST
Info: Processes: 167 Uptime: 1:08 Memory: 687.6/7983.6MB Client: Shell (sh) inxi: 2.3.51
#

It's working okay so far,
Thanks.

[chiron²]

Downloaded and tested. Great. The first Puppy-like OS ever to run on an Thinkpad X61 Tablet AND recognize the Wacom Pen and touchscreen. Thanks to Xinput ootb. Did use savefile from 710, works OK so far, only my panels/docks are gone, but that is a minor prolem.

[Keef]

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Dell XPS M1530
Processor	: 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7250  @ 2.00GHz
Memory: 2047MB (245MB used)
Resolution: 1280x800 pixels
OpenGL Renderer: NV84

All working fine. Boots to desktop with drive icons showing in under 30s.

[jake29]

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Dell XPS M1530
Processor	: 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7250  @ 2.00GHz
Memory: 2047MB (245MB used)
Resolution: 1280x800 pixels
OpenGL Renderer: NV84

All working fine. Boots to desktop with drive icons showing in under 30s.

Core 2 Duo CPU (E4500) @ 2.20GHz / Memory: 3338MB. *Full install w/o Bootloader* - This build of FatDog64 boots quickly and without issue.

[bigpup]

External USB hard drive

Did a frugal install of Fatdog64-720 Beta

Used this to do the install running from Xenialpup64 7.5.
Yapi
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=107601

Used Grub4dos bootloader config to setup a boot loader on the drive.

What should the boot menu entry really look like?

Here are the options.

1. (this is what Grub4dos config made it)

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title Fatdog64 (sdc5/Fatdog64720b)
  uuid 19b0847a-549d-49c9-8c98-25af56f1d0ee
  kernel /Fatdog64720b/vmlinuz psubdir=Fatdog64720b pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck
  initrd /Fatdog64720b/initrd

2. (I modified it)

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title Fatdog64 (sdc5/Fatdog64720b)
  uuid 19b0847a-549d-49c9-8c98-25af56f1d0ee
  kernel /Fatdog64720b/vmlinuz rootfstype=ramfs
  initrd /Fatdog64720b/initrd

3. (I modified it)

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title Fatdog64-720b
  rootnoverify (hd0,4)
  kernel /Fatdog64720b/vmlinuz savefile=direct:device:sdc5:/Fatdog64720b/fd64save
  initrd /Fatdog64720b/initrd

I too saw the slow to bootup.
It booted to the point of message:

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linux-bzImage, etc..........

Hung there for a long time.
No message about what is happening.
Finally got to a working desktop.

The only problem with this.
It looks like the computer is locked up or frozen.
Nothing indicates it is still in the bootup process.

[don570]

to bigpup....

I noticed something strange.
Your device is ---> device:sdc5

Whereas the system is looking for (hd0,4) which is the 5th partition on sda
Could that be causing the delay in booting???

____________________________________________


In my situation I have saved to a folder (fd64save-folder) rather than a save file ---> I believe that is an option when you first make a savefile??
and I am using the hard drive that the kernel recognizes --> sda

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title fatdog 710 (sda1/fd64save-folder)
  find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /fatdog710/initrd
  kernel /fatdog710/vmlinuz   psubdir=fatdog710 pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck savefile=direct:device:sda1:/fd64save-folder 
  initrd /fatdog710/initrd
  

________

It boots quickly. If it isn't booting quickly then it is having recognition problems.

____________________________________________________

[rockedge]

That Bismarck was one hell of a ship...until she went down, that is Wink

I agree...here are some of my photos of the Bismarck at 4192 meters.....


my collection : http://g3.rockedge.org/index.php/Film-T ... n-Bismarck

[kirk]

Slow boots are usually do to your boot loader or slow media such as USB2.0 or optical drive. The laptop I usually use has grub legacy installed, which works fast with ext2 or ext3, but with ext4 it's very very slow. So I use ext3. You may not notice how slow your boot loader is with a typical size kernel/initrd of 10MB or so, but when you make that 370MB, now it's very noticeable. For slow boot loaders you basically have three options:

1) Replace your boot loader.
2) Find a filesystem that your bootloader works well with (Ext3 for grub legacy, maybe others)
3) Split the base.sfs out of the initrd. See http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... nitrd.html

The reason that splitting the initd speeds things up is that your slow boot loader only has to load 10MB and then the OS loads the rest.

[Wognath]

Fatdog team, thanks for 720.

As always, against advice, I copied my save folder over to the new install (frugal, large initrd). At first, there were no drive icons or panel with lxqt. lxqt-panel reports liblxqt.so not found. ** Edit: found .wh.liblxqt.so in /usr/local/lib64 **

Make-spot-more-secure went off without a hitch.

In all, a smooth transition. So far, everything I have tried works as expected. It boots a little slower (50s vs 44s for 710, from lickgrub menu to appearance of drive icons).

720 is now promoted to top of the grub menu! Thanks again.

[jamesbond]

@LateAdopter - you're correct. Here: http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/MinimalFatdogBoot.

@belham2: We started the huge/humongous initrd in Fatdog 600, that was back in 2012. The idea is not even new; Barry wrote Puppy support for humongous initrd back in 2007.

Machines I've previously booted Fatdog on (using USB flash drive)
(I no longer have access to some of them):
- Acer eMachines Netbook (2010): Atom N450 (single-core, 1.6GHz), 1GB - BIOS
- HP desktop (2012): Core i5 (dual-core 3.4 GHz), 8GB - UEFI
- Samsung laptop (2012): AMD A6 (quad-core, 1.6GHz), 8GB - BIOS
- Sony Vaio (2014): Core i5 (dual-core, 2.0Ghz), 16GB - UEFI
- MacMini (2017): Core i5 (dual-core, 2.6GHz), 8GB - UEFI
- Self-assembled desktop (2007): Athlon X2 (dual-core, can't remember GHz, definitely faster than the Atom Netbook), Gigabyte motherboard, 4GB - BIOS

Of all these machines, only the last one has the slowness problem. The rest boots from USB stick in less than 30seconds (from start of bootloader until kernel starts to run). The last one does take over 10 minutes if booted from USB or optical drive; **however** if booted from harddisk, it boots as fast as the others.

So no we're not expecting latest and greatest machine. Machines from 10 years ago is good enough.

... and always laying that at the feet of the user saying "...well, your BIOS (or some other thing) is holding you guys back..."

Unfortunately it is indeed the case. What other explanation could, then, explain why the much-lower-powered Atom netbook can boot Fatdog faster than the Athlon desktop?

As SFR said it, "it's incredible bad luck that **all** your machines have this problem".

@mavrothal:

OK.
Shouldn't /etc/brightness.conf takeover at some point though?

By default this file is empty. /etc/brightness.conf is updated by "brightness-up/brightness-down" (which you can activate using keyboard shortcuts, in sven); and by fatdog-brightness applet.
But for the this settings to be used at boot, you need to call "brightness-set restore" inside /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
Reason why this is not the default? This only makes sense if the machine as machine-adjustable brightness screen (=ie, laptop).

Otherwise looks like that the settings did not stick, which is not a good second impression

Yeah, this is a tough one because of conflicting objectives. What I've done is, if the settings have been set before, it will not be asked again. E.g. if you have set the keyboard map during first boot and then save the session, the first-run wizard which runs on the next boot will not ask about keyboard anymore. At least that's how it is supposed to work.

@bigpup -

The only problem with this.
It looks like the computer is locked up or frozen.
Nothing indicates it is still in the bootup process.

My answer will sound like a cop-out, but it is the truth. The problem of "no indication" is the bootloader problem. Fatdog hasn't even been started at that time, it's the bootloader who's in charge. So there is nothing we can do about it.

Here are some statistics:
- syslinux - prints dots as it loads the file. It does take a ridiculous amount of dots before Fatdog boots (about half a screen I think) but at least you know it's not hanging or something.
- old grub4dos (version 0.4.4 dated 2009) - does not show any indication.
- newer grub4dos (version 0.4.5c dated 2014) - prints the partial loaded size, updated every second
- grub-legacy: I don't know. Never used one.
- grub2 bios: I don't know. Never used one.
- grub2-efi: does not show any indication.
- refind: does not show any indication.
The only saving grace from refind and grub2-efi is that worst-case UEFI-based firmware can usually load it faster (under 30 seconds) than worst-case BIOS.

@All - thanks for test and feedback.

EDIT: Fix typo - Atom is N450 not N270.

[chiron²]

Any chance for a newer GLIBC (like 2.22) in final? The later claws-mail builds from Debian repos complain and want GLIBC >=2.22. Apart from that, great. Soundcard selector works again. Desktop drive icons work. Boot time is fast. Tested on a Thinkpad R500, T9600, 4GB, 120GB SSD and a Thinkpad X61 Tablet L7200, 4GB, 120GB SSD. Both work ootb. Including the serial Wacom pen and touch of the tablet. Screen rotation in the tablet does work, only the rotate key is not recognized yet. The new WPA-GUI is great, too. Setting up static IP made easy .

Kodi from SFS manager misses libsmb, but that's explained earlier.

Only thing missing: NFS. Whoever needs it, the famous NFS utils pet does also work in FD 720 Wink to the devs, it's only 152k.