pcPuppyOS RC5 - Maximum Testers Requested!

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Roger Hunter · #16 Post by **Roger Hunter** » Mon 18 Feb 2008, 20:03

Finally, after wasting 4 CDs and downloading 3 different versions I've got PCPuppyOS up and running.

it has some peculiarities. It doesn't seem to understand large HDs. My 200Mb IDE drive is partitioned from hda1 to hda18. I have WinXP and Win98SE in the first 2 partitions with the rest devoted to Linux distros. hda5 is Puppy 2.14, my favorite. I wanted to put PCPOS in hda17 but it failed several times. Finally I noticed that ROX wasn't reporting anything beyond hda16. (2.14 can see them all) so I installed to hda13. That finally worked after several attempts

Roger

friedsonjm · #17 Post by **friedsonjm** » Mon 18 Feb 2008, 20:09

Roger Hunter wrote:Finally, after wasting 4 CDs and downloading 3 different versions I've got PCPuppyOS up and running.

it has some peculiarities. It doesn't seem to understand large HDs. My 200Mb IDE drive is partitioned from hda1 to hda18. I have WinXP and Win98SE in the first 2 partitions with the rest devoted to Linux distros. hda5 is Puppy 2.14, my favorite. I wanted to put PCPOS in hda17 but it failed several times. Finally I noticed that ROX wasn't reporting anything beyond hda16. (2.14 can see them all) so I installed to hda13. That finally worked after several attempts

Roger

Just out of curiosity, what kind of file system on each HD?

Roger Hunter · #18 Post by **Roger Hunter** » Mon 18 Feb 2008, 22:56

The linux partitions are ext3. hda11 is the swap file. There may be a reiserf in there somewhere. hda1 and 2 are fat32 and so is all of hdb which is an 80Gb containing D: and E: for the two windows partitions.

Roger

Roger Hunter · #19 Post by **Roger Hunter** » Tue 19 Feb 2008, 00:20

Make that a 200Gb main drive with 10-20Gb partitions.

Roger

friedsonjm · #20 Post by **friedsonjm** » Tue 19 Feb 2008, 12:07

Roger, Jeremy sent me the following comment:

Puppy 3.xx doesn't ship with device nodes in /dev/ for anything higher than hda16.
Also, it only has up to 9 for hdb, hdc, and hdd. Similar
situations with the sda designations. The command mknod can be used
in conjunction with /proc/devices to add more, but I don't remember
the exact command. If he looked it up,
or copied in the correct file (/dev/hda17) from another Puppy, he'd
have to do that to both the LiveCD before installing, and then to the
new installation before rebooting (I think, but wouldn't hurt at all.
Easy too: once he has one copy in the LiveCD he can just re-use it).

NOTE: He can't just rename an existing node. I'm nearly certain that
that wouldn't work. If I remember right, the name of the node is
irrelevant; hda16 will still link to hda16 if renamed hda17. He needs
to either create a new hda17 or copy that specific file from the old
Puppy and hope it works (probably will, easy enough to test: just try
mounting the drive).

friedsonjm · #21 Post by **friedsonjm** » Tue 19 Feb 2008, 13:55

BUG REPORT: Installing decom98 from winetools does not appear to be working properly, will be fixed in the next release. jf

Roger Hunter · #22 Post by **Roger Hunter** » Tue 19 Feb 2008, 15:32

Ok, I figured it was something like that.

Nice distro anyway.

Roger

Tui · #23 Post by **Tui** » Wed 20 Feb 2008, 10:40

Hi Friedsonjm,
I did a D/L of version RC5 via xwget and had a good
burn to cd. All that I have tested so far is going ok, even
the latest version of xgxine 0.5.11, and yes it goes to FULL SCREEN !!

I am not sure how to tell what the diff between versions as the
HELP talks about v3.01 and nothing about pcpuppyos -rc5? With
so many versions of puppy around how does one keep track?

The problem I have found is that the fonts used in MENU and
sub MENU is very hard to read, I would like to change the style
and size of font used, where do I find the files with these fonts ?

I have tried the following screen res 640x480, 800x600,
1024x768 and 1280x1024 (I need times 5 reading glasses for
this one)
The best font that I have seen is in ver 2.14 and 2.15 and I have tested
over the above range of res' It looks good and clear.

Please advise what files I need to change.

Cheers Tui

Sit Heel Speak · #24 Post by **Sit Heel Speak** » Wed 20 Feb 2008, 12:17

pcPuppyOS on the Intel Classmate, booted from USB stick. Skype, Firefox, and the Gimp all work; awaiting technical data from Intel to get Oxygen Office's fonting to work right. A wonderful machine for people with hands one-quarter the size of mine. Perhaps this time next year every ten-year-old will carry one. The actual screen ought to be an inch larger in every direction but is clear and sharp, I hope it doesn't get degraded by resizing here.

Sit Heel Speak · #25 Post by **Sit Heel Speak** » Wed 20 Feb 2008, 12:20

EEhhhh, it got degraded. Let me try again:

Sit Heel Speak · #26 Post by **Sit Heel Speak** » Wed 20 Feb 2008, 13:06

Tui wrote:The problem I have found is that the fonts used in MENU and sub MENU is very hard to read, I would like to change the style
and size of font used, where do I find the files with these fonts?

It's hard to beat the look of WhoDo's EZPup, correctly tweaked...

http://i25.tinypic.com/28alr42.png

jamesbond · #27 Post by **jamesbond** » Wed 20 Feb 2008, 23:58

Excellent work. Planning to use this to update 2.15CE in my "recovery partition" because of the additional interesting applications - VPN clients etc.

I tested this on Toshiba Tecra A6 with Core Duo CPU, 2 GB RAM - boots beautifully, xorg runs straight away. Haven't really tested the VPN client though, will probably test it later.

Three request:
1. Can upgrade the ntfs-3g? 1.417 is very aged and doesn't handle large files very well ...
2. Can I have mrxvt installed? It's just a small addition but very useful.
3. Am not sure of the size of partimage, but if you can get it installed, it will be super useful.

Question:
4. The standard puppy pfix=ram means a) runs totally in ram, and b) don't use any existing save-file. What is the behaviour of pfix=noram? Will it use existing savefile or not?

While testing, I'd like to run with pfix=noram BUT don't use my existing savefile (which belongs to 2.15CE) - what is the pfix parameter to use?

Of course later on when everything is fine I'd like to use the savefile.

Thanks !

EDIT: corrected typo & clarify question 4.

friedsonjm · #28 Post by **friedsonjm** » Thu 21 Feb 2008, 00:51

Tui wrote:Hi Friedsonjm,

The problem I have found is that the fonts used in MENU and
sub MENU is very hard to read, I would like to change the style
and size of font used, where do I find the files with these fonts ?

Cheers Tui

Per Jeremy:

To modify fonts in the menu, task-bar, and title-bar, you need to edit
the "default.theme" file for the theme IceWM is using. The default is
/root/.icewm/themes/Fbx/default.theme. Just find any entries that
have "font" in them.

jf

friedsonjm · #29 Post by **friedsonjm** » Thu 21 Feb 2008, 00:53

jamesbond wrote: Three request:
1. Can upgrade the ntfs-3g? 1.417 is very aged and doesn't handle large files very well ...
2. Can I have mrxvt installed? It's just a small addition but very useful.
3. Am not sure of the size of partimage, but if you can get it installed, it will be super useful.

Question:
4. The standard puppy pfix=ram means a) runs totally in ram, and b) don't use any existing save-file. What is the behaviour of pfix=noram? Will it use existing savefile or not?

While testing, I'd like to run with pfix=noram BUT don't use my existing savefile (which belongs to 2.15CE) - what is the pfix parameter to use?

Per Jeremy:

pfix=noram prevents pup_301.sfs from being copied into ram (instead it
is mounted from whatever it's on, such as the harddrive or the CD).
It doesn't affect anything else. This is the same as what Barry added
for Dingo and 3.02. You can use both noram and ram at the same time
like this: pfix=ram,noram. That will prevent the save file from
loading and also cause the pup_301.sfs file to be mounted from
whatever media it's on. I know the naming isn't intuitive. I was
thinking about changing it, but then Barry added the same feature to
Dingo using the 'noram' string, so I kept it to reduce confusion.

I'll try to look into partview, mrxvt, and ntfs-3g sometime, but
things have gotten really busy lately so I can't make any guarantees.
I definitely won't be doing anything until Monday at the earliest.

friedsonjm · #30 Post by **friedsonjm** » Thu 21 Feb 2008, 04:31

I had not heard of partimage, so I looked it up; some very clever features here:

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

Description: Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files to be copied on CDs / DVDs, ... Partitions can also be saved across the network since version 0.6.0 using the partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS....

Partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition. For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. This is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty blocks. Partimage also works for large, very full partitions. For example, a full 1 GB partition can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

This is very useful to save partitions to an image in some cases:

* First you can restore your linux partition if there is a problem (virus, file system errors, manipulation error). When you have a problem, you just have to restore the partition, and after 10 minutes, you have the original partition. You can write the image to a CD-R if you don't want the image to use hard-disk space.
* This utility can be used to install many identical computers. For example, if you buy 50 PCs, with the same hardware, and you want to install the same linux systems on all 50 PCs, you will save a lot of time. Indeed, you just have to install on the first PC and create an image from it. For the 49 others, you can use the image file and Partition Image's restore function.

jamesbond · #31 Post by **jamesbond** » Fri 22 Feb 2008, 01:16

Thanks john. Yeah the partimage is interesting, I'm using it to backup my windows partition as well as full-install linux partitions.

More feedbacks, based on my random testing.

1. Request for Sydney timezone (for now I chose Guam - same GMT+10 as syd)
2. Clam AV update doesn't work behind proxy.
3. Gslapt doesn't work behind proxy.
(Perhaps there is a global proxy settings here that we can use?)

4. Hardinfo for system information display (instead of Xproc)
5. You may want to change the default pdf reader to something else - the gs reader is well - aged (and doesn't work on some pdfs) - and we can't select text for cut / paste. Perhaps epdfview (I haven't used it myself though).
6. CUPS can't print to windows printer. Every time I tried I failed with error message (in the error_log) "Can't load /etc/samba/smb.conf - run testparm to debug it", and the webpage says "/usr/lib/cups/backend/smb failed". I ran testparm, nothing wrong with it. I ran smbspool manually as in

Code: Select all

# DEVICE_URI="smb://user:topsecret@GROUP/SOMEPC/Canon"
# export DEVICE_URI
# echo something | smbspool 99 me test 1 ""

And it worked, so smbspool doesn't seem to be the problem. And /usr/lib/cups/backend/smb is symlinked to /usr/bin/smbspool correctly.

EDIT:
7. Tried mounting a Windows share from puppy with Linneighbourhood. Failed with error message: cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.

TheKid7 · #32 Post by **TheKid7** » Sat 23 Feb 2008, 00:25

When I tried to open the following streaming audio link (asx file) Gxine appeared to quickly crash and I was at a Login Prompt. I am a Newbie to Linux so I am only reporting a possible "bug". Windows XP does not have any issues with this streaming audio file.

Streaming Audio Link:
http://streamstart.x9tech.com/fbn.asx

Web Page with the streaming audio link ("Play" Button):
http://www.fbnradio.com/

friedsonjm · #33 Post by **friedsonjm** » Sun 24 Feb 2008, 03:57

TheKid7 wrote:When I tried to open the following streaming audio link (asx file) Gxine appeared to quickly crash and I was at a Login Prompt. I am a Newbie to Linux so I am only reporting a possible "bug". Windows XP does not have any issues with this streaming audio file.

Streaming Audio Link:
http://streamstart.x9tech.com/fbn.asx

Web Page with the streaming audio link ("Play" Button):
http://www.fbnradio.com/

Well, for what its worth, its a repeatable bud; blew up on me too. jf

happyhippo · #34 Post by **happyhippo** » Mon 25 Feb 2008, 08:43

some problems

first,after a harddisk install and boot up from hd i get after loading the kernel
expr syntax error.
but it boot up and i get into puppy.
next problem is the network

mostly my dell cpx with pcmcia network card the card is found
now only wifi cards show up to chose.

friedsonjm · #35 Post by **friedsonjm** » Mon 25 Feb 2008, 12:59

happyhippo wrote: first,after a harddisk install and boot up from hd i get after loading the kernel
expr syntax error.

I am getting this too, although I have been 'playing around' with turning Pebble on and off, which may have something to do with it.

I've had no problems at all with network, wired or wireless...

jf

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