Puppy 4.2 Beta2 Bugs & Fixes

[01micko]

In 420 beta 2 now, There is an ongoing bug with wireless driver rtl8187. Maybe Tempestuous can fix it. It doesn't work with ndiswrapper either.

[ttuuxxx]

In 420 beta 2 now, There is an ongoing bug with wireless driver rtl8187. Maybe Tempestuous can fix it. It doesn't work with ndiswrapper either.

I'll post a summary on the first page
ttuuxxx

[Lobster]

Yes the Citrus theme will be loved in some cultures and age groups. The themes in IceWM are a good balance, covering a variety of states of consciousness, from psychedelically inhibited to lemon flashback They have that Puppy 'feel good' factor. I like them a lot. The default (when entering IceWm) is a great choice.

Another topic, personally I do not like the clutter of the widgets (that is me) BUT most people will find them great - so they should be there by default in my opinion - even though I will turn them off.

Ttuuxxx what do you feel are the priorities for the next RC release?

[pa_mcclamrock]

PUPPY 4.2 BETA2 NOTES

On the bright side, I see no remaining Tcl/Tk problems, xpad doesn't come up automatically, the IceWM taskbar is considerably less cluttered, and it has the indispensable Show Desktop icon. Almost two-thirds of the taskbar is now available to show running apps--still short of the more than 80% I get on my ruthlessly stripped-down taskbar in Puppy 4.1.1, but a big improvement. Everything else that worked before, I'm assuming, still works. The good news is very good indeed.

On the dim side, the IceWM Shutdown menu item is still the same, it's still confusing, and I still don't see how to restart IceWM except by restarting the X server. Users who install software with PETget will not be pleased to be told they have to restart the window manager to see the new menu item, and then not be able to see how to do it! This really needs to be changed!

On the pale side . . . are the GTK+ themes. There are a lot more of them, they're not bad at all, and Stardust looks even better with a lighter gray background . . . but they all seem to have pale, un-vivid backgrounds except MurrineShadow, which veers way too far in the opposite direction. Would you like me to finish (quickly) tweaking some or all of my six new, colorful Clearlooks themes (see screenshots: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 5&start=15), only about 3 KB total .PET, and submit them for inclusion?

And now . . . drum roll . . . can I print, or not? Printer is turned on (Brother HL-5140 monochrome laser). I select "Setup CUPS printing." I do want to add a new printer. CUPS window appears, considerably better-looking than the one in Puppy 4.1.1. It's a bit disconcerting to see the old purple xmessage window telling me to click on 'Manage Printers' when I should click on 'Administration' in the new window, but I readily figure out what to click.

I then click "Add Printer" and am pleased to see some big text telling me what username and password to enter, which I proceed to do. I select "LPT #1" under Local Printers, pausing only briefly to note that "unknown" is misspelled in "pdf writer (unkown)" [sic]. I enter the printer name and note that the connection, /dev/lp0, appears to be correct.

I reach the page with the list of brands of printers, and I'm pleased to see that I can use a driver specifically for the HL-5140 instead of having to use the HL-1240 driver, so I do. I don't know why there need to be two drivers, one English-only and one not, but I figure the English-only one will probably be simplest for testing, so I select it. (One little thing: the scrollbar on the driver list wasn't visible initially, and I had to move the bottom scrollbar to see it.)

I click Add Printer, accept default options, learn that they've been set successfully, and see my new listing for "BrotherHL5140 (Idle, Accepting Jobs, Not Shared)." I decide to keep the CUPS window open to see if it will show me any information in the event that the printing still doesn't work. I open AbiWord, which has been known to print text correctly even though, not long ago, it gave me a disgusting black blob instead of the image in my personal letterhead. I type a bit of text in AbiWord, and make sure everything looks OK in Page Setup and Print Preview.

Now comes the moment of truth. I click Print, select BrotherHL5140 which AbiWord says is "Ready," and click Print again. I wait. Nothing happens. I look at "Jobs" in CUPS. No jobs are shown. I look at "Printers" in CUPS. Status is "Paused, starting GPL Ghostscript 8.15.2..."

I run "ps" in rxvt and see that the following relevant processes are running:

22230 root 2652 S /bin/sh /usr/sbin/cups_shell
22389 root 3916 R /usr/sbin/cupsd
22396 root 105224 S bareview http://localhost:631/

But they don't include "ghostscript," or "gs," or "gsc." I verify that ghostscript is installed and the ghostscript executable (/usr/bin/gsc) is present; it is.

I look at the CUPS error log. Here's what it says:

Code: Select all

E [22/Feb/2009:12:11:29 +0800] Unknown browse protocol "@CUPS_DEFAULT_BROWSE_LOCAL_PROTOCOLS@" ignored!
E [22/Feb/2009:04:35:22 +0800] Unknown browse protocol "@CUPS_DEFAULT_BROWSE_LOCAL_PROTOCOLS@" ignored!
E [22/Feb/2009:05:05:22 +0800] [Job 1] Unable to open device file "/dev/lp0": Permission denied
E [22/Feb/2009:05:05:42 +0800] Returning IPP client-error-bad-request for Get-Jobs (ipp://localhost/jobs) from localhost

I look at the permissions for /dev/lp0 and note that they're 660 (not executable), while the permissions for /dev/lp1 are 777 (executable). Before I tried to print, though, the permissions for both were 777.

This exhausts my knowledge of why the printing doesn't work. I would very strongly recommend that there should be a third beta in which everyone reports that the printing does work. The main goal of all these 4.2 alpha and beta efforts, we should keep in mind, is not to get done quickly or to keep Puppy under 100 MB; it is to produce a superb little distribution in which, so far as humanly possible, everything works. The world will little note nor long remember whether Puppy 4.2 is slightly under or slightly over 100 MB, nor whether it comes out slightly before or slightly after Easter 2009--but everyone will notice whether the printing works or not, and the predictable reaction will be most unfavorable if it doesn't.

As for keeping Puppy under 100 MB while including Remaster Express: well, I'm a lawyer and a software hobbyist, not a professional programmer; lawyers learn how to re-examine and re-characterize rules and facts when appropriate (and sometimes when not appropriate). I think it would be appropriate to re-characterize the self-imposed 100 MB limit as a limit on what is loaded into RAM (which is important for the purpose of running Puppy on older computers without a lot of excess RAM)--not a limit on the total size of the ISO, which will easily fit on a CD in any event. If the package lists were put into an "extras" directory as I recently proposed in the "Beta1" thread, only a small amount for the "RemaX" script itself would be added to what goes into RAM, and the re-characterized 100 MB limit wouldn't be exceeded.

Isn't that the most appropriate characterization in light of one of the primary purposes of Puppy--Your Honor?

David McClamrock

[ttuuxxx]

Yes the Citrus theme will be loved in some cultures and age groups. The themes in IceWM are a good balance, covering a variety of states of consciousness, from psychedelically inhibited to lemon flashback They have that Puppy 'feel good' factor. I like them a lot. The default (when entering IceWm) is a great choice.

Another topic, personally I do not like the clutter of the widgets (that is me) BUT most people will find them great - so they should be there by default in my opinion - even though I will turn them off.

Ttuuxxx what do you feel are the priorities for the next RC release?

Well I would say:
- Cups is one, Icewm should now finally be finished:),
- The icons that WhoDo is working on should be working fully, I do think its a mess moving bins around to just to change a theme might have sort of implications 126 bins etc in /root/my applications/bin is a bit unusual, most wouldn't look at that location for those thing. I strongly feel we should just revert back to the standard icon switcher, and stop complicating the file system even further. Things should be simpler.
The way I have the taskbar setup on icewm, its not going to change, because those are fixed, but the menu icons will, but still is it really worth it?
-wireless issues,
- I would like to see the repo updated so the all the new packages that aren't installed by default could be downloaded by the puppy package manager, Also the mplayer in the repo, hasn't worked from day 1 and only needs the .desktop file altered to actually have it working, so that should be fixed.
- Plus theres one little 'show stopper' application left to be added, but thats Top level Secret. it might take me a couple of days to get that setup its small but time consuming. But thats all I can say about it <-- Little teaser
as long as we wait atleast a week before the next release, we should be doing very well.
ttuuxxx

[trio]

On the dim side, the IceWM Shutdown menu item is still the same, it's still confusing, and I still don't see how to restart IceWM except by restarting the X server. Users who install software with PETget will not be pleased to be told they have to restart the window manager to see the new menu item, and then not be able to see how to do it! This really needs to be changed!

Actually there is a "resfresh menus" ....don't have to run fixmenus plus restart wm anymore

[ttuuxxx]

PUPPY 4.2 BETA2 NOTES

On the dim side, the IceWM Shutdown menu item is still the same, it's still confusing, and I still don't see how to restart IceWM except by restarting the X server. <---No No we have a new 'Refresh Menus' listing above the 'Shutdown' menu' That restarts icewm and fixmenus. Thats why we don't need restart Icewm anymore.

Users who install software with PETget will not be pleased to be told they have to restart the window manager to see the new menu item, and then not be able to see how to do it! This really needs to be changed! <---- I can change the script to say 'Refresh Menus'

And now . . . drum roll . . . can I print, or not? <---Yes I know, Its in the works. I'm working on it right now. I have the same problem, I didn't have it on alpha4, so I'll have to compare.

Puppy--Your Honor?

David McClamrock

[ttuuxxx]

Hey WhoDo why does it say that puppy's kernel is i686, shouldn't it say, i486? And from what Barry has said at distrowatch it should be i386, which puppy never was, well not 2,3,4 series was always i486, that should be fixed also.
ttuuxxx

[01micko]

Now this is too good.

I reduced heaps so edges may blur

Nice default, and that is jpg 200x150, 5Kb

[Lobster]

Plus theres one little 'show stopper' application left to be added, but thats Top level Secret

Good news - Barry did this a lot

m m m . . . the point about 100MB and CUPS is well made and true
We are aiming for below 100MB - keeps us focussed . . .

I also agree with a third beta - there still feels a lot of edges, even though the core is solid

[ttuuxxx]

Another reason to dump the new icon switch that I hadn't noticed, is the fixmenus menu script or the new refresh menu script that uses the fixmenu script, It takes wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy toooooooooooo longgggggggggg on my wifes PC, (She has the slowest Pc by far in the house, Don't tell anyone ) its a 1.1GHZ with 1 gig of ddr1 , it must take like 3 minutes now to refresh menus or fixmenus, Thats just so wrong, it used to take seconds, It never had to indivually refresh 124 bins before, it was like 2 second jwm, 2 seconds icewm, 2 blinks an it was done, now I can go make a coffee, nuke some food, come back and its just finishing. Thats over the top.
ttuuxxx

[zigbert]

Another reason to dump the new icon switch that I hadn't noticed...

Another time you use the wrong approach. We should fix, rather than dump (if we in the end want it ). Fixmenus is NOT acting like it is meant to, simple because WhoDo hasn't included the bugfixed version. We have still the same fixmenus script in beta2 as in beta1. WhoDo, how did you install the fixed fixmenus. If used the one from Ptray, I guess it's the old one. Should I repack Ptray WITHOUT fixmenus and globicons??????????

- Pwidgets include clock-skin browser, so it is not necessary to install seperate package.
- Maybe I'm wrong, but the wallpaper setter in beta2 is not the latest.
- the icons 'trash' and 'lock' is not placed correct on my screen and gives a bad first impression. See 01mickos screenshot.


Best wishes
Sigmund

[ttuuxxx]

We have still the same fixmenus script in beta2 as in beta1.
Best wishes
Sigmund

Hey Sigmund
No we don't have the same fixmenus, unless they act completely different on 2 computers 1 slow (wifes) and 1 fast,
the beta1 script on my build pc only shows jwm, icewm and its done in like 2 seconds like always, my wifes pc using beta2 shows jwm,icewm and 100+bins from my-applications plus others scroll up, I'll take a screenshot and show you.
ttuuxxx

[ttuuxxx]

Its about double this length in 4.2 beta2, where as 4.2 beta 1 only showed jwm,icewm thats it.

[ttuuxxx]

here's page 2 &3 of it
hope that helps
ttuuxxx

[ttuuxxx]

at the bottom of page 3 it say, hard link not allowed??
any ideas?
ttuuxxx

[trio]

Ttuxx

Not to defend zigbert or anything. But your screenshot is exactly what I have in beta 1 ! And in beta 2 again ! You must have mix new files and old files. I hope this will clear up everything for whodo

Thanks

[Wellesfargo]

In 420 beta 2 now, There is an ongoing bug with wireless driver rtl8187. Maybe Tempestuous can fix it. It doesn't work with ndiswrapper either.

I was having trouble with b43 driver. I found the the firmware was not in the /lib/firmware folder like it was in Puppy 4.12. I copied the b43 folder from my Puppy 4.12 and manually put it in my /lib/firmware folder and now I am able to find and configure the wireless. Hope this helps track down the nasty little bug.

[ttuuxxx]

Ttuxx

Not to defend zigbert or anything. But your screenshot is exactly what I have in beta 1 ! And in beta 2 again ! You must have mix new files and old files. I hope this will clear up everything for whodo

Thanks

Now thats strange I'll show you beta one on my fast pc
I never seen fixmenus do that list before beta2

ttuuxxx,

[trio]

Now thats strange I'll show you beta one on my fast pc
I never seen fixmenus do that list before beta2

ttuuxxx,

Yes, seriously, anybody else have a comment on this fixmenus thing? please do, ttuuxxx perhaps you must have forgotten that actually you did installed a newer fixmenus on your beta 1?