Introducing PULP - 125 MB Puplet for older hardware

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
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puppyiso
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Joined: Tue 13 Jan 2009, 02:27

#31 Post by puppyiso »

TextMaker word processor is indeed good one.

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#32 Post by zenfunk »

Hey zenfunk!

VERY cool puplet! Two questions:

1. Are you still actively working / maintaining this?
Yes, sort of. Since the last release it is in almost daily use by me. So far I haven't found much room for improvement. Only thing I added afterwards was an easier and nicer way to open .doc files. The rest worked fine for me. I think the next release wouldn't be before Puppy 5 series are matured.
The only thing that really bugs me in puppy is the inconsistency between versions that keeps the community from having a nice big repository and a good packet manager of its own. The lack of these really is annoying once you had a taste of them in Debian or Ubuntu. So I will wait with my next version until Puppy is able to use a good repository.
2. Would you have any issues with me mirroring it on my website?

Thanks!
Sully
Of course not, please go ahead. It's all free software. The more opportunities to share it, the better.

To Lobster:
I'm not very familliar with Textmaker, andnever tried word documents on it. How does it perform?
Nevertheless, since it is not free software I won't include it into the stock version.

The method I found to open word documents uses a script that converts the .doc file to a .pdf which then is opened in xpdf.

The method is described here:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 51&start=0

The script is the following two lines:
#!/bin/sh
LANG="bs_BA" antiword -a a4 "$1" > ~/.doctmp.pdf && xpdf ~/.doctmp.pdf && rm ~/.doctmp.pdf

Store the script in /usr/bin or something under the name docview
and run it with this command:
docview nameofwordfile.doc

Viewing .doc files doesn't get any faster than this.


Cheers, Christian

mrreality13
Posts: 93
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Location: arlington texas

#33 Post by mrreality13 »

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks for ending my search for a old laptop os.
i been hunting and hunting for something i like to breath life into a old laptop.
Great job :lol:
im on it now on my toshiba satellite 2535cds pent1@.300 mhz/96 megs ram/4 gig hd /floppy/1- 1.1 usb/cd drive- Nice old gem hell the batt still holds about 1 1/2 hrs :roll:

I got it cheep on craigslist in the usa ($15) due to my reading Kmandla's blog and wanted to play with something up his alley `even he would be proud of this lil old lappy
im browsing here on firepup with steraming radio going
(xmms) and htop reports roughly 80% cpu and 45/96 ram :shock:
Very nicely done !!

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#34 Post by zenfunk »

Yeehaw,
I'm really glad you like it. :D

Nice RAM and CPU usage specs on your lappy.

Kmandlas blog was a great resource of information for the making of PULP. My skills are waaay below his, so a puppy remaster was the way to go for me.

Happy hacking,

Christian

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sullysat
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Location: San Antonio, TX

#35 Post by sullysat »

zenfunk wrote:
Hey zenfunk!

The method I found to open word documents uses a script that converts the .doc file to a .pdf which then is opened in xpdf.

The method is described here:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 51&start=0

The script is the following two lines:
#!/bin/sh
LANG="bs_BA" antiword -a a4 "$1" > ~/.doctmp.pdf && xpdf ~/.doctmp.pdf && rm ~/.doctmp.pdf

Store the script in /usr/bin or something under the name docview
and run it with this command:
docview nameofwordfile.doc

Viewing .doc files doesn't get any faster than this.


Cheers, Christian
Christian,
How hard would it be to put this script into the distro with a menu entry next time you remaster?

I know I can do it because its right here and I see it, but for others down the road, that is a hugely useful function to have 'out of the box'

FYI, I'll mirror PULP this week and let you know when its up.

Just a thought,
Sully
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sullysat
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Location: San Antonio, TX

Issues with Siag Office

#36 Post by sullysat »

I'm having an issue with Siag Office that I hope others have seen and know a fix for.

Sometimes, but not always, the menu items and, specifically, the font selection menus, do not work.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?

I have noticed that it happens more often after I install (frugally) to the hard drive.

I thought at first it was just a bug in another distro that used the same apps because it wasn't happening with PULP, but now since I installed to my test machine I'm seeing it happen here too.

Ideas?
Sully
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mrreality13
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Location: arlington texas

#37 Post by mrreality13 »

zenfunk wrote:Yeehaw,
I'm really glad you like it. :D

Nice RAM and CPU usage specs on your lappy.

Kmandlas blog was a great resource of information for the making of PULP. My skills are waaay below his, so a puppy remaster was the way to go for me.

Happy hacking,

Christian
My skills are way below his and yours but his blog really made the "tinkerer" in me curious Slight update now this old lap dog has a 60 gig hd,not sure why it see's 55 gigs, but i sow a post some where (cant find dam link now) that these older satellite's have a very forgiving bios.
see ya round the dog pound ,and again nice lil pup you made

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#38 Post by zenfunk »

Christian,
How hard would it be to put this script into the distro with a menu entry next time you remaster?

I know I can do it because its right here and I see it, but for others down the road, that is a hugely useful function to have 'out of the box'

FYI, I'll mirror PULP this week and let you know when its up.

Just a thought,
Sully
This is exactly what I have planned for, but as I said before the next release very likely has to wait until puppy5 is released.

Have you tried out the docview script? Wickedly fast isn't it? You could run docview 5 times before abiword would start, let alone openoffice.

About the siag office issues - I really have no idea. I just did some basic typing just to make sure it works- that's about it.
Although I love tinkering with my otherwise "obsolete" low end laptops, my main computer still is a core2duo where all the "serious" work gets done, so I haven't used Siag much.
My skills are way below his and yours but his blog really made the "tinkerer" in me curious Slight update now this old lap dog has a 60 gig hd,not sure why it see's 55 gigs, but i sow a post some where (cant find dam link now) that these older satellite's have a very forgiving bios.
see ya round the dog pound ,and again nice lil pup you made
I have two sattelites myself. While the bios might be very forgiving, the graphics card gives me headaches each time I boot a fresh puppy. Xvesa doesn't work, trident driver in xorg doesn't too, so you have to use xvesa driver in xorg(!!!) to get it going. Wicked.
Nevertheless, nice machines.
The oldest laptop I got has a 8082 processor and 1 MB RAM with a 1 MB kredit card type RAM expansion card. The MS- DOS 3.something is stored in ROM!!! (no harddrive, only floppy disk). While not for Linux (Linux only boots down to a 386 IMHO), the boot time of this old beast is about 12 seconds. Nice little machine for tetris or something.

mrreality13
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Location: arlington texas

#39 Post by mrreality13 »

mine runs fine in xvesa BUT with that being said im havein a hell of a time finding a video player that will play .avi files it SEEMS that mplayer and xine rely on xorg drivers.
And i was also wondering how to chance the background i cant find the file you mentioned that was broke in jwm,
Thanx :wink:

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#40 Post by zenfunk »

Tuuxxx very kindly reuploaded the Abiword 1.0.2 version:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 246#212246

Will get back to you about the background color,. I'm not at my PULP machine right now.

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sullysat
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#41 Post by sullysat »

zenfunk wrote:Tuuxxx very kindly reuploaded the Abiword 1.0.2 version:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 246#212246

Will get back to you about the background color,. I'm not at my PULP machine right now.
I'm looking forward to trying this version of Abiword after all the problems I'm seeing with Siag Office.

Are you going to try it out too zen?

Sully
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zenfunk
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#42 Post by zenfunk »

Changing the backround color:
Open ~/.jwm/jwmrc-personal in your texteditor and change the line that begins with <Background...... to something like this:

<Background="solid">#524A7F</Background>

The wicked series of numbers and letters is a colorcode.
You can find a code for the color you like with the Gcolor2 color chooser in the graphics menu.

Now on to abiword... downloading now.

Cheers, Christian

zenfunk
Posts: 220
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#43 Post by zenfunk »

Apparently the abiword from the above link seems to work. Yeehaw...

Have fun- and a big thanks to Tuuxxxx (again).

Christian

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sullysat
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#44 Post by sullysat »

Wellllllll... it sort of works.

It loads, and runs, but it doesn't add to the menu properly. I added it to the menu, but then jwm didn't work right.

If it worked for you, please tell me what you did to make that happen.

I haven't had a chance to play with it since I loaded it, but I'm really hoping we can sort it out. It would be a good replacement for pathetic write, which lives up to its name completely.

I've seen several distros (not puppy, but DSL and a couple others) that run siag spreadsheet and some other word processor. My opinion based on how this version of abiword runs is, that you do that with the next version of PULP, provided that Siag will work better once its not tied up with the word processor.

I've never had a problem using siag, but on both PULP and ttuuxxx's 3.01Retro Lite, neither the word processor or the spreadsheet work correctly. I could do without a spreadsheet in a light distro, but a decent browser (firepup or dillo2) and a word processor are essential IMO.

Anyway, there you go.

Sully
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zenfunk
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#45 Post by zenfunk »

I simply ran fixmenus after the installation and restarted jwm. Abiword was found in the documents submenu. I had no probs at all. What did you do?
(Nevertheless, I shot my system shortly afterward by installing a new glibc or something- how dumb is that? Grrrrr- will have to reinstall...).

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sullysat
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#46 Post by sullysat »

I'm not sure what happened zen, but I did fixmenus then restarted jwm and it all went whacky.

I'm going to delete and reinstall PULP, then run it again and see what happens. I'll put an update here and let you know how that goes.

Sully
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sullysat
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#47 Post by sullysat »

I'm not sure what I did, but all kinds of jwm craziness was going on!

So, I deleted my PULP install and started over. I did a new frugal install and then installed Abiword and everything seems to be working fine now.

I don't know what you're shooting for, resource-wise but on my machine PULP is using only 21MB of RAM with HTOP and Abiword open. On all the machines I'm currently working on, that would be pretty acceptable, especially given the additional capability of reading and writing to .doc files.

I really don't know of a better tiny spreadsheet than Siag, but I've used that in other distros without PW and its worked just fine. Am I the only one who's reported font and sizing issues on that program?

Now that its starting to cool off, I'm going to get my workbench cleaned up and put together a low spec system to test PULP on. I appreciate your efforts with this and look forward to testing its lower limits.

Thanks,
Sully
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zenfunk
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#48 Post by zenfunk »

So far I'm very pleased with the resources pulp uses. Abiword GTK1 starts fine in a couple of seconds on my Pentium IIs.
The thing with the whole siag office suit is that modern file formats are not supported very well. I very seldomly (is this a word?) create new office documents (mostly work with text files to be honest). So the office suites I use are mostly for opening existing documents. This renders siag, and other not wide spread office suites, fairly useless for most of my tasks. Abiword is definitely a keeper, because it supports .doc files quite well.

Really annoying is that there seems to be no support for open document format files on slow computers. Dspite of being open and well documented and all, all the existing solutions involve openoffice at some point. Openoffice needs over 5 seconds to start on my dual core- how long would it take on my Pentium II?

Ironically the proprietary .doc format is much better supported in PULP ATM.


Cheers, Christian

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sullysat
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#49 Post by sullysat »

zenfunk wrote:<SNIP>
The thing with the whole siag office suit is that modern file formats are not supported very well.
Agreed
I very seldomly (is this a word?) [It is now!] create new office documents (mostly work with text files to be honest). So the office suites I use are mostly for opening existing documents. This renders siag, and other not wide spread office suites, fairly useless for most of my tasks. Abiword is definitely a keeper, because it supports .doc files quite well.
We certainly agree on that!

Really annoying is that there seems to be no support for open document format files on slow computers. Despite of being open and well documented and all, all the existing solutions involve openoffice at some point. Openoffice needs over 5 seconds to start on my dual core- how long would it take on my Pentium II?

Ironically the proprietary .doc format is much better supported in PULP ATM.
Cheers, Christian
I'm still in a place where, for compatibility purposes, most of my documents are saved and processed in .doc format, so I haven't used open document formats for much yet, though I'm moving in that direction.

In the mean time, I've found that as long as I can write to pdf or doc I can usually do whatever I need to do. This is a good deal for your little distro, IMO.

So, whatcha gonna do about the spreadsheet? :wink: :?:

Sully
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Puppyt
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#50 Post by Puppyt »

Hi zenfunk,

just a few comments - I'm dashing this off in Pulpv3 now, attempting to pre-configure it on my main (P4) machine before porting it across via "brain transplant" into a Satellite Pro 430CDS, 120MHz Pent., 16MB RAM. Have tried loads of other puplets to get around the Toshiba-laptop-Xvideo issues, HOW DID YOU DO IT? To paraphrase, "zenfunki-wan, you're my only hope..." I'll update on that issue later, please don't bother with a serious and detailed reply I think I'm close to solving it- I supect the video issue is slowing overall processing speed but then I only have fleabit -size RAM.

Your Firepup runs the Firefox add-on and bibliographic tool "Zotero". Don't know why I've not been able to get the two to gel in previous attempts in other puplets, but this rates. Seriously useful! (I didn't know Firepup was ttuuxx's - he's worked his magic again)

I second puppyiso's and Lobster's assessment of TextMaker - I used it pre-installed in a puplet (?) yonks ago, liked it so much I downloaded the "free" versions for Windows. I don't recall if the TextMaker pet in the official repostitories also has PlanMaker (Excel), albeit seriously limited to 40 rows of data - but I wonder what progress has been made with the SoftMaker company and licencing to Puppy as it might be the solution to the Word/Excel-type issues mentioned earlier in the thread.

I appreciate your work on Pulp very much, by the way! Good Work!

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