Puppy Stardust 001

[zigbert]

Do any one know if it is possible to compile mhwaveedit (172kb) or sweep (254kb) without lidsndfile (153kb) as a dependency? I think mhwaveedit are the only app using libsndfile in Stardust. Or maybe there is another alternative. Yes know about Precord, but it's not there yet....

Some calculations:

ALT1 (633kb)
gtksourceview (208kb)
nicoedit (43kb) - we get a codebrowser
PuppyBrowser (59kb) - tabbed browsing
notecase (333kb) - compiled with gtksourceview


ALT2 (531kb) - without gtksourceview
leafpad (35kb) - tabbed textediting
gtkmoz (13kb)
notecase (483kb) - compiled without gtksourceview

Notecase without gtksourceview could maybe be recompiled for size optimizing. Any takers?


Sigmund

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

zigbert !
Good looking desktop stardust has ... I grabbed a copy like right after you posted it up ... just got to play with it just now .....

I see that the pwireless2 pop-up is in the startup folder. I think it needs a wifi setup validation routine. That should solve the uninitiated pop-up ...

If I may, I'd like to suggest upgrading your ptray applet to use tray icon setup interface. I think that would make the desktop cleaner (... I kept having the top & left tray popping out with my kludgey mouse). Perhaps use gtrayicon as it is already included in stardust or if you think that's not sufficient, let me know, maybe I can help whip up a specific ptray tray icon ... (maybe you can integrate pwidgets setup into the tray icon too ...)

I'd have to say that it has a nice control panel ... just a bit too big on crampy screen ... maybe you can optimize the layout ?

BTW, I miss geany ..... scripting is kludgy with nicoedit for me ....

Overall, I'd say it's pretty good ... A little bit more polishing and then I could pass this off to newbies and I think they'll have a great time using it .....


prehistoric
From what I know:

1. Can't comment on pwireless2 overall ... Haven't used them yet .....

2. The ptray is actually a setup implementation of jwm tray ... I can assure you that concurrency is not an issue ... the ptray is handled natively by jwm with no extra instances running in the background ... (the pop-up tray interface does seem to get in my way though ... maybe the timer value needs some investigation ...)

3. pwidgets ..... well, this is something like a Harley bike ... either you hate them or love them .... for me, I love Harley bikes until they start giving me a headache .....

4. Conky should be viewed as a generic utility to make life easier ... The conky devs tries hard to optimize conky resource usage and I tend to agree that they've done it pretty well .... I've experimented running about 6-8 instances of conky on a p3-600 (many moons ago when I had reservations about pwidgets during the p4.2rc) and found overall impact on system responsiveness negligible ... of course, the scripts i used were optimized ...

Yes, there are other utils that does the same but I tend to believe conky was chosen for its simplicity ... newbies can jump straight into making nice looking conky scripts in just a few hours ... but this is where it could get mushy ... some haven't thought about overall impact and could result in a resource hogging script ...


Rgds

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

Do any one know if it is possible to compile mhwaveedit (172kb) .....

Is that before upx of after? or is this the pet size? ..... sure, can compile it without sdl, libsndfile and oss to make it smaller ...


Rgds

[davids45]

G'day "Ziggy" (obviously a David Bowie fan),

I have quickly tried Stardust and found it very good.
A few notes or small issues:

nico-edit - could it give some sign of a successful save like other text editors - such as a change in intensity of the Save icon?

network - how do I set up static IP addresses for my network cards (eth0 and wlan0)? While trying to set these via the standard wizard, I was getting messages about the cards being given dhcp addresses in a pink box at the top of the display. If I remove the pwireless file from Startup directory would I avoid these unwanted auto addresses?

Having to boot with acpi=off, I needed to add "power_off=1" to line 249 of rc.sysint to get a full shut-down.

pwidgets - having a dual core desktop, is there some way the cpu widget could detect two cores and display both usages? I modify the cpu_bar config to add the second cpu bar, so I'm used to doing this with each new Pup. But it would be better for new users if it was automatic.

My extra partition/drive icons on first booting formed a pile at bottom-right of the screen (did not display in two rows). BK is working on fixing this (see his blog) for systems with lots of drives, partitions and usb add-ons. This would be a useful patch for later Startdusts.

I too like the Control Panel feature.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

David S.

[MinHundHettePerro]

As far as the Sun widget is concerned, it now displays times for sunrise and sunset on this machine, even plausible times, but something is wrong. Good ! When I change the check box for daylight saving time there is no change. Sorry, don't remember exactly, haven't used it, myself, for half a year, or so . My best guess (for now) would be that DST reflects the present (in accordance with the sloppy (sic!) MHHP practice of not setting his time-zone ) - you'd, most probably(?) would have to set it according to your local state of Sun-/Bureaucratic-time. (What should this box do? If MHHP never sets timezone, how does it know when to switch? MHHP just likes to set his own computer clock to whatever is appropriate at the time being (two reasons; 1> often use old computers, with dying CMOS batteries, 2> my other favourite OS, of which one is not to speak here, scr**s file-times up if MHHP sets time-zone and automatic changing of DST.). My guess is that he has built in the rule for his location. No, not at all.) I'm afraid there was also a failure to update when I replaced the approximate latitude and longitude with more precise values. Don't remember the exact updating frequency right now, I'm afraid.

On a more general pwidgets/Sun-note: at the moment, the disk where I have the pwidget/Sun-files is not mounted (physically, that is) so my answers above are merely from the back of my head.
There was a concern not to poll the website, providing the sun-rise/-set times, to often (to avoid getting one's IP banned), but IIRC the pwidget/Sun-script was intended to update within a minute, or so, from changing the settings.

Perhaps we shouldn't clutter this thread with issues on pwidget/Sun, rather take it to the pwidgets thread instead, leaving this thread for discussing the nice slim-blingy Puppy Stardust initiative of Zigbert's?

Yes, there are other utils that does the same but I tend to believe conky was chosen for its simplicity ... newbies can jump straight into making nice looking conky scripts in just a few hours ... but this is where it could get mushy ... some haven't thought about overall impact and could result in a resource hogging script ...

Umm, yes, newbies on Harleys ...

I must admit that I haven't checked out Puppy Stardust 001 yet. I will download and check it out, in a few days, though.

59°19'18"N is far north of the tropic of cancer /
MHHP

[jemimah]

davids45, static IPs are net yet implemented in Pwireless2. Hopefully I'll have that fixed soon. Removing the 'networking' script from /root/Startup will stop dhcpcd from automatically configuring your interfaces.

[davids45]

G'day jemimah,
Thanks for the advice re my static addresses. I have to share my home network with a troublesome XP laptop and a network printer that sometimes want to change their dhcp selections. Using static addresses with Puppy on my computers fixed these issues (at least, XP failing or dropping out was no longer "my fault").
I'll do the change you suggest tonight to Stardust.
David S.

[prehistoric]

...
Perhaps we shouldn't clutter this thread with issues on pwidget/Sun, rather take it to the pwidgets thread instead, leaving this thread for discussing the nice slim-blingy Puppy Stardust initiative of Zigbert's?

Some of this is not at all relevant to Stardust and can be moved. I wasn't trying to tear your contribution apart, I was chasing an entirely different problem and was trying to eliminate a variable.

What got me into this was the search for time-dependent peculiarities which might be related to problems I saw on two machines. I am constantly looking for such things as nondeterminacy, deadlocks, livelocks and race conditions. Seeing a response to a mouse-over event a full minute late on a 1.8 GHz machine convinced me something was seriously wrong. This is not simply a case of needing to "make the program faster".

I had not considered the possibility you were polling an external site. To me this is a purely computational problem. Once you have latitude, longitude and date you simply apply formulas to get times of sunrise and sunset. Compared to the computations that go on in every hand-held GPS device these are trivial. The computation only needs to be done once per day.

(I once navigated a sailboat, in those ancient days before GPS, using a sextant, a watch and an HP-25 calculator. As a precaution against losing the tables I needed, I wrote programs for reducing a sight on one side of a 3x5 card, and a program to compute the position of the Sun on the other. This program was good to roughly a minute of arc for a period of several years. Oh, BTW I did lose those tables, and needed that card. You can see I got back safely.)

Accuracy of sunrise and sunset predictions is limited to about one minute in many locations, even if you know the altitude of the observer, an important variable. (Since this data is not available to this application, I would not expect great precision anyway.) Variations in temperature, pressure and humidity can change atmospheric refraction enough to change times of rising and setting by tens of seconds, even at much lower latitudes than yours. (At your latitude, the angle of the motion of the rising or setting sun to the horizon is a long way from 90 degrees, making rising/setting predictions much less precise.)

Thinking that way, you can imagine why I thought I was seeing symptoms of a serious real-time problem.

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

.....
What got me into this was the search for time-dependent peculiarities which might be related to problems I saw on two machines. I am constantly looking for such things as nondeterminacy, deadlocks, livelocks and race conditions. Seeing a response to a mouse-over event a full minute late on a 1.8 GHz machine convinced me something was seriously wrong. This is not simply a case of needing to "make the program faster". ........

Ah yes ..... something that I have seen previously too ... that is until I stopped thinking about kernel upgrades all the time ...

I noticed that my systems are noticeably more responsive on the older kernel ... I believe that how the kernel was configured (options, modules, bloat, etc etc) may have an impact ... The basic reason for me still being on the older k2.6.21.7 is due to many "classic" systems still chugging nicely around me, so it's easier for me to streamline stuffs ... but, I also noticed that my more recent hardware is more responsive too (ie. when compared to k2.6.25.16) ... If I need kernel module fixes, I'll see if they can be back-ported ... For now, it works reasonably well for my case .....


Rgds

[ttuuxxx]

Do any one know if it is possible to compile mhwaveedit (172kb) or sweep (254kb) without lidsndfile (153kb) as a dependency? I think mhwaveedit are the only app using libsndfile in Stardust. Or maybe there is another alternative. Yes know about Precord, but it's not there yet....

Some calculations:

ALT1 (633kb)
gtksourceview (208kb)
nicoedit (43kb) - we get a codebrowser
PuppyBrowser (59kb) - tabbed browsing
notecase (333kb) - compiled with gtksourceview


ALT2 (531kb) - without gtksourceview
leafpad (35kb) - tabbed textediting
gtkmoz (13kb)
notecase (483kb) - compiled without gtksourceview

Notecase without gtksourceview could maybe be recompiled for size optimizing. Any takers?


Sigmund

I compiled it on 2.14X and it was a 332 kb, but has libgio as dep, does startdust have libgio? most newer woof puppies does and also 2.14X
If you have libgio try it out.

libgio is a 152kb pet http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 485#371485
ttuuxxx

[ttuuxxx]

Here's mhwaveedit-1.4.16 without libsndfile on 2.14X should work with startdust hmmm uses linbio from above

[prehistoric]

Hmmm .....

.....Seeing a response to a mouse-over event a full minute late on a 1.8 GHz machine convinced me something was seriously wrong...

Ah yes ..... something that I have seen previously too ... that is until I stopped thinking about kernel upgrades all the time ...

I noticed that my systems are noticeably more responsive on the older kernel ... I believe that how the kernel was configured (options, modules, bloat, etc etc) may have an impact ... The basic reason for me still being on the older k2.6.21.7 is due to many "classic" systems still chugging nicely around me, so it's easier for me to streamline stuffs ... but, I also noticed that my more recent hardware is more responsive too (ie. when compared to k2.6.25.16) ... If I need kernel module fixes, I'll see if they can be back-ported ... For now, it works reasonably well for my case .....

This has been intermittently apparent on a number of Puppies. At first, I thought this might be due to hardware problems with my D600. Seeing it on the D610 convinced me it was a real bug. (Both have the same synaptics touchpad. Is that the source of trouble?)

Part of the time there is no problem in response, at other times, I find myself using keyboard, like the alt key for menus, to unblock something holding the response back. Restarting the X-window system clears out all related processes and temporarily fixes things. Most of the time this is a minor irritation which merely hints at potential problems. In technical terms, I would describe the "lack of responsiveness" as a large variance in latency, not a poor value for mean latency.

Sticking with older kernels is an option for those who have a system working satisfactorily. However, back-porting tends to fragment the user community. When you are dealing with Pwireless2, just for example, you have the case that debugging of drivers for some wireless chips, even those that have been out for a while, is just now reaching the point where they can use wpa_supplicant. Jemimah is going to kernel 2.6.31 on the specialized Puppeee 4.3.1 because workarounds have become too much trouble. In that project, she has found that even machines with the same model number may have different parts.

(Even sticking with the "ASUS Eee PC" covers a considerable range. In the future, this may turn out to have no more commonality than you can assume now when someone tells you "I have an HP Pavilion" or "I have a Compaq Presario". Bletch!)

If we can discover the cause of kernel problems, I would much rather get them fixed in the most actively supported version, before they cause other trouble that may be harder to identify. Backporting modules with new features may also backport bugs.

Added: I almost forgot the relevance to this topic. Why is this problem much more apparent in Stardust than in stock 4.3.1 on the same machines?

[zigbert]

Patriot
- all mentioned sizes (...kb) are pet packages.
- Yes it's a good idea to add a Ptray icon in the bottom-tray. And it would be great if you could show me how to do this. I hoped (one day) that I could make a manager for apps in bottom-tray....... on the other hand, this will be a part of your upcoming service-manager I hope you allow me to include it into Stardust.
- wireless issues are nicely handled by jemimah. I am sure he will improve this, and I will of course upgrade for 002

I'd have to say that it has a nice control panel ... just a bit too big on crampy screen ... maybe you can optimize the layout ?

The window should be 800 pixels wide. This is the maximum I use for all my guis. I thought smaller screens than 800x600 was on museum only ... What size do you want?

BTW, I miss geany ..... scripting is kludgy with nicoedit for me

Hmmmm ...... If you PM me I could give you a course in howto install programs into Puppy. I agree with you completely, but I'm still not sure if it belongs in 'the user oriented' Stardust.


Sigmund

[zigbert]

Stardust doesn't have libgio. So if anyone is willing to compile Mhvaweedit without libsndfile and notecase without gtksourceview it would be awesome. It is of course important that it doesn't include new dependencies that is not yet in Puppy 4.3.1.

It would be an important step for Puppy if we could reduce the number of libs. Barry made a very nice job when he managed to remove tk/tcl and gtk1 for Puppy 4. Now it's time to look at more shrinking.


Sigmund

[zigbert]

Does anyone know which pet package sfconvert and sfinfo belongs to. They looks like older versions of libsnd-convert and libsnd-info. I have removed both from the Stardust iso, but I would like to check the rest of the package.


Sigmund

[ttuuxxx]

Does anyone know which pet package sfconvert and sfinfo belongs to. They looks like older versions of libsnd-convert and libsnd-info. I have removed both from the Stardust iso, but I would like to check the rest of the package.


Sigmund

DL
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... -1.3.2.pet

Info
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01027

ttuuxxx

[zigbert]

I wonder.....
Why do Barry compile inkscapelite without libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui for Quirky. Abiword also uses these libs????


Sigmund

[zigbert]

ttuuxxx
Oooooppppssss!!!
I need to put these back


Thanks for your knowledge
Sigmund

[zigbert]

Does anyone know if we still need the CD/DVD wizard? If we do, I must change the help text:

Code: Select all

/dev/dvd and /dev/cdrom are links to the actual devices, for example, a link
to /dev/hdc. These should point to the drives that you want to read from.
For example, my PC has two drives, a DVD read-only drive and a CD-burner
drive. I point *both* /dev/dvd and /dev/cdrom to the DVD drive, although I
could have pointed /dev/cdrom to the burner drive (a DVD drive can also read
CDs, so I chose it as my default for reading both CDs and DVDs).

There are various applications for reading from CD or DVD. For example, Gxine
can play audio CDs and video DVDs. Most of these applications require that
/dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd point to the correct devices.

Puppy has applications for burning, for example TkDVD and Graveman. The latter
will burn to both CD and DVDs, whereas TkDVD is for burning to DVDs only.
TkDVD defaults to using /dev/dvd to tell it what drive to use, whereas
Graveman will scan the hardware directly so is not dependent on the /dev/dvd
and /dev/cdrom settings -- nor do you have to choose the burner drive in
this Wizard as it is done from within the program.

Gcombust is an older application designed for the 2.4 kernel and hence thinks
in terms of SCSI-emulation, however it does still work without a SCSI-emulated
burner drive. Gcombust is available as a PET package if not on the live-CD.

Two recent applications developed especially for Puppy are Burniso2cd and
Grafburn -- look in the Multimedia menu.

if you want to turn on SCSI-emulation of the burner drive, run the "old"
Wizard by executing "cdburner-wizard-old" from the commandline. if you do
not know what SCSI-emulation is, no problem, no need to know about it.
SCSI-emulation is no longer required for burning CD/DVDs in Puppy, although
it does have a historical reputation of being more reliable.

Note that this Wizard stores the settings in /etc/cdromdevice, /etc/dvddevice,
and /etc/cdburnerdevice.

[prehistoric]

Does anyone know if we still need the CD/DVD wizard? If we do, I must change the help text:

It's been so long since I used this I can't actually say when it stopped being necessary. I'm going through a collection of old machines, some in my possession, some farmed out to others, and trying stardust001 on them. I'll make a specific check for any needing the CD/DVD wizard. So far, this hasn't been necessary.