Wary Puppy 5.0-final feedback

[otropogo]

...

I don't miss the SeaMonkey web browser so much, but kind of liked the mail client. Is it even possible to have both mozilla products available at the same time (technosaurus seemed to indicate it is not)?

I seem to recall doing so in the past.

As a new puppy user I'm frustrated by how easy it is to 'break' things and not know how to restore them. The initial install from CD went very smoothly. I'm about ready to try to figure out how to uninstall/reinstall the whole mess and start over. Please be patient with this old Windows user trying to find his way through Puppy.

Bill253
..

Suggest you download and try Knoppix_V6.4.3CD*.iso.

(unless you know German, get the _en rather than the _de version - I downloaded from Kernel.org).

It booted up without much of a problem on my main system. it took me a few minutes only to adjusted the display settings, instead of the near half hour (for an inferior fit) with Wary5.

I got the DVD version, which was a three hour download. You might want to try the CD version first. If it works, the DVD version has a huge selection of apps, including several browsers to try. So even if you don't use it regularly, it's a great reference tool.

Knoppix even booted on my old Compaq 500Mhz Celeron, with 768MB of RAM, and even got the LCD monitor right right off the bat. Wary just gave me a kernel panic message and died. But I have to admit, trying to run Gimp was more than the old compaq could handle.

It booted fine on the newer Laptop with 4GB of RAM too, but couldn't manage to go online. Actually the first time that autoconfig function has failed in my experience with a dozen or so Knoppix discs.

[Bill253]

Hi guys can you please left click help on firefox and select "About Mozilla Firefox" And tell me which version is installed and later today I'll boot Wary and make a proper fix for it, The last one was an educated guess but looks like something is out of the ordinary compared to a regular firefox install.
ttuuxxx

Hey, maybe I'm getting this reply thing figured out...

ttuuxxx, the installed version of Firefox is 3.6.9

Thanks for your interest and time,
Bill253

[ttuuxxx]

Hi guys can you please left click help on firefox and select "About Mozilla Firefox" And tell me which version is installed and later today I'll boot Wary and make a proper fix for it, The last one was an educated guess but looks like something is out of the ordinary compared to a regular firefox install.
ttuuxxx

Hey, maybe I'm getting this reply thing figured out...

ttuuxxx, the installed version of Firefox is 3.6.9

Thanks for your interest and time,
Bill253

Hi bill nice to see your learning something new You'll be a pro at this forum thing in no time
ttuuxxx

[Country Bumkin]

I ruin some BOINC projects on Puppy systems and when I converted from Official 431 to Wary 5 I noticed the BOINC benchmarks showed a substantial decrease in floating point performance.

For example on an Acer Aspire 1 (1.6Ghz N270, 1Gb ram) booted from USB drives.
BOINC Bechmark
Official 431 - Floating 480 Whetstone, Integer 1019 Dhrystone
Wary 5 - Floating 370 Whetstone, Integer 949 Dhrystone

I then tried the benchmarks in Hardinfo
(Elapsed time - shorter is better)
Official 431 - Blowfish 16.86 sec, Raytracing 51.58 sec
Wary 5 - Blowfish 16.98 sec, Raytracing 75.01 sec

It appears some change has substantially diminished floating point performance.

Regards C Bumkin

[technosaurus]

It appears some change has substantially diminished floating point performance.
Regards C Bumkin

GNU libc and libstdc++ typically get a little slower with each release since it bolts on fixes to maintain backwards compatibility with itself while fixing bugs and security holes. While there are ways to remove this compatibility, it is generally not desirable to do so (for proprietary stuff like flash, skype,...). We jumped 5 minor versions between p4 and w5. Also glibc can no longer compile with -Os out of the box (I do have a patch) IIRC, Barry went through a tedious process to determine the best compile options for 4 series, but now in recent versions this is difficult to do without breaking the build, because it relies on the compiler (also GNU) to do certain things. This is one reason (there are many) why Debian and others have switched to eglibc.

[mcewanw]

Hi, Barry. Welcome back home and a happy new year.

Does the alsaconf calls depmod?

# diff alsaconf.old alsaconf

Code: Select all

> DEPMOD=$(which depmod-FULL) || DEPMODE=$(which depmod)
shinobar

Should above be:

> DEPMOD=$(which depmod-FULL) || DEPMOD=$(which depmod)

i.e. DEPMOD rather than DEPMODE ???

[rjbrewer]

I then tried the benchmarks in Hardinfo
(Elapsed time - shorter is better)
Official 431 - Blowfish 16.86 sec, Raytracing 51.58 sec
Wary 5 - Blowfish 16.98 sec, Raytracing 75.01 sec

It appears some change has substantially diminished floating point performance.

Regards C Bumkin

Don't find that to be the case at all.
Pent. M, 1.6ghz, 1gb ram

FPU raytracing:

4.12= 31.161

4.31= 31.95

Wary5= 30.60

Luci5.2= 30.09

[starhawk]

Running a frugal install on my HP Pavilion s7220n... ALSA can't find my sound device (Intel HD Audio). Is there something I can do about this?

[zekebaby]

Shinobar,

I tried your suggested fixes below and would like to report that unfortunately, it does not fix the problem of sound detection on my Panasonic Toughbook CF-T2

Code: Select all

30a31,33
> # 2jan2011 shinobar: depmod
> DEPMOD=$(which depmod-FULL) || DEPMODE=$(which depmod)
> #$DEPMOD
455a459
>     [ -f $MODDIR/modules.pcimap ] || $DEPMOD  # 2jan2010 shinobar

Code: Select all

modprobe snd-mixer-oss
modprobe snd-seq-oss
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
for I in $(seq 4); do
[ -c /dev/mixer ] && break
sleep 1
done

I've had alsa problems since I started using Wary - problems that were never there in Puppy 4.3.1. Essentially, I get proper sound detection when I run for the first time, and sound persists for a handful of reboots using warysave. Eventually, sound goes away and alsaconf is not capable of bringing it back. I have to delete my warysave and start over.

I gave up using Wary because of this, but yesterday, I stumbled on your fix and decided to give it a spin. The one difference from stock Wary was that sound always came up muted, and I needed to run alsaconf to unmute (raising the volume did not work). It stayed this way for about 5 boots, until now, when I booted and the saw the sound icon missing from the tray. I ran alsaconf and get no sound (just like the unmodified Wary). Here's the alsaconf log:

Code: Select all

Getting started...
Building card database, please wait...
...device found
Configure driver snd-intel8x0...
Sound driver configured.
Setting default volumes...
amixer: Mixer attach default error: Input/output error
retrovol: hcontrol.c:570: snd_hctl_load: Assertion `hctl->count == 0' failed.
/usr/sbin/alsaconf: line 697: 27018 Aborted                 nohup /root/Startup/retrovol_tray >/dev/null

ALSA lib confmisc.c:674:(snd_determine_driver) could not open control for card 0
ALSA lib conf.c:3286:(snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load_for_all_cards returned error: Input/output error
ALSA lib confmisc.c:674:(snd_determine_driver) could not open control for card 0
ALSA lib conf.c:4154:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: Input/output error
ALSA lib confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:4154:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: Input/output error
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:4154:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: Input/output error
ALSA lib conf.c:4633:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: Input/output error
ALSA lib pcm.c:2211:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.default
aplay: main:608: audio open error: Input/output error
killall: aplay: no process killed

===============================================================================

 Now ALSA is ready to use.
 For adjustment of volumes, use your favorite mixer.

 Have a lot of fun!

If you (or Barry) would like support to fine-tune your fixes, I would be glad to help. Until then, it's back to Puppy 4.3.1 for me. I can't use Puppy 5.1.1 and 5.2 because of the Intel video problem.

Cheers!

[rodin.s]

I like wary. But on one of my PCs mplayer doesn't work. It has AMD-K6-3D CPU.
When I run mplayer I got this:

Code: Select all

mplayer 03-youll_be_in_my_heart.mp3 
Creating config file: /root/.mplayer/config
MPlayer SVN-r32344-snapshot-4.3.4 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team

Playing 03-youll_be_in_my_heart.mp3.


MPlayer interrupted by signal 4 in module: demux_open
- MPlayer crashed by an 'Illegal Instruction'.
  It may be a bug in our new runtime CPU-detection code...
  Please read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
  Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
  disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
  It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
  gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
  DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
  won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

In Wary-0.3 I run on this PC everything is OK. I'll try to copy Wary-0.3 binary and check if it will work on Wary-5.0.
Snapshot of hardinfo: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=36956

[abushcrafter]

The GTK Dialog Text Markup Script is missing.

The man PET was added to "/usr" not "/". So in the Devx, one ends up with "/usr/usr" "/usr/etc".

[dogle]

This is not a Wary-specific issue but one which, when I come to think of it, has been my biggest Puppy bugbear over years and which is perpetuated in Wary. Maybe this is the best place in which to mention it.

When I open a file manager, I am looking for information. When, by default, I see instead a box filled with useless images of folders I think, well, how stupid can you get. When, by default, stuff is hidden from me, I get annoyed.

Due respect and gratitude to ROX creator Thomas Leonard for his gift to the world but I fear that in electing to dumb things down Redmond-style he has done his product a great disservice. More to the point, the default presentation is IMHO quite unsuited to the needs of yer average Puppy user who operates as root - ooh! - contrary to Mr. Leonard's warnings.

Even more to the point, it is seriously difficult for yer average Puppy user to redress matters. Granted, expert CLI-jockeys may not have great need of ROX and granted, it is easy to fix the hide thing via the options menu (except for non-multisession CD, grrr).

Beyond that, saved display preferences are forgotten whenever you mount something new. The options menu seems severely limited as to controlling things at deeper level; no way there to command the presentation I usually want or suppress the permissions/owner/group entries which I generally don't. (I have had no success fiddling things per CLI per the ROX manual which I suspect is out of sync with the version being used).

So, the request is, could ROX defaults be arranged ab initio to something more appropriate to expected Puppy usage, in future Wary/Puppy releases?

(My own preferences would be nohide, list, minimal icons, full 'gen apart from permissions/owner/group columns, as the Wary/Puppy defaults - but I'm quite open to flak on these).

(Whatever, I'm pleased that mc is now an official PET).

[Bill253]

So I noticed on Barry's blog that:

Firefox 3.6.13
I have compiled Firefox 3.6.13 for Wary. I have created a PET, and I think that I have addressed the concerns expressed by users of the previous Firefox PET -- that included SeaMonkey no longer working after Firefox was installed, and/or SM not working after the Firefox PET is uninstalled.

I just tried it and, unfortunately at least for me, it takes over SeaMonkey just like the last one (Firefox 3.6.9-w5) did.

After downloading/installing the new pet from:

Posted on 25 Jan 2011, 8:53 by BarryK
Firefox now uploaded
I can now upload to ibiblio:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... .13-w5.pet

All my Firefox and SeaMonkey menu links and the browse and email screen icons now bring up the new Firefox named Namoroka version 3.6.13.

What I did discover is that SeaMonkey rerturns upon uninstalling Firefox, including my 'lost' mail. I never would have thought to do the uninstall, had Barry not mentioned it in his blog. Plus I learned how to uninstall a package, so there's that...

Here I am referring to Barry like I know him, when feel I should be bowing toward Australia in reverence for all the hard work and wonderful things that he and the all the rest of the developers/contributers have done with Puppy Linux. Thanks to you all!!!

[ravensrest]

I'll second Dogle's request for upgraded Rox-filer initial settings. I like his selection of settings too.
BS

[Béèm]

I'll second Dogle's request for upgraded Rox-filer initial settings. I like his selection of settings too.
BS

Me too, I change every time the view to list and small icons.
Altho it takes a couple of seconds, it would be nice to have it as default, but I see more.
As columns I would like to see name|date|size|type|owner|group

The bad message is, that there isn't even something in options to change that.

P.S. I know I could use another filemanger, so no need to make the remark.

[gcmartin]

AMEN @Dogle! Amen @Béèm

I agree. Several years ago, this might have been OK for a tire-kicking Puppy user. Too bad its still around. There are better options available, but I fear that the effort in selection may be too large for even BarryK to overcome.....imagine the "uproar".

But, maybe it is time to begin to migrate to a easy to start-up, fuller feature set, FM that comes with Puppies via Woof.

...
P.S. I know I could use another filemanger, so no need to make the remark.

[gerry]

I like ROX just the way it is.

gerry

[mave]

Hi,

checking this in several ways but without solution:

Creatings fresh pupsave in Wary 5, surfing with Seamonkey or Firefox (also not mixed): speed is not good, mostly web sides going down, often many seconds (long!) no reaction, while the browsers are doing anything (in background?). In this time, the application windows can't be moved. Pictures are coming slow. No input possible...

No ideas. I good example here is the (german, no problem, you can play arround...) side of an linux online shop:

http://www.linux-onlineshop.de/Hardware ... tt-PC.geek

Try this, in all cases here, Seamonkey and Firefox goes "down" with not acceptable handling on my Thinkpad T60 Duo Core, not an old, slow hardware and in Lucid mostly it's okay, and e.g. with Google Chrome normal speed...

Why this (in Wary 5)?

mave

[Sylvander]

1. Working in Wary-500 right now and liking how "snappy" fast it is.
[EXCEPT the partition on my 4GB Flash Drive takes a LONG TIME to mount]
Tweaked it so it's looking good, and added a few nice packages.
[Must install Parcellite...DONE]

2. This is one of my favourite Puppies, together with...
LighthousePup-5.02-G
Lupu-520
Boxpup-431
I gave copies of these to my son.
Will he ever get the time to use them I wonder?

[abushcrafter]

The window closing method used by Pup-Shots Screenshot Utility does not work.