Teh Gray Puppy 055

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Iguleder · #1 Post by **Iguleder** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 21:41

Introduction

Teh Gray Puppy is a spup derivative that focuses on innovation, one-application-per-task, low usage of resources and simplicity.

It is a pet-project without a release cycle or pre-determined goals. However, it is developed and improved for three main reasons: to improve of Woof, to help develop 01micko’s spup and to explore new ideas and innovations for Puppy.

The Ugly Technical Part

Teh Gray Puppy started as a straight spup 052 derivative: a clean 052 with 4-5 extra packages. Then, during the 053 release cycle, Teh Gray Puppy became a modified spup, with some removed or replaced packages. Teh Gray Puppy 055 is 99% spup 055, but it has many tweaks, package upgrades and improvements to make it more innovative, unique and snappy. Most of its core is upgraded - Busybox, dbus, dhcpcd, Coreutils, mktemp ... and the list is partial.

First, Teh Gray Puppy uses Linux kernel 2.6.36.2: it is patched with BFS (Brain Fuck Scheduler), which improves performance and efficiency on desktop machines, especially with multi-core processors. It comes with a big bunch of drivers and supports Hyperthreading (especially useful on recent Intel processors, Core 2 Duo and above, notably Atom), rfkill, GPIO, power saving on sound cards and more.

On the solid base of the kernel, it consists of traditional Puppy applications, mostly: for example, Osmo, Abiword, Gnumeric and Geany are there at your service. However, there are some exceptions: for instance, a browser installer and Sylpheed replace Seamonkey, due to their smaller size, lower resources consumption and the fact they’re two applications and not an application suite. DeaDBeeF replaces Pmusic: it’s lighter and way better. There are more examples, but they’re too many to mention here. The most notable addition is PetThing, a modular and simple software center similar to Quickpet, which also features a browser installer.

Also, there are tray icons for the battery, processor frequency and power schemes. There’s a clipboard, too. These make sure you’re constantly aware of your system’s status. If being root is total control, these complete the Puppy experience by providing the information you need to control and manage your system in a smarter way.

Additionally, Teh Gray Puppy includes some extra command-line utilities and applications, such as GNU nano, PowerTOP, Htop and fsarchiver. It is also armed with xbindkeys, which makes CTRL + ALT + DEL launch the task manager, LXTask, CTRL + ALT + L lock the screen and Fn + Zz to suspend the system. Also, the PrintScreen key works.

Also, Teh Gray Puppy has desktop icons and file icons from Trinity, the KDE 3.x fork. These are just eye-candy, but they’re nice. The wallpaper is a traditional Puppy wallpaper and the JWM theme is original. It also includes a basic selection of fonts to make web pages and documents prettier and easier on the eyes. It even has the Ubuntu font, which is good for logos and documents. Extra fonts are available through PetThing or PPM.

Moreover, one of the biggest features of Teh Gray Puppy is the fact it uses LZO compression instead of the traditional gzip compression for its SFS extensions. LZO compression consumes less resources than gzip compression, which means it boots faster, applications open faster, shell scripts run faster and it consumes less resources. This difference is quite noticeable on netbooks and all kinds of weak computers.

Credits

- Barry Kauler: Woof, Puppy and everything here
- 01micko: many packages and his wonderful work on spup, Lucid Puppy and Puppy in general
- All the spup, Lucid Puppy, Puppy, Wary, Quirky and Teh Gray Puppy contributors

Known Issues

- You can't open the help page or the CUPS administration thingy unless you have a browser ... for obvious reasons.
- Fonts are great for me, but if some text looks funny, install more fonts through PetThing (through the "Desktop" tab) or PPM.
- If you intend to use any locale other than en_US, Opera won’t run unless you install opera_NLS through PPM. You'll need to enable the Packages-puppy-igu-official repo for this.
- If you want to use browser plugins with Opera, you'll need some Mozilla libraries, you can find them in PPM.
- This isn’t an issue, but Teh Gray Puppy comes without locales, so install them just for the applications you want. For example, it makes no sense to install locales for Axel, since it has the graphical frontend. However, locales for office applications and the browser are important.
- SFSs built on Teh Gray Puppy are incompatible with other Puppies because it's the first Puppy that uses LZO compression. However, run "mksquashfs --help" to see how to make gzip-compressed (and therefore, compatible) SFS extensions under Teh Gray Puppy. gzip-compressed SFS extensions are compatible with Teh Gray Puppy.
- It's definitely my best puplet so far and I put almost two months of work it, but IT ISN'T PERFECT. Not even close. Use at your own risk, nothing is guaranteed.

And remember - it is made by volunteers who do it for fun. Right, some of us are highly-trained professionals, but still, most of the developers do whatever they do for fun. Respect other developers and help us make spup the best Puppy ever.

Downloads

Teh Gray Puppy 055 is released on 5th February.

ISO: gray-055.iso (113 MB)
devx: gray_devx_055.sfs (101 MB)
MD5: md5sums.txt

For Users
Screenshots: here

For Developers
Woof files: DISTRO_SPECS, DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-slackware-13.1 and DISTRO_PET_REPOS

Extra Packages
Kernel sources SFS: kernel_sources-2.6.36.2-bfs-spup.sfs
Wine: wine-1.3.11.sfs
LibreOffice (Writer, Calc and Impress): libreoffice-3.3.sfs
PET packages: here (also available through PPM, enable the Packages-puppy-igu-official repo first)

James C · #2 Post by **James C** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 22:14

Just downloaded and burned to cd.......

James C · #3 Post by **James C** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 22:51

Since this wasn't a problem with any of the Spup's, I'll report it here......2 different boxes live pfix=ram...........neither mouse (ps2) will work.Totally frozen.
Booted to a good desktop and then......no mouse use possible.

#4 Post by **BÃ©Ã¨m** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 22:51

Well that was quick.
Download, no CD to burn,
FRUGAL Lin'N'Win install.
Got to the desktop, but mouse (trackpoint) not working. (nor buttons)
Tried with a USB connected mouse. Didn't work either.
So for the moment adventure finished.

#5 Post by **BÃ©Ã¨m** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 22:53

JamesC, you did beat me by one second.

Happy Newyear.

James C · #6 Post by **James C** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 22:59

Béèm wrote:JamesC, you did beat me by one second.
Happy Newyear.

Happy New Year to you too.

There's a tornado warning here so it could be an interesting beginning of the new year...

#7 Post by **BÃ©Ã¨m** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 23:32

Oh, hope it doesn't harm you.
Half an hour in the new year now here. Your midnight and fireworks has still to come.

nooby · #8 Post by **nooby** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 23:40

Gray Puppy booted good but failed to get the USB Mouse recognized but accepted the TouchPad on my Acer D250 Netbook.

Both Dpup,Spup,Inpu and all other puppies do recognize the USB mouse so something is missing there

puppyiso · #9 Post by **puppyiso** » Fri 31 Dec 2010, 23:48

Happy New year, People!

First of all, it's all gray. Seriously!

There is(are) gray icons and themes somewhere in this forum. If you make "ALL gray" it would look nicer.

John

raffy · #10 Post by **raffy** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 02:20

I have a good old PS2 mouse which does not work in Gray - this is the first instance of mouse not working in this PC.

Iguleder · #11 Post by **Iguleder** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 10:15

I'm pretty sure it's the kernel, I'll fix this.

Thank you!

pemasu · #12 Post by **pemasu** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 10:35

Teh gray works fine for me. I use only touchpad. I tried your new kernel with Insidious 002 and my Snow Puppy, but i can get vesa driver only to work. Intel driver hangs with X and Ati radeon goes to X but touchpad does not work.

But Teh gray 053 surely is fast, small, and fine selection of basic apps. Browser install is great and the flasplayer dld semiautomatic option is great. And this was first introduction to new 2.6.36.2 patched kernel. It needs just some finetuning.

Keep up the good work. I can give my recommendation to your officers in army. Where should I post them ?

Iguleder · #13 Post by **Iguleder** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 10:39

My basic training should end within 2 weeks, still not sure. Then I'm supposed to do study some cool stuff to make me a real pr0

At the moment I'm recompiling the kernel, I think it's mousedev - it needs to be compiled into the kernel and not as a module. I want this kernel to be a true traditional Puppy kernel.

duh · #14 Post by **duh** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 19:01

If i manually repeat mouse/kbd controll via F12-menu-setup
then #ctrl-alt-backspace
then #xwin
mouse will be activated and working correctly.

this i have to do at every reboot (sorry cant find the reason why)

happy new year for the mice as well

duh

#15 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 19:16

Just a quick question, why did you remove glade and yaf_splash both are very handy, ever look what yaf splash can do? http://www.nongnu.org/yaf-splash/
ttuuxxx

Iguleder · #16 Post by **Iguleder** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 20:58

duh: yes - the problem is mousedev, it's a module. Once it loads, mouse works, but you'll have to restart X to make the mouse work. Most people posted their replies without restarting X

ttuuxxx, because it conflicts with Slackware's libglade. The PET is ancient and contains some static libraries and a non-Puppy-style menu entry which has a missing icon.

Regarding yaf-splash, the replacement is good enough and Barry is switching to it.

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

I compiled Rox and hacked its defaults to make it Puppy-style out-of-the-box. Now I'm also working on a Trinity MIME-types icon set

EDIT: made more tweaks ... now it works well. I had to change the default to large icons and make right-click on the pinboard call the window manager menu.

#17 Post by **BÃ©Ã¨m** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 22:16

Well, sure. In other puppy's the mouse is working OOTB without having to do F12 things and restarting X.
Has to be done at every reboot.

#18 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 22:25

if you want replacement mimes, I spent about 3 days compressing the mimes for rox, barry's latest was like 86kb I shaved 50kb out of it, and made a few new ones, The only ones I wouldn't change are th eapplication-x-compressed-tar.png, application-x-squashfs-image.png . it looks better not so compressed. anyways you can pic and choose if you want.
ttuuxxx

#19 Post by **BÃ©Ã¨m** » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 23:16

Tried to select the download for dri/mesa, but got the message that the link is broken.

Tui · #20 Post by **Tui** » Sun 02 Jan 2011, 11:52

It's a pity the developer of this one did not check his work!
After a re d/l and cd burn I still can't get the mouse to work (ps2 type)

Therefore the rest of testing can't be done - if the basics not working!

Tui

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Teh Gray Puppy 055

Teh Gray Puppy 055

mouse

frozen mouse

broken link dri/mesa

A dead duck for me !