Pussy: potentially a Puppy with a perfect package manager

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
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sickgut
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Re: pussy

#1591 Post by sickgut »

Bob_the_plumber wrote:yo yo yo sickgut, i've registered here just to ask you a question, i currently use puppy 5.28 as my primary OS which is great but i need something new so i searched on the internetz for a debian derivative just for fun and found your pussy.

My questionz are :

1) Can I use your pussy for my primary OS ?? I know it's in beta stage, but i want to use it as my everyday distro so..

2) i don't have any other questions i think so thanks dude for creating an apt-get compatible puppy

yo yo yo
Pussy isnt at its core an actual Puppy, just a debian that i and a few others (contributors) made to be a rough equivalent to Puppy, as much as a debian can be a Puppy.

The Beta-ness of the OS is held to a high standard. Its beta-ish compared to Ubuntu or Puppy that has been established for a long time, but not when compared to alot of other linuxes that are in full release. Pussy is about as stable and feature packed as you can make a debian OS, we did a good job :)

I was on the edge of officially getting out of beta and claiming that it was full release and paying for a spot on distro watch to advertise it. The only thing that stopped me was a bad case of burnout and coding psychosis :(

One good thing with Pussy is that you can get support at any debian support chat channel. But dont tell them its pussy, just debian live squeeze... any advice they will give you would work as we didnt do anything to break compatibility with debain. You could say that support it better than debian because you have the debian ppl you can ask for help or you can post here and ask for help.

As far as i can remember, everything is still works ok and is new enough not to have to be hassled with updating everything before you start surfing the internet and or opening office type of files

Good Luck

Bob_the_plumber
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#1592 Post by Bob_the_plumber »

ImageKewl bro i'll wipe my hard drive today Image the stability of debian and the speed of puppy united in one OSImage Image Hats off dude! ImageImage

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saintless
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Re: Bare bones debian for Rasp Pi available. Law of efficiency.

#1593 Post by saintless »

sickgut wrote:...i will have a look at Barry's Puppy Pi and how it is setup to use a compressed file system.
Hi, Sickgut,
maybe this link will help you better:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-you ... tribution/
Based on the information there you should be able to create compressed live cd from debian this way.

Bob_the_plumber
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#1594 Post by Bob_the_plumber »

Hmm.. how do i install this stuff the only choice i have is "live cd, live cd copy to ram, live cd failsafe.." frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about this live cd feature, i want it on my hd. is there a way to install it because i'm so noob that i did not find it. :oops:

NERVERMIND I've read the first pages of the post and there is no "easy" installation, I'll try to find a way or read more.


Well after reading how to do a hd image here http://www.thepussycatforest.info/linux/README.txt i think i will give up, i'm to noob for this kind of stuff and i will surely mess up my puppy / winxp dual boot.. :evil: :(

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#1595 Post by saintless »

Bob_the_plumber wrote:Well after reading how to do a hd image here http://www.thepussycatforest.info/linux/README.txt i think i will give up, i'm to noob for this kind of stuff and i will surely mess up my puppy / winxp dual boot.. :evil: :(
If you have puppy installed you already have Grub boot loader. Then the installation is very easy. Open the live CD from puppy and copy the live folder on the same partition where puppy is.
Then add this lines in grub menu list:

Code: Select all

title Pussy Linux Beta
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /live/vmlinuz boot=live config persistent swapon quickreboot noprompt autologin username=root password=pussy
initrd /live/initrd.img
boot
Just change the number of the partition (hd0,0) if it is different.

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sickgut
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Rasp Pi no working opengl in the debian image

#1596 Post by sickgut »

I kind of wasted an entire day trying to get OpenGL working with the Rasp Pi and i couldnt get it to work, so it looks like my plans for a gaming system are out the window at the moment. In the meantime i am waiting for a response to my post on the raspberrypi.org forum, maybe there is something im missing...

anyway, will start working on a game-less pussy tomorrow

[Edit]
After further searching, followed links on the actual raspberry.org site and it had a link to download the quake 3 demo and on the site it says simply to compile it as delivered. So that i did, and it didnt work.
Apparently this doesnt work for anyone and you have to ask people how to get it to work. A youtube vid showed how you actually do it, includes copying .pk files from a previous installation etc, then giving the program permissions etc.... So, we where all supposed to just guess this?

I simply cannot believe how these instructions are still on their site, i literally wasted an entire day doing this, and the wrong information is still on the site. Even following the instructions on a youtube video, it doesnt mention at all the method for compiling the ARM executables as following the "just type make" instructions dont actually do this, and the install instructions for setting up the game after compiling it where "just type make copyfiles, they should be copied to /usr/local/games/quake3.." and surprise surprise, that didnt work either. After watching 5 different youtube vids that where tutorials on how to instal quake 3 on the rasp and chasing up accurate documentation for the bits the tutorials left out lead me on a wild goose chase and 9 hours later, i still havent found the actual complete instructions on how to do it.

Its not the fact that i personally failed to do this that annoys me, its the fact that maybe 5000 other people have been mislead by the wrong information on the site as well. See, this is why i only deal with binaries and dont supply packages that require the end user to compile the program, there is no need for it. It wouldnt have killed the rasp people to just make the complete package available, already compiled. I know that people reading this would be thinking :The Rasp is educational, so they want you to learn to do it.... but the problem is the information supplied is simply wrong. Where is the education in that?

Enough ranting for now, looks like we will have to wait till the whole opengl thing is well supported before setting games up.

This debian the rasp people have made for the rasp pi is giving debian a bad name, even the apt-get stuff is broken... if you try to install a propper xorg to get away from their non accelerated frame buffer or vesa video, it grabs xorg but there are dependencies missing, the libgl1-mesa-dri for instance, its required to run xorg, but isnt available from their mirror, and apt-get returns a 404 message, this is after doing a apt-get update.... i dont know why the hell they would put non existent packages in their status file that lets apt-get know what packages are available from their site and what depends on what. They even have openarena there and available to apt-get, but it doesnt work. Why the f*** have a program in your repo that doesnt work? There are other strange things too, the assaultcube-data package is available (provides all the skins and maps etc for assaultcube), but the actual assaultcube game isnt there. Tell me, what use is the data pack for assaultcube if you cant install assaultcube?

The other thing here is that altho the rasp has a armhf cpu, it cant run armhf packages from the debian website, so if you have a rasp, you are stuck with their crappy broken repo unless you compile everything yourself, but that defeats the purpose of having apt-get. Without apt-get working well, there is no point to even make Pussy as Pussy is supposed to be reasonably puppylike in performance etc but with apt-get compatibility. Fair enough the server type stuff works well, but with desktop and games, the rasp simply fails big time.

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HDD vs USB and or CDROM/ DVD installs

#1597 Post by sickgut »

Hello People,

This is just a quick note and survey of users of Pussy.

How many of you view a well sorted out USB stick install as "good enough" and wouldnt bother with installing to HDD? I personally do, i believe that installing to USB is better for a small, "run in RAM" or quick booting OS as the simplicity is great. No need to mess with your internal HDD and use grub, and or risk messing up your vendor provided windows on your new laptop (they dont provide disks anymore!).....

However, i do realize that many people view hdd installs as the ONLY way to roll.

With new USB buses being released (usb 3.0 recently), the blur between HDD and USB is gettng even more fuzzy. I also love the fact that "reformatting my system" only entails flashing a USB disk, and now there are a number of utilities for windows that allow you to do this, so you dont need to start with an initial linux install to get the nerd ball rolling.

I have personally ran the live cd/ dvd on a daily basis when i used to go over the road and use their computers all day, it was convenient and was "fast enough" just to run the live cd even without copying to ram.

I know many people do not feel the same way. And the low priority of "if i figure it out, ill set up an easy to use hdd installer for pussy, but in the mean time i wont spend a billion dollars in search for a solution..." attitude to Pussy has put off some prospective users.

It would be good as a matter of research to find out how many of you would use Pussy if it was easy to install to the HDD... (well its easy to install to hdd with dd but its not a multiboot solution..)

A live cd/ dvd/ usb distro is fine as far as i am concerned, and i feel that many people dont really appreciate how good a USB installation actually is, especially with compressed squashfs and using this method as your save file as you can fit like 20gb on a 8gb stick, even more.

Ok please have your say... lay it on me.

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greengeek
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Re: HDD vs USB and or CDROM/ DVD installs

#1598 Post by greengeek »

sickgut wrote:It would be good as a matter of research to find out how many of you would use Pussy if it was easy to install to the HDD...
Over the years I have been a fan of HDD installs, and have only recently become a convert to usb stick installs. Flash drives are such a good way to transport functionality from one system to another, and as you say, it lets you bypass the OS installed on HDD, without modifying it.

The downside is that many usb sticks are SO SLOW. Depending on my choice of stick a usb OS can either run at tolerable speed, or just be too slow to be practical.

I would probaby give an HDD pussy a go, but I need to address the dhcpcd issue first. There's no chance of me changing my router to get past this problem I have been having, so it'll have to wait for me to follow the suggestions provided to me earlier in this forum topic. Dunno' if others have had such problems or not...

The two reasons for me to not use pussy as an HDD install on the main computer that the family uses is as follows:
1) My Linux knowledge is still not adequate to take that big a step yet. I would feel out on a limb.
2) Puppy has so many users that it is easier to find others that have overcome similar problems. Pussy has not reached that critical mass yet and maybe an HDD-install capable version would break the ice.

One last thing: when I tell people I am experimenting with Pussy, people look at me strangely and the conversation dries up. Any chance of calling it Kitty-Linux instead? :-)
Last edited by greengeek on Mon 13 Aug 2012, 00:57, edited 1 time in total.

jbv
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#1599 Post by jbv »

I did some extensive benchmarking on quite a few USB thumb drives last year.

The performance difference between different brands is staggering. Some of the biggest and supposedly most professional brands are often the slowest in both read and write.

The one product that shone was the Corsair Voyager. It just smoked anything and everything in all areas, read and write. If you are looking to have a USB stick based distro, you really should invest a few bucks and make sure that your "primary" drive is a Voyager. I bought a few of them and will probably grab a few more.

There are a few other things you need to consider with USB based distros, such as the way that any Flash device has a certain life in so far as the number of times you can write to a cell. I don't trust write leveling and like to know exactly when the Flash is being written to, which is most likely my Embedded Electronics Background coming to the fore, but it is something you need to consider and possibly manage. This was one of the key things that attracted me to Pussy. Provided you don't try to put the cow on a Flash partition and leave it in RAM, you are always in control of exactly when the Flash gets written to. There are both pluses and minuses with it though.

For my Linux project, running 100% from the USB stick was a must. Doing this from container files with the squash-filesystem has advantages, and while there are also some drawbacks, it has probably saved my butt more times than not.

Anyway, get a decent USB stick. Even if your system only has USB-2, you can often get a big performance boost with the right stick - I certainly did. Benchmarking and testing on numerous systems has proven it.

Cheers

aarf

#1600 Post by aarf »

Internal SDcard but it is portable opera that destroys the partitions.

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#1601 Post by SBP »

HI Jbv

How is your project evolving? Do you have something to try, and can we follow your progress anywhere?

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Re: HDD vs USB and or CDROM/ DVD installs

#1602 Post by sickgut »

greengeek wrote:
sickgut wrote:It would be good as a matter of research to find out how many of you would use Pussy if it was easy to install to the HDD...
Over the years I have been a fan of HDD installs, and have only recently become a convert to usb stick installs. Flash drives are such a good way to transport functionality from one system to another, and as you say, it lets you bypass the OS installed on HDD, without modifying it.

The downside is that many usb sticks are SO SLOW. Depending on my choice of stick a usb OS can either run at tolerable speed, or just be too slow to be practical.

I would probaby give an HDD pussy a go, but I need to address the dhcpcd issue first. There's no chance of me changing my router to get past this problem I have been having, so it'll have to wait for me to follow the suggestions provided to me earlier in this forum topic. Dunno' if others have had such problems or not...

The two reasons for me to not use pussy as an HDD install on the main computer that the family uses is as follows:
1) My Linux knowledge is still not adequate to take that big a step yet. I would feel out on a limb.
2) Puppy has so many users that it is easier to find others that have overcome similar problems. Pussy has not reached that critical mass yet and maybe an HDD-install capable version would break the ice.

One last thing: when I tell people I am experimenting with Pussy, people look at me strangely and the conversation dries up. Any chance of calling it Kitty-Linux instead? :-)
Pussy Alpha had a silly, overlooked configuration error, the /etc/resolv.conf file had a static, hardwired gateway, dns ip address ( 192.168.1.1) that i forgot to blank out. There was also the program that works with dhcp that automatically sets up your dns/ gateway ip and continually scans for the correct settings and updates it, that i left out.

with the later versions, beta and beta2, the dhcp works fine because the resolv.conf is left blank and the program that autodetects the gateway. dns is installed and working. Make sure you are not using an Alpha save file or partition or save file using squashfs/ remaster with the beta version. however not matter what you do or how careful you are or what drivers are installed, its impossible to guarantee that it will work on every computer and router.
I personally have been bitten with things like this with Puppy and Solaris mainly. Some puppies dont boot and solaris altho it lists my network adaptor as fully supported for many years, drops the connections after about a minute. I know for a fact that there is nothing faulty with the computer, its just one of those things. There can never be a universal feature rich OS that works on every computer, unless all the computers run exactly the same hardware.

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#1603 Post by john1618 »

Hey Sickgut,

First of all, this is a great distro, and I want to express my sincere appreciation for your work.

I have a suggestion though... Saluki is also a great puplet, and I was wondering if you could port the enhancements in saluki to pussy... would that be possible?

Thanks a bunch!

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saintless
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#1604 Post by saintless »

I use HDD (frugal) puppy and pussy linux install because I don't have boot from usb bios option. I also need my DVD-rom to be empty and since my computer has 512 Mb RAM I prefer not to use copy to RAM option.
For people with older computers HDD install is the only option.

SBP - very soon we will get a message from JBV. At the moment I'm the reason for the delay of his message. I need to check some things on my hardware before the test version is open for download.

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sickgut
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#1605 Post by sickgut »

john1618 wrote:Hey Sickgut,

First of all, this is a great distro, and I want to express my sincere appreciation for your work.

I have a suggestion though... Saluki is also a great puplet, and I was wondering if you could port the enhancements in saluki to pussy... would that be possible?

Thanks a bunch!
It depends what exact improvement that you mean, if its cosmetic/ visual or do with the visual interface then while i would cringe at the thought (its not my specialty) it could probably be done very easily. However if its under the hood and more technical then it would probably break our "100% debian compatible" policy... but it all depends on what the specific tweaks are. I havent used saluki before, but ill give it a whirl and see.

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#1606 Post by sickgut »

Bob_the_plumber wrote:Hmm.. how do i install this stuff the only choice i have is "live cd, live cd copy to ram, live cd failsafe.." frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about this live cd feature, i want it on my hd. is there a way to install it because i'm so noob that i did not find it. :oops:

NERVERMIND I've read the first pages of the post and there is no "easy" installation, I'll try to find a way or read more.


Well after reading how to do a hd image here http://www.thepussycatforest.info/linux/README.txt i think i will give up, i'm to noob for this kind of stuff and i will surely mess up my puppy / winxp dual boot.. :evil: :(
yeah pussy is a live distro and best ran from a CDROM or USB stick. If you want to use a USB stick then download and use the .img.zip, and unzip it then use "dd" to image it to the USB stick (instructions in the README on the website) or there are a number of utilities that run in windows that can use the .iso to put on a USB stick. Either way, you can still run a save file on your HDD or compressed save file on your USB stick. (You can literally fit 20GB on a 8GB USB stick when using compressed save files).

HDD installs while not "officially supported" (ie. every computer system is different and so while we can help you, we cant tell you exactly what to type command for command if you have problems, the only way to be sure is to visit you personally and take a look at your setup) most people do end up installing to HDD once they have had some experience with grub.

However, Pussy was MADE to run from a USB stick and will work so well doing this that in most cases it negates the need to run from a HDD. Also this lets you simply leave your other OSes alone and not have to mess with your HDD.

As far as bugs and or features that need to be added and or fix in Pussy goes, the HDD install method that is newbie friendly is top priority.

It was a trade off when planning to make Pussy, either use normal debian and have an easy HDD install method and loose the ability to run from cd and USB, or use debian live and have very well supported cd and usb installs but loose the HDD install feature. The live usb and cd method was chosen over HDD only.

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#1607 Post by sickgut »

Pussy-Pie update:

Pussy for the Raspberry Pi is making progress. The server version is already available for download from the website: http://www.thepussycatforest.info

The more Puppy-like OS that i am working on now uses the server version as a base and keeps all the servery type things intact while adding a proper usable desktop.

So far all the apps are installed and i am working on the cosmetic type stuff to tie it all in. The desktop will initially look very much like normal Pussy with it booting to JWM and giving the user the option of enabling ROX filer to handle the background icons etc and file managing. This is even more important on Pussy Pie than normal Pussy because the Rasp has so little resources.

Here is a list of the applications that Pussy Pie Desktop will have: (may call this one Pussy Pie Xtra, to keep in line with current naming of the different Pussies.)

mtpaint, leafpad, gpicview, mplayer + mplayer-gui, dillo, milkytracker, rosegarden, XFburn, xaos, cadubi, dosbox, basic256, squashfstools, mhwaveedit, ayttm, epdfview, fbreader, airstrike, hydrogen, audacity, jackd, dead-souls (a MUD text adventure game server ), and of cause the openssh-server, pure-ftpd, telnet server and lighttpd webserver.

There are some familiar apps in there and some that i thought would be interesting to add. Rosegarden/ milkytracker/ hydrogen/ audacity/ jackd (including jack2 and all the other tiny midi packages that it depends on) could be a very good and educational music suite for that revolves around the midi and mod formats. Depending on performance, i may subtract and or add to this lineup of music type apps. I have a midi keyboard and i will use it to test and set it all up well, the OS wont ship with badly configured jack/ rosegarden that is kinda fiddly at the best of times.

This may lean heavily on audio type things but the Rasp Pi is so restricting that its probably best to play to its strengths, because the problem here is trying to find things that it can actually run, and using the Rasp Pi as a useful midi and recording station for home studios is something the Rasp can actually do and do it *silently*. With no fans needed to cool it, the Rasp is silent and this is good for home studios.

I fear that the application selection will undergo many reviews as better drivers and utilities for the Rasp are released. For instance, when OpenGL actually works on debian and is accelerated then I will add some games and maybe release a dedicated games OS as well. When webcams are more available, then a webcam app will be added ... etc... you get the picture.

Many things in the Raspbian repos are not there, either they need to more time to compile the entire Debian repos for the Rasp, or there is some real compatibility issues somewhere. For example, i wanted to add DOSEmu but its not there, but DosBox is. Its not just a matter of performance that dictates what apps we can have working on the Rasp, but the actual availability of applications that have been compiled.

There are a couple of oddities that i am attempting to iron out as far as the disk footprint. Here are a couple of issues as an example:

xcalc: a calculator is always expected to be there, but for some reason this simple program depends on 50MB of other apps, this is strange.

Midori: while this is only a 18mb program, when i try to apt-get it, the dependencies total more than 100MB. In comparison, iceweasel the debian version of firefox only needs 20mb of space including dependencies.

due to the lack of a decent repo of static packages that have been compiled for the Rasp, i kinda have my hands tied with what i can install. If i was to install these and then delete the junky type dependencies from the filesystem manually, this would leave a broken and therefor an incompatible Raspbian OS in its wake, and apt-get will simply be very buggy or may be completely unusable.

There is also no solution for running a compressed filesystem using squashfs for the main OS (this is not a live system like other Pussies).
So 50mb is really actually 50mb. Whereas with other Pussies, 50mb of install programs really only took about 13mb after slimming them and then adding them to the compressed squashfs filesystem. And because all Rasp Pi users will be using SD cards, we need to keep a very small footprint.

well.... back to work :)

[Edit:] I forgot to mention that xarchiver and anyterm will be included. The anyterm server lets you designate a port number to run on and when you surf to that port using a web browser, it will provide you with a web to ssh shell interface. You can use it to provide access to the command line interface or a program that can be run at the console. The www.thepussycatforest.info website uses anyterm to provide access to a text adventure game. This becomes a bit of a memory nazi with multiple sessions of this running at once, but its not meant for high traffic. Combining the dead-souls MUD server with anyterm results in a game that is embedded into a webpage that can be used as a chat room.
Last edited by sickgut on Wed 15 Aug 2012, 09:05, edited 1 time in total.

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greengeek
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#1608 Post by greengeek »

sickgut wrote:There are some familiar apps in there and some that i thought would be interesting to add. Rosegarden/ milkytracker/ hydrogen/ audacity/ jackd (including jack2 and all the other tiny midi packages that it depends on) could be a very good and educational music suite for that revolves around the midi and mod formats.
Sounds awesome. Hydrogen is a lot of fun. Hope everything plays ball and comes together ok.

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Media Streaming

#1609 Post by sickgut »

Hello people....

I have stumbled across an idea and i need advice from all you guys.
Apparently there is a few media "streaming" applications available.

The difference between just serving out video files via the webserver or ftp or samba etc.... and the video files being served out using streaming software is this:

#1) Traditional webserver/ samba/ ftp serving of video files.... when the user surfs to or logs in or clicks on a shared folder and then clicks on a video file, it doesnt play... it downloads and then the user needs to find where it was saved then play the file

#2) With streaming software (as i understand it), you can use your web browser to surf to the servers IP or hostname and all this is the same as number #1 except when you click on the video file, it plays over the network, just like youtube.

Now i am asking you guys for advice, can you guys point me in the right directiion in selecting what media streaming software is easy to use and stable etc... any recommendations are welcome,

I think the Rasp Pi would be able to run streaming software and this would be an awesome addition to Pussy-Pie.

my ears are open and my eyes are even more open... i want to learn

aarf

#1610 Post by aarf »

If i was to stream something i would stick it in a webpage with the appropriate html. I'd have to look the html code up because i havent done it for a long time.

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