(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have been playing with puppies for bout 6 years now. I cant stand the ROX filer. I used NOP and K-9 puppies for this reason. I love that puppy "runs in ram" and now that I have 16GBs of ram I want 64 bit puppy. FATDOG!
But how to successfully remove JWM and ROX and replace with Xfce kde gnome anything without ROX.
I try but I always !@% it up. The info I do find is for 32 bit...not sure it works for Fatdog64.

Agreed! I do not like ROX at all

Is an error free replacment of Rox in Fatdog64 just a dream?
Can't be....other puplets use alternate (Default) file managers.
Sure I can install another....but how to change the "System" file manager?

ROX rocks, if you give it a chance. Otherwise, look at Saluki / Carolina with PAE to see all your RAM, or Lighthouse puppy can run KDE (I believe) and is 64bit.

to me Rox is ugly and is incompatible with most icon themes.

Is there some way to show what you guys talk about?

what is ti the others do that work better?

I really like Saluki ! ....if it was only 64 bit.
i have an intel i7 2600k
EVGA GTX 570 x 2 sli
Kingston HyperX 1600 MHz 16GB
2 x 42 inch HD TV's
I want to test a 64 bit puppy "runs from ram" against an 64 bit Ubuntu hard drive install, on modern hardware.
I was unaware that Saluki came in a PAE version. The version I ran shows only 3.5GB of ram.

Saluki can be remastered with the PAE kernel, which must be pretty easy, after all I did it..!!

I believe that Carolina uses PAE by default, and is the extension of saluki.

Using my PAE saluki, I see all 8gig of ram on an otherwise similarly specced system to yours. Perhaps that will be an easier endeavour for you, rather than making massive changes to FatDog.


I upgraded my system a few months ago, and figured with the extra horsepower, I'd try Ubuntu / Mint again, after not using them for a couple of years. Puppy kicks both their butts in speed and usability. I use Saluki now, because it looks pretty, but reality is, traditional puppies, 32bit, PAE or 64bit are the fastest, and all are faster than Ubuntu in use. I did find Ubuntu boots faster on my SSD however than Puppy.

p310don - You make a good point...about making so many changes to Fatdog....I'm no "coder or script writer" But consider this:
I have Windows on 2 x 120GB sata2 raid 0 which boots fast enough, but Shutdown is slow (its the Bios boot screen that takes the longest).
Puppy from USB is painfully slow to boot! But who cares...when you're running windows you have to reboot with almost every new program install, unlike Puppy the where the changes are usually instant, so you don't have to Reboot.
I envision a 64 bit, high performance configured Puppy system. Intel's i7 with 4 memory channels 64 GB (1600 MHz or faster) Ram. A Small 64 GB Sata3 SSD for the Operating System "storage" and Fast Automatic saves of the Changes made (not the whole SFS) during your puppy session. Something like "caching" the disk writes in ram until there is ample processor time to write to disk, or something like that.
Anyways, I don't think Puppy has to be a "Toy" or "Virtual Upgrade" for Old computers anymore. Puppy works differently than other Linux distros and has the potential to be even Better on New Hardware. But then I could be just dreamin. What do you all think

I can't comment on how good this is, as I've never given it time to properly look at it, but look at lighthouse puppy. All reports are that it is excellent.

http://www.lhpup.org/

I believe that might be what you're looking for.

To comment:

With a frugally installed puppy, which runs in ram, there is no advantage that I can see to having an SSD, apart from bootup speed. I upgraded to SSD, and the only benefit is on my saluki install, which does a FSCK on the savefile every boot, the boot time, or fsck time is greatly reduced.

64bit stuff from what I have used is not really any better than 32bit in terms of speed. Unless a program is specifically made and compiled for 64bit, it doesn't benefit much over 32bit.

I would love to use 64bit, but have found that Flash in particular is very buggy, making the internet virtuallly useless, or at the least, painful. Plus, many programs are just 32bit programs, compiled for 64bit, so not taking advantage of all of the benefits of a 64bit system.

I agree with you, I don't like to see puppy labelled as a tinkerer's OS, or something for just old machines. It fits those labels really well, but, is perfectly suited to full time use for most people.

p310don....I am typing this from Lighthouse Puppy. its kinda buggy and configured strangly.
BUT, There is a "Select Default Programs" setting that allows me to switch from Rox to PCfileman and Thunar!!!! (almost all other apps too) I am really happy about that. Works flawlessly.

I installed the Nvidia driver....got the "Twin View" working, Set the resolutions to 1920 x 1080 60 Hz(both TVs), but the desktop streches out on both displays and Zarfy (the screen setup configuration from Pup Control, displays 3840 x 1200 50Hz.

Oh well, at least now when "tweaking" Lighthouse....I'll be using Thunar file manager instead of Rox!

YEAH

Usage of rox is entrenched in Fatdog, in three places:
a) drive icon display is very specific to rox (you can "fix" this by using other ways to manage drive icons, such as pup-volume-monitor)
b) application launcher uses rox for mime-type detection (ie, xdg-open calls "rox")
c) And a lot of scripts which calls "rox" to open filer windows, etc.

So, removing rox isn't going to be easy. Removing "rox" desktop though, is not too bad (but you need pup-volume-monitor or equivalent as above). Assigning Win+E to open another filer isn't too difficult either.

If all you hate is the filer, there are choices in the pet repo. You have xfe, you have emelfm2, you have tuxcmd, you have pathfinder.

64bit isn't exactly the same as PAE. 32-bit gimp running on PAE kernel can only access 3GB of memory - PAE or not. 64bit gimp can use all available memory.