Puppy 4.2 RC4 Deep Thought - Bugs & Fixes

[pa_mcclamrock]

In order to retest this you will need to manually Stop the cups server (localhost:631) and Restart it again.

Um, sure, when I find out how to do it! (Sorry, I'm not familiar with how to do that; I know how to kill processes, but the cups server, unlike cupsd, doesn't appear in the list of processes.)

[WhoDo]

In order to retest this you will need to manually Stop the cups server (localhost:631) and Restart it again.

Um, sure, when I find out how to do it! (Sorry, I'm not familiar with how to do that; I know how to kill processes, but the cups server, unlike cupsd, doesn't appear in the list of processes.)

Use the following from a command line:

Code: Select all

cups stop
cups start

Basically this performs an orderly "kill" on cupsd which actually is the cups server process (I think).

I also note from the documentation that there is a cupsd.conf file that we can maybe use to control the problem. I haven't had a look at it yet, so be my guest if you'd like to try it out.

[technosaurus]

What I can not understand is why this is an acceptable behavior on an public internet forum that is supposed to win people over to the product?
...
Why are there not any proactive Mods here to take action when it's obvious some people can not self police themselves?
...
I don't care for any other other Linux distros, but if I was an average user experimenting with Linux, all the "drama" in the forums would have me looking elsewhere if I was hoping for tech support.
...
No one asked for such an opinion, but since theses forums appear to be unmoderated, does it really matter?

Puppy has a lot of dedicated people that are passionate about their work and their projects. It is my opinion that these heated discussions are a big contributor to Puppy's continued improvement. Most of these discussions occur in the development section of the forum and are innocuous to the everyday newcomer. Without these public debates Puppy would not be able to keep up with mainstream expectations and still be functional on lower resource systems.

Fortunately most of us have thick skin and continue making our projects smaller, lighter, faster and better - testing in puplets till there is no question that it is ready for prime time, full release Puppy. There is plenty of encouragement and useful suggestions (or constructive criticism) from the forum along the way . Much of this is the kind of thing you would find in mail lists, the Puppy community has just progressed beyond that to having truly open discussions on the forum.

I hope that this active discussion never gets moderated and that deleted posts are limited to truly offensive posts and spam.

Back on Topic
My only objection to this RC so far was the default background... RC2's flowed much better artistically and will work with more desktop configurations. The smooth transitions provided less visual interference and the blue hued background nicely offset the orange toned default icon set... It was great demonstration of the proper use of complementary colors and I hope it is selected as default in the final release.

[WhoDo]

My only objection to this RC so far was the default background... RC2's flowed much better artistically and will work with more desktop configurations. The smooth transitions provided less visual interference and the blue hued background nicely offset the orange toned default icon set... It was great demonstration of the proper use of complementary colors and I hope it is selected as default in the final release.

The background to which you refer is Stardust, provided by Zigbert and still available in /usr/share/backgrounds. I also like it which is why I made it default for the early Alpha's, Beta's and RC's. Unfortunately it just doesn't look good with the screen running in 16bit colour mode - too pixelated, with obvoius divisions between the colours where these should be a seamless. If you can solve that I'll go back to it, but it's not an easy fix. I have to be sure that what we release looks good on as many machines as possible, which is why I've reverted to an image.

I hope that explains my reasoning on the choice of a default background. If you want to test it for yourself just Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to the console and run xorgwizard to select 16bit colour for your resolution. If you or anyone else can make a version of Ziggy's Stardust where the blending appears seamless in 16bit colour mode, I'll go with it again.

Cheers.

[technosaurus]

For all of your CUPS concerns see the changelog since this release for the development tree - there are fixes for these known bugs

http://svn.easysw.com/public/cups/trunk/CHANGES.txt

Does anyone have an SVN pet so someone can try to compile SVN... or should we roll back for stability...

[trapster]

htop does not show it but top shows 87% cpu for /usr/sbin/cupsd.
cups stop does not work.

killall cupsd does work.
cupsd in a console does restart it at 1%
Printed a webpage after restarting cupsd and the page printed fine with the cpu staying at 1%.

[William (Dthdealer)]

Sorry about my last post. Although it was not clear, my intention of leaving was only if we started to become larger and larger, turning into a large desktop distro. Again, sorry about that and anyone I offended.

Our forums are not always formal, but that doesn't matter. Members may come and go, but what matters is the Puppy community spirit. Our main problem is that there are several Puppy Linux forums (eg linuxquestions.org). Commonly topics are solved simply by people referring others to our forums here, and the expertise is different between forums. The supposed downfall of puppy should not be blamed on a member unless that member has taken negative actions toward our community.

I agree with technosaurus about the puppy background. The old icon set would also be a nice addition.

BTW why don't any of the puppy icons sets have Australia as the centre? It's always America.

[panzerpuppy]

You have only one minute to test RC4...How many bugs can you find?

A lot

[dogone]

Another CUPS bug: I thought I'd try to see exactly when the high CPU usage kicked in by opening the CUPS window again and doing a few things--but I couldn't, because I got an error message saying "The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost:631" (etc.). All I know is that (1) here's another CUPS bug that must be squashed, and (2) the high CPU usage did not kick in as soon as I opened the window and got the error message (I guess because cupsd didn't start running yet).

As I reported some time ago, I first noticed this cupsd-related CPU loading problem in RC3. CPU utilization goes to ~94% as soon as the USERNAME/PASSWORD DIALOG appears. It remains at that level until cupsd is killed. Starting the CUPS wizard fails thereafter.

[dogone]

Since RC3 I've several times had Claws-mail die while I was browsing the preferences dialog. Puff! Gone. This is highly unusual for Claws. I urge RC4 testers to exercise the Claws preferences dialog. If it's important, I had one IMAP account configured and working fine at the time.

[WhoDo]

For all of your CUPS concerns see the changelog since this release for the development tree - there are fixes for these known bugs...

Aha, so it isn't us but CUPS - it looks like the 100% CPU issue has been resolved by 1.42b3, so my vote would be to recompile or at least patch our present version for that fix rather than roll back. We've come too far for that. Thanks, techno.

[jayargent]

Overall I really like 4.2 RC4. You guys have done a fine job!

Here are a couple things that I have found though....

JWM Configuration Manager

The "Application launch buttons in tray" script is broken. The "Add" button does not do anything and the "Edit" button goes into an infinite loop. I figured out that the problem was caused by using an icon for the task bar menu button instead of an icon + label. The panel-buttons script uses that line in .jwmrc-tray as a reference. I tried adjusting the panel-buttons script to look for the new line. It then partially worked but it started adding duplicate icons to the taskbar. I don't know why.


XorgWizard

I saw this bug mentioned in an earlier thread but since I saw this behavior too I thought I would restate it here since it still does it and maybe it did not get noticed. My video card has never worked with Xorg in any previous Puppy version. When I tried it with 4.2 and selected "Test_X_Now" the screen went black and never went back to the wizard so Xvesa can be selected like it did in 4.12. Even after trying "Alt Ctl Backspace" multiple times and waiting for the suppposed 60 second timeout. I copied the xorgwizard file from 4.12 to 4.2 and the test worked as it had before.

Have a great day!


Jay

[WhoDo]

You have only one minute to test RC4...How many bugs can you find? A lot

It is helpful if you actually read a thread before jumping in at the middle with your $0.02c worth.

1. Tooltips on top toolbar are function of where you place your mouse and NOT a bug in RC4. Place it lower and the tooltip will be entirely visible. This has been noted more than once before. I'm sure our JWM guru Patriot will address that in his upcoming release.

2. The missing analog clock only occurs on first boot. It is in in the process of being addressed already, so another bug report about it is redundant.

3. The Alsa-Mixer version is NOT a bug in RC4 - that is the latest version of Alsa-utils I have available. Alsalibs have been upgraded to 1.0.19 so testing there would help since tempestuous has warned of using different versions of the tools for the libs in use.

4. The position of the trash and xlock icons has been reported ... and reported ... and reported. It is a minor polish issue, NOT a bug, that will be addressed before Final.

So you've managed to "report" only one actual bug that had already been reported here before and was noted by me in the release notes at the very beginning of the thread. Well done, panzapuppy. Thank you for your input.

[8-bit]

The example links in Puppy Reference still need to be removed as the example files they pointed to got removed.
The xerrors.log file shows a number of files as not being found.
This is on a clean CD boot of Puppy rc4.

[WhoDo]

I agree with technosaurus about the puppy background. The old icon set would also be a nice addition.

BTW why don't any of the puppy icons sets have Australia as the centre? It's always America.

The "old icon set" is there already - menu > Desktop > Desktop icon switcher (it's called Stardust). If you prefer it then use it, but the default for this release will be DeepThought.

I agree that it would be nice to have globe icons with Australia at the centre. No-one has created them AFAIK. JebaJQ8 has created some unique icons for Japanese Puppy, and shared those with us, but it would be nice to have a complete Puppy set - unique to us, regardless of which country is at the centre of the globe.

[WhoDo]

The example links in Puppy Reference still need to be removed as the example files they pointed to got removed.
The xerrors.log file shows a number of files as not being found.
This is on a clean CD boot of Puppy rc4.

Fixed for next release. Thanks, 8-bit.

[ttuuxxx]

I looked at the processes with Htop and saw that "cupsd" was using about ninety-four percent (94%) of the total CPU capacity (on my 2.6 GHz CPU). [EDIT: I wasn't even printing at the time.] I killed cupsd with Pprocess and the total CPU usage immediately dropped to about 6 or 8 percent (that's with an MP3 file playing); the mouse pointer wasn't jerky any more, and neither was the sound.

Yes, I reported that problem to the packager (ttuuxxx) at least 3 versions ago. Seems he has other issues on his mind. *sigh* Anyone else care to take a lash at why cupsd occasionally goes to full load and won't throttle back?

WhoDo I'm good, but not that good, The only person I know who could easily fix that is Zigbert, He would know how to reduce load, Since he made pprocess it kind of the same thing.
ttuuxxx

[WhoDo]

JWM Configuration Manager

The "Application launch buttons in tray" script is broken. The "Add" button does not do anything and the "Edit" button goes into an infinite loop. I figured out that the problem was caused by using an icon for the task bar menu button instead of an icon + label. The panel-buttons script uses that line in .jwmrc-tray as a reference. I tried adjusting the panel-buttons script to look for the new line. It then partially worked but it started adding duplicate icons to the taskbar. I don't know why.

This is a JWM issue, Jay. Would you please report it in Patriot's JWM Update thread? He may see it here, but he surely WILL see it there.

XorgWizard

I saw this bug mentioned in an earlier thread but since I saw this behavior too I thought I would restate it here since it still does it and maybe it did not get noticed. My video card has never worked with Xorg in any previous Puppy version. When I tried it with 4.2 and selected "Test_X_Now" the screen went black and never went back to the wizard so Xvesa can be selected like it did in 4.12. Even after trying "Alt Ctl Backspace" multiple times and waiting for the suppposed 60 second timeout. I copied the xorgwizard file from 4.12 to 4.2 and the test worked as it had before.

xorgwizard has been updated to allow for localisation, but I don't know what version was used as the base. I'm sure the localisation team will pick this one up and fix it for us. If not I will revert to the one from the 4.1.2 release.

Thanks for the report, Jay. I didn't see the xorgwizard issue mentioned earlier, so reporting its continued presence in this thread is worthwhile. Cheers.

[cthisbear]

Libretto100ct :

I've handed out a LOT of Puppy CD's on my own dime
over the last 2 years because I believe in the project.

"""""""""""""""
Yep! Been there done that..........hundreds.
"""""""""
I have never personally invited anyone to this
forum because ttuuxx's unprofessional and erratic
behavior that absolutely takes away credibility
from the Puppy Community.
It's embarrassing, period.

""""""""
ttuuxx unprofessional and erratic behavior
But often he comes good. Yes he's a ....

But his enthusiasm and drive and certainly committment
have helped heaps of people.
At least on the Puppy forum you don't fall asleep.
It's Action Jackson.
""""""""
What I can not understand is why this is an acceptable
behavior on an public internet forum that is supposed to
win people over to the product?

""""""""""""
that there are other possibly other talented people
that are on the same level of proficiency as ttuuxx that
do not post, add content, or help on this website because
they do not care for the consistent threat of confrontation?

+++++++++++++
And some get a wind up to outdo him.
++++++++++

Why are there not any proactive Mods here to
take action when it's obvious some people can
not self police themselves?

It's NOT welcoming and lacks class.

///////////
Too much censorship in the world.

We are an Aussie distro.
Ex convict stock.....no class at all.
////////
Has anyone over the last 2 years noticed how many
people have come and gone on these forums?
Not because of dissatisfaction with the product,
but with what they read here.

------
Good riddance. Everyone has choice.
And many people quietly stay here having a laugh.
We are a unique forum.
Plenty of smarties here.....not me mate....
yes a lot of first rate cutting edge people.
Puppy is blessed in abundance.
--------
I don't care for any other other Linux distros, but if I was an
average user experimenting with Linux, all the "drama" in the
forums would have me looking elsewhere if I was hoping for
tech support.

+++++++++
And enjoy Ubuntu.............losers.
++++++++
To answer ttuuxx's pattern of asking

""""""""""""
Horrible to watch. Embarrassing. Not likely to change.
He should be on Derryn Hinchs' shame file.
""""""""""""
I'm here for the duration, so I'm not going anywhere.

No one asked for such an opinion, but since theses
forums appear to be unmoderated, does it really matter? :?:

///////////////
Good for you and welcome.

Don't get me upset now.
///////////
William (Dthdealer)

Members may come and go, but what matters is the
Puppy community spirit.

""""""
Exactly

""""""""

Again, sorry about that and anyone I offended.

"""""""""
OK! Putting the axe back in the shed now.

/////////

technosaurus

Puppy has a lot of dedicated people that are passionate about
their work and their projects. It is my opinion that these heated discussions are a big contributor to Puppy's continued improvement.

""""""""""
Passion Pop without the sweetness.

""""""""""
Fortunately most of us have thick skin.

There is plenty of encouragement and useful suggestions

"""""""""""
Ticked all my boxes

"""""""""
the Puppy community has just progressed beyond that to
having truly open discussions on the forum.

""""""""""
Exactly.

Truth, certainty and then denouncement.
Then we get up the next day and come back for more.
Hey we hate everybody here.

In a shirty shirty world sometimes I log onto the
Puppy Forum and have a good laugh.

Sometimes I am embarrassed, often I wonder at
what thoughts are expressed, occasionally I despair.
.
But I have seen many scientific, philosophical, educational
articles posted. Nah! I never used them.
But I saw them.
One thing about Puppy.....never bored.

Long may it be tolerated.
John Murga....good fellow is awarded by me The Medal of Muck.

Thank you John for letting us be different.

Puppy has advanced because of your goodwill and your ability
to hold yourself back from the DELETE button.

Of course I will vilify you tomorrow...but nicely.

Chris.

[panzerpuppy]

1 -> I fixed the ALSA mixer. alsa-utils did the trick

2 -> Is it possible to skin the ugly Motif-style scrollbar in the rxvt console?