(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

@Guy- good on yer, mate! (Do they still say that in Australia? I worked there for a couple of months thirty years ago- when they bought me a tube of Touhy's (?) they said "If you're feeling homesick, stick it under yer armpit for a while".) A good mob to work with.

gerry

I've been using my Mandriva / Ubuntu box this weekend and since I just happened to have an empty partition I installed Beta 5.

Synaptic is working pretty well, except for still needing to fix the menus; installed 4 or 5 apps with no real problems but a few missing libs.

Installed Google Chrome with the pet from dpup.org, working fine as well. And Dpup flies on this AMD Duron 1.4 ghz/ 384 mb ram/ 1 gb swap old computer.

Hi guys,

A couple of reports of what look like bugs that I wanted to put up for consideration:

1. My bug regarding no saves in /etc is continuing, on every save file I use. It seems unrelated to what is installed and what is not, to the sfs files that are loaded, etc. (perhaps I could be wrong on this, but have tested almost every conceivable configuration) and just seems to start happening after a certain number of boots. The save files are fsck'ed on every reboot and dosfsck reports no problems with the underlying vfat file system excepting differences between the boot sector and its backup. It does not seem to be a bad block related problem because it happens in all save files. I have finally given up on trying to trace this and have started using workarounds instead (setup scripts in /root/Startup to copy over all the fiels that are lost, etc.) but things are still not working properly.

2. My screen goes blank when using intel video driver problem has started reoccuring in beta5. When we discussed it at that post, gposil, it had seemed to be a fluxbox thing. But now the identical problem has occurred when running icewm, jwm and Enlightenment DR17. Will post an xerrs.log as soon as I remmber to save it properly . It happens fairly frequently.

3. The wifi drivers for the Eee PC 701SD - something weird is going on with mine. The standard one (ath5k) in dpup was running ok at first and then suddenly developed severe problems, not connecting at all most of the time (would connect perhaps once out of ten times) and then, once connected, the connection would be very erratic and slow. So I switched to this driver compiled by tempestuous for this kernel and there was a great improvement. But then later this driver as well started showing similar problems, though not as bad as the ath5k one, and now I'm reduced to wired internet (which works fine ). The adapter is identiifed as an Atheros AR5001.

Should note that I have not had the latter two problems ever in 4.1.2 or 4.3.1, though as mentioned earlier the first problem did start occurring in 4.3.1.

Possibly these problems could be fixed with more up-to-date intel and atheros drivers? Just a shot in the dark...

Incidentally have finally managed to compile Enlightenment DR17 in dpup, will post shortly.

Wow! Thanks shankar, it's not just me! I'm having exactly the same problem with wifi connection, in dpup and in the old iscraig acerpup, based on 4.1 I think.
I been trying over and over to get both working. The acerpup has been working for some time on my Acer Aspire One, but won't work now, and in dpup I have one savefile that does work, and another that won't. It's always the "association" stage that fails, whatever that means.
EDIT: dpup also on AA1.

gerry

Gerry, what adapter do you have in the Aspire One? Would be good to check if Atheros chipsets are the problem.

Ok, finally managed to compile Enlightenment DR17 for dpup beta 5. You will also need Lua, so that dotpet is also attached. This is compiled from the December 2nd snapshots (svn code refused to compile). These will not work in normal Puppy. You can find both at:

NB:Turns out you will also need to have the devx sfs loaded, or otherwise install libiconv - get it from the repository here.

http://stashbox.org/743400/enlightenmen ... 3-i486.pet
http://stashbox.org/743407/lua-5.1.4-i486.pet

Before you run E17 you will need to make the following change in your /root/.xinitrc. Change this line: to this: This will switch off ROX, which otherwise will prevent you from seeing the E17 desktop.

Then, to start E17, exit to prompt from X and do this: I have been using E17 since January 2007 and nowadays can hardly work without it. It's space-heavy, but incredibly beautiful and very fast even on old machines. Screenshot attached. All those bits - the clock, the systray, and the iconbar (except freememapplet) are set to auto-hide, and I bring them out when I need with a keystroke. You may also want to turn off wbar (set /var/wbon to false) as E17's built in ibar module is better integrated and prettier.

This version is more up to date than the debian package available at package.enlightenment.org (which dates from the first week of August), and has a few new bells and whistles. You can get themes from http://exchange.enlightenment.org.

PS: as I am not a fan of menus, I have not bothered to fix the application menus (which are a little wonky) and the non-functional shutdown menu. Sorry no time . To get to applications I use the "Run Everything" dialog from the main menu, which is new and pretty cool, try it (you can also bind it to a key combination, which is what I've done). To shutdown I just Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and type poweroff.

PS-squared: can someone add in this note to the dotpet? I don't know how to do that - i.e. create a readme that will show up on install - so that people will know they have to make these changes before running E17.

shankargopal wrote: 2. My screen goes blank when using intel video driver problem has started reoccuring in beta5. When we discussed it at that post, gposil, it had seemed to be a fluxbox thing. But now the identical problem has occurred when running icewm, jwm and Enlightenment DR17. Will post an xerrs.log as soon as I remmber to save it properly . It happens fairly frequently.

Ok, it just happened again, and this time managed to save the xerrs.log. I was running in E17 at the time so there is a lot of Enlightenment stuff in xerrs.log, but the key error appears to be the one about the "Ring" etc. This error, on a cursory visual inspection, was present in xerrs.log when I had this problem when running icewm as well.

Have attached xerrs.log and xorg.conf, both renamed to ".gz" to allow me to attach them (just rename them, not compressed).

@shankar- lscpi gives AR5001 (01)

gerry

shankargopal,

Your xorg.conf is loading the vesa driver, not the intel driver....

Hello gposil,

Just out of interest, which kernel do you propose for the retro version?

Cheers

gposil wrote:shankargopal,

Your xorg.conf is loading the vesa driver, not the intel driver....

Sorry, that's because I uploaded the xorg.conf after I had changed it to vesa to allow me to start X again. The original xorg.conf (i.e. the one that was there when the problem occurred) was identical except it loaded the intel driver instead of vesa.

I was thinking 2.6.21.7 or maybe the old faithful 2.6.25.16...not sure, I was going to throw it open for discussion...now's as good a time as any....

gposil wrote:I was thinking 2.6.21.7 or maybe the old faithful 2.6.25.16...not sure, I was going to throw it open for discussion...now's as good a time as any....

The former gets my vote, very nice on old p3s

Howdy Dev. team, all,
Really like what I see in Dpup, thus far.
Problems:
Wine; no menu entry with 482 nor 4.30 using
both SFS and/or dpup pet.

ATI Radeon driver; tried to dl from Synaptic.
Get errors, 1 of which says 'need to have
'do_initrd' in kernel line?, something as such.

Virtual Box: would the best approach be a new pet,
or install thru Synaptic?

I am using default desktop, no Wbar. Have installed
patches.

Many thanks for your efforts. This should be the best Pup yet.
Sincerely, jw

Hello, jeffy39.

Welcome aboard ! And thanks for the compliments!
I'll try to answer two of your questions. (I've never used VBox.)

jeffy39 wrote:Howdy Dev. team, all,
Really like what I see in Dpup, thus far.
Problems:
Wine; no menu entry with 482 nor 4.30 using
both SFS and/or dpup pet.

ATI Radeon driver; tried to dl from Synaptic.
Get errors, 1 of which says 'need to have
'do_initrd' in kernel line?, something as such.
[...]

Many thanks for your efforts. This should be the best Pup yet.
Sincerely, jw

Are you sure your Wine is loaded correctly? To get it working, I had to unpack the sfs in its own directory in $HOME (on an ext3 drive), and then symlink manually the sub-directories at their proper corresponding places in the Linux hierarchy. I'm pretty sure this manual solution will work, but it's a little chore.

Another solution might be to activate your Wine sfs through the bootloader as well as through the "sfs-linker".

Item # 2: I have a Radeon card on this machine, and didn't need any special driver: it worked "out of the box"! How old (or how new) is your Radeon card? A senior dpup dev might want to confirm this, but I don't think you need a driver with dpup's version of Xorg.

Best wishes of the Season, incidentally.

gposil wrote:I was thinking 2.6.21.7 or maybe the old faithful 2.6.25.16...not sure, I was going to throw it open for discussion...now's as good a time as any....

2.14X uses 2.6.18.1 its old but a lot of users really find it stable and haven't complained, plus there are a lot of updated modules for it, thanks to MU and tempestuous, but 2.6.18.8 was used in puppy 2.18 woof and hasn't been all that tested but I guess it was updated up until around a year ago.
ttuuxxx

Just as an experiment in regard to the retro kernel, I dug out my slowest computer....a P3 433 mhz w/ 384 mb ram and no swap. (Presently has a Windows 98 install.)

Running live with 482 Beta 5 right now.......not the fastest but certainly usable. Only using about 40 mb ram at idle too. Full disclosure, its using about 80 mb right now as I post this in Firefox.....

Since Etch has 2.6.18 and Lenny is at 2.6.26.2 I guess somewhere in the middle could work.Depends on how retro you want to go....

shankargopal, e17 also needs libiconv on clean boot, wouldn't start otherwise. Haven't tested it much but it runs

To confirm musher0's report... xorg has included the "radeon" driver for awhile. I think the "radeonhd" driver is also included. The "radeon" driver should support most older cards and the "radeonhd" driver newer cards. These drivers are free and open-source. There is also the proprietary driver FGLRX, provided for Linux by ATI/AMD. I'm pretty sure there are .debs in the debian repos fo ATI/AMD drivers (proprietary included) but they will not work with the dpup kernel. The only drivers you can use are drivers compiled for the Puppy 2.6.30.5 kernel. You can compile these yourself but you need the devx installed/loaded and the kernel source (available from puppylinux,com/sources).

More info can be found here http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon

Hope some of this info is helpful.

Cheers

My Radeon 9250 works fine with default xorg drivers and dri also works when libgl mesa installed. I also uncomment rage teathre option in xorg.conf and also force tvout so I can use tv-out with xorg. I can paste my xorg.conf if someone has similar card.