Fatdog64 710 Beta2 [CLOSED]

[fatdog]

James, Kirk and Jake (with a lot of help from Step) are happy to announce Fatdog-710 Beta2.

Fatdog64-710 is a major update built from source, with new base packages, using a new build system.

There have been over 200 commits since the beta release. The beta release announcement can be foundhere.

Changes from 710 Beta:

Updates:

Linux kernel updated to 4.4.21
Faster startup for Rox filer (remove gethostbyname)
Qt updated to 5.6.1
Mesa 12.0.3 (without vdpau)
compton, duff, extundelete now in basesfs
mhwaveedit does not need mplayer anymore, uses ffmpeg
gtkmenuplus 1.1.2
gtk2 2.24.31
Simpler, and more accurate drive icons.
Fixes for libdvdcss
Flashplayer 11.2.202.637
Default actions for various images updated to be more consistent. All of them will run defaultimageviewer.
Fotoxx moved out of basesfs. Default image viewer is now viewnior.
Replace pmirror, pbackup with grsync.
refind updated to 0.10.3
Default locale is now en_US.UTF-8
mtpaint 3.49.12

New Features:

Libreoffice suit replaces abiword, gnumeric
Libreoffice comes with English spell checkers, check repo for other languages and offline help files.
23oz and matching smokey-theme included

Numerous bug fixes and fine tunings. We think this will be the last release before final. The kernel will be upgraded to the latest 4.4.x kernel for final. The Fatdog put on a few pounds with the addition of LibreOffice, it's now 355MB but so worth it.

Big thanks to all the beta testers.

Get it from here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/iso/710beta2/

[fatdog]

---

[prehistoric]

Now running Fatdog710b2 on an ancient dual-core machine without problems.

Still, I wouldn't live up to my name if I didn't complain about the switch to Libreoffice. I've grown used to using both Abiword and Gnumeric over the years, and the convenience of having applications which just pop up, even on old machines, is valuable. I will also say that the increase in load time from DVDs on some machines is painful.

When I write, I avoid formatting while I get the text down, and I typically do this with Sylpheed which I use for email. (Another old habit.) A quick format using Abiword then allows me to print things. Running a quick spreadsheet calculation with Gnumeric is another habit. Even when I'm on a machine with M$ Office, I try to avoid it because there are always complications with these tools I don't want to deal with while I'm thinking about the content I'm writing or a problem I'm solving. (A lot of writing on the Internet looks like it was done by people who have stopped thinking about content.)

The trouble with Libreoffice is that it tries to maintain compatibility with M$ Office, and this is an on-going struggle. You will have noticed that M$ has switched to a rolling update with M$ Office 365, and a business model of software-as-a-service. Keeping compatibility with that treadmill will whipsaw everyone else in software development. M$ has done this repeatedly, and the handwriting is on the wall for those who expect stability.

Other people will certainly have different preferences, but I strongly suggest making Libreoffice a SFS, so you don't have to issue a new Fatdog every time it changes. As a living fossil, I would also like the option of installing a SFS with Abiword and Gnumeric without paying the price of loading Libreoffice.

[Gobbi]

Seamonkey is opening normally ( fast ) , now . Thanks for finding the solution for this !
Good to see LibreOffice in base_sfs .
Long filenames are still cut . I solved this by increasing the number of pixels : rightclick inside a rox window --> Options --> Display --> ( Wrapped, Details ) .
Everything else looks good , for now .

[mavrothal]

710b2 look pretty good!
Is the first puppy that can almost handle OK the Macbook trackpad
As older FatDogs does not unmount the VFAT partition is running from cleanly and leaves the dirty bit on that occasionally gives problems, but this may have to do with my 64GB USB3 stick setup.
As mentioned above booting from anything slower than USB 3 takes it time and you may want to provide some feedback while is loading.
One little strange thing is that network connection icon shows as disconnected when you have a WiFi connection. You may want to change that or provide some other input for the active WiFi connection (change color of the wpa_gui tray icon for example).
A little problem I have was that zafry froze when I tried to change screen resolution on first boot. After going through xrandr, zafry behaved.
Doing all the customization needed to run in the macbook I was thinking that FD is getting pretty mature and you may want to provide better support for version updates in the future so does not feel like a "temporary/alternative" OS (and spare me the same changes every time )

[Billtoo]

I burned the iso to a DVD and booted it on my lenovo desktop pc, used
the fatdog installer to a 64gb usb-3.0 flash drive which is plugged
into a usb-2.0 port.

Summary
Computer
Processor 2x Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
Memory 3916MB (254MB used)
Machine Type Physical machine
Operating System Fatdog64 [710]
User Name root (root)
Date/Time Sat Oct 22 12:50:11 2016
Display
Resolution 1920x1080 pixels
OpenGL Renderer Mesa DRI Intel(R) G41
X11 Vendor The X.Org Foundation
Audio Devices
Audio Adapter HDA-Intel - HDA Intel

USB Devices
Kingston Technology
D-Link System AirPlus G DWL-G122 Wireless Adapter(rev.C1) (Ralink RT2571W)

Sensors
Temperature
temp2 (coretemp) 42.00°C
temp3 (coretemp) 36.00°C

Storage
SCSI Disks
ATA WDC WD3200AAJS-5
HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH40N
Kingston DataTraveler 3.0

I added gtk3 with the package manager then Firefox-49.0.2 with Updates
in the control panel.

No problems so far,
Thanks

[jlst]

The trouble with Libreoffice is that it tries to maintain compatibility with M$ Office, and this is an on-going struggle. You will have noticed that M$ has switched to a rolling update with M$ Office 365, and a business model of software-as-a-service. Keeping compatibility with that treadmill will whipsaw everyone else in software development. M$ has done this repeatedly, and the handwriting is on the wall for those who expect stability.

When I want to write something i just use geany. It's the world that forces me to use something else, i wouldn't mind reading everything in plain text, simple html, and simple odf docs maybe.

I guess the best suite for this is WPS Office Community, which provides binaries up to 5x faster than libre office that look very much like MS office 2013 or (2010).. a clone.. no kidding.

Unfortunately it doesn't have ODF support, it was just meant to be a MS office clone, and has succeeded wonderfully.

I run the WPS suite in an old celeron, and it runs quite fine... libre office kills that processor and all the ram as well.

Unfortunately WPS is closed source, but it just works fine and has better MS Office compatibility than libre office, way better. it just feels like the real MS thing... and it's about 2-3 times smaller if you remove most stuff.

[step]

@jlst, does one need a license for WPS free version? Can the free version create/write MS office word files?

[jlst]

@jlst, does one need a license for WPS free version? Can the free version create/write MS office word files?

The Linux version is free.For windows they have a free version a and Pro Version (paid) . Both versions are like 20-50 times smaller than Micr[soft office.

In fact i read they were trying to stuff their app into a major distro when they were beginning to produce the linux version. But there were suspicions because it's not open source and it's from China. I think they don't care if you promote their app by including it by default. It's just a matter of philosophy.. when it comes to MS stuff, i don't care that much as long as something is free of charge and runs in linux natively..

The WPS Office Community suite only produces MS Office compatible docs, that means they are a mile ahead of Libre Office regarding ms office compat. I read Libre Office can't properly show or edit MS documents, well, WPS Office for Linux does a better job, but that's it.

When i download their app, i remove language files and some other files, can't remember which ones. The last time i downloaded it, about 7 months ago, and removed stuff, the gzipped package was about 75-85mb... can't remember, then i adjusted the gui to look like office 2013 or 2003, set language (lang files are downloaded automatically).

When i download libre office it's always a few times bigger no matter what.. I can't believe they still have Java as a dependency for some parts. In the other hand wps office community does not have extra dependencies, i think it's 100% C++ or something. It would be great if some millonaire buyed that suite and release the source and encourage further development, but it's not going to happen.

This is what i'd do to sort this out:
1) include wps office for MS office stuff
2) include minimal versions of abiword and gnumeric only for basic odf support (only odf related plugins or something)

But i'm not taking into account how many dependencies gnumeric and abirword have.

Of course this is trying to avoid a heavyweight champion like Libre Office. But if you want a little bit of everything, Libre Office is the right choice, ignoring the fact that is bloated and some parts depend on python, java, etc, etc.

[quirkian2new]

I have the same opinion as prehistoric. Futhermore i have 3 points to add:

Within commercial companies, nearly 99% are using M$ office(i think this if the fact).

Outside commercial companies, most fatdog64 users may not be heavy office suite users. Heavy office suite users may not be fatdog64 users.
So i can't see the rationale of including libre in the basesfs.

Secondly, IMHO the fatdog iso should be best under 280mb or 300 mb. If the size grow larger and larger, some fatdog64 users may
switch to other 64bit puppy derivative like PuppEX64 /ExTiX ....... because these are more fat.

Thirdly, booting is more & more tedious with iso over 300mb.

if including lire makes an iso of 355mb, what else can be added in the future release of fatdog64 ?
The kernel-module.sfs inevitable becoming bigger with the increase in hardware models. Hope that dev team reserving more room for the future releases.

[mikeslr]

I think LibreOffice requires Java only for its Math and Database Modules, which WPS (Wordprocessing, Presentations, Spreadsheets) doesn't provide. But then, trying to get rid of LibreOffice's Math and Database Modules is a time-consuming job best left to experts (if possible at all). It could be done with OpenOffice.

One nice thing about LibreOffice I've discovered is that it now natively opens and accurately presents a couple of decades of my WordPerfect files.

One nice thing about WPS is that there is also a version which runs under Android. And running under Android it has the capability of accepting voice-input. For a Puppy version, see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... c634f250a1. Untested under Fatdog64 and will probably need 32bit compatibility libraries installed. Or try the version direct from WPS, https://www.wps.com/linux Under Tahrpup64, the tar,xz package for Linux could be unpacked and run by clicking its component starter scripts, wps, wpp or et. Each, however, complains that some functions might not function properly as a consequence of a missing symbol font. That's as far as I got. Again, untested under Fatdog64.

With multi-gigabytes of hard-drive space, I'm less concern about the size of any application except to the extent that it requires RAM. I don't mind having available multiple applications providing pretty much the same functions, and switching between them when one offers something another does not. But frankly, and regretfully, nothing in Linux offers the customization which WordPerft Suite provided. My fingers still expect Word-processing applications to respond to the short-cuts I used for a couple of decades but which can't be programmed into other Word-processors.

Lastly, I wonder if some version of focus-writer will run under Fatdog64: an excellent application for just getting ideas "down on the page."

Guess I'll have to spend some time exploring the new Fatdog64.

mikesLr

[SFR]

One little strange thing is that network connection icon shows as disconnected when you have a WiFi connection.

It's pre-configured to eth0, so you'd need to right-click it and configure to wlan.
You can have multiple network monitor tray icons, for each active interface, btw.

WPS

I gave it a spin some time ago and one thing that puts me off is calling home at 198.199.118.170 every time you start it (even if you disable so-called "home page" in settings).
I was searching for a way to block it, but apparently it can't be...

As for LO, I'm not a heavy Office user and I didn't have much against Abiword/Gnumeric combo, but, after initial skepticism, I'm glad to have it OOTB, especially that it comes with a vector drawing app - a piece that was always missing in FD.

Also, Kirk managed to trim it down substantially, otherwise the ISO would weight ~500M.

Greetings!

[belham2]

WPS
I gave it a spin some time ago and one thing that puts me off is calling home at 198.199.118.170 every time you start it (even if you disable so-called "home page" in settings).
I was searching for a way to block it, but apparently it can't be...

Greetings!

The history of MS Office (who I've no love for the parent company --MSFT---given its past behavior towards software releases) battles in China concerning copyright and, specifically, the MS Office Suite, are legendary. The Chinese gov't repeatedly would tell MSFT one thing, then in private do the exact opposite. There's nothing that can be done with this and/or about this, imho, as that is the way of economic warfare---always has, and always will be, for every country.

What makes using WPS full of question (this worry has always been the problem) though is Kingsoft's uber-close ties to the Beijing gov't (Kingsoft's WPS phoning home doesn't help matters). Kingsoft tried and still tries to deny that they are not close to Beijing, but it doesn't change the fact that they are.
Thus, in the end, it's up to the office software user (whether corporate, society, individual or whatever) whether they have trust in knowing WPS is safe to use. When speaking of 'trust' issues, I think it needs to be said that you can argue this very same thing with MSFT itself, since their stuff is essentially closed-source too, right? What makes MSFT any safer than Kingsoft??

But if you are asking me, as an individual user, to choose from the three big world office suite entities (MSFT, Libre and WPS), and choose those I'd trust with my sensitive documents (health, insurance, financial, etc), I know quite well which two I am going to be choosing. And since I am in the Linux world, it's either LO and/or Abiword/Gnumeric (running the current Libre behemoth, on older hardware, is a quick path to insanity).


Changing topic and speaking of Fatdogs, I do know the previous version Fatdogs w/o LO run great on my Atom-based older HP laptop (which is where I use Fatdog). This new release by James and Kirk, with LO installed by default, I am pretty sure it will bring this laptop to its knees, hahahaha, thus I am hedging my bets & choosing not to go forward with the new Fatdog, and most likely move to something else if I can't update the previous non-LO Fatdogs.

Still, it's gotta be said, when seeing the ISO size of this new Fatdog, you have to echo something SFR just said: how in heck James/Kirk got this new Fatdog down to this size with LO included, is nothing short of being a bit amazing. Well done, gang!

[mikeslr]

http://www.freeoffice.com/en/download

I've used this in the past. Also Microsoft compatible. By a German company, IIRC, so none of the Chinese funny business. Requires registration, send you email offerings and free fonts. But isn't really intrusive. Like wps, smaller, lighter, doesn't include Math and Database modules.

Untried under Fatdog64 or Android.

mikesLr

[step]

@jlst I've never used WPS. I sure would like to try an SFS of it, although I do think that its Bejing connection and phoning home do worry me. I thought WPS is derived from Softmaker Office (freeoffice.com) but I'm not sure anymore. Softmaker freeoffice can't write MS word files, it can only read them. It's free but it still needs registration, so it's unsuitable for OOTB distribution.

I am very unhappy with Abiword and gnumeric. I've seen them crashing way too many times with my unfinished documents to be able to trust them. Never versions need GTK3, so they aren't compiled for Fatdog64. MS office compatibility is important to me, and so far Fatdog64 LO has scored 100% with the kind of documents and spreadsheets I use. I haven't yet tested LO on my Atom netbook, but my core due 4GB laptop loads LO almost instantly.
As far as size, I think the Fatdog64 LO is truly remarkably small, a work of manual artistry.

SFS mentioned that LO provides a vector drawing app, which is good. OTOH we'll need to see how good that is. BK reports in the Quirky for RPi2/3 thread that LO Draw on the RPi can't open some files created with inkscape, and that it produces large files.

[Billtoo]

I used the fatdog installer to a usb-3.0 hard drive, pc is a hp
desktop:

Summary
Computer
Processor 4x Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3550 CPU @ 3.30GHz
Memory 12191MB (264MB used)
Machine Type Physical machine
Operating System Fatdog64 [710]
User Name root (root)
Date/Time Sun Oct 23 10:05:20 2016
Display
Resolution 1920x1080 pixels
OpenGL Renderer Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Desktop
X11 Vendor The X.Org Foundation
Audio Devices
Audio Adapter HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH

SCSI Disks
ATA ST2000DM001-9YN1
hp DVD-RAM SW810
SAMSUNG HD103SI

The computer is connected to a 32" TV, the cable has a DVI connector on
one end and HDMI on the other end.
Haven't been able to get sound through the TV speakers so using
external speakers.

Working well so far.

[prehistoric]

My comments about LibreOffice were largely personal preferences, but the question about the rate at which software updates will be required has a great deal of relevance for developers. Current compatibility problems indicate there will be a constant stream of changes as Libre Office tries to track changes in formats only visible as a kind of fan dance to people outside M$.

I'll admit I have not suffered loss of documents in Abiword, because most of my text is created before I worry about formatting and export, which is all I use Abiword to do. If it crashes I lose formatting, which also regularly happens when I send things to people running M$ Office.

I won't get into the WPS argument, though I hesitate to use that package. I suspect those developers had access to M$ source code.

I do have a speculative idea about the reason it does better at M$ Office compatibility. Having looked at files created by old M$ products, including buggy ones, I have a strong suspicion M$ Office takes a look at metadata describing which program created the file before making any attempt to deal with problems. Non-M$ software is then held to a higher standard of compatibility simply because this sells more M$ products.

Has anyone checked the metadata on files produced by WPS to see if it is a chameleon producing files which claim to be made by M$ products?

Added: to give credit where credit is due, Fatdog 710b2 still seems remarkably solid. As soon as I back up my last decade of email, I think I will move operations to that almost release.

[Billtoo]

I used the fatdog installer to a usb-3.0 SSD, computer is a hp mini
stream:

Summary
Computer
Processor 2x Intel(R) Celeron(R) 2957U @ 1.40GHz
Memory 1898MB (282MB used)
Machine Type Physical machine
Operating System Fatdog64 [710]
User Name root (root)
Date/Time Sun Oct 23 13:28:28 2016
Display
Resolution 1920x1080 pixels
OpenGL Renderer Mesa DRI Intel(R) Haswell Mobile
X11 Vendor The X.Org Foundation
Audio Devices
Audio Adapter HDA-Intel - HDA Intel HDMI
Audio Adapter HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH

SCSI Disks
ATA SanDisk SDSA6MM-
Monster Overdrive 3.0
SONY DVD RW DRU-820A
TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100

The computer shares the same 32" TV as the hp desktop but it has a
standard HDMI cable connected to a different HDMI port, still no sound
through the TV speakers so using external speakers.

Working well otherwise.

[kirk]

The computer shares the same 32" TV as the hp desktop but it has a
standard HDMI cable connected to a different HDMI port, still no sound
through the TV speakers so using external speakers.

Probably need to open the Control panel, click on the Sound tab and then click on Fatdog64 Set Default Sound Card. Then select your hdmi output. After that click on Alsa Mixer and make sure the output is not muted. It will show "mm" if it muted. Press the "m" key to toggle mute.

Also, If you just want VLC to send audio to hdmi, you can ignore all that typed above. Open VLC and click on the Audio Menu and the select Audio Device and select your hdmi output.

The reason for replacement of Abiword is that Abiword crashes a lot. It's OK as a viewer and maybe for typing a single page. But beyond that it's very bad. Libreoffice is the best we can do. The package we compiled is 59MB (as a tar.xz) which includes about 3MB of dictionaries/thesaurus for all english language locals. Besides replacing Abiword, LibreOffice replaces Gnumeric and adds a drawing application and a presentation application that's compatible with Powerpoint.

[prehistoric]

Afraid I don't know what the problem is with Abiword crashing, and I'm not in a position to find out at present.

Now, having talked about how solid Fatdog 710b2 feels, I just got my comeupance.

The problem turned up when I was backing up things to switch to this version. My home disk has quite a number of different Puppy descendants, and it takes an effort to keep them from getting in each other's way.

I keep my Downloads folder out of the save file, and try to share it between OSes. Same with Mail. No big deal there.

I will also admit to being a messy housekeeper who doesn't throw things away if they might become useful. This resulted, over time, in a Downloads folder that was full of crap. After a while I created a new Downloads folder/directory, and renamed the previous one Downloads.old. (Hang on, I'll get to the point eventually.) Still later I did this a second time, producing both Downloads.old and Downloads.older, without throwing anything away.

This resulted in a lot of wasted disk space, which I finally decided to clean up for Fatdog 710. I used 701b2 to copy these directories to another disk, which took a while. There were some I/O errors, so I checked for files that got dropped. To my surprise, I found instead that some new files had appeared in the copy! All of these appear to have passed through Downloads at an earlier date, so I think we are seeing a bug in the aufs layered file system.

One problem with this bug report is that it takes a real effort to reproduce the bug. I didn't see the I/O errors at the time they appeared because I was away from the screen during the 20 minutes or so the copy took.

I don't suspect the hardware because this is the same dual-core AMD processor and 8 GB memory I have been using all along. The 3 TB hard drive was replaced last year using my usual procedure, which is to retire the previous working drive to drive emeritus status and copy contents to a new drive before any disk failure takes place.

Copying the Mail folder was not a problem. All the files in there are text files in MH format, and relatively small. The Downloads folders had a number of ISO images, and other large files, even entire books and videos.

I'm afraid we are dealing with a concurrency problem which looks better (rarer) on faster processors. I have not seen this on the quad-core 3.8 GHz processor with 32 GB of faster RAM, though I'll admit I have not tested it heavily.