Precise-light - 17March2019 - for older hardware

[jrb]

I posted a reply and the text didn't show up in the forum, but it was there when I tried to edit. Must have been using invisible ink. I deleted the text and tried over again and it worked.

[jrb]

Lupu won't run Palemoon 28

I just got watchdogs palemoon-28.8.0-glibc219tweak.pet to work in lupu-528. I'm posting from it now. Details to follow, I don't have my bookmarks or notes on this computer. BFN

[jrb]

Lupu won't run Palemoon 28

I just got watchdogs palemoon-28.8.0-glibc219tweak.pet to work in lupu-528. I'm posting from it now. Details to follow, I don't have my bookmarks or notes on this computer. BFN

First I copied these libs from Racy-5.5

• libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
  libglib-2.0.so.0
  libpangocairo-1.0.so.0
  libpangoft2-1.0.so.0

Then I booted lupu-528.005 and installed palemoon-28.8.0-glibc219tweak.pet mentioned above.

Then I placed the copied libs in /usr/lib/palemoon/glibc219/lib and started palemoon. And here I am posting from it.

This is very cool as lucidpup was, back in the day, the most versatile puppy for hardware at the time. Doesn't play so nice with new stuff but its still the best for the old stuff.

[Mike Walsh]

@ jrb, sindi:-

I can confirm the above 'workaround', too. For the first time, this is running natively for me in Richard's Lucid 5.2.8.7 'Sulu-002'.

D/l, and install, the Palemoon 28.8.0 with glibc tweak first. Then, download & install this:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQzLqc ... sp=sharing

(I've just put jrb's deps from Racy all together in a .pet package, to simplify matters.) So;

1) Palemoon first....
2) ...then the deps.

Then you can fire it up.


Mike.

[jrb]

@ jrb, sindi:-

I can confirm the above 'workaround', too. For the first time, this is running natively for me in Richard's Lucid 5.2.8.7 'Sulu-002'.

D/l, and install, the Palemoon 28.8.0 with glibc tweak first. Then, download & install this:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQzLqc ... sp=sharing

(I've just put jrb's deps from Racy all together in a .pet package, to simplify matters.) So;

1) Palemoon first....
2) ...then the deps.

Then you can fire it up.


Mike.

Thanks Mike, Should have thought of that myself. I've just been playing a bit with Sulu-001, debating whether to do a bit of remastering.

[keniv]

@ jrb, sindi:-

I can confirm the above 'workaround', too. For the first time, this is running natively for me in Richard's Lucid 5.2.8.7 'Sulu-002'.

D/l, and install, the Palemoon 28.8.0 with glibc tweak first. Then, download & install this:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HQzLqc ... sp=sharing

(I've just put jrb's deps from Racy all together in a .pet package, to simplify matters.) So;

1) Palemoon first....
2) ...then the deps.

Then you can fire it up.


Mike.

Hi All,
I've followed the above instructions to install palemoon 28.8.0 on lucid 5287 lupu002. All seemed to go well but when I boot up I get the browser, then in a window, i get this message.

Code: Select all

File not found

Pale Moon can't find the file at /root/$@.

    Check the file name for capitalization or other typing errors.
    Check to see if the file was moved, renamed or deleted.

I presumed that this had something to do with /root/.moonchild productions or /root/.mozilla but both files are there. I assume they are working to some extent in that my setup changes are stored as are favorites etc. I changed my start page to duckduckgo lite. After this I could use the browser, however, I can't search for add-ons. If I shut palemoon then re-open it I get the same message again. Would someone be good enough to point me in the right direction to fix this.

Regards,

Ken.

[Mike Walsh]

@ Ken:-

It's a simple 'fix', mate. Go into /usr/share/applications, locate the palemoon.desktop file, and open 'er up with Geany.

Find the 'Exec' line, and change

Code: Select all

Exec=palemoon "$@"

....to:-

Code: Select all

Exec=palemoon

In other words, scrub that "$@", and get rid of it. It's used in 'standard' freedesktop stuff by the mainstream distros.....but Puppy never has used it.

You should then find it'll fire up OK.


Mike.

[keniv]

@ Ken:-

It's a simple 'fix', mate.

Thanks Mike,
It's now working as it should. It's great to be able to use a browser such as palemoon on an older pup like lucid 5287. It gives them a new lease of life. It was my favourite pup at one time and I still like it a lot. I was using the 27.9.0 version before this. Do you know if this 28.8.4 version will upgrade itself on lucid?

Regards,

Ken.

[sheldonisaac]

It's great to be able to use a browser such as palemoon on an older pup like lucid 5287. It gives them a new lease of life. It was my favourite pup at one time and I still like it a lot.

Ken et al, Lucid was my favourite pup also. Don't remember what I used before that.

Sheldon

[keniv]

@sheldoissac

I still use it quite a lot on an old Toshiba laptop (PIII 800MHz 320MB) as well as on this machine. I liked the way it was regularly updated as well. The frugal install I'm using now came from the lupusuper2-5.2.8.7-k3.2.48-20171125.iso which I think might have been the last update but I'm not sure of that.

Regards,

Ken.

[Mike Walsh]

@ Ken:-

Do you know if this 28.8.4 version will upgrade itself on lucid?

Yup; should do. Ever since the start of the 28-series, Palemoon has contained a very similar internal update mechanism to Firefox.....so you'll be periodically notified of updates as & when they're released. All you have to do is accept.

I'm not certain whether the update mechanism can be set to 'auto' (so it'll update without you needing to 'OK' it).....but even 'as is', it's a vast improvement over the older, separate updater that used to be employed.

You couldn't have updated 27.9.4 even if you'd wanted to, because the SSE-only build was a 'one-off'.

Quite an improvement though, isn't it? And from what I understand from the Palemoon forums, the build-environment for the 32-bit Linux builds is set to remain static for the forseeable future, so.....with any luck, there shouldn't be any nasty surprises in the pipeline for quite a while. (Fingers crossed..!)


Mike.

[sheldonisaac]

I still use it quite a lot on an old Toshiba laptop (PIII 800MHz 320MB) as well as on this machine. I liked the way it was regularly updated as well. The frugal install I'm using now came from the lupusuper2-5.2.8.7-k3.2.48-20171125.iso which I think might have been the last update but I'm not sure of that.

Thank you, Ken. I downloaded that from
http://download941.mediafire.com/0jdbxz ... 171125.iso
but when I try to boot it says it can't find sulu_002.sfs
Help?

ls -lat /mnt/home/LuPu/
total 186020
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Dec 25 18:37 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 25 17:59 .
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3688506 Dec 4 2017 initrd.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 183971872 Dec 4 2017 sulu_002.sfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2802352 Dec 4 2017 vmlinuz

title Sulu 002 (sda1/LuPu)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /LuPu/vmlinuz psubdir=/LuPu pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck
initrd /LuPu/initrd.gz

[keniv]

Hello Sheldon,
I'm no expert on this but here is my setup. I'm booting with grub4dos. My drive has four partitions. Three are formatted ntfs and the fourth is ext3. All my pups are on sda3 which is ntfs. Here is my menu.lst entry for Sulu.

Code: Select all

title Sulu 5287 (sda3/5287sulu)
  uuid 2E9CD81C9CD7DC81
  kernel /5287sulu/vmlinuz   psubdir=5287sulu pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck
  initrd /5287sulu/initrd.gz

As you can see all the sulu stuff is in a folder called 5287sulu. I don't think you need 'root (hd0,0)' or the uuid thing, in mine, which I think grub4dos put in the first time I ran it. When I complete this post I'll comment out the uuid line and see if it still boots. I'll let you know the outcome.

Regards,

Ken.
Edit1. I was wrong about the uuid bit. It does not boot without it.
Edit2. Just tried commenting out the uuid line and replacing it with root (hd0,2) line and it booted so I'm now not sure what I said above is relevant.
Hopefully an expert will come along and sort this out.

[keniv]

@Mike

Yup; should do. Ever since the start of the 28-series

Thanks for that info it's good to know. It can update automatically but I've left it on the 'let me know when a updates available'.

You couldn't have updated 27.9.4 even if you'd wanted to, because the SSE-only build was a 'one-off'.

Yes it was a pity it could not be updated but it's still useful on old stuff like my PIII, 800MHz, 320MB laptop as it's still a very usable browser and reasonably up to date.

Regards,

Ken.

[sindi]

Just curious, have you tried [urlhttp://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=80546]Dpup Wheezy 3.5.2.11[/url]? It's very well built and respected Puppy. If by some chance it should work it would be easy to remaster.[/quote]

I tried dPup 7 Stretch with kernel 3. None of the pups later than Racy do framebuffer console. This one appears to work otherwise until I reboot and get a blank screen. Mouse worked (once).

I forget the problem with Xenial. Kernel 4 is overkill for 2007.

Tahr is scrambled and crashes.

Racy and Lupu sometimes work and sometimes go to blank screen.

Precise mouse is dead with vesa, nv, or the default driver.

I think this computer has brain damage and it is time to switch.
I like it for it speed and keyboard. It has a crummy shiny screen that keeps going dim except in X. It cannot display to any external monitor. I was using it because it came with Win7 but it no longer boots with more than 2GB RAM.

I will plug in a nice keyboard into a fast 2006 Thinkpad T60 or Dell E1405 or E1505 (with matte screens robbed off dead ones). And run Precise 5.7.1. Light with framebuffer console and print capability and the latest lynx and Palemoon. Thank you all for suggestions.

Thanks for all the intelligent and educational suggestions.

[sindi]

I had the same problems with DELL 600M as with the HP DV6500 - non-moving mouse, no modules loaded.
In fact I had no modules to load. I was symlinking the no_PAE files to vmlinuz and zdrv.
When I renamed them as instructed, everything worked. I am online with precise and lynx 2.8.9.1.
I chose the Radeon video driver at 1024x768. Framebuffer console and sound also work.

Maybe the DV6500 will behave long enough to get Precise working too.

If all else fails, follow instructions.

[sindi]

I probably had a hyphen instead of an underscore in my zdrv file.

DELL Inspiron 1521 (2006) and 600M (2004) are now running Precise perfectly including ethernet (dead wifi slots), sound, framebuffer console by default, with ATI Radeon video drivers. HP DV5000 (2004) with integrated Intel graphics is also good. Precise prints. It runs the latest Palemoon and lynx (with Wikipedia and Duckduckgo.). Peasywifi makes it easy to set static IP address.

On 2007 HP DV6500, without typos, and with no X, Precise starts up and crashes at a screen with repeated words, with four columns of letters near the right side in a pretty green. No framebuffer console.

With X, it lets me choose US, with two copies of the dialog box, one in the middle and one split between left and right, and then asks me to choose a video driver but I can't read the dialog because because it goes off screen bottom.

Tahr, not suprisingly, does the same.

What other version of Puppy linux might I rob kernel and modules from?

Lupu successfully uses nv, and racy vesa, by default. They don't have zdrv files. Should I try to copy the modules manually to precisesave?

[sindi]

Using sns from Precise or from Racy, or peasywifi, there is 'no profile, and 'configured as a router'
and it assigns a 168.... number not 192.168.1.X.

The racy SNS works in Racy. (Racy won't print or do framebuffer console or the latest lynx).
Ethernet works.

Otherwise Precise is ideal for this 2004 Intel-graphics laptop with 512MB RAM.

I found no automated way to make a swapfile to prevent frequent crashes so did it manually.

cd /mnt/home/

dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=512K (wait for the file to be created, 512MB)
mkswap swapfile (creates the proper file structure)

swapon swapfile - I put this in /etc/rc.d/rc.local as swapon /mnt/home/swapfile
(is the path really needed)?

I had to remove 'forcepae' when using the noPAE tahr vmlinuz and kernel modules.

Despite integrated graphics, the ASUS plays 720p Youtube with CDE-based youtube-viewer pet. 1.6GHz single-core.
The direct approach without CDE uses a bit less CPU but this method only got the CPU to 67% at 720p.

Minor problems are dead clock battery (requires complete disassembly to replace) and very expensive proprietary memory.
Puppy can handle the problems. I kill a few unused processes such as ROX-filer.

Precise has worked on four of five laptops apart from the wifi problem.

On HP DV6500 all Puppies 6+ produced scrambled screen before even reaching X, but the scrambling varies.
Repeated words with a few green letters at right, or blank screen, and most recently a grid of pink dots.
There is no consistency within the same puppy version, as noted by others trying to set up this same laptop.
One commented that only PcLinuxOS and Puppy worked, and only older versions. I guess I was lucky for three years.
They also complained of losing USB ports.

I tried to play streaming mp3 files with a script that uses mplayer. No mplayer. No mpg123. No mpv.
There are two small programs that create or alter mp3 files. The music player files required a 'display' except for aplay.
There is a midi player. mp3s are much more common (also oggs).

I can add a statically compiled mplayer.

PPM restarts when I try to update database.

[jrb]

I tried to play streaming mp3 files with a script that uses mplayer. No mplayer. No mpg123. No mpv.

mpv-20150814-git-i686-precise.pet works quite nicely with no additional dependencies. Its my favourite full featured media player

[sindi]

mpv was not found by ppm. I followed your link.
Works with my scripts to play classical radio stations http://keesan.freeshell.org/puppy/radio2019.tgz
if I symlink to mplayer ln -s mpv mplayer.

The mplayer 0.93 I once compiled is under 1MB but needs libvga and libvgagl and libncurses.
mpv is over 18MB and gives messages about not finding youtube-dl and python (both used by youtube-viewer).