Industry Standard Puppy - Running Firefox 3.5 in 4.16

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playdayz · #1 Post by **playdayz** » Wed 08 Jul 2009, 23:02

The discussion of running Firefox 3.5 in Puppy 4.16 is at the bottom.

The picture is a Puppy-like desktop that I have running in Ubuntu 9.04 (JWM and Rox basically). I like the Puppy desktop because it is more responsive than Gnome (both quicker to open programs and quicker to run them--benchmarking Peacekeeper runs about 7% faster than in Gnome). I also like the Puppy desktop because I find it very well designed with the needed tools available and within easy reach. These are Linux tools such as the terminal and mounting tools, which some other distros try to hide.

I am running the Puppy-like desktop in Ubuntu rather than simply running Puppy because some times I need an "Industry Standard Architecture" operating system. By that I mean I need to be able to install and run some programs that expect to see a certain configuration in the OS. One simple example is Firefox 3.5, which has in the past needed libgio in order to run in Puppy--I think it might now need libdbus-glib. Another thing that is important to me is Crossover Linux because I must be able to see the projects my students make exactly as they made them--I need to run MS Office, in other words. Now, I can and do run both Firefox and Crossover in Puppy, but with Crossover I lose the menus as well as having to make sure Puppy's devx is installed. And finally, I prefer to run an smp kernel with the proper drivers for my ati card. Other people will have other concerns, but all of those concerns could be addressed by one Industry Standard Puppy.

MU's NewYearsPup is the closest thing so far and I think it shows how easily the ISA Puppy could be created. I hope some people might undertake this project. As I understand it, Woof will not automatically result in an ISA Puppy, but it could be a step closer. I also understand that some of the things that make Puppy non-standard are what makes it fast and lean, so that would be the trick, keeping the ISA Puppy as lean and fast as possible.

Of course, these comments are not a criticism of Puppy in any sense, rather I would say, an expansion. I want something that runs as nicely as Puppy, with a more standard configuration, and I am prepared to accept a larger Puppy in return. From my experiment with Ubuntu it seems that there would be a significant benefit. I think it might even be possible to prepare a Puppy desktop that could be installed on *any* Linux system.

linuxcbon · #2 Post by **linuxcbon** » Thu 09 Jul 2009, 02:25

Please, dont call it ISA, ISA is already copyrighted by IEEE.

And what you are asking is not a standard, or not even industrial at all, it's simply your needs.

Firefox 3.5 can be found here

"Crossover Linux" is proprietary program to let run MS Office on linux...
Why dont you use Open Office or Abiword etc ?
What's the point of using linux, just stay with microsot windows if so...

smp kernel .
Puppy 4.2 smp

the proper drivers for ati card

Billwho? · #3 Post by **Billwho?** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 10:56

playdayz wrote:because I must be able to see the projects my students make exactly as they made them

There is your answer right there.
I have the same problem here. My daughter still uses Window$ as her O/S of choice on her laptop, with M$ Office being used to create here homework documents. We do not have any form of networking and the printer is connected to my wife's tower, which is also the internet access computer. When my daughter needs to print her latest assignment she saves it on a flash drive and brings it to the tower machine.If I happen to have Puppy booted on this machine at the time and try to print it using either Abiword or Open Office some of the formatting she has used can not be seen in the programme (let alone printed) and any pagebreaks etc are completely screwed up. Not what she needs for her homework. So using M$ Office in WINE or Crossover (neither of which I have successfully set up yet) is the only viable alternative to a reboot into window$.
If you can get a Word document to display and print EXACTLY as it was created to do using either Abiword or Open Office then pleeeease post a detailed howto so the rest of can do it too. It would certainly save a lot of heartache and stuffing around here.

NB: The highlighting in playdayz' quote is mine

droope · #4 Post by **droope** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 11:11

The problem with that, is of course, microsoft... Open Ofice tries to guess what Word format is, but the fault goes to word "format" being closed source.

Just wanted to point that out.

Cheers!

Billwho? · #5 Post by **Billwho?** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 12:41

That's what I always thought. Which is why I believe word docs can only be viewed and printed the way they were created with word

mikeb · #6 Post by **mikeb** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 14:46

Billwho...suggestion...there are plenty of good apps out there thet can print in windows to pdf (or word itself?)..perhaps use that as an intermedeate format since it's very close to the postscript format that is printed anyway.

Agreed that schools insisting on microsoft products is something that needs dealing with...start 'em young says bill. Same reason they gave away XP in the far east.

I also find doc is the most compatible format between linux and windows (and linux to linux!) which is probably why they came up with docx.

And treat yourself to a couple of network cards

mike

playdayz · #7 Post by **playdayz** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 17:12

And what you are asking is not a standard, or not even industrial at all, it's simply your needs.

Well, yes, in some ways it is easier to meet my needs with a "standard linux" arrangement. I think if someone looked at, say, the top 20 distros on Distrowatch and then analyzed them in terms of dbus, hal, glib, and perl, just to mention the first four I thought of, it would be seen that Puppy differs from the standard. I personally would rather not run dbus and hal because they are very pokey, which is why I am hoping some Puppy magic would mitigate their adverse effects on responsiveness and performance. It would be a matter of some investigation to see what an "industry standard" Puppy would contain.

Agreed that schools insisting on microsoft products is something that needs dealing with

My god, does this happen mikeb? Certainly not at my schools ( 2 community colleges and a private university). My students can use any software they choose and it is my job to be able to read their projects accurately. I make no secret that I use Linux and I make sure they know of free software options.

"Crossover Linux" is proprietary program to let run MS Office on linux...
Why don't you use Open Office or Abiword etc ?

As I said, out of respect for the students it is my job to read exactly what the students submit. I was surprised and disappointed to find that OpenOffice did not render even such "simple" items as backgrounds and borders properly. I do use OpenOffice, btw, to open papers students submit in odt format.

So using M$ Office in WINE or Crossover (neither of which I have successfully set up yet) is the only viable alternative to a reboot into window$.

billwho, I am an "advocate" for Crossover Linux, which means that I do beta testing on one or more programs and then submit the results into the compatibility database. My programs are K-Meleon, Foobar2000, Exact Audio Copy, and MS Office Compatibility Pack. Advocates receive free software in return. I have also purchased Crossover Linux Pro, since I use it for work. The people at Crossover are the ones who have worked for over 10 years developing wine and so money spent on Crossover supports the further development of wine.
In my experience Crossover works very well in Puppy 4.1 and 4.2, no menus but i work around that easily. Crossover 8.0, the current version, runs Office 2003 and the 2007 Compatibility Pack perfectly as far as I can tell and runs Office 2007 very well. One "trick" is to install the Puppy devx sfs. Then install the sh (shell install) version of Crossover and then what you need is in /opt/cxoffice/bin: cxinstallwizard and cxbottlemanager. There is a free trial version.

Firefox 3.5 can be found here - smp kernel - Puppy 4.2 smp - the proper drivers for ati card

Thanks for the links, linuxcbon. I am aware of how many people do a lot of difficult work to prepare pets for the Puppy community. I have done so myself with K-Office, Clanbomber, Arora, SRWare Iron, Scribus, Gimp, and some others, all latest versions at the time I posted them. But that is the problem, people do all this hard work to prepare programs that run almost as well as they are supposed to, and then when there is a version upgrade they have to do it all, or much of it, all over again. So, often we have programs that do not run fully as intended or are previous versions. Further, I am not really comfortable with depending on someone else to do the work for me in programs such as Firefox, which are designed to install easily and correctly on any standard linux system.
The smp kernel and the ati drivers is a case in point. I tried them and found that they were incompatible with each other. But, as I said, I have found that both features run right in NewYearsPup.

I want to be sure to say this, I am a great admirer of BarryK's boldness and creativity in examining some of the "orthodoxies" of Linux (such as running in root and using pup_event_frontend to do the automounting instead of hal and dbus). What I am hoping to see next, one of the things, is to feed BarryK's contributions back into standard Linux, to create a marriage of 1) a Puppy that runs standard programs more easily and 2) a Linux desktop that is more responsive and usable and an even more widespread use of Puppy. Perhaps we could call this derivative Big Dog Linux

Thank you all for humoring me with this theoretical discussion.

mikeb · #8 Post by **mikeb** » Fri 10 Jul 2009, 17:24

My god, does this happen mikeb?

well this is the UK ..no citizens here

mike

#9 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Mon 13 Jul 2009, 17:14

Firefox 3.5+gio+dbus+dbus-glib+flash10= working 100%=2.14X for the 2 months or so. I still have some other bugs in it, but I'm getting there, but if you need FF3.5 that doesn't crash, and flash 10 works perfect, than tryout 2.14X series. Probably in about 2 days or so V7 will be out, I would wait for that one.
ttuuxxx

playdayz · #10 Post by **playdayz** » Wed 15 Jul 2009, 17:33

Thanks ttuuxx, Running Firefox is not exactly the *problem,* it is more like an indicator of how close the system is to the standard that is expected by many of the best Linux programs.

I am working in 416 right now and for any who are interested all that is necessary to run Swiftfox 3.5 (an optimized build of Firefox 3.5) is to download and install libdbus and libgdbus-glib. The versions for the Jaunty build of Ubuntu, which is the basis for Puppy 4.16, can be found and downloaded by searching from this page: http://packages.ubuntu.com/

Once the two packages are downloaded, one needs only click them to install--that;'s right, the Puppy Package Manger now installs deb packages (I didn't know that until it happened). It is not necessary to download and install (or run) dbus itself in order to run Swiftfox; installing the libraries is sufficient.

And then after the packages are installed, one can download swiftfox from http://www.getswiftfox.com. Once downloaded, click to unpack, and then to run, open the swiftfox folder and click swiftfox.

I guess I should check Firefox 3.5 also.

#11 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Wed 15 Jul 2009, 17:42

playdayz wrote:Thanks ttuuxx, Running Firefox is not exactly the *problem,* it is more like an indicator of how close the system is to the standard that is expected by many of the best Linux programs.

Actually firefox 3.5 or swiftfox, is a problem on 4.16, 416 runs about 75-80% scroll speed where as 2.14X runs at 100% and Dpup also, just go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ?sort=name
and drag your scrollbar up and down real quick like and you'll see it stick, lol now try that on 2.14X, it will fly up and down and no sticking. Thats the difference. Only 2.14X and dpup run perfect on that test.
ttuuxxx

playdayz · #12 Post by **playdayz** » Wed 15 Jul 2009, 17:56

Thanks for the test ttuuxxx, I do like to have a means of testing performance. However, I didn't get any sticking--it looked like full speed to me--although I don't have 2.14X available right now to try. Since you are putting such work into it I will get it installed. Do you think it might make a difference that I used the Ubuntu Jaunty libraries of libdbus and libdbus-glib? Or that I didn't install dbus itself, just the libraries? Or maybe it just runs a bit faster in 2.14X because 4.16 is not fully developed yet? Isn't this fun?

Further, I have installed Flash 10 and that seems to be running fine. One of my tests is whether Flash will play full-screen in hulu.com, and it is doing that. I have also installed java 6u7 (an older version because one of my work programs needs that old version) and that is working OK too.

BTW, I also tested Firefox in this 4.16 and got the same results as Swiftfox.

Uh, ttuuxxx, where is 2.14X? Thanks.

#13 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Wed 15 Jul 2009, 18:14

Hi the latest version is V6 but its a bit buggier than V5, so I'm reverting back to v5 and moving forward to v7, but anyways v5 is the one to try right now

http://www.ttuuxxx.gposil.com/2.14X/iso/214X5.iso
ttuuxxx

playdayz · #14 Post by **playdayz** » Wed 15 Jul 2009, 19:16

Is 2.14X anywhere else ttuuxxx? This download keeps dying before it is halfway through.

#15 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 09:19

playdayz wrote:Is 2.14X anywhere else ttuuxxx? This download keeps dying before it is halfway through.

Ok I'll look into it

ttuuxxx

Hi try this link

http://www.puppylinux.asia/tpp/ttuuxxx/ ... /214X5.iso
ttuuxxx

fratermus · #16 Post by **fratermus** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 15:11

playdayz wrote:
As I said, out of respect for the students it is my job to read exactly what the students submit.

Could they be encouraged to submit their work in an open format or something closed but more portable (.pdf)? How about .rtf? It's controlled by Micro$oft but at least it is well-understood and support is widespread.

In my experience students get fixated on bling when they are short of content.

Or maybe it's an avoidance mechanism, like cleaning up your room when you've got homework to do.

playdayz · #17 Post by **playdayz** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 15:26

Hey ttuuxxx, The second link worked like a charm, download speed about 250KB/sec. It is very nice--it seems quite quick and responsive. There seemed to be an error in the menu.lst file: In the third listing the "rootnoverify (hd,0)" is missing a 0 after hd.

Code: Select all

# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux on (/dev/hda1)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# Linux bootable initrd config begins
  title Puppy Linux (frugal) install on /dev/hda1
  rootnoverify (hd0,0)
  kernel /boot/puppy214R/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=idehd
  initrd /tmp/boot/boot/puppy214R/initrd.gz
# Linux bootable initrd config ends
# Linux bootable partition config begins
title = Puppy 214R (frugal) on hda1
--->  rootnoverify (hd,0)
kernel /boot/puppy214R/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=idehd
initrd /boot/puppy214R/initrd.gz
# Linux bootable partition config ends

Also the Audio icon on the Desktop did not do anything.

Good Things: xorg selected the vmware driver (correct) and the video worked. The vmware driver does not work on 4.16, either the orignal Puppy vmware_drv.so or the one that is part of vmware tools.

Firefox 3.5 came right up and worked well. I haven't installed Flash yet.

Speedwise, I ran the Peacekeeper browser benchmark in 2.14R to compare to 4.16. They were pretty equal, with a slight advantage to 2.14R but within the margin of error (1520 to 1490). I think the difference might be due to the video driver: xorg vmware in 2.14R versus xvesa in 4.16.

May I ask what you have added to make 2.14R ready for Firefox 3.5 and etc.? It must include dbus and dbus-glib I think.

Best to you and thanks once more for all the work you do to make Puppy great.

Oh, one more question. Is there a devx.sfs available and kernel sources? Are they the standard from 2.14? I might compile the vmware-tools and see what happens. This 2.14R might be a good choice for people who wanted to run Puppy in vmware or virtualbox, as it is light, fast and stable, if the vmware and virtualbox tools will compile and work correctly. Are you incorporating the updates BarryK made to 2.18?

playdayz · #18 Post by **playdayz** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 15:42

@fratermus, I don't mind giving students freedom of choice as far as software is concerned. The less complicated the arrangements for an online course the better, imho. What I have just taken to doing is what you suggest. I convert anything with a substantial graphic component to PDF which allows everyone to read it--necessary because students write to help each other rather than just for the professor. I kind of like the challenge of being able to convert anything they turn in

Actually, i insist on the "bling," meaning just pictures, graphics, formatting, white space, text boxes, and so forth, on the theory that the bling should be used to enhance the communication, not for its own sake. Out in the world, I think, they will find that such things are expected and necessary. Thanks.

#19 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 15:48

Don't install flash, It comes with flash 10 the latest version already installed

Yes I know about the music icon, that was fixed in V6 but thats another story, I've replaced/installed over 50 packages on that version, so explaining it is almost impossible, The next release will be even better, as the compiler goes, that will come in about another 3-4 releases, I already have it, but I'm constantly updating it as I go on with the releases, Since it has GlibC from series 3, a lot of the slackware 12 packages work also

Later I'll try to get the solibs working from slackware . But first things is first like fixing errors,
So far your about 58 pages of reading behind

lol that thread is a short novel

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42553
ttuuxxx

#20 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Thu 16 Jul 2009, 16:02

Most of Barry's updates I didn't use, well gparted I did because he compiled that static:) He didn't use the current Gtk or Glib etc, The ones he used were a 6+ months old, 2.14X has the latest version for the backend, But even some 3,4,5, series works on it anyways, like the xchat from series 4 I made up, plus gxine from series 4 works also but you have to install ffmpeg and 3 other packages to get it working.
ttuuxxx

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Industry Standard Puppy - Running Firefox 3.5 in 4.16

Industry Standard Puppy - Running Firefox 3.5 in 4.16