test results for alpha puppy2

[Trobin]

I thought I'd give Puppy2-alpha a try. It was not successful.

First boot. Everything went as expected until Puppy2 tried to find my sound card. First I tried to identify the card that I had. It did not find it, and went on to select video mode. I chose Vesa, and Puppy2 decided to take another look for my sound card. This time I just enterd my way through and Puppy2 got hung up when Alsa tried to identify my card.

I finally had to reboot.

Second boot, the same as the first, except this time I told Puppy2 not to search for any legacy sound cards. Again it wanted to search for a sound card after I chose the VESA mode, but finally booted the screen.

Since I normally do a HD2 install that was my next step. Puppy2 went throught the process of installing itself. Except for GRUB. I accepted the defaults, including the one where it asked where to put Grub. The default was "NONE" It told me it was working but nothing was happening.

When I went to reboot, Puppy2 asked if I wanted to save a file, to disk. I chose HDA!, vfat, but nothing was saved.

Finally re-installed 1.0.6

[Nathan F]

So far no problems encountered. Booted up just fine on a Fujitsu Lifebook lappy, created the storage correctly and mounted it correctly at the next boot. Haven't tried Xorg yet but Alsa was no problem. I'm installing it to a usb stick right now and I must say the installer is a drastic improvement. I'll try to underdog my Vector box sometime later this week and see how that goes-I might get back to running my server from Puppy after all, or at least having the ability to boot it into Puppy every now and then to do some development.

Anyway, no real problems so far.

Nathan

[Nathan F]

Okay, running great from usb now using Xorg. Very nice experience on the whole, not too much difference from an end user's perspective.

Nathan

[GuestToo]

i copied vmlinuz, initrd.gz, and pup_003.sfs to hda1

i put this in Grub's menu.lst:

title = Puppy2
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PMEDIA=idehd
initrd /initrd.gz

it does not install drivers for my sound card ... it asks if i want to search for legacy isa cards

xorg does not work

xvesa works only at 640x480 low res ... rox and some other X programs won't work at this resolution

Puppy 2 almost does not function at all on my machine

the reason for this seems to be that the file system is not writable ... either unionfs is not working properly and there is not a writable layer, or there simply isn't enough space to write to

/mnt/home is empty (not mounted)

Puppy 2 has no working space at all ... it creates files, but they are all empty ... 0 bytes length

so inittab, fstab, videomode, etc etc etc are all empty files and things don't work ... this would be why xorg doesn't work and why xvesa is running at 640x480 and why the sound drivers aren't installed

df shows something like this:

/dev/root 3.2M 3.2M 62k 98% /initrd
/dev/hda1 5G 5G 29m 99% /initrd/mnt/dev_ro1
/dev/loop0 63M 63M 0 100% /initrd/pup_ro2
none 63M 63M 0 100% /

[GuestToo]

df:

Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 3.3M 3.2M 62.0k 98% /initrd
/dev/hda1 5.0G 4.6G 425.0M 92% /initrd/mnt/dev_ro1
/dev/loop0 63.0M 63.0M 0 100% /initrd/pup_ro2
none 63.0M 63.0M 0 100% /

mount:

/dev/root on /initrd type ext2 (ro)
/dev/hda1 on /initrd/mnt/dev_ro1 type vfat (rw,noatime)
tmpfs on /initrd/pup_rw type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/loop0 on /initrd/pup_ro2 type squashfs (ro,noatime)
none on / type unionfs (rw,dirs=/initrd/pup_rw=rw:/initrd/pup_ro2=ro,debug=0,delete=all,copyup=preserve)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

df /initrd/pup_rw:

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 0 0 0 0% /initrd/pup_rw

[gnomen]

Better safe than sorry I booted it up as a livecd in vmware 5.5. It boots just fine, sound seems to work, resolution 1024x768, haven't tried much of the applications, but the new browser is fine

Tried to install to a USB pendrive with the new installer. The pen has the last puppy2 alpha on it from before. It detects the ext2 superfloppy and stops the wizard. I format the drive to ext3 superfloppy. It detects that, I choose superfloppy and seems to work fine until the "last sanity check". All /dev/ parameters in the dialogbox are empty, I press enter and the result is just errors

I reboot (the pup_save.3fs-thing to a hd partion works fine btw) and try the same yet again. This time I choose to let the wizard format the drive with a ext3 partion. But the resulting dialogs shows it formats it as a FAT. The wizard continues with installing it to a ext3 partion. The "last sanity check" dialog has all empty /dev/ parameters. I press enter and just errors. Pmount confirms that it did indeed format it as a FAT

I boot into a fresh vm and install it to the hd with a option2. It works fine. The grub-install doesn't find the partion as it used to, but apart from that everything seems smooth. But when I choose "power off computer" the result is just a big xdialog box which seems to explain how to use xdialog. I exit to the promt and give the command poweroff which only results in this output

Code: Select all

Executing /etc/rc.d/rc.shutdown...
cat: /etc/rc.d/PDEV1: No such file or directory
cat: /etc/rc.d/PDEVFS: No such file or directory
cat: /etc/rc.d/PUPSFS: No such file or directory
cat: /etc/rc.d/PUPSAVE: No such file or directory
cat: /etc/rc.d/PMEDIA: No such file or directory
killall: savepuppyd: no process killed
killing X and all X apps...

Unmounting filesystems:
Unmounting /dev/hda1...
/dev/hda1:

losts of numbers

Code: Select all

md: recovery thread got woken up ...
md: recovery thread finished ...

login[641]: root login on `tty1

[kirk]

At first all seemed good until I tried to reboot. It seemed to hang at the message "Make sure any required USB, floppy, etc is PLUGGED IN NOW!" and then after a while it posted this message "end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0. I have a Dell Latitude laptop with an external floppy. So I went and found my floppy and plugged it in. It then completed the normal pup_save3fs shutdown script (I guess). I wouldn't think looking for the floppy would be very useful. When It rebooted all seemed well, so I tried rebooting again. This time the boot process stopped :

Starting sound driver: snd_intel8x0 intel8x0_measure_ac97_clock
measured 49440 usecs
Intel8x0: clocking to 48000
done
No state is present for card I82801CAICH3
0: old priority 0, new priorty 19
436: old priority 0, new priorty 19
#

I typed xwin and it finished comming up. I tried the tone generator and I had sound. So I deleted the pup_save3fs and tried again (3 times total) and every time the same result, first reboot no problem, second reboot stops as listed above.

JWM seems faster. Having the whole file system R/W will be nice.

[Nathan F]

On the second bootup from usb I encountered my first error. X fails to start with a message that /usr/X11R6/bin/X can't be found. I booted back into the old pup and mounted pup_save.3fs manually and the file does indeed exist, so maybe this is some kind of unionfs error? Not sure. The union seems to exist because it is trying to start X with the settings I had before, but it's hard to figure out what's going on because the system hangs at this point and becomes completely unresponsive. I'll investigate a little further and post the actuall error messages.

Nathan

[Rhino]

Nice job Barry...this seems excellent!

I booted into Puppy without a hitch. It detected my sound with ALSA, the Xorg wizard worked fine although I had to manually adjust my screensize to 1440x900 it was no problem and looks great. I had to manually set the wallpaper for the "odd" screen resolution since it came up solid white as expected.

The only hitch I have come up with so far is with the wifi-beta2.pup installation. I installed the wifi-beta2.pup just fine, but when I run it, my computer hangs, won't respond to CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-DEL and then sadly overheats and shuts down (my laptop has crappy heat management issues). When I reboot it has not saved my settings since it had an unexpected shutdown.

I will attempt to use ndiswrapper tomorrow night although it might produce the same results. If someone has other suggestions, I will be glad to try it.

My computer has worked with wireless quite well on the previous releases.

After I get the internet connectivity worked out, I will try a multisession DVD and/or USB install.

Thanks Barry...great work!

[tronkel]

In p2 (Puppy2) I like sylpheed but in practical day to day usage usually end up using gmail

When using Puppy I seem to end up using Gmail over the web simply because it is so much faster.

Yes, Seamonkey is a great program but I find it just too slow on my old 64MB RAM PC running Puppy2Alpha. This has always been the case with Mozilla/Seamonkey even on other Linuces. I have a gut feeling that the mail client is the problem here. If Seamonkey could be compiled with the email client excluded there might be some observable speed improvement.

A reasonable interim solution is to use the latest Firefox !.5.1 as the browser. My experience with this is that it is 2-3 times faster than Seamonkey even with a lot of installed extensions in Firefox. Firefox developers have succeeded in building it with a better performance/size trade-off. Thunderbird as stand-alone also seems a tad faster than the Seamonkey mail client. Text-only browsers such as Elinks are good but very limited in certain circumstances.

But the ultimate solution - particularly for Gmail users - must surely be Dillo. The philosophy of really tight and optimised C coding really does the business here. I can access my Gmail inbox over the WEB virtually instaneously using Dillo. Unfortunately under Puppy2 Alpha Dillo seems incapable of deleting messages from the spam folder.

Hopefully then during the era of Puppy2, will Dillo's continued development hasten the time when large application suites like Seamonkey and/or Firefox/Thunderbird combinations can be dispensed with. Come on all you Dillo developers - Puppy needs you badly!

[BarryK]

In p2 (Puppy2) I notice that @ has to be typed in using "

Puppy is set up for US so that is not right?
I did run the locale thing - so please test if on a pristine p2

Lobster, you have a British keyboard? Where are the " and @ located on your keyboard?

Pup2alpha is using Xkb, but it needs to be setup manually.
If you look at the Developer News page, somewhere about Feb 12 I made a note on this. Your layout would be "gb", yes?
Looking in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/, there is a "gb" in there, so add lines into the keyboard section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf like this:

Code: Select all

   Option "XkbModel" "pc102"
   Option "XkbLayout" "gb"

...at least I think that would be right.

[BarryK]

I thought I'd give Puppy2-alpha a try. It was not successful.

First boot. Everything went as expected until Puppy2 tried to find my sound card. First I tried to identify the card that I had. It did not find it, and went on to select video mode. I chose Vesa, and Puppy2 decided to take another look for my sound card. This time I just enterd my way through and Puppy2 got hung up when Alsa tried to identify my card.

I finally had to reboot.

Second boot, the same as the first, except this time I told Puppy2 not to search for any legacy sound cards. Again it wanted to search for a sound card after I chose the VESA mode, but finally booted the screen.

Since I normally do a HD2 install that was my next step. Puppy2 went throught the process of installing itself. Except for GRUB. I accepted the defaults, including the one where it asked where to put Grub. The default was "NONE" It told me it was working but nothing was happening.

When I went to reboot, Puppy2 asked if I wanted to save a file, to disk. I chose HDA!, vfat, but nothing was saved.

Finally re-installed 1.0.6

Yes, we have identified that bug with alsa. It is okay if the correct card is found. But if not, alsaconf will run everytime X is started.

When you get to that part of the h.d. install where Grub is installed,
accept all defaults, except for when it asks where to put Grub bootloader -- choose MBR.

[BarryK]

GuestToo,
I hadn't got around to testing a porr-man's h.d. install.
Will do so promptly.

What about booting from live-CD on your PC, is that working?

[tempestuous]

I had hoped to avoid using a boot menu.

Barry, I suggest you could still avoid a boot menu, but have a prompt with a 5 second delay for the user to add any boot options if needed.
Most Linux installers I have used work this way. I think (?) the isolinux.cfg would be like this -

default puppy
display boot.msg
prompt 1
label puppy
kernel vmlinuz
append root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
timeout 50

The boot.msg would say something like -
"If you need particular boot options like "acpi=off" type "puppy" then a space, then each boot option separated by a space."

"puppy" is obviously the boot-choice-label. You must type this text first, otherwise isolinux will think that the first boot option you type is a boot-choice-label, and will report this as an invalid choice. Most Linux distros I have seen label their default boot choice "linux" ... so you could use this label instead of "puppy" in the interests of standardization.

Just recently I booted Puppy 1.0.7 CD and added a boot option in this manner (vga=788) ... it worked fine.

I think that "acpi=off" would be OK with ACPI-enabled computers (and can sometimes make previously unrecognised hardware work) but I think that some users would then complain that certain features don't work - like power saving features, battery meters etc.

[Trobin]

Yes, we have identified that bug with alsa. It is okay if the correct card is found. But if not, alsaconf will run everytime X is started.

When you get to that part of the h.d. install where Grub is installed,
accept all defaults, except for when it asks where to put Grub bootloader -- choose MBR.

Thanks. But the first two tries didn't get that far. I did have to change one default setting in Grub Install. Where it asks where to put the Grub Files, the default is "NONE." I changed it to /dev/hda2, and it worked. Xorg did not. Which is okay as Xvesa did.

[dewdrop]

Hi Pups,

Here's my 2 cents on testing from a CD install of Puppy 2.

Dewdrop

System Info:
17” AOC Monitor
Processor: Intel Pentium 4
CPU 3.4Ghz
Total RAM: 904920kb
HDD: IDE
Sound: HDA-Intel - never recognized by Pup2, but works fine in 1.0.7
(mis-identified by Pup2 as azx 00:1b.0, Class 0403 8086:2668 (Rev 3)

For Puppy 1.0.7

usr_devx.sfs and usr_more.sfs are mounted on same location as pup001.

For Puppy 2

I tested the following – used the xorg wizard to test each one:

1. Screen Resolutions
640x480x16;
800x600x16;
1024x768x16 (selected by default mechanism at start of test);
1280x1024x16;
1600x1200x16

a.I did not test the x24 versions, although they were noted as being supported.

b.I would have had to manually adjust the monitor's screen size to center the desktops but it would not have needed much adjusting.

c.The default pawdesk image was present at each resolution.

2.Screen Icons
The only icon that did not respond was the Contacts icon.
Each of the others responded in a normal fashion.

3.Sound
Although there was no sound with Gxine, it did play the video of an Eagle's Concert in Australia called “Eagle's Farewell 1 Tour – Live from Melbourne." No date found on any of the DVD info..so don't know how old the DVD is.

4. Internet
DCHP and Firewall installed with no problems.
Seamonkey goes to the Puppy Home Page, and Blinky works as expected.

5. I did not attempt to change the default window manager.

[Guest]

What about booting from live-CD on your PC, is that working?

no, it's exactly the same as a poor man's install

df /initrd/pup_rw:

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 0 0 0 0% /initrd/pup_rw

[GuestToo]

forgot to sign in

[J_Rey]

1: OK the problem with JWM 1.4 being much slower than 0.24 under QEMU has been reported to the developer of JWM (via chatroom). He didn't immediately figure out the reason for the slowness, but was working on figuring it out.

2: My BIOS is from the year 2000 and I flashed it to the latest with ACPI support. When I don't provide a acpi= boot parameter then I get this:

Code: Select all

ACPI is disabled because your bios is from 2000 and too old
You can enable it with acpi=force

So not providing an ACPI parameter auto detects (kinda) for ACPI support. I can use Puppy successfully with all three methods.

3: I always boot Puppy Linux from a DOS prompt with either Gujin (tiny.exe) or linld.com from my hard drive. So, I found the same error with the PMEDIA boot parameter mentioned earlier. But while it was stopped I decided to scroll up (Shift-Page Up) to see if there were any other boot errors/messages and I found some interesting things (non-interesting edited out):

Code: Select all

loop: loaded (max 8 devices)
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 12288K size 1024 blocksize
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe - s -k scsi_hostadapter, errno=2
/sbin/init: 402: probedisk: not found
TEST PUPMODE=1 PUPSAVE=
ERROR, cannot find Puppy on idehd boot media.
PUPMODE=1  PDEV1=
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

So, with no PMEDIA parameter and PMEDIA= I got the above error. PMEDIA=idehd worked as expected, but I expected Puppy 2 to autodetect where it was located! Also, the directory /mnt/home was there but blank and confused me for a minute.

4: The ALSA config at startup worked in X but when I selected Yes to play the sample, it never played it just skipped it and went to X. (?!?!?)

5: Great news! XOrgWizard in Puppy 2a and 1.0.8r1 both work as they should for my video chipset, Intel 82810-DC100 (i810)!

6: I much prefer SeaMonkey over the other browsers/suites. But I noticed that you didn't compile with Roaming Profile support! That would be a great thing to add, so I could share my profile from my Windoze install. Also, for the final release, all the references to Mozilla should be replaced with SeaMonkey (e.g. in the menu and no symlinks, etc.).

7: What will the extra addon files be expected to be named? E.g. instead of only usr_more.sfs, would it be xtra_123.sfs or ooo_202.sfs?

8: Of course the Help files will need revamped, but also I'd like to suggest mirroring them online.

[Lobster]

6: I much prefer SeaMonkey over the other browsers/suites. But I noticed that you didn't compile with Roaming Profile support! That would be a great thing to add,

I always have to change preferences / appearance / fonts
from serif to san serif (16) if this can be compiled in it makes all browsing more ledgible . . .