Lucid Puppy 5.1.1 Bugs, Fixes, & Feedback

[ken geometrics]

I just tried 511 there is an issue with gparted

I started from the LiveCD for the 1st time.

I plugged in a USB 1T byte Seagate external hard drive
I then clicked on the gparted in the menu.

It took so long to start that I looked at the disk and the CD lights to see if anything was happening. No lights were blinking. I tried it again, thinking perhaps I had not actually clicked on it. Still nothing.

I popped out the CD and put in the 4.31 CD. I went to the shutdown menu entry and was about to reboot when up came 2 copies of gparted at the same time ( didn't see one then the other both
suddenly appeared)

I shut down and started 431, On 431, gparted starts instantly.

[willem1940NLD]

Locale and keyboard: a bit confusing in setup, yes. I found that ALWAYS, at any change, the whole multi-stage keyboard input in "setup" icon must be rerun, else will not obey.

So, I use Netherlands-Euro for locale and USA keyboard VAR-alt-int, first screen select USA, save, open other pictogram and add VAR-alt-int. This one has all the accents/diacritics for west-european languages, except the cedille which (in Linux) is deformed, constructed by using 'c but resulting as ć.
Again: both stages must be gone through to perform any change.

In distros other than Puppy, I used to use USA-int which gave cedille correctly, but in Puppy USA-int remains plain USA without the accents, which I consider a bug.

In these USA-(alt)-int settings, accent after 1 touch stays hidden till next a suitable character is typed ... if unfit, beeps.

à ñ ã é è ë ä ï ó ò ỳ ê ć ..... etc..

If the accent is not meant to mount a character, blank space counts as "suitable" so showing the sole accent for any purpose.

` ' ^ " ~ ...... etc..

Once used to the use of extra blank spaces, I can use USA-alt-int for the handful of languages I need, without changing keyboards.

[wabbit]

IBM X30 Thinkpad laptop - Test results

Every time I tried to boot the Puppy v511 cd, It would hang just at the point of displaying the initial screen. While displaying an empty (black) screen, the screen backlight would brighten, then dim, then brighten again and just sit there. The keyboard was completly dead ... even ctrl-alt-del wouldn't work. Had to manually power down by holding down the power on-off button.

Next step was booting with the pfix=ram,nox option. At the prompt, I typed in xorgwizard twice, selected 1024x768 (also tried 800x600 both known-to-work resolutions, and on one attempt, I even selected Xvesa instead of probe). X did not start, so I typed in xwin as instructed, and the laptop hung as described above.

There's more, but at this point, here are how things stand in relation to the above problem ONLY:

Quirky v120 works as expected. No problem in highly limited testing.
Puppy v215CE final hangs as above.
Puppy v431 gets to initial puppy screen, but then hangs as above when you try to use it.
Puppy v510 hangs as above.
Puppy v511 hangs as above.

So, I figured ... let's see if we can break it.

Started 511 again with pfix=ram,nox. Typed in xorgwizard twice, and selected 1280x1024x16 as my resolution (1024x768 is max for the screen display). X did not start. Typed in xwin, and my puppy screen came up. The bottom of the screen was missing (menu button, tray, etc.), but the blue plasma wallpaper and all the desktop icons were there.

Before going any further, I established the wifi with WPA. No problem except that my wifi scan detected 2 wifi networks. Mine, and one that appeared to be an odd collection of letters I had never seen before. What's odd is that scans from two Ubuntu wireless laptops showed my network as the only one in existence. In any case the wifi was established and the firewall successfully started.

At this point did a right click on the desktop and selected system/system status and config/hardinfo hardware information/summary and sure enough the display was set at 1280x1024.

Did a right click/setup/Xorg video wizard, and selected edit xorg.conf file, Scolled down to the resolution and changed it to 1024x768, saved, closed the file, and quit.

Did a right click/shutdown/restart X server.

After the server restart, My screen was just as it should be for 1024x768. The bottom of the screen was just as it should be, and a hardware info display showed the correct resolution. One interesting point. My wifi info was dropped during the restart.

During reconnection, when it scanned for wireless networks, it found only one ... mine. Reconnection went okay, and I am currently moving on in the information and testing.

More later. Have a great day, and thanks for such a wonderful operating system.


Wudy

[8-bit]

It sounds to me that by selecting the higher resolution, you got a video frequency that worked with your display.
Different resolution frequencies appear to have caused the problem.
I will have to try that on a laptop that I have been unable to get Puppy 510 to work with.

[acrocosm]

As the subject suggests, x server crashes on exit and restart. In short, I am able only to start it once. There is no way to restart it to reflect any changes I might have made and I am unable to properly shut down or reboot the machine. When I try it I end up on a blank screen, not off, just blank black, no HD activity, nothing. alt+ctrl+del, alt+ctrl+backspace, alt+f(x) don't do anything either (I'm not sure if there are any virtual terminals anyway). The power button has to be kept pressed to turn off and then be able to reboot.

The machine is an x40 IBM with a 1.2Ghz pentium m.

This is true for both 5.1 (official and ubuntustudioPE) AND 5.1.1. And it happens with both the ati/intel drivers and without any extra drivers installed. The graphics chipset is 855gme.

On usb stick installation it behaves as expected. It doesn't matter whether I use a save file or not. It just works. On hard disk installation however things go wicked. I tried using acpi=force as suggested in this thread but to no avail. I'm not completely noob with linux, but I'm nood enough so I don't know what else to try.

I haven't tried xvesa since I intend to do heavy graphic work on it. Yeah I know it's a laugh with 855gme but anyway it's better than xvesa anyway ...i suppose...

I love puppy, it's a fully functional and easy os where I can run blender/gimp/photoshop/renoise/sunvox/whatever I like to use. With some slight changes (fluxbox, conky, no rox pinboard) it boots from hd using just 25mb of ram!! leaving all the rest to hungry creativity. It's super fast, it's stable enough, it's nearly perfect ...err apart from that x-server issue and maybe one two others I can live with or overcome. Next thing I'm gonna try running is maya o.O

Any help welcome, any info or tests from my part, I'd be more than glad to provide

Thank you



p.s. aytmm crashes for fun, it's less tolerant than win95 when inserting a cd

Since I didn't get any answer and figured out myself the cause I'm qoting myself for any other that might have that problem


So, the curlpit was grub. When I installed it I choose 1024x768 as grub resolution. It's the max resolution the x40 screen supports. There was nothing showing on the screen while booting which I found odd but since it was booting and getting into a graphical shell I didn't bothered.

I thought about it when I decided to try an earlier version of puppy (boxpup, brilliant pupplet). That one was more tollerant than lucid puppy as I besides not been able to see anything when exiting xserver I was able to blindly type xwin or reboot or ctrl+alt+del while lucid was just dead.

[lugligino]

I installed lupu in my old PC (Full Installation) and tried to connect to the internet with my Huawei E156G internet key. The connection was good.
After a little I saw that the keyboard was US type but I need IT (italian) so I chose the IT keyboard in setup. The connection was still good until I restarted the PC. After the reboot pupdial was not able to connect anymore.
Pupdial recognized the key in ttyUSB0 and probed it successfully but the connection to the internet ends with the message
ERROR
BAD INIT STRING

Ciao lugligino.
You may not need this information anymore but for all european try to use the PupDial...

Apparently the pupdial has a bug under some european languages.
We can escape the bug with the next way, i guess.

On Lupu and most of puppies, the locale is set to the country corresponding the keyboard layout.
You can set the locale to 'en_US' by using the chooselocale after you set your keyboard layout.

Or, start the PupDial from the virtual terminal. Type:

Code: Select all

LANG=C pupdial 

Or:

Code: Select all

LC_ALL=C pupdial 

Shinobar,
I tried your hints, but they work only until I reboot the PC.
So pupdial doesn't work and I have to use the program umtsmon-0.9 that works fine.
Bye
Luigi

[willem1940NLD]

@acrocosm: did you use the icon "setup" and run all pocedures offered there?

Maybe it shows more resolutions than those which one immediately sees by other entries to the system.

I have the lot on old desktop 1GHz, 786RAM, 2xHD80GB (IDE) and several Puppies, including 511 which I am using now, do well on it. I found I needed the 1280 setting, but scrolling down the very long list to ... the range meant for old cathode ray displays, although my EIZO screen is LCD (17 in).

By the way, on this old machine all I use is Puppy 511 and I used very old "trick in the book" taught to me by first hour IT workers some 20 years ago: have a swap partition as first one on each disk .... so obtaining the ultimate speed the old hardware can render.

[rjbrewer]

Since I didn't get any answer and figured out myself the cause I'm qoting myself for any other that might have that problem


So, the curlpit was grub. When I installed it I choose 1024x768 as grub resolution. It's the max resolution the x40 screen supports. There was nothing showing on the screen while booting which I found odd but since it was booting and getting into a graphical shell I didn't bothered.

I thought about it when I decided to try an earlier version of puppy (boxpup, brilliant pupplet). That one was more tollerant than lucid puppy as I besides not been able to see anything when exiting xserver I was able to blindly type xwin or reboot or ctrl+alt+del while lucid was just dead.

No

You are confused.

Setting the resolution when booting depends on your graphics
chip and has nothing to do with "Grub".

[willem1940NLD]

Just changed screen, old 1280 down to 1024. As usual, the keyboard setting (USA-alt-int) went lost but settings via icon "setup" this time seemed reluctant, I had to repeat steps and restart X-server several times before it finally stuck.

[acrocosm]

No

You are confused.

Setting the resolution when booting depends on your graphics
chip and has nothing to do with "Grub".

Sure, I'm definitely confused now ^_^

What do you mean? Does it get auto-detected and set to the highest offered by the chip and and screen's max resolution?

What's grub's resolution setting for then? Changing it does affect the pre-x resolution on my crunchbang installation for sure. And it does affect puppy's pre-x screen (completely blank vs visible text).

The fact that setting 1024x768 for grub brakes it, while selecting auto makes it work fine is enough proof for me. Not for what's exactly going on behind but for the solution to my problem. It's tested twice with boxpup first then ubuntustudiope.

I'd welcome any clarification of course but that wasn't really a helpfull post...

@acrocosm: did you use the icon "setup" and run all pocedures offered there?

Maybe it shows more resolutions than those which one immediately sees by other entries to the system.

I did folowed all steps closely... a couple of times. The resolution I picked every time was 1024x768x256

Hmm next time I'll format the disk I'll try your swap partition trick. I was always sticking them to the end in one disk machines so os files are faster accessible. Or so I though would make it faster. I haven't pushed it hard yet with blender/gimp/openshot/renoise so it has never used the swap partition anyway. 1gb ram, the max it has get is around 180mb

[rjbrewer]

No

You are confused.

Setting the resolution when booting depends on your graphics
chip and has nothing to do with "Grub".

Sure, I'm definitely confused now ^_^

What do you mean? Does it get auto-detected and set to the highest offered by the chip and and screen's max resolution?

What's grub's resolution setting for then? Changing it does affect the pre-x resolution on my crunchbang installation for sure. And it does affect puppy's pre-x screen (completely blank vs visible text).

The fact that setting 1024x768 for grub brakes it, while selecting auto makes it work fine is enough proof for me. Not for what's exactly going on behind but for the solution to my problem. It's tested twice with boxpup first then ubuntustudiope.

I'd welcome any clarification of course but that wasn't really a helpfull post...

Grub is the bootloader.
It just "gets the ball rolling".
Grub doesn't have a resolution setting.
After kernel start and initrd when booting, everything is handled
by the operating system.
Grub can be used to modify the kernel, but doesn't do so
without the users intervention.

[rcrsn51]

When you run the GRUB configuration program as part of an install, it asks you to pick a video resolution. This is not a setting for GRUB per se - it's for the system's video output before X loads. If you make the wrong choice, you get a black screen.

You can see the setting in your menu.lst file in the folder /boot/grub. The safest setting is "vga=normal".

[rjbrewer]

When you run the GRUB configuration program as part of an install, it asks you to pick a video resolution. This is not a setting for GRUB per se - it's for the system's video output before X loads. If you make the wrong choice, you get a black screen.

You can see the setting in your menu.lst file in the folder /boot/grub. The safest setting is "vga=normal".

When installing grub it asks if you want to choose a framebuffer
setting.
I have 7 different Puppies installed and it makes no difference at all
if "ro vga=normal" is included in the kernel line.

Acrocosm seemed to be under the impression that restart problems
in the 5.xx Puppies was a "Grub" problem.

(Acrocosm quote)
"So, the curlpit was grub. When I installed it I choose 1024x768 as grub resolution."

[acrocosm]

When you run the GRUB configuration program as part of an install, it asks you to pick a video resolution. This is not a setting for GRUB per se - it's for the system's video output before X loads. If you make the wrong choice, you get a black screen.

You can see the setting in your menu.lst file in the folder /boot/grub. The safest setting is "vga=normal".

Thnx

@rjbrewer
Ignore my ignorance for a while, don't stick to specific words I choose to explain and understand that I picked a resolution that both the graphics chip and the screen support. This was set through grub's installation and caused me problems. Setting it to vga=normal as rcrsn51 suggests fixed it. I didn't had to hand edit menu.lst as the last time I installed puppy I picked that option during grub's installation.

To a noob like me who might encounter this issue and doesn't know what framebuffer stands for, it is enough to suggest picking the safe option. Having a working system to ...work with, you can expand your knowledge in more areas


Now, I couldn't imagine the reason this happened. But it did happen and it does indicate that something, somewhere is wrong(?)

I don't really know what else to say. I'm happy with my system now

[willem1940NLD]

......................................

Hmm next time I'll format the disk I'll try your swap partition trick. I was always sticking them to the end in one disk machines so os files are faster accessible. Or so I though would make it faster. I haven't pushed it hard yet with blender/gimp/openshot/renoise so it has never used the swap partition anyway. 1gb ram, the max it has get is around 180mb

Too much honour, I did not invent the trick but was once taught so.

Main principle: swap on other HD than the one which the OS is on, saves time because the processor giving orders to 2 disks almost simultaneously, works quicker than entering 1 same disk several times. Also, first partition is the quickest to reach.

On one-disk machines, for linux, swap as first partition goes without particulars but MS Windows then always funnily adds some (small) system files there.

Reason why I put a swap partition on both disks is, not to be without a swap partition if by whatever cause or reason the 2nd disk gets unmounted.

I spent some time testing with and without swap-on-slave-disk some years ago, mainly by moving a zipped file of 4GB and it resulted well over 150% of the speed obtained with swap on system disk.

I do not really trust the programs that display the use of RAM; think they cannot show very short peaks. A rather useful test I found, opening a number of "heavy" programs minimised, also web sites, whilst watching such RAMviewer.

Linux has as habit to immediately recognise and use any partition formatted with swap extenson; this is different from MS windows, where I had to force it in settings.

[acrocosm]

Main principle: swap on other HD than the one which the OS is on, saves time because the processor giving orders to 2 disks almost simultaneously, works quicker than entering 1 same disk several times. Also, first partition is the quickest to reach.

On one-disk machines, for linux, swap as first partition goes without particulars but MS Windows then always funnily adds some (small) system files there.

Reason why I put a swap partition on both disks is, not to be without a swap partition if by whatever cause or reason the 2nd disk gets unmounted.

Yes on dual os situations with 2 disks I always use the one os on the first with its swap on the second and the other os on the second with swap on the first. Just alyaws, by habbit really, stick the swaps to the last partition of each disk.

On ram, yes, I've noticed such behaviour between different ram usage display programs.

[prehistoric]

Up until now, I've merely been irritated by the "deprecated" message concerning modules. This time it actually broke a script in network setup. I bought a D-Link WUA-2340 USB wireless adapter which was not immediately associated with a Linux driver module (I think we have an Atheros 9001U here.)

"Not to worry", says I, "I can use NDIS wrapper and the .inf file from Windows XP." Guess what happens when it tries to load the module? The "deprecated" message causes an error which prevents NDIS wrapper from working.

[chopstyx]

first of all, congrats on a wonderful job with puppy 5.1.1
did a fresh install on an ancient acer notebook (1.7 centrino, 1gb ram, defunct ide-controller, ati x700m grfx)
to boot to the desktop, i have to choose vesa, after downloading and installing the xorg driver and restarting x-server the system stays with the vesa-driver. any thoughts?

[bigpup]

first of all, congrats on a wonderful job with puppy 5.1.1
did a fresh install on an ancient acer notebook (1.7 centrino, 1gb ram, defunct ide-controller, ati x700m grfx)
to boot to the desktop, i have to choose vesa, after downloading and installing the xorg driver and restarting x-server the system stays with the vesa-driver. any thoughts?

Installed Xorg driver. Is it the Xorg-high driver from Quickpet?

Follow this:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=58810

Written for Nvidia video card drivers, but the basic steps are the same for any video driver.

[chopstyx]

thanks for your help, did another fresh install, downloaded the xorg-driver via ppm and followed the instructions in the link above.
i cannot find an entry-box in the xorgwizard/choose-dialog, so after selecting radeon from the list, xwin refuses to start and i have to revert to the vesa-driver. i'll stick to that for the time being...
one more thing: why would i need 200mb space on my save-file for the abovementioned procedure?

edit: yes, the first time 'round it was the xorg high-driver via quickpet

edit 2: xorg high-1.1-lucid