Hi
I would like to ask an important question:
Are concept and reality yet adapted to each other?
I did begin with Puppy just before 0.41 and at this time it was not possible to change something or to save some data, settings or values... It was only possible to write correctly in English in extremely light applications!
Since this time Puppy did grow and grow and grow and become new figures to do all the thing what big distributions do.
FIRST PROBLEM
Puppy seems to never be
actual!
old package versions were often in the last puppies published as final version:
old mTpaint,
old Seamonkey,
ayttm,
cups,
char tables,
etc.
SECOND PROBLEM:
no generalization!
no keyboard variant US INTL (is included in xorg but can't be selected in the keyboard setting menu, idem for the swiss keyboard ch, probably the reason why divers swiss persons did create her own distributions, Slitaz 34 MB, Debris Linux less than 180 MB, the first Debian live, were under 300 MB but don't exist any more, and nutyx! as you know comes Mandriva also from this geographic room: the problems generated by the absence of commodity in existent distributions can be an effective instigator of creativity!):
only those, ridiculous, 4 chars I-N-T-L, more in only ONE document of Puppy, xorg.conf
would automaticly make each Puppy (with no problem for those using only US keyboard) able to instantly operate correctly and without restriction with
- Spanish ¿¡ñü
- French çéèêàùïüâôûæ (oe is only in Puppy not possible)
- Portuguese sames plus ãõ
- German ßüöäÄÖÜ
- Dutch
- Italian
and probably more languages that I am not knowing and I can't recognize with my ignorance, but I see more and more chars in this keyboard layout, that I can't identify (śćýṕŕźĺṕ etc.)!
include 4 char I-N-T-L more in /etc/X11/xorg.conf would directly open the way to more than ONE international language per char and we don't do it!
THIRD PROBLEM:
An important part of the users will process since years really ambitious jobs with puppy and do it
so that
they never touch some parts of each Puppy
like
Abiword
Gnumeric
Geany
3 of the 4 offered calculators
(I always use «dc» in CLI
)
Osmo
Homebank
they use the same LibreOffice.sfs for all Puppy versions and wonder of the forced presence in x Puppy versions on her hard disk of those AbiWord and consorts! Why not the 'inverse': Abiword, Gnumeric, Geany, Osmo, Homebank as well as 3 of the 4 calculators etc. are all in one little 'big SFS' and be simply added for the iso directly in the iso as it was the case with divers kernel modules in an separate sfs file?
using the ISO they are present as usual.
starting frugal you can erase this SFS easily (can be done by the installations script and it can actualize the menu, list of installed packages, icons on the desktop etc) without to need some FATFREE version!
in such a case, the ISO would contain
- vmlinuz
- initrd.gz
- rcy522systempart.sfs <- (is the fatfree base! only tools for system setting up and maintenance, no special X-application at all)
- rcy522addmodules.sfs <- if wished (only example, not needed in that racy)
- rcy522goodies.sfs <- there are the goodie's applications
but important parts are traditionally missing for example for each school puppy, excuse me, pupil: each child need a music note editor during his education and there were never some one included in official Puppy repositories ... Puppy is really not rich in this point, is somewhat for adults, you can see each video
but not write a line of good school music.
or OCR, the normal continuation of sane and xsane so that the included point of xsane did never work in Puppy
or 1 dictionary FOR ALL applications able to use a dictionary (browser, text processing, editors etc), if possible extensible with own words...
I know: It would be a own development for Puppy in Puppy as the all LibreOffice, Seamonkey, Firefox, Abiword, Opera, Adobe can't reach an agreement concerning this important question!
FORTH PROBLEM:
a great number of users is
- playing,
- working,
- testing and, different users,
- developing
with more than ONE Puppy!
but Puppy did never take under consideration, that such users would better need different parts of her system outside her official save file to
- save memory on the disk
- avoid repetitions of entries (logins, passwords, etc.) in each version!
it is not usefull to have a /root/.mozilla/seamonkey directory directly in the save file! a link in /root/.mozilla to /mnt/home/seamonkey (containing /mnt/home/seamonkey/ab54cde.default and /mnt/home/seamonkey/profiles.ini), is more effective: only one seamonkey archive for all puppy's!
and as I use mozilla / seamonkey since Puppy did introduce this suite as his prefered browser and email client and did preserve my archive along this time, my Seamonkey archive did increase as big that it can not really be included any more in a usual save file with 512 MB or more, as it contains a lot of document annexed, million of photos etc...
same thing for /root/.wine: it is nonsens pure to include a Wine archive, eventually a full windows archive with less, but or more, perhaps million windows programs and archives in a Puppy save file.
a link /root/.wine to /mnt/home/wine is very more realistic and effective!
same thing for some program and library subject to very frequent actualization:
it is not really easy to export externaly all the wine files as links being in /usr/bin
but it is very simple to do it with the global /usr/lib/seamonkey ! only one link and all the seamonkey directory is away and being to find in /mnt/home (on my hard disk as under directory in the available dir /mnt/home/seamonkey: I find in it my library directory /mnt/home/seamonkey/seamonkey so I have only one entry for seamonkey in /mnt/home; same thing for instantbird that I am using instead of ayttm at the time where ayttm did crash as often in the past! Seamonkey also give me an IRC network! And my Skype archive is also on /mnt/home. 4 subdir seamonkey, skype, stantbird and wine - I did rename instantbird at this place in to standbird to find all the 3 dir's at one place to make the saving easy as I am regulary saving same manually...)
also my /root/my-applications and /root/my-documents are not in the puppy save file but under /mnt/home/f(iles)/my: so I can change the started Puppy without to have to remember if this or those document is in the Puppy save file of this version of Puppy: For all Puppy version it is the same place: /mnt/home/f/my
. something else would not be logic!
(perhaps something for the very rarely used
«spot» of Puppy being installable easily in old installations script as well in the save file as outside?)
PROBLEM FIVE:
If I enter confidential contents in internet fields in the browser (for ex. banking entries), I mask my link /root/.mozilla/seamonkey renaming it /root/.mozilla/seamonkey.notyet and restart seamonkey. seamonkey create an fresh subdir /root/.mozilla/seamonkey
because I am not certain that the CONFIDENTIALITY is well preserved as I always handle as user «root».
after that, I erase immediately the fresh subdir /root/.mozilla/seamonkey and rename my link! and restart always immediately Puppy
or more easy but more work in different puppy, I start without save file after renaming the save file so that it will not be recognize at the next start! in this case make Puppy a complete /root subdir but you have only in some versions the possibility to add without presence of save file a program_file.SFS as seamonkey.sfs: you have no seamonkey...
how effective is the CONFIDENTIALITY on Puppy?
(in this context it would be better to pre install
https://duckduckgo.com or perhaps
https://encrypted.google.com , is not the same, google restricts the use of confidentiality, and I think that we always have to pre install an Adblock!)
PROBLEM SIX:
At version five of Puppy, divers new methods did appear in Puppy:
- new editor (nico)
- new management of .jwmrc and generally of the menus (the comment in .jwmrc what is to do if you will change something is now generally wrong
)
- new connection method in the network (I prefer myself really
frisbee as it is never down in the LAN networt; the other connection managers goes all down on IAD's with own activity and own memory as we are often using in German because the IAD registers the changes and refuses to accept that the same user can be logged in under an other Puppy without DHCP reset!)
- it seems that Rox operate perhaps differently as in the past (renaming directories by copying them first and erase the original after that; very small save files with only 32 MB crash often if you attempt to do that with sub relatively heavy dir's like the /root/.mozilla/seamonkey dir
!)
I suppose that different users are also sad to have always and always to re adapt their newer Puppy version to the average level...
- divers Woof are not really to recognize directly (message concerning the use of an old Woof in Luci!)
it would be good the menu>help
would include
- the name of the Puppy
- the date of announcement
- the link to the announcement as well as to the debug discussion
- the link to the wiki page
- the link to the main download depository for official packages or sfs
- the indication if a dev.sfs exists and download link (important for derivates)
- the indications concerning Woof
- the level of the caracteristical software ability/compatibility (kernel, C bibliothek) as we more and more packages refused by our packager because of bad libraries (for ex. Merkaartor to manage OpenStreetMaps, I know this software will not be maintened in the next time, but it is the only one being fast enough in Puppy... and exist as merkaartor.pet)
so that people not online can see what they do or can do with it as the documentation is not always complete in the iso and this problem will probably be insoluble in a mini-distribution also in all future.
PROBLEM SEVEN:
we need a better tracking system or marking for *.PET's and program *.SFS's to recommend for user created additional software for example in form of date 20120418rcy522 (for example firefox20120418rcy522.sfs , so you can see 2 years later, what was the matter with the base equipment of racy 5.2.2 in the year 2012! which kernel, included libraries etc.). an usefull would be to give each new puppy a very short well defined abbreviation like rcy522 for racy 5.2.2 and always the same! we need a list of such abbreviations on a central site page or wiki!
kind regards
.