A newbie (to Puppy) raves about the product

[richard.a]

Good morning,

I would like to say "thank you" to Barry (who lives the other side of Australia from me) and the rest of you for the magnificent concept behind PuppyLinux. This is, for many of us, the ideal sort of Linux, in keeping (perhaps) with Linus Torvalds's original thoughts.

I used to evaluate software for Australia's #1 CAD Monthly magazine, from its inception until shortly before it ceased print. I try to write in every layman's and woman's) terms, so maybe some will feel concerned that I haven't used "Geek Speak". I don't. It makes for an elite view in the eye of those who don't understand it.

The concept of being able to slide a Live CD (or DVD) into a computer - even an ancient one - and have it start from the disc, and then run, and continue to run at a mind-boggling speed, has been for many (most?) a far-off fantasy. Not So with Puppy.

While the distribution needs a bit of polish in some areas, one might ask if that polish is needed. I remember OS/2 in about 1996, and Windows95 had these beautiful 3D buttons and millions of colours on the desktop which greatly used system resources. OS/2 would run on a machine with an 80286 processor, with less RAM faster, and do more.

The Puppy desktop is like that. Loads fast. I haven't tried running it on a 80286 because I no longer have one! But I have a Pentium 100 with two 32Meg RAM chips - in the garage - but it's too hard to reach it lol


So as part of my critique of the product, I would like to ask some questions and/or offer some suggestions, and will explain why I think each one needs considering and answering.


1. Multimedia keyboards are sold with virtually every sale of a PC with Windows, and therefore almost all Windows users would be disappointed that the extra keys don't seem to work. They are useful shortcuts if you are a keyboard user, and those shortcuts are faster than using a mouse on a GUI.

The only Linux I've found that supports those extra keys out of the box is the proprietory one, Sun's Java Desktop System, which has an excellent setup wizard.

I'm sure that this not very long list of other stuff has answers, but I've looked and haven't found them I'm a user, not a coder, probably that accounts for my preferring to use a GUI, although if I know the commands I'm not frightened by a console; after all my introduction to computers in the mid 1980s was with PC-DOS.

2. I've come up against a brick wall on how to set a default application to open a specific file type. In this case Timidity for midi files. There will be others, I expect. If the installer doesn't do it, there needs to be a manual way, I'm sure.

3. I believe that Wine would be an enormous asset, and this is because there are many utilities which do not have either as functional an equivalent, or any equivalent at all. Perhaps someone could make a DotPup or whatever for it please? And perhaps there could be an accessible listing of where downloads are located? And equally the opportunity to change your mind about from where you want to download. I have twice over experienced the annoyance of having to start all over again because my choice was wrong and it always goes there thereafter

4. Some of the downloads regularly don't work because they are corrupt... hexedit, xpad, pdbreader, pdftk, GkrellM (no route to host)... and Tight VNC server which is a must on my LAN. Is there an inbuilt VNC server? If so, how does one set password access for remote login?

The installer tells me repeatedly that the following card games suffer from poor file integrity: hearts, once in a lieftime solitaire, spider solitaire, tri-peaks solitaire... it seems that the dead links or bad integrity messages are all files on either a .de website or Barry's; maybe that's where they all are anyway?


A couple of visual things.
1. Font Size - and more importantly colour of the desktop icon text. I would like to use darker wallpaper or plain backgrounds, but can't with black text.

2. Ability to edit the menu, adding deleting and moving entries, etc. And ability to change the size of the huge icons on the DotPups submenu. Some people don't like icons on the desktop at all, and menu editing would solve their "beef".

3. One of my computers' video card won't allow higher resolution than 1024x768, and another 800x600. How can we globally change the size of the desktop icons for those lower resolutions? And make them larger at 1600x1200?

4. 24-hour displayed clock. Many users prefer this, and I'm one


Wish List
1. In LiveCD mode, an opportunity to "save as" and create a new pup_save.3fs file - and give it a name, so that specific configuration can be saved seperate from the "default" one.

I discovered by accident how you get a boot menu of different pup_save files; this is terrific, and thankyou folks.

2. I would like to set up users, and create a login screen. Maybe this is already there, but not documented?

3. A dotpup for "Katapult"



Grub
Glad you provided it as an option.

On one computer I have three instances of Puppy differently customised, running on three partitions, along with with hda1 a DOS bootable partition. Grub switches them seperately and it works *very* well.

However, I have a query. Does Grub ver 0.96 support the use of a bootsplash image? I can't get it to do that, maybe there is a trick other than the statement "splashimage=/boot/grub/myfile.xpm.gz" placed in the global section of the menu.lst file? Or maybe its location in that section?

I was thinking of making a custom Bootsplash image for Puppy users.


In conclusion
One thing I found confusion over. The websites suggest that there is a specific ISO file for multisession burning. Now I searched and couldn't find one. Has that necessity been done away with in Version 2, perhaps?

And there seem to be problems (for me) with the 2.01 Opera download ISO... but I'm using the 2.02 SeaMonkey one and it's really fabulous

Tongue in cheek, thought you might like to see what I did with the peach theme here.

[socalguy]

Like you, although from a less expert perspective, I'm amazed by Puppy Linux's speed and efficiency. I take every opportunity to inform others of its unique ram based archictecture and its usefulness as a lifeline to the internet in the case of a disk failure or Windows crash.

One thing mentioned particularly struck home--Dot Pup downloads and installs seem very chancy. So far I'm hitting about a 33% success rate without error messages of one kind or another. This problem is not unique to Puppy. I've tried PCLinux, a commercial version of Xandros, Ubuntu and most recently Linspire Free. All seem to have one problem or another with downloading and installing programs. I can't imagine any version of Linux becoming a universal OS until someone comes up with a generally reliable download/install routine. Xandros and Linspire come close but only in their propietary program lists.

That said, Puppy is the best distro of the bunch and I'm greatful to the developer who must be incredibly innovative.

[fluxit]

1. Multimedia keyboards are sold with virtually every sale of a PC with Windows, and therefore almost all Windows users would be disappointed that they don't seem to work. They are useful shortcuts if you are a keyboard user, and those shortcuts are faster than using a mouse on a GUI.

Try this: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=9740.
Unfortunately there is not a real standard for multimedia keyboard scancodes, so in order to support all keyboards via a wizard requires support to be added for each individual keyboard. There are projects in process on SourceForge that are trying to do just that. Whether this is apropos to Puppy is not for me to say.

2. I've come up against a brick wall on how to set a default application to open a specific file type.

Right-click on a file in rox. Select Set Run Action....

3. I believe that Wine would be an enormous asset, and this is because there are many utilities which do not have either as functional an equivalent, or any equivalent at all. Perhaps someone could make a DotPup or whatever for it please?

Search the forum for wine dotpup. Make sure that you select Search for all terms on the search page to narrow it down a bit.

Many of your other questions have been answered on the forum as well.

As you offered your post as a critique, I'm not entirely sure if you were looking for external(forum) answers to your questions or not.

[Pizzasgood]

Sorry in advance, I should have gone to bed two hours ago. I started reading throuroughly, but started scanning when I saw the clock. Tomorrow I'll come back and read it again so I can make sure I read it all.

Timidity: right click midi file, set the run action, use: timidity -ig "$1"
Others: in /usr/local/bin are defaulttexteditor, defaultbrowser, etc. Edit to run app of choice.

Wine is availible, use the .9.17 (I think, I do know it's the one with a 17 in it). 18+ are kinda funny for now. Search forums.

Font-colors are by right-clicking icon, rox-options, in there somewhere. Maybe it has size. It has other options for all kinds of stuff too.

Icon size: a weak point. Currently, you must replace icons yourself to get bigger (unless you want to blow them up, but they aren't high-res so they will look funny). In rox you can change size to blowup them, but looks bad and some don't change. We need to make better use of rox's icon-theme ability (assuming that is in the old rox, I use the new one so can't check). Not by default though as big filesize. Add-on definately.

Save-as would be very cool. Especially for developers. Easy backups, multiple test environs, etc.

You use the same iso for normal and multisession now.

I'm working on a bootsplash as part of a project for someone. When I get done I'll generalize the script and make it availible. I have it running on mine and it looks great. Needs polishing and stuff (currently hides all text when you exit X, so you can't see what you type.) Give it a week or two, and I'll have a beta up.

Oooh. Kitties. Evil peach theme. Cool.

Again, sorry for any poor grammer and spelling. Need go sleep now. G'night.

[richard.a]

Roger on that Socalguy.

I was a Linspire beta tester through the last part of the ver 4.5 programme and the original 5.0 programme, and a bit of the 5.1. I don't have the time right now to involve myself as much as I did back then.

I personally see nothing wrong with commercial Linux. I'm not an ideologist, I am prepared to buy tools to do jobs, if I can't adapt what I already have. A computer - to me - is nothing more (or less) than a tool.

When I evaluated (for a print magazine editor) CAD applications in the 1990s - which included AutoCAD and its lesser offshoots - Autodesk got quite snakey with me because I would point out to readers where the next version wasn't necessary as a tool because the previous version with third party utilities would do the job just as well. That didn't make me very popular with AutoDesk lol

It also allowed the users to weigh if they needed to update their hardware platform because of the resource-hunger of the more recent version.

I think the problem with any installer is that to use a biblical expression, it has to "be all things to all men" (and women). That is very hard to do with a computer. I've only had problems with Linspire (and Lindows before the name change) installer known as "Click-n-Run" when their server side thing had a hernia Otherwise it was perfect, except when someone replaced a good version application with a beta... which happened with Audacity which I found annoying as I use that product.

PC-BSD has a similar concept, they took a port of FreeBSD and set up a snappy install to HDD and install apps from their warehouse repository called pbi. They don't have as many as Linspire, but they are growing. However I find more of Puppy works reliably, and much faster, than either PC-BSD or Linspire.

Just my unbiassed opinion. Seriously, I just want tools for the job, I have no reason for bias

I found your remarks interesting, and appreciated them. Hope I get some answers mate

[BarryK]

richard.a,
Aargh, a cat on the desktop!!! ...Puppy must be turning in his grave

The points you have raised are all valid of course, and are from the user's
perspective, whereas I tend to give the user interface a fairly low priority.
I think though, the build system and underlying scripts are maturing to a
point where I can shift attention more to the user interface. Some of the other
guys are of course filling this gap, developing stuff to improve the user
experience -- such as all the gadgets that MU has developed.
XDG menus is an example where I have dragged my heals.

[Béèm]

Wine
I use for the moment wine 0.9.20 and an e-mail program Pegasus Mail.

For wine and all other queries you throw up, you can search in wiki or in the forums itself.
Wiki: http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyLinuxMainPage

[richard.a]

Wow, so many replies

Thank you all, and I'll do one post responding to them alll.

Here goes...

One thing mentioned particularly struck home--Dot Pup downloads and installs seem very chancy. So far I'm hitting about a 33% success rate without error messages of one kind or another.

I think mine is slightly better than 33%, but it's good to get someone else's results to compare with. Thanks.

This problem is not unique to Puppy. I've tried PCLinux, a commercial version of Xandros, Ubuntu and most recently Linspire Free. All seem to have one problem or another with downloading and installing programs. I can't imagine any version of Linux becoming a universal OS until someone comes up with a generally reliable download/install routine. Xandros and Linspire come close but only in their propietary program lists.

I didn't like Xandros, either Version 2 or Version 3. Actually I like Lycoris Desktop/LX and it's such a pity Joe had to give up and sell his development.

Linspire's downloads are the most reliable I've encountered, and it is interesting to note that this week they opened the CNR product for free in dollars (beer). Not sure if the code is open yet, but I believe that's on the horizon.

PC-BSD seems more rock-solid than any other distro to me - maybe BSD Unix tends to be, I don't know. Their PBI concept is like the dotpup idea, inasmuch as anyone can create something for download by anybody else.

That said, Puppy is the best distro of the bunch and I'm greatful to the developer who must be incredibly innovative.

I totally agree there. A nice confirmation too Thanks for your input.

Try this: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=9740.
Unfortunately there is not a real standard for multimedia keyboard scancodes, so in order to support all keyboards via a wizard requires support to be added for each individual keyboard. There are projects in process on SourceForge that are trying to do just that. Whether this is apropos to Puppy is not for me to say.

I look forward to seeing development here.

The Sun-JDS2 multimedia keys wizard is quite brilliant, though I believe it is proprietory to Sun, which is a pity as it's a shame to have to reinvent the wheel, particularly as they use Gnome.

In fact I have tried five (maybe six) different Windows marketed multimedia keyboards with JDS and their wizard allows most of those keys to be mapped. It is a simple Modus Operandi. You select in a GUI which function you wish to define, and then you press the appropriate key.

The HP keyboard that came with my Vectra VL PII-400 is by far the most succesful I've tried with the JDS wizard.

2. I've come up against a brick wall on how to set a default application to open a specific file type.

Right-click on a file in rox. Select Set Run Action....

[/quote]
Thankee kind sir/madam. Some of the prompts in the right click dialogue box are "different" from what I've encountered, but I'm gradually getting the feel.

Search the forum for wine dotpup. Make sure that you select Search for all terms on the search page to narrow it down a bit.

Many of your other questions have been answered on the forum as well.

Yeah I hear you. Actually I did try, but forums are notorious for not returning what you are looking for.

I suspect it may have something to do with the actual words you type in don't match what others have posted about.

Actually, I only asked that string of questions because I was unable to find the answers either in the websites or in the forums. I thought I had explained that, sorry.

As you offered your post as a critique, I'm not entirely sure if you were looking for external(forum) answers to your questions or not.

Both, actually.

A critique of what I had found.

And a request for help on the bits that didn't work.

Thanks, anyway for your input. Input to questions in forums sometimes isn't forthcoming, I'm afraid, but it is encouraging that several people (yourself included) did respond. I'm encouraged

Timidity: right click midi file, set the run action, use: timidity -ig "$1"
Others: in /usr/local/bin are defaulttexteditor, defaultbrowser, etc. Edit to run app of choice.

Yes! Thank you! as I mentioned further up, some of the wording in the right click menu box was a bit obscure (to me).

Wine is availible, use the .9.17 (I think, I do know it's the one with a 17 in it). 18+ are kinda funny for now. Search forums.

Font-colors are by right-clicking icon, rox-options, in there somewhere. Maybe it has size. It has other options for all kinds of stuff too.

Font colours didn't seem to be succesful for me, until I discovered the haloed writing option - "outline" which is what KDE seems to ship with as a default. Thanks a million for pointing that out

Icon size: a weak point. Currently, you must replace icons yourself to get bigger (unless you want to blow them up, but they aren't high-res so they will look funny). In rox you can change size to blowup them, but looks bad and some don't change. We need to make better use of rox's icon-theme ability (assuming that is in the old rox, I use the new one so can't check). Not by default though as big filesize. Add-on definately.

Save-as would be very cool. Especially for developers. Easy backups, multiple test environs, etc.

Okay, a work in progress. That's fine. Can live with that

I do hope that it will be possible to set the size of the dotpup application "start" icons on the main menu smaller, to match the default menu items icon size.

You use the same iso for normal and multisession now.

Thankyou

I'm working on a bootsplash as part of a project for someone. When I get done I'll generalize the script and make it availible. I have it running on mine and it looks great. Needs polishing and stuff (currently hides all text when you exit X, so you can't see what you type.) Give it a week or two, and I'll have a beta up.

Oh joy I really look forward to seeing and using that

Will you be writing up where you locate your own custom splash image? And would you like me to help test it?

Oooh. Kitties. Evil peach theme. Cool.

richard.a,
Aargh, a cat on the desktop!!! ...Puppy must be turning in his grave

LOL. Or should I say meeow or woof lolol

The points you have raised are all valid of course, and are from the user's perspective, whereas I tend to give the user interface a fairly low priority.

Yep, Understand

I think though, the build system and underlying scripts are maturing to a point where I can shift attention more to the user interface. Some of the other guys are of course filling this gap, developing stuff to improve the user experience -- such as all the gadgets that MU has developed.

Please don't misunderstand me, I was not being critical, just offering a few thoughts as someone fresh from never seeing it before, looking as far as possible with the eyes of a Windows user.

I think what you have done is brilliant, and very useable.

XDG menus is an example where I have dragged my heals.

I'm not sure what XDG menus are, but I'm assuming its the type of menu used in Puppy as the main menu off the panel and taskbar?

While Perenjori rings a bell, never visited there, although I did live in Bunbury for several years, and also South Perth and Wattle Grove, all back in the mid to late 60's.

[quote="B

[Pizzasgood]

Yeah, I'll be posting it for all to test/use as soon as I get it finished. Gotta get the other project done first though. They're both at about 75% completion.

The JWM icons may be configureable in the hidden file /root/.jwmrc. That . in front of the name is what makes it hidden. A button on the Rox toolbar un-hides them. (You may know about hidden things, but I'm posting it in case others don't).

Otherwise, you could read that file to find out where the icons it loads are located. Then you could find them and resize them manually.

I don't use JWM, so that's about all I can tell you about it. I prefer IceWM or XFCE. It definately seems much nicer than when we first switched over to it from FVWM though.

I really like that save-as idea. I just might add it to the next Pizzapup to see how people like it

[richard.a]

Yeah, I'll be posting it for all to test/use as soon as I get it finished. Gotta get the other project done first though. They're both at about 75% completion.

I really look forward to that. I thought I had it licked when I tried adding that line in the menu.lst, but it didn't work. It did work for me in Linspire.

The JWM icons may be configureable in the hidden file /root/.jwmrc. That . in front of the name is what makes it hidden. A button on the Rox toolbar un-hides them. (You may know about hidden things, but I'm posting it in case others don't).

Otherwise, you could read that file to find out where the icons it loads are located. Then you could find them and resize them manually.

Yeah understood, and yes I did know about them, but you're right, some who read this may be unaware.

I did a test on a virgin CD run with adding X-Chat v2 from the dotpup repository.

First step is always to back up the configuration file

Then opened the 48x48 icon from /usr/local/Xchat into mtPaint, and selected the whole image Selection > All which has the shortcut Control + A in most programs in most operating systems.

Next went to Image > Scale Canvas and changed the resolution to 20 pixels, and saved it as icon2.png; then restarted the desktop after editing the /root/.jwmrc file that you mentioned, changing

<Program label="Xchat"
icon="/usr/local/Xchat/icon.xpm"> /usr/local/Xchat/bin/Xchat</Program>

to

<Program label="Xchat"
icon="/usr/local/Xchat/icon2.png"> /usr/local/Xchat/bin/Xchat</Program>

This way, the original icon is still there if the user decides they want it like it originally was.

While I was about it, I tried changing the program label to read Xchat ver 2 IRC client to see if you can customise the menu further, and that worked too.

The simplest thing to do - once a user has got the hang of this - is to open the icon in a more fully featured image editor, and save it under the original filename and type (xpm), having backed up the icon first. That way, there is no need to alter the configuration file.

Perhaps 21 or 22 pixels is a better size to use, but this is more easily determined after a string of program starts has been added to the dotpup menu

Edit
Here are a pair of screen caps, with the size of the icons on all three menu items adjusted to 21 pixels.
Looks nearly right to me (perhaps 22 or 23 pixels would be better?);
the 'before' shot on the left, 'after' on the right...

-
/Edit

I really like that save-as idea. I just might add it to the next Pizzapup to see how people like it

Look forward to seeing it.

[Ted Dog]

Or chick magnet pup

OK granted this is just below my silly-sweet male gag reflex

[muggins]

hi richard,

i could be talking at cross-porpoises here but,

splashimage (hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz works in my grub menu.lst. However i can't recall if I'm using grub that came with pup or not.

Also i thought I would mention that you're Point 4, regarding the solitaires having poor integrity, is referring to puppy's dotup downloader.

muggins

[muggins]

hi richard,

i could be talking at cross-porpoises here but,

splashimage (hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz works in my grub menu.lst. However i can't recall if I'm using grub that came with pup or not.

Also i thought I would mention that you're Point 4, regarding the solitaires having poor integrity, is referring to puppy's dotup downloader.

muggins

[GuestToo]

some of the earlier dotpup packages were uploaded to the forum on goosee.com ... then that forum was removed, and Puppy switched to a new forum ... which made those packages inaccessible

Barry is the only person who had access to that server ... he later made those packages available on his server again

lately, Puppy has moved from goosee.com to new servers, and those packages that were on goosee.com are again not accessible

they may be gone forever ... i'll have to ask Barry about them

i did have a copy of my hexeditor package, so i uploaded it to the forum, so that link should now work

you can download dotpup packages using whatever downloader program you like ... for example, browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Lynx, Links, Elinks ... ftp clients like gFtp ... you could even used Puppy's netcat if you like

MU created a program to download dotpups, that some people seem to like ... one problem with the program, is that people think that this program that looks little like a stripped down synaptic, actually is a package manager, and get confused and think that the dotpup system is a package manager

in fact, MU's downloader has nothing to do with the dotpup system ... it's just a program that you use to download files, like Firefox, Opera, wget, etc etc

MU's downloader probably should not pass an empty dotpup file to the dotpup handler script when it could not download the file ... that is why you get the error message "corrupted package" ... if you used Mozilla or Firefox or Opera to download the file, you probably would realize that the file was not there to download

dotpup packages were intended to work something like NSIS packages ... like these:
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Users
basically ... click the file to download it, click it again to install it

as for dotpup packages not working ... as far as i know, all of my packages worked properly when i created them

Puppy keeps changing, and some of these changes have broken some of my packages, to a greater or lesser extent

i don't know of any of my packages that are broken that i have not fixed ... but there are probably a few, i don't think 77% of my packages are broken ... i don't use most of my own packages, and i don't use most of the packages made by other people either, so the only way i would know if a package is broken, is if someone reports it ... the last package someone reported as broken was Rox 2.4.1 not working in Puppy 2.0.2 ... i tried it myself and it seemed to work perfectly ... anyway, i updated that package to Rox 2.5

each dotpup package is the responsibility of the creator of the package ... thay are third party packages that are not part of the "official" Puppy OS

[Ted Dog]

I was reviewing using netcat to pull an ISO file and burn using growisofs stream input mode. One weekness of using a DVD-only puppy machine and low RAM is burning new versions. can you give examples of how to pull an ISO from a web page.

[richard.a]

splashimage (hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz works in my grub menu.lst. However i can't recall if I'm using grub that came with pup or not.

muggins

I wonder if you could please advise the version of Grub you were using? Mine is 0.96 and is the version that is available through puppy.

I've also tried it with and without the (hd0,0) statement in the splashimage instruction, and made sure that where it is told to point is, in fact, correct. Also using a /dev/ path. Maybe I should go and look again when I have a few. I don't think I have made a syntax error.

In my case it would surely be (hd0,4) for the first extended partition on the first drive? Corresponding to hda5 ? I have puppies on hda5, 6 and 7, in three different customisations, to check it out. And yes, I did try, out of interest if it would display in the other two linux partitions.

The reason it is not hd0,0 (hda1) is that partition is DOS bootable FAT32.

Also i thought I would mention that you're Point 4, regarding the solitaires having poor integrity, is referring to puppy's dotup downloader.

Yeah, thankyou to GuestToo for their extremely lucid explanation, it now makes a lot more sense to me.


BTW maybe I'm senile but I can't work out how to put a signature on my profile There seems to be an entry box missing on this specific forum lol.

Richard in (South) Australia.

[Pizzasgood]

Go up to the top of the screen. Click "Profile". The sig goes in the box in the image below:

[muggins]

i just checked my grub version & it's 0.94.

[richard.a]

Pizzasgood, the form I get is very different from yours, surprisingly...

Edit
Deleted having been resolved
Maybe a mod would like to delete this post?
/Edit

When we resolve this, I'll delete this post and the images, takes up space on the forum server and is very slow to load (of course)


Richard in (South) Australia

[Pizzasgood]

Strange

Just so you know, I think we're talking about two different types of boot-splashes. What I'm making will completely hide the text, showing nothing but an image from the time the kernel gets loaded until a split-second before Xwindows starts, and has nothing at all to do with Grub. Just so you don't think I'm holding out information or anything. I actually know little to nothing about using Grub.