Updated English version of puppy

[noprob]

I came across Puppy Linux back in the day 2003?

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=38677

I have been interested in this type (distribution) of Linux ever since.

The original mascot of Puppy Linux really touched me and had me to think this Linux has heart <3

Then ttuuxxx uploaded firehydrant and he had a very cool web site, gone but not forgotten.

I could continue with the many Puppy Linux derivatives or pups...

I look forward to whatever you decide to conjure up with Puppy Linux.

Thank you ttuuxxx,Barry K for Puppy Linux and all others who endeavor to use and promote the use of Puppy.

noprob

-eof

[ttuuxxx]

I came across Puppy Linux back in the day 2003?

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=38677

I have been interested in this type (distribution) of Linux ever since.

The original mascot of Puppy Linux really touched me and had me to think this Linux has heart <3

Then ttuuxxx uploaded firehydrant and he had a very cool web site, gone but not forgotten.

I could continue with the many Puppy Linux derivatives or pups...

I look forward to whatever you decide to conjure up with Puppy Linux.

Thank you ttuuxxx,Barry K for Puppy Linux and all others who endeavor to use and promote the use of Puppy.

noprob

-eof

I still own the website, just haven't made another one on it. Will think about it, just takes a lot of time.
ttuuxxx

[bigpup]

ttuuxxx,

Not sure if you have seen Tahrpup 6.0 CE and tried it out.

It is using Pale Moon as the installed browser.
Seems to be working OK. Kind of a clone of Firefox.

Also, Tahrpup 6.0 CE is a good example of what you get if building a Puppy using Woof CE.

Something to consider

[ttuuxxx]

ttuuxxx,

Not sure if you have seen Tahrpup 6.0 CE and tried it out.

It is using Pale Moon as the installed browser.
Seems to be working OK. Kind of a clone of Firefox.

Also, Tahrpup 6.0 CE is a good example of what you get if building a Puppy using Woof CE.

Something to consider

I think I might try CE. I'm opened to a Firefox fork as long as it doesn't act like the main release. I'm thinking try Tahrpup and see how Pale Moon goes after a couple of weeks of my intense surfing, If it stands up to my surfing habits, I'll make it default. Really a full a smallish full browser fork of FF over Chrome I would take any day, as long as it doesn't get crippled and crash after a few weeks of intense browsing, I usually use the net around 8+hrs a day and run live 24/7 and reset the PC every 3-4 months.
ttuuxxx

[bigpup]

Tahrpup 6.0 CE also has a nice feature that 666philb is using to provide update bug fixes.

He has Quickpet on the desktop.
Quickpet->info->Tahrpup bug fixes

Click on Tahrpup bug fixes and it downloads, installs, any and all bug fixes, available at that time.

Try it out when you do initial install of Tahrpup.
There are some bug fixes to install.

[Volhout]

Hi ttuuxxx,

Why not team with Barry? He is going your route if I am not mistaken.

[wboz]

It seems to me that maybe for some of these decisions you could let the user choose rather than struggle with the answer. Keep in mind that I am not a developer and have no right to make suggestions or requests. So in case it helps here are some thoughts and I hope in some way they may find you some benefit in some way.

The office-suite decision comes up a lot and it seems like a big struggle because there's a constant compromise needed. I think someone mentioned that even the "light" Abiword and maybe Gnumeric etc end up taking up 1/3 of a "slim" Puppy. Many distributions make Libreoffice available as packages so the user can install it if they find it valuable, but it doesn't double the size of the base distribution. Why not take a similar approach to Abiword, if it's a major piece of the size? Include a minimal editor only, make Abiword/Gnumeric available as a package.

Just speaking for myself, I don't use my Puppy systems to do office work. In fact, for my personal work I use Google Drive for writing. Of course plenty of people do like installed software and with a few clicks they can get it. I don't think there's any obligation to offer a doc-compatible office suite as bundled with the distribution -- just make it readily available.

Next is the choice of browser. This is a harder one because the "light" browsers are a real turnoff to many people. But even just choosing between Firefox and Chrome is going to disappoint someone, right? And neither is tiny. Especially I could caution you about trying to include Chrome in a "small" distribution because I think you may turn off the intended user, even though I myself like it. I am not certain what the right answer is.

Is it possible to offer Firefox along with clear instructions how to uninstall if it's not desired? I do like the idea of Pale Moon but that is more a personal curiosity ... my thinking would be more like, pick something that's not huge in size, that is relatively modern, that you know will appeal to at least a piece of your audience. And then offer alternatives too since there cannot be one right answer.

More thoughts at a later point maybe ... good luck! Very interested to see what happens...

[rufwoof]

I believe I was the last person to produce a full featured pup under 100m. It was called THINSlacko based on slacko 5.3 (slackware-13.37).

At the time, firefox 3 was still in final development so I shipped with that, no flashplayer and xz compressed. It was a good kernel too iirc.

My daily heavily used one and only choice (thanks Micko). Moved across just before XP stopped support some 8 months ago and used nothing else since (other than playing around). A solid core puppy for my hardware and some solid apps that work well for me.

Cut your Thin Slacko down to a leaner 75MB puppy sfs (80MB ISO), removed abiword, gnumeric ... and others to a core minimalist desktop (using a large compression dictionary during remastering also helped knock the size down some). Everything else loaded as SFS's/PET's on the fly. Boots real quick and as I load all the SFS's into ram, general usage is also quick.

I don't use a savefile as the core is more or less fixed/simple. Boot frugally and just have each SFS that's loaded symbolic link the respective config directory/files to outside of puppy (where the SFS's are stored), so config changes preserved across reboots. All data (documents etc.) also stored outside of puppy space.

I use Shinobar's portable firefox http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=91945 for general browsing, so the latest version all of the time and preserves history/bookmarks etc across reboots. For online banking I just reboot to the core puppy and use a wget script to download the latest firefox direct from Mozilla. I do have other sfs's for chrome (for its inbuilt flash) etc.

I use libre for office, again a SFS that's dynamically loaded as/when required. I've built up/accumulated quite a repository of apps/programs - for example recently having added PDFShuffler and Lynx http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 427#810427

Nice having a fixed core, no savefile, so exact same at each reboot, and everything else that's more dynamic as 'plugins'. Personally I'd rather see more modular choices of Puppy's. Something that boots to a basic GUI desktop for a wide range of hardware and the rest all added by the user according to their own preferences (Chrome or Firefox or Dillo ... Abiword or Libre of Soffice ... etc), with no need for savefile as the core is minimal/fixed and everything else is stored outside of puppy space.

I've merged multiple SFS's into single SFS's for some app combinations, such as Blender with OpenShot, audacity ....etc for a single 'multi-media' sfs. For others I just load the individuals i.e. my load-office script is (sfs_load_nocopy and petgetquiet are just versions of the normal sfs_load and petget scripts that have all of the interactions removed, so just run quietly) :

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
curdir=`pwd`
if [ ! -f /EXTRAS/.sfs_load_nocopy ]; then
   mkdir /EXTRAS
   cp ./.sfs_load_nocopy /EXTRAS/.sfs_load_nocopy
fi
if [ ! -f /EXTRAS/.petgetquiet ]; then
   mkdir /EXTRAS
   cp ./.petgetquiet /EXTRAS/.petgetquiet
fi

# Avoid double loading
if [ ! -f /EXTRAS/.libre-4.2.3.sfs ]; then
  cd ~
  cd .config
  rm -rf ./libreoffice
  ln -s /mnt/sda4/puppylivecdbuild-OFFICE-AMD/EXTRAS/libreoffice libreoffice
  cd $curdir
  yaf-splash -bg orange -text "Copying OFFICE files to RAM" &
  X3PID=$!
  cp .libre-4.2.3.sfs /EXTRAS/.libre-4.2.3.sfs
  cp .evince-2.30.3-i386.pet /EXTRAS/.evince-2.30.3-i386.pet
  cp .pdfshuffler.sfs /EXTRAS/.pdfshuffler.sfs
  cp .Xournal-0.4.8-x86.pet /EXTRAS/.Xournal-0.4.8-x86.pet
  kill $X3PID
  cd /EXTRAS
  yaf-splash -bg orange -text "Loading Libre SFS" &
  X4PID=$!
  ./.sfs_load_nocopy -c -q /EXTRAS/.libre-4.2.3.sfs
  cd /opt/libreoffice4.2/program
  ./soffice --quickstart &
  kill $X4PID
  cd /EXTRAS
  yaf-splash -bg orange -text "Loading EVINCE, PDF Shuffler, Xournal" &
  X5PID=$!
  ./.petgetquiet /EXTRAS/.Xournal-0.4.8-x86.pet
  ./.petgetquiet /EXTRAS/.evince-2.30.3-i386.pet
  ./.sfs_load_nocopy -c -q /EXTRAS/.pdfshuffler.sfs
  kill $X5PID
  yaf-splash -bg orange -text "Swapping epfdview for evince" &
  X6PID=$!
  #Substitute (better) evince for epdfview
  cd /usr/bin
  mv epdfview epdfview-orig
  ln -s /usr/bin/evince epdfview
  cd /usr/lib
  # Xournal requires libpoppler-glib.so.8
  ln -s libpoppler-glib.so.6.0.0 libpoppler-glib.so.8
  kill $X6PID
fi

The next logical step might be to have the apps (SFS's) in the cloud, i.e. a minimal fixed core puppy, everything else dynamically loaded as SFS's, but where those SFS's where retrieved using wget into local memory (and all data, word processor files were saved/stored remotely/to the cloud). I haven't fully gone that far myself, but I do have the potential (and have actually used a couple of times) to have a fully operational system and access to word processor, spreadsheet data etc within minutes given just a blank CD, PC and internet connection (i.e download and burn my remastered 80MB thin slacko puppy ISO, boot that CD and use puppy to retreive SFS's from my googledrive as required, and use those apps to access my cloud and/or USB based docs/data.

Here's a desktop snapshot. Noteworthy is how no HDD's are mounted, and how the personal storage space is all of available ram/swap space (memory). i.e. latest firefox retrieved using wget into memory space, soffice loaded as a SFS into memory ...etc.

[rufwoof]

I'm not really trying to get it under 100MB, What I'm doing is trying to get the system files under control, The backend of puppy has grown a lot since woof introduction

What would be a really neat puppy would be one that focussed on being able to boot the widest range of hardware - rather than the current focus towards 101 varieties of apps/desktops (puplets). Just enough to be able to boot, open up internet access and then add whatever apps the user preferred via perhaps a basic PPM type interface. Together with the option to preserve/re-load settings/configurations of those apps remotely, so that subsequent boots had the apps preconfigured as originally configured/tweaked.

That core puppy might be just a hardware detection mechanism and basic internet connection system, that enabled the rest to be pulled down/installed into memory from the internet according to each users personal preferences.

Fundamentally the variety of pupplets are 1000's of hours of effort to all be much the same - just different kernels, desktop background images, menu arrangement and choice of pre-installed apps. Simplified to a minimalist initial, the rest all being loaded on demand, and that might steer future collective effort away from fixed pre-installed apps + option to extend ... repeated replication, towards improving and extending the number of apps.

With data, apps and apps configurations all stored remotely, just the core minimalist puppy being local, the numbers and range of hardware that ran puppy would also expand IMO.

[puppyluvr]

Hello Jeff!
Nice to see you back. I know what you mean about kids, my son is 8 Thnksgiving day.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
I gave up and I just build everything by hand.
So I agree woofing up a base, and building on it from there, is the way to go.
Anyhow, good to see you back.

[mikeslr]

Hi All, and Have a Happy Thanksgiving,

I was catching up on this thread and so got to wboz's post. It got me thinking along the same lines as rufwoof & puppyluvr. What I was going to post would have been longer, but the posts of rufwoof and puppyluvr --both of whom know far more than I-- have pretty much covered it. So i'll only add the following:

One way to keep the ISO small while providing a user his or her choice of web-browser and document creation apps is not to include any. At all. All that is really necessary are applications such as 01micko's "GUI to download LibreOffice", http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 027#505027 combined with (I think) ETP's GUI or the routine provided by Quickpet in Tahrpup 6.0 so that the first time a user attempts to open "the" web browser or document creator he or she is provided with choices of which to download. [I think something like Quickpet would have to be used to obtain Abiword &/or gnumeric. Versions of LibreOffice downloaded and build via 01micko's app will run under any Pup built with recent-enough glibc, I don't know if downloads from Abiword.org could do the same].

In addition to Shinobar's portable-firefox, he or his team have also created portable-google-chrome and portable-seamonkey. I'm sure the technique they used could be applied to Chromium or other web-browsers. I think they used a similar technique to create portable-wine.

As an alternative to Shinobar's portable apps, a technique explained by playdaz and further developed by DaveS could be developed further. I've posted many times about the advantages of Program Folders and External Apps. Most recently regarding FileZilla. Essentially, all that is involved is to download an application from the organization which maintains it, and decompress it into a folder. Scripts on "the path" are then used to call the application's executable. The advantage shinobar's portable apps have is that they're designed to place the application's cache and settings outside any SaveFile. But his portable-web-browsers involve compressed files, while Program Folders are decompressed and so use less computer resources. Currently, as I don't have the programming skills to do so*, I have to manually move .mozilla out of /root and symlink it back. Someone, of course, should be able to write a script to do that automatically*. [This isn't necessary for Opera run from a folder. But unlike Firefox or Seamonkey, Opera can't be updated. You have to download and unpack a new version. Great if the new version is problematic as it hasn't over-written the old].

Once a user selects a web-browser, sszindian's 93k my-cloud apps, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 967#536967 --which works with any Pup-- enables the use of any cloud-based application.

Palemoon can only use a handful of Firefox's many addons. http://www.palemoon.org/faq.shtml. Opera remains my "default" browser despite that it has difficulty with an increasing number of websites and I hate its new GUI. But when opera has a problem with a website, or I want to accomplish something for which opera doesn't have a plugin, I'll copy the website address and open firefox to it.

mikeslr

* Actually, now that I think about it, I probably now know enough Bash. I'll have to see.