Some questions about Puppy before I start using it

[Trichechus]

Hello!

I have a fairly old Samsung Q1, 900MHz CPU and 2GB RAM. I've been running versions of Mint for quite some time. That works, but none too fast. I've had my eye on Puppy for a while and with Tahrpup 6.0 coming out I'm close to making the switch.

My first impression of Tahr is: wow! Great work. Fast, elegant, idiosyncratic in a good way. I'd really like to run this!

Things I was happy to find working:
* internet -- very easy with Frisbee
* sound, including recording from an external USB microphone
* video (though hi-res mp4 is choppy - may be a general memory limitation)
* printer (HP Photosmart 5510) after the driver became available in the CUPS menu after installing hplip (an added 31MB including dependencies)
* no-fuss access to PDFs, YouTube, .doc files... I don't really like these, but can't get around them pragmatically (Hmm, apparently YT works via its HTML5 -- not Flash. Okay!)

But, a long list of questions, pardon the length...

* I don't fully understand the run-from-memory and savefile system. My test runs are from a 1GB USB pendrive, with 512MB assigned to the savefile. Now:
(1) What actually happens when I install additional packages? Are they 'installed into RAM'? But I suppose the idea is to make them permanent by installing them to the savefile, too -- but what if the size of the additional packages exceeds those 512MB (in this case)?
(2) Does Puppy use the remainder of the space on the pendrive in any way? Or is the idea that this can be used as a general 'data storage space'?

* I have an empty 10GB partition on my hard disk, and am considering installing Puppy there...
(1) Frugal install is recommended by the installer. But does a fully installed system work faster? Presumably a full install does not use RAM in the same way as a frugal one?
(2) If I choose a frugal install, can I have a savefile that can expand indefinitely (up to the limits of the 10Gig partition of course)?
(3) I did a test install, in which Grub4Dos created a new MBR. This made the existing Mint system inaccessible, because it uses fake-pae to simulate a pae system (which my processor isn't, but Mint requires). For now, I restored the old MBR (thanks Puppy for pointing out how). There probably was an option in the Grub4Dos install that allows keeping the fake-pae setting... but where?
(4) Will Puppy actually work faster from the HD than from a pendrive? I have another 16GB pendrive -- perhaps I may just as well make that my system's home?

* I blacklisted snd_pcsp in the BootManager in hopes of disabling the pc speaker beep heard upon e.g. unsuccessful tab completion in the terminal. Even after reboot (and the module is still blacklisted, as it should), this doesn't help -- the beep is still there.

* In my Mint install, I have sets of xrandr and xinput commands that allow me to fine-tune monitor and touchscreen settings (I sometimes use an extra attached monitor). The xrandr commands work fine in Puppy. But xinput does not. It does not recognize my 'Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen' so I cannot set its properties. 'xinput list' gives:

Code: Select all

⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Mouse0                                  	id=7	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Keyboard0                               	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)

Trying 'xinput set-int-prop "Virtual core XTEST pointer" ...' does nothing. Curiously, HardInfo does list Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen under 'Input Devices', so it's not entirely unnoticed by the system...

* Installing and using acpitool -s to suspend the computer works, by itself. But after waking up again, I get error messages when Puppy tries to write to the savefile: "Warning! There were some errors detected (see /tmp/snapmerge-puppy-error for details). Filesystem check of the savefile (pfix=fsck) is highly recommended." Apparently something is amiss with the pendrive then...

* Neither of my smartphones (Samsung GT-S5300 and Fairphone) is recognized when plugging them in via USB -- i.e. with the intention of transferring files. Is there a way to do this?

* There is no bluetooth out of the box. I installed bluez (along with dependencies). But that seems to be 'only' behind-the-scenes stuff, excluding an interface to actually use bluetooth - correct? I notice the blueman package ('Graphical bluetooth manager'). But this too has lots of dependencies like the Gnome icons, and I wonder if that's the right way to go...

* ... further from the above, does Puppy get badly bloated if you feed it some other distro's diet? Do many Puppy users find that they have to install half a Gnome-y system or half a KDE-y system? Does that degrade Puppy's responsiveness, or will it keep its edge?

Please do not take some of the above as criticism. I'm in awe and grateful. Just trying to understand what beastie this is.

Thanks!

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
First, welcome!
Now to your questions:
1. I only use frugal, as a full install uses a whole partition, limits you to one Puppy, (I have 18 ) and complicates using .sfs files.
2. When you make your savefile you are given the option to use the whole partition. I use 1gb. Move large programs to /mnt/home and link to them.
3. Fake pae? IDK..
4. Unless your hdd is ssd, the usb drive is faster. I just use the hdd for storage, so unless I mount it, it never even spins up.
In your video player you can choose output:
Try switching from x11 to xv or (if you have the drivers), gl.
Your touchscreen prob needs a module loaded. Dont have bluetooth, cant help you on that one.
For phone access, search "MTPdevice" on the forum.

[ardvark]

* ... further from the above, does Puppy get badly bloated if you feed it some other distro's diet? Do many Puppy users find that they have to install half a Gnome-y system or half a KDE-y system? Does that degrade Puppy's responsiveness, or will it keep its edge?

Hi...

Welcome to the forum

As far as Puppy losing its edge, while I couldn't tell you exactly, it's certainly a possibility, especially for older systems. You would have to experiment and see.

I'm sorry I don't have any answer better than that or answers to your other questions.

Regards...

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
See here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=91442

[666philb]

hi Trichechus,

with some phones you need to click the mount icon on the desktop.

tahrpup has suspend to ram already setup with acpi & acpid-busybox. (script is /etc/acpi/actions/suspend.sh) and will not suspend if there's a mounted usb as puppy may have booted off it and be writing to the save, which seems to be what happened when you forced suspend with a different tool.

if you install puppy frugally to a linux partition ext2,ext3 or ext4, you will get the option to use save-to-folder, which unlike a savefile, doesn't need to be re-sized manually and will just grow to use the space on the partition.

the console beep can on some kernel/hardware combinations be switched off in retrovol (right click on the taskbar volume icon and choose full window)

there is a bluetooth pet on the forum but it will need updating for tahrpup

your touch screen driver probably wasn't enabled in the kernel config, can you post more info, so that it can be enabled in future kernels.

[Trichechus]

Thanks all. Between you, you've given pointers for all of the issues, so I'll have a look at it ASAP. For now:

@puppyluvr:

Move large programs to /mnt/home

Hm... how? I don't know much about how and where Linux programs get typically installed, but my impression was that it's in various folders, the binary file here, shared libraries there, config files somewhere else. So it seems hard to move a single large program...?

Is /mnt/home the 'free' remainder of the puppified USB drive?

@666philb:

with some phones you need to click the mount icon on the desktop.

Do you mean on the Puppy desktop, like the icons for sda1, sda2, sdb or whatever partitions there are? But such an icon does not appear when I plug in the phone.

I did try all the settings on the phones themselves. The only one which produced something was the 'attach as camera' setting on the Fairphone, in which case Puppy recognized a camera -- but it was fickle, with the mount breaking down when I tried to move some photos from phone to desktop. Also I imagine mount-as-camera does not give access to all files on the phone (I may be wrong).

In any case I'll have a look at the MTP stuff puppyluvr mentioned...

your touch screen driver probably wasn't enabled in the kernel config, can you post more info, so that it can be enabled in future kernels

Not sure what info you need, but I get this from here within Mint:

~$ xinput list-props "Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen"
Device 'Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen':
Device Enabled (151): 1
Coordinate Transformation Matrix (153): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
Device Accel Profile (276): 0
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (277): 1.000000
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (278): 1.000000
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (279): 10.000000
Device Product ID (270): 3823, 1
Device Node (271): "/dev/input/event3"
Evdev Axis Inversion (280): 0, 0
Evdev Axis Calibration (281): <no items>
Evdev Axes Swap (282): 0
Axis Labels (283): "Abs X" (274), "Abs Y" (275)
Button Labels (284): "Button Left" (154), "Button Unknown" (273), "Button Right" (156), "Button Wheel Up" (157), "Button Wheel Down" (158)
Evdev Middle Button Emulation (285): 0
Evdev Middle Button Timeout (286): 50
Evdev Third Button Emulation (287): 0
Evdev Third Button Emulation Timeout (288): 1000
Evdev Third Button Emulation Button (289): 3
Evdev Third Button Emulation Threshold (290): 20
Evdev Wheel Emulation (291): 0
Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (292): 0, 0, 4, 5
Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (293): 10
Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (294): 200
Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (295): 4
Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (296): 0
Evdev Axis Callibration (418): 88, 3964, 192, 3907

In HardInfo:

Name Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen
Type Joystick
Bus 0x3
Vendor eef
Product 0x1
Version 0x100
Connected to usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input0

Let me know if you need other info.

cheers!

[Bushbuck]

* video (though hi-res mp4 is choppy - may be a general memory limitation)

Hi Trichechus, in the Gnome MPlayer Setting Preferences menu, make sure that "Enable cache" is enabled, and set it to a generous size, and that might smooth out the performance a bit. That helped with DVDs here.

[Techtardette]

I found this on Google and this is how I got my phone recognized:

USB

The first thing to do is check and make sure that your *nix box is recognizing your phone via USB. To start off, with the phone unplugged from the box, open up a terminal and run:
dmesg
You should get something about USB being disconnected, or alternatively no message about USB at all (check the end of the output). Now, connect your phone to a USB port, and run dmesg again. You should see an output at the end that says something about 'high speed USB device' or something similar.

[dejan555]

savefile is like a virtual drive that gets mounted as root "/" of your system, also main and any additional "sfs" files are mounted as another layer and everything eventually acts as one filesystem but changes are all saved in savefile as sfs files are read-only.
/mnt/home becomes link to drive/partition where you installed puppy.
Anything that you install or save will use space from savefile.
There's an icon in system tray that shows you how much "personal space" you have left.
There's utility in puppy menu to increase savefile size if you need to.
It's good if you save documents (music, docs, videos) somewhere outside savefile (on hd partition or something, mounted as /mnt/sd*) so it doesn't waste savefile space.
Also, if you add pfix=fsck at the end of kernel line in grub's menu.lst, savefile will be checked at boot once in a while for errors as they tend to get corrupted after some time.

Since you have enough memory I reccomend using frugal, it's really how most puppy users have it setup, after you get used to it I think it's easier to use.

About beep, snd_pcsp: try blacklisting "pcspkr" module

[mikeb]

Hi res mp4 will be choppy on that system...h264 is cpu intensive and you certainly will not have any hardware acceleration for it in the graphics...simply not fast enough and memory is pretty irrelevant to playback issues in spite of the myth unless its in flashplayer.

Double check gnome player is set to xv output as the default tends not to be... unlikely if other stuff plays ok.

mike

[Techtardette]

Hi, Trichechus.

This link may be helpful with your phone: GSM Tethering: http://wiki.howardforums.com/index.php/ ... with_Linux

By the way, I am a newbie, so if this doesn't help, no harm intended. Enjoy Puppy. I have been loving learning a little about UNIX.

[Uten]

hi Trichechus,

This is my approach to avoid bloat and let my puppy stay sharp.
1: I try to not use a save file (pfix=ram in your boot configuration). As you pointed out it will fill up rather quickly.
2: I make a (or rather several) sfs file containing applications and configurations I use every day. Then I load he sfs files as I need them. I have one for my browser of choice ( Make a new one when the browser is updated ). Java has one and libreOffice in a separate one. On for cad applications and finally one for math and engineering related stuff.
3: Stuff I don't use often but that I find handy to have around is installed when needed. I usually download the needed packages to a local folder on my hd and install them from there. I have a modified petget script to do this, but using PPM and select local folder as your source works to.

There are nuances to this approach. I have to configure my network settings every time I restart the machine. I also mount samba shares and he likes manual every time. But all in all (after trying suse, redhat, slaxware, ubuntu, mint, tinycore and others) puppy is the best solution I have found to work with my old hardware.

Wish you the best on your quest to find your perfect system. [/list]

[mikeb]

Uten...an sfs made of your settings which gets loaded at boot to pup_rw would do the trick

Or use the sfs load method that loads it ON TOP of the main sfs.

By the way the kernel can load up to 252 sfs files .... and the on the fly scipt use here can at least take advantage of some of that.

mike