DebianDog - Jessie (21 June 2017)

[fredx181]

Sorry Toni, needed to make a small fix for correct icon, re-uploaded dogradio 0.0.2, see Edit1:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 507#854507
Thanks!

fred

[mcewanw]

Thanks for the new dogradio fred. I just tried it - the search facility is really nice! It found everything I searched for in a couple of different countries.

William

[fredx181]

Thanks for the new dogradio fred. I just tried it - the search facility is really nice! It found everything I searched for in a couple of different countries.

William

Yes, the search is nice, only thing is that most, but not all will actually play, probably for different reasons e.g: offline, not supported to play by mplayer, login required, flash only, etc...

Here's a littlle script, btw, to update the 'big' RadioSure playlist,
Partly took the code from simple-gtk-radio and added code to remove lines with duplicate '|' or none
(if more than one or none '|' on a line, the total output would be messed up)
So, this removes around 20 out of 28700 radiostations, which I think is not a real problem
Attached radiosure-update.tar.gz

Fred

[fredx181]

Hi Toni, William, All,

If I followed well, there's initrd1.xz for wheezy, that William provided with support for booting from Sdcard, but not for Jessie yet, so here it is:

https://googledrive.com/host/0ByBgCDlZZ ... sie-sdcard

Added 'sdhci sdhci-pci' to 'echo $i"loading kernel modules..."
for MODULE in ...
in linuxrc.

Unfortunately still can't test now booting from Sdcard, probably next week I will have the opportunity.

EDIT: Ooops, from testing, the initrd1.xz from William appears not to be working for wheezy, was it meant for Jessie then? I'm confused.

Fred

[fredx181]

Sorry,accidentally double posted.

Fred

[mcewanw]

EDIT: Ooops, from testing, the initrd1.xz from William appears not to be working for wheezy, was it meant for Jessie then? I'm confused.

Fred

Hi Fred,

I don't have any Jessie installation as yet, Fred, only Wheezy and MintPup and I am primarily booting from SD card in all cases. Perhaps you have accidentally used the wrong initrd.xz?

I've also used exactly the same initrd.xz booting from usb stick yesterday (MintPup one as far as I remember) and it worked fine.

William

[saintless]

Hi, Fred.

The initrd1.xz from William
http://kazzascorner.com.au/saintless/De ... ods.tar.gz
is for Wheezy 3.16 Pae kernel only:
http://kazzascorner.com.au/saintless/De ... 86-pae.iso
http://kazzascorner.com.au/saintless/De ... 86-pae.iso
We have separate kernel modules and two different kernel versions for jessie and Wheezy. I don't think uploading initrd1.xz with mods for one version or another helps.
When we are ready we will replace all separate kernel modules and iso images with sdcard mods (initrd1.xz and scripts).
Latest dogradio available from repository.

Toni

[fredx181]

The initrd1.xz from William
http://kazzascorner.com.au/saintless/De ... ods.tar.gz
is for Wheezy 3.16 Pae kernel only:

Ah, that explains it, thanks!

Fred

[Satori]

After running DDog Jessie for a week and configuring it for a daily OS, this is what I found:

using Synapic to install an app, the JWM loses custom settings which requires that I re-edit my changes which
involve font sizes and autohide of the tray.

LCD screen brightness changes to high, after a reboot.

Synaptic can get broken in which if a dependency fails to download, it leaves it in a state where the broken
reference can neither be removed or reinstalled. I was installing gstreamer and it failed to find libgudev which
'fix broken' could not resolve.

There seems no way to fix synaptic to work correctly again, as it kept complaining about 'broken packages'.

Using 'hardinfo', it shows that the OpenGL vendor is unknown and Direct Rendering is off. NVidia driver 340.65
is installed and nvidia's tool shows that direct render is 'on'.

This makes apps such as Kodi/XBMC unable to run because it looks at the same flag that hardinfo accesses.
The Direct Rendering was an issue under Wheezy as well and I was never able to resolve it, forcing me to use
other puppies if I wanted to use XBMC.

Chrome and VLC cannot be run under 'root'. There's a cheezy workaround for chrome involving the '--no-sandbox' flag
but to fix VLC involves hacking the binary to change a startup flag.

A 'user wrapper' that defines the XDisplay to access, would be handy in cases like Chrome and VLC.

DDog Jessie, as itself, works fine as a mini-debian distro but may be difficult for the casual puppy user,
who expects things to be plug-n-play. It's taken years of fine tuning of various scripts and gui-apps to make
puppy distros a user friendly system and may take time for DDog to achive the same level.

Overall, it's a keeper. But then, I'm not a casual linux user.

[mcewanw]

DDog Jessie, as itself, works fine as a mini-debian distro but may be difficult for the casual puppy user,
who expects things to be plug-n-play. It's taken years of fine tuning of various scripts and gui-apps to make
puppy distros a user friendly system and may take time for DDog to achive the same level.

Overall, it's a keeper. But then, I'm not a casual linux user.

Hi Satori,

I couldn't help but comment that I've been a Puppy user since 2008 but now I mainly use DebianDog (jwm and openbox) and haven't noticed any of the problems you have had. Admittedly, I have been using DD-wheezy, and not Jessie, but I doubt there would be such a difference. Perhaps I am wrong but I haven't noticed Toni or Fred discussing so many issues - all distributions have some issues of course, even the mainline ones.

Also, compared to the Puppies I have used, I find DebianDog to be just as polished, though neither have ever been perfect and time is indeed a great improver. Of course, sometimes I've run across the case where one of my several computers doesn't run well with a particular distribution but fine with another. I have a Toshiba satellite which has had tons of problems with pretty much all Puppies I've tried on it except upup by Pemasu (with which it works imperfectly, but quite well) - it does, however, also work fine with DebianDog.

So whilst I think the list of problems you have found DD-Jessie creates on your individual machine is very useful in bringing up potential issues with Toni, some of which may be fixable, I do think your are wrong to talk in generalisations as if DebianDog gives these problems whenever it is installed more generally. Having experienced such issues, you would need, I feel, to repeat the tests on different computers before you could reliably make such generalizations regarding its performance and usability.

Well, DebianDog wheezy, at least, certainly has none of these problems that I've noticed on my own machines at least. Perhaps Jessie is significantly different - though I don't see how since it is just an upgrade from Wheezy for the most part. In any case, I hope Fred or Toni can help you to achieve a better experience with the distribution and that some of your issues lead to an even better DebianDog. I would personally strongly recommend DebianDog to anyone who wanted a small and easy to maintain Puppy-like distribution with full Debian apt-get package management compatibility.

William

EDIT: As for Chrome and VLC not starting as root, that has nothing to do with DebianDog per say. The developers of these applications do not want them run by root user for security reasons. DebianDog focusses on Debian compatibility and I'm sure you would find Debian versions of Chrome and VLC do not run on mainline Debian either. You could of course re-compile with any flags you mention or use some other 'fix' - no doubt Puppy does that. Maybe Toni or Fred will provide a suitable workaround though since there are many who like to run as root user and also want to use these apps.

As far as Synaptics is concerned, the only time I've had any issues was when I accidentally used a repository that didn't match the system (Wheezy in my case). Of course, if you have ever installed any app that was not from an official Debian-Jessie repository then you may well run into all sorts of problems with your system, and could hardly expect otherwise, though I presume you have not done so. I do know the downloadable DD wheezy iso has an error in its /etc/apt/sources.list file in that it specifies 'stable' rather than 'wheezy' distribution, but that won't be the case with DD-Jessie (which is the current Debian stable anyway).

[mcewanw]

Fred,

I agree with you that since Thunar is nicely configured on openbox DD, it is unfair of me to highlight the fact that Rox and Xfe are not fully-configured in that DD version - I realise they are simply provided as convenience apps for those who want to use them and/or tinker with them. To be honest, Thunar is pretty good so I hardly ever do open Rox or Xfe when in DD openbox.

However, if I ever get round to trying to configure say Rox filer on DD openbox I'll let you know and upload what I'm using. I don't know if I'll bother to get round to that, since I know pretty much nothing about Rox, but I was inspired enough to have a look at some Rox documentation late last night so you never know if I get hooked on the subject or not! I think the best way to help any distribution develop is to actually search for and suggest fixes or improvements myself, when and if possible (which depends on my own limited capabilities and energy).

William

[saintless]

Thanks William.

DDog Jessie, as itself, works fine as a mini-debian distro but may be difficult for the casual puppy user,
who expects things to be plug-n-play. It's taken years of fine tuning of various scripts and gui-apps to make
puppy distros a user friendly system and may take time for DDog to achive the same level.

Overall, it's a keeper. But then, I'm not a casual linux user.

..........................
So whilst I think the list of problems you have found DD-Jessie creates on your individual machine is very useful in bringing up potential issues with Toni, some of which may be fixable, I do think your are wrong to talk in generalisations as if DebianDog gives these problems whenever it is installed more generally.
..........................

I don't see any questions in the quoted post.
Anyway I will repeat again for anyone who reads this - DebianDog is not Puppy. Asking here or googling for the same problem in Debian is the way to find what is wrong in your system.

For example this will help setup the LCD screen brightness:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 711#850711

I need
........................
3. Backlight set to 10 instead of 100

3. Try installing xbacklight (you need to run apt-get update only one time if you have saving changes working):

Code: Select all

apt-get update
apt-get install xbacklight

Set it from terminal to 10:

Code: Select all

xbacklight -set 10

Synaptic is not the best tool for fixing dpkg problems.
Apt-get is much smarter. Aptitude is the best.
In case no alien packages are installed and Synaptic can't resolve some dependencies type in terminal:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get -f install

Most probably some packages must be autoremoved (or you will get more information about the problem):

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get autoremove

Then start Synaptic again and it should work.

DD-Jwm has three different menu-systems included and all work the same way in Jwm. The default one is menu-puppy (mk-jwm.menu from Terry).
~/.jwmrc file is auto-generated after running update-menus from postinst or postrm script while installing/removing package. Editing ~/.jwmrc will not work to keep the changes. The change has to be made in ~/.jwm/jwm.head or jwm.tail
In case you change the theme from the menu do the same change again because ~/.jwm/jwm.tail file will be replaced with new theme settings from /opt/docs/jwm-themes files.
IceWm has only the official debian menu system and there will be message to change it switching to IceWm.

About programs not running as root I do not plan to make the process easier for the user. DebianDog is multiuser system and login from root to user takes 10 seconds. If you like to run such program as root make special startup script on the desktop.

I have no problem to get direct rendering working (also correct shown in hardinfo). But I'm sure it depends on hardware and correct drivers installed. I can't do anything about this but the user with such problem can find a way to fix it (since the needed hardware is available) and post the solution for others.

Toni

[mcewanw]

Chrome and VLC cannot be run under 'root'. There's a cheezy workaround for chrome involving the '--no-sandbox' flag
but to fix VLC involves hacking the binary to change a startup flag.

I note that this has been a problem in Puppy too and fixes documented in several places including:

http://ksiiitm.blogspot.co.nz/2011/05/r ... owser.html

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... er-in-root

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86487

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 148#703148

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1743565

If you already knew the 'hack' it would be more useful to supply a link.

William

[Gooplusplus]

For those interested, I will be releasing my next USB Multiboot Collection within a week or so.

Hi Gooplusplus,

Looks like an interesting offering, which I imagine will also make it easier to compare these different distributions. I'll keep an eye out for your release.

William

The USB Lite Speed 32 Collection is now available but only from a 6.5GB Google Drive download ZIP file link. I will have a valid torrent link up in a day or two.

The collection requires an 8GB USB flash drive for a non-persistent install and 16GB USB flash drive to add some/all of the (highly compressed) 8.5GB of persistence files.

Here are some relevant links:

http://www.gooplusplus.com/download-2015-lite-speed-32 Google Drive download

http://www.gooplusplus.com/multiboot-20 ... -speed-32/ Documentation, links, setup and 480 pixel width distro images

http://www.gooplusplus.com/multiboot-20 ... eed-32.pdf PDF version

http://www.gooplusplus.com/multiboot-20 ... blinks.htm Related distro reviews (text/YouTube) + links

http://www.gooplusplus.com/multiboot-20 ... ackup.html USB persistence information

https://picasaweb.google.com/1065475095 ... LS32Images Distro Images - with 1366x768 download option

BTW, I was unable to get DebianDog USB persistence in a YUMI multiboot USB flash drive using the live-rw method so I used the Porteus method.

Has anyone gotten Debian-based file-based USB persistence working with YUMI multiboot structure/software?

Each year I release a few USB multiboot collections. For future collections, will there be a version number for updated DebianDog releases?

[saintless]

BTW, I was unable to get DebianDog USB persistence in a YUMI multiboot USB flash drive using the live-rw method so I used the Porteus method.

Has anyone gotten Debian-based file-based USB persistence working with YUMI multiboot structure/software?

I don't know what is the problem but for file with name live-rw you need to use initrd1.img and persistent in the boot code. If live-rw is at top of vfat or ext partition this should be enough. If it is inside /live then you need to add also persistent-path=live/
But porteus-boot is more flexible and better choice for testing new system.

Each year I release a few USB multiboot collections. For future collections, will there be a version number for updated DebianDog releases?

Maybe not version number but the date or something similar will be added.

Toni

[Gooplusplus]

I don't know what is the problem but for file with name live-rw you need to use initrd1.img and persistent in the boot code. If live-rw is at top of vfat or ext partition this should be enough. If it is inside /live then you need to add also persistent-path=live/

YUMI's FAT32 (vfat) directory structure is /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/isolinux and /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/live etc.

The Porteus method works fine but I wanted to figure out how to get the live-rw method working since it is common to other Debian distros. The 64-bit collection I will release in August will probably include Debian-based TweakOS, a post-Crunchbang distro using Jessie. I'd like to add USB persistence to that and other Debian distros via YUMI multiboot but I have not had any success with Debian-based distros.

[Satori]

Hiyas...

When I said a 'hack' for VLC to get around the root user problem, I truely meant an old school hack of using
a binary editor to manually change a variable reference. It can be googled easily enough but compiler outputs
are a moving target and I can't really recommend it to anyone.

As for setting the lcd screen brightness, the real problem is that it's changed at all. My dell laptop uses a function
key that ties to the bios, which sets the current screen brightness and xwindows startup overrides it.

have fun

[saintless]

As for setting the lcd screen brightness, the real problem is that it's changed at all. My dell laptop uses a function
key that ties to the bios, which sets the current screen brightness and xwindows startup overrides it.

I'm sure Debian developers don't see real problem since this is the way Xorg and official kernel work. Second easy solution for this problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132

acpi_osi=
This option frequently solves problems with LCD backlight, fan control problems and misreporting of thermal events.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/128463/h ... brightness

I use GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi="
(I'm on an Aspire 5750-6866.) It works fine, same control levels I had in Windows.
My brightness used to be stuck at max before I discovered this.

Toni

[fredx181]

Hi gooplusplus,

First, my compliments for your new USB Lite Speed 32, it's just great!!!
It was a bit of a hassle to install, tried from linux first, but gave up early and used Windows XP for installing to USB.
It would be nice if there is a little more documentation and support about how to setup on linux.

Only Android and Tinycore didn't work for me (stuck at console, not starting GUI)

saintless wrote:
I don't know what is the problem but for file with name live-rw you need to use initrd1.img and persistent in the boot code. If live-rw is at top of vfat or ext partition this should be enough. If it is inside /live then you need to add also persistent-path=live/

YUMI's FAT32 (vfat) directory structure is /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/isolinux and /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/live etc.

For me persistency works with live-boot 2 by using this entry in /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/isolinux/live.cfg :

Code: Select all

label DebianDog live-boot-2 
kernel /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/live/vmlinuz1
append noprompt live-media-path=/multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/live persistent persistent-path=/multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie initrd=/multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie/live/initrd1.img boot=live config swapon noeject quickreboot forcepae

This is when live-rw savefile is placed in /multiboot/DebianDog-Jessie

Added 'forcepae' because I don't have PAE capable CPU, BTW, I think adding it doesn't do any harm if a computer does have PAE.

Fred

[fredx181]

Fred,

I agree with you that since Thunar is nicely configured on openbox DD, it is unfair of me to highlight the fact that Rox and Xfe are not fully-configured in that DD version - I realise they are simply provided as convenience apps for those who want to use them and/or tinker with them. To be honest, Thunar is pretty good so I hardly ever do open Rox or Xfe when in DD openbox.

However, if I ever get round to trying to configure say Rox filer on DD openbox I'll let you know and upload what I'm using. I don't know if I'll bother to get round to that, since I know pretty much nothing about Rox, but I was inspired enough to have a look at some Rox documentation late last night so you never know if I get hooked on the subject or not! I think the best way to help any distribution develop is to actually search for and suggest fixes or improvements myself, when and if possible (which depends on my own limited capabilities and energy).

William

Thanks William, Yes, it would be nice if there's more options for Rox or Xfe on OpenBox version.
I tried, but could never be 'friends' with Rox, on all Puppy's I've tried in the past, I always installed a different filemanager.
Xfe I like much more ,btw.

Fred