(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jemimah:

I sincerely trust and hope I have misunderstood your intent with what appears to be the idea of a closed forum for discussion and development. I understand the pitfalls of everything in the open.. but you have a lot of contributors on this forum who have may years of valuable experience. Some of us do not chime up very often, as we are not currently coders... but have years and years of valuable experience with systems and software....and lots of test machines and hardware.

Yes long threads can be confusing and their must be a better way... but please do not shut out our comments. Many of us use the forum daily. And when appropriate make a contribution.

I don't intend to create any closed forums.

The idea is to have something better than a forum thread. Whoever wants to, can contribute.

My point was, I'm not trying to replace the Puppy Wiki, or this forum. The only people who would care about the new site would be Saluki contributors.

For Puppeee I use both this forum, and the puppeee blog/forum - I get different contributors in each place. In fact, the Puppeee website has been a lot busier than the murga-linux forum thread recently.

Jemimah/Minnesota my words of "closed" only was meant to reflect that controls are in place to exercise how contributions can be made/managed. In reflection, "closed" was a bad word and better word(s) could have be used.

Sorry for any confusion that was caused.

I'd just like to point out that a Saluki is one of the fastest dogs on earth, this level of speed and grace is only achieved by the fact that there isn't an ounce of wasted space on a dog of this sort, lean and swift, no extra baggage.....

Why re-invent the wheel? ...

"As per my usual habit of reinventing the wheel, I have created my own basic version control system, named Bones."

~Barry Kauler
http://bkhome.org/woof/index.html

...'cause that's how puppies are born.

Well, if the coordinator wants to try groupware for greater productivity and record-keeping, why not?

May I suggest webcollab, as it seems to be a mature collaboration suite? (I have seen the size of Tikiwiki since years ago and always get sleepless nights thinking about maintaining it. )

We still have servage.net hosting, and we can use a domain for it, like puppyce.org.

does anyone know of experimentation with something like:

LD_PRELOAD [a_bunch_of_libs] /sbin/init

I wonder if this would allow you to unmount an entire filesystem containing all of the libraries and put them in a usable place.

using the --as-needed LDFLAG may be required??? ... maybe dummy libs too?

I built the latest gnash, and while obviously a bit buggy, I think it could almost pass in place of Flashplayer. I had some trouble with some YouTube videos, but 80-90% of them work. Haven't tested flash games yet.

My gnash build is 6.9MB uncompressed with a static libboost, and could probably be smaller if optimized. I also expect better performance as gnash can render with openGL and uses ffmpeg for video playback.

EDIT: I am now having zero problems with youtube in Chrome. Maybe firefox is the culprit.

Flash games maybe half of them work and video from sites other than youtube... a bit iffy.

jemimah wrote:I built the latest gnash, and while obviously a bit buggy, I think it could almost pass in place of Flashplayer. I had some trouble with some YouTube videos, but 80-90% of them work. Haven't tested flash games yet.

IMHO, that alone relegates the distro to non-usable for all but special purposes.

(oops....please, not another flash discussion....

thanks afgs, have added to wiki page and will modify blog shortly
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy6

jemimah wrote:EDIT: I am now having zero problems with youtube in Chrome. Maybe firefox is the culprit.

Chrome normally contains its own copy of Flash built in. I never checked to see if the Puppy version did this, but I assume so. That would account for the difference.

jpeps wrote: IMHO, that alone relegates the distro to non-usable for all but special purposes.

Agreed.

(but there are people like me whose only use for flash is the occasional youtube video).

This will work in places where flash will not, like slow machines or on platforms that flashplayer does not support (it's also extremely flexible on the dependencies). If flash is deemed too big - this is better than nothing, And it will only get better if the devs keep working on it.

SirDuncan wrote:

jemimah wrote:EDIT: I am now having zero problems with youtube in Chrome. Maybe firefox is the culprit.

Chrome normally contains its own copy of Flash built in. I never checked to see if the Puppy version did this, but I assume so. That would account for the difference.

It's not "built in" the way you are thinking - it's easy to delete it and replace with gnash. It's quite easy to tell which one you are using, as gnash has a lot more options on the menu.

LightSpark looks promising, the next version should have some hybrid software and hardware rendering engine that uses Pango and OpenGL.

Seems very promising to me.

Oooh I see there is a new lightspark release. Maybe I'll build it and compare.

Lobster wrote:thanks afgs, have added to wiki page and will modify blog shortly
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy6

Like what you've started.
Does the team have an IRC?

I sometimes hang out in #puppylinux (less now that I'm on vacation) and Iguleder is there pretty often.

As you probably know, I'm working on my own distro and its own ISO building tool. It uses a file named /etc/distrorc which has 4 variables - the distro name, the distro file prefix ("pup"), the version (600) and release date. That's an idea I had even before the Woof age, but back at the time I didn't have the skills to make my own distro.

It's an independent distro that has nothing to do with Puppy, but I use many paths and directory names to make it easier. For instance, the main SFS file is mounted under /mnt/${distroFilePrefix}ro.

The initramfs has just Busybox, udev and all kernel modules at the moment (it's 16 MB, very big, gzip compressed) but I want to experiment with a monolithic kernel or the Puppy way of doing things, block device modules in the initramfs and the rest in the main SFS. This way the initramfs can be 2-4 MB and other modules don't waste RAM. Not very hard to achieve, I just need to figure out which modules must go into the initramfs.

So far this thing boots just fine from any media - it creates a (writeable) tmpfs on /, then locates $distroFilePrefix-$distroVersion.sfs, links its contents, if there is a directory named $distroFilePrefix-extensions in the same directory as the SFS, it loads all the SFSs in it. Then, it checks whether $PdistroFilePrefix}save.img exists and loads it - it uses it as a writeable Aufs layer on top of the vanilla /root. Also has a /root/Startup mechanism. There's a 2-3 seconds delay in the decompression stage (due to the huge size, I'll solve this problem), but it boots kinda fast with 93 SFSs

One init script, automatic detection of installation sub-directories, automatic SFS loading, no SFS limit, no "pmedia" thing. It has only SFS extensions and no "packages", the ability to load SFSs on-the-fly is good enough - no waste of precious space in the save file. Just one method of package-management that is transparent to the end-user. That's the way I like it.

Also, it's much "safer" than Puppy - the whole / is writable but changes are discarded on boot; only /root is persistent through a save file. Sort of a good compromise between Puppy's total control and Tiny Core's toughness and durability. The system always remains clean and nothing is altered so no loss of performance over time.

I still need to add a save file creation mechanism and I have a plan to make a boolean variable in /etc/distrorc that determines whether just /root is persistent or it runs in "Puppy-compatibility mode"

It's very generic, all "system" files and directories are named after the distro's details specified in /etc/distrorc, so it's kinda easy to do rebranding.

EDIT: I'm so stupid, forgot the punch line - I can upload this if you need anything for Saluki.

You should probably upload it. I expect people will find it useful.

Personally I prefer "total control" and simplicity but I could be wrong.

OK, uploading Calf GNU/Linux 001, find it here. It's a very primitive and stupid alpha release, don't expect too much from it.

It uses a Puppy Squeeze kernel ('cos it no longer has its own kernel, I'm gonna compile one soon) and packages I built manually (yes, all built manually using a home-made cross-toolchain) for i486 with i686 optimizations. At the moment I'm rebuilding the whole thing, every single package, manually. And I'm going to make a good kernel for it, based on the Squeeze 2.6.32.24 kernel.

The save file is blank and consists of just zeros, gunzip it after you download it. To boot this thing, create a bootable USB stick with Puppy's installer, then put these files on it, I used Puppy's names (initrd.gz, vmlinuz) to make it more familiar.

If you want, there's also clf-extensions, that's a directory with SFS extensions. Put it on your flash drive if you want Calf to load them, it's automatic. It has lots of stuff, WeeChat, Vim, GCC, blah blah. 93 extensions in total, a full "devx" plus many console applications.

The command to load a SFS on-the-fly is simply "loadsfs" and it's stupid, it doesn't know how to create save files, it's around 5 lines of code I'm too lazy to add at the moment, I'm working on other things like init speed improvements.

Known problem: I boot it on my netbook and I need to pass "i915.modeset=0" to disable KMS which makes my screen go blank FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON.

I'm still uploading the extensions, so check the MD5s.

EDIT: forgot some important things-
1) It's console-only but can connect to a wireless network, play music, download torrents and browse the internet.
2) clf-001.sfs contains just some crappy stuff that appear in /root ... for testing.
3) When you decide to try it, clear your mind of any expectations. Maybe it won't boot.
4) Before you decide to try it, assume it runs rm -rf /
5) I don't remember if it's the copy I booted yesterday which worked well and passed all my tests ... it could be a non-booting copy too.