(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Well , I love Puppy! I've spent since Friday night rebuilding an ancient laptop with three Linux distros, and Puppy is by far the best in terms of speed, stability and features.

That said, I have been hitting different sites for a few hours now (and to no avail). I am trying to find a tiny application that will alert me with a WAV file when I get an incoming message from gmail.

I am using Seamonkey right now. This was not a problem in either Windoze, or in Ubuntu with Firefox, but I don't even know if Firefox will work with Mozilla extensions/add-ons in Puppy.

Has anybody researched this before? Does such a critter exist for Seamonkey, or has somebody compiled a small PET file already?

Thank you!

Gmail Notifier is for firefox, my be you can add a firefox to your puppy.

there is firefox on forum, you can search it. or just click my signature. it willbe bring you to firefox.pet,

Thnak you, but I had heard that Firefox is a bit slower than SeaMonkey, so I had wanted to stay with SeaMonkey.

Do you know if the pet that you built will accept Firefox add-ons/extensions?

SaskMike wrote:That said, I have been hitting different sites for a few hours now (and to no avail). I am trying to find a tiny application that will alert me with a WAV file when I get an incoming message from gmail.

I am using Seamonkey right now. This was not a problem in either Windoze, or in Ubuntu with Firefox, but I don't even know if Firefox will work with Mozilla extensions/add-ons in Puppy.

Has anybody researched this before? Does such a critter exist for Seamonkey, or has somebody compiled a small PET file already?

I use an add-on in Firefox called GMail Notifier by Doron Rosenberg. It places an icon in the Firefox status line, and provides notification when new mail arrives. It can be set to automatically log in if I'm not when I click on the status bar icon, and open GMail in a new firefox tab. The developer claims it works in SeaMonkey 1.0 plus, but I haven't tried it in SM yet. (I don't recall if it plays WAV files. I prefer machines to not speak unless spoken to, and turn aubible alarms off.)

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/173

Firefox is Firefox, and most add-ons work in the Linux version as well as the Windows or Mac OS/X versions. (Those that don't work in all architectures tend to say so.)

The same is true for SeaMonkey. Mozilla code is designed to be portable and cross-platform, and most add-ons are too.

Puppy ships with a 1.1X version of SeaMonkey. It's smaller and faster than Firefox, and is a decent choice for lower end machines, but is no longer developed. The current SeaMonkey version is 2.03, based on current versions of the Gecko rendering engine.

Add-ons will require some research. SeaMonkey 1.1X used an XPIInstall framework. SeaMonkey 2.X uses the Gecko Toolkit used by Firefox and Thunderbird. Extensions written for one will not run in the other.

In addition, SeaMonkey 1.1X provides no built in way to uninstall extensions that aren't behaving or that you don't use. Fortunately, there's an extension for that. I use Jeremy Gillick's Extension Uninstaller, available here: http://mozmonkey.com/

The canonical place to get Mozilla extensions is the Mozilla Add-ons site, at http://addons.mozilla.org. Go and look. You'll find a raft of useful stuff.
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Dennis

Thanks for the explanation of some of the issues I am encountering in the new-found Linux world.

I think I can safely say that I can do without the gmail incoming mail audio notification. I am not prepared at this late hour to start playing with extensions that I may or may not be able to successfully remove immediately..

The version of SeaMonkey that comes with Puppy is version 1.1.18 or something like that, so I may just have to start by finding a more up-to-date browser and don't even know what the security audit considerations of this particular browser are.

Who cares though? Cripes, as of Friday night I had never used a Linux mini-distro or even setup a partition before. As of today, I have an older P3 laptop with less than 150 MB of RAM that is now screaming with three Linux distros using some nonsense called grub.

Good bye, Windows![/i]

Do you use Pwidgets, if so there is a Gmail widget that will run whether you are using a browser or not. It checks your account at regular intervals.

You can always use pwidgets and clear all widgets except the Gmail one.

I suspect I can add a sound for new mail for you if really necessary.

SaskMike wrote:Thanks for the explanation of some of the issues I am encountering in the new-found Linux world.

You're welcome.

I think I can safely say that I can do without the gmail incoming mail audio notification. I am not prepared at this late hour to start playing with extensions that I may or may not be able to successfully remove immediately..

The first thing I do for SM 1.18 is install the extension I mentioned that lets me remove extensions.

The version of SeaMonkey that comes with Puppy is version 1.1.18 or something like that, so I may just have to start by finding a more up-to-date browser and don't even know what the security audit considerations of this particular browser are.

SeaMonkey 1.1X gets the not for delivery with Puppy because it's smaller and faster on the sort of hardware Puppy tends to be installed on.

As mentioned, the current SeaMonkey branch is 2.0, with 2.03 just released. It's built on the latest version of the Gecko rendering engine used by all Mozilla products, and uses the Gecko Toolkit infrastructure, so add-ons and be installed and removed the same way they are in Firefox or Thunderbird.

It's bigger and slower than SM 1.18. I'd play with the existing SM version a bit before looking at switching. It may meet your needs. Yes, there have been security updates in later SeaMonkey versions, but this is Linux, not Windows, and security threats are less of a concern because most of the stuff you would worry about targets Windows and doesn't affect Linux.

On a machine with 150MB of RAM, SM 2+ and FF 3+ may just be too big and resource hungry.

I can provide advice on customizing SM 1.18, and what add-ons you might want to look at. In particular, you might want to look at
http://www.lamarelle.org/mo-zi-lla/mozilla.php#smf

The proprietor has been compiling static builds of SeaMonkey 1.18 and 2.0X. Static builds have as much as possible compiled into the executable, rather than linking against external libraries. They tend to load faster on the sort of hardware Puppy is run on.

Who cares though? Cripes, as of Friday night I had never used a Linux mini-distro or even setup a partition before. As of today, I have an older P3 laptop with less than 150 MB of RAM that is now screaming with three Linux distros using some nonsense called grub.

Good bye, Windows!

The box I run Puppy on is an old Fujitsu Lifebook, with 256MB of RAM. It has a 40GB UDMA 4 hard drive triple booting Win2K Pro, Ubuntu 9.10, and Puppy 4.31. Win2K is snail slow, and only there for when I have to have Windows for something. Ubuntu 9.10 is sluggish but usable. Puppy and the built in apps are fairly sprightly. Other things are another matter. Firefox 3.6, for instance, takes about 30 seconds to load and initialize, and is sluggish once up. I have it installed because I'm testing what I can do to optimize it for lower end gear, but I know patience is required when using it.
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Dennis

Yes, Ubuntu was the first distro that I tried to install. It installed all the way then hung. I knew beforehand that the processor and RAM were insufficient.

I am now triple-booting Tiny Core, Puppy, and Vector. All three are much more responsive than any Windows product that I could install on this relic.

Using SeaMonkey in Puppy is, for the most part, a decent experience. Flash is out of the question though. The low RAM just cripples the browser trying to process Flash. Most websites though open in excellent times. I tried just about everything to get Flash to improve its performance but to no avail. Everything from adjusting swap space, to upgrading Flash (to 10) and trying firedog.

I may try some of your recommendations tonight when I get a bit more time .

I think that migrating to a Linux distro test system may be a bit of a time-consumer, having already dedicated over twenty hours to the cause this weekend. lol.

SaskMike wrote:Yes, Ubuntu was the first distro that I tried to install. It installed all the way then hung. I knew beforehand that the processor and RAM were insufficient.

I originally installed Xubuntu, which was supposedly for lower resouerce machines. It installed and technically ran, but was very slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested too much Gnome had crept it, and it was no longer really a lightweight distro. They suggested installing Ubuntu from the MinimalCD to get a bare bones command line installation, then add the Xfce4 window manager and applications using apt-get. The result is a lot more usable, though not as quick as Puppy.

I am now triple-booting Tiny Core, Puppy, and Vector. All three are much more responsive than any Windows product that I could install on this relic.

Win98 would probably behave, but it's not exactly recommended. It's unsupported, and a lot of current Windows software simply won't run on it.

Using SeaMonkey in Puppy is, for the most part, a decent experience. Flash is out of the question though. The low RAM just cripples the browser trying to process Flash. Most websites though open in excellent times. I tried just about everything to get Flash to improve its performance but to no avail. Everything from adjusting swap space, to upgrading Flash (to 10) and trying firedog.

I generally don't even try flash. It technically works on my machine, but the box just cant render fast enough. A You Tube video will look like a series of still pictures.

I may try some of your recommendations tonight when I get a bit more time .

Let me know how you do.

I think that migrating to a Linux distro test system may be a bit of a time-consumer, having already dedicated over twenty hours to the cause this weekend. lol.

Yes, it is bit of a time sink, especially if you are unfamiliar with Linux going in. You seem to be adjusting OK, however,
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Dennis

Say, is there a rather straight-forward way to just disable Flash from ever loading on a webpage in SeaMonkey? That might solve some of my most immediate issues, and prevent my frustration with Adobe from growing even vaster? Or do I just have to uninstall Flash?