Bionic32-light - 27 April, 2019

[jrb]

G'day jrb,
Getting BionicPup32-Light set up as per my other Pups, I came across a few issues:
1) no spreadsheet in Default Applications Chooser: - fixed by adding text to /usr/local/bin/defaultspreadsheet
2) Pwidgets needed libxcb-xlib.so.0 - added to /usr/lib/
3) hardware temperature module smsc47b397 for this old computer is not being loaded by Boot manager: this is a recent BionicPup problem (not just yours): I fix this with a modprobe script in /root/Startup/ to load the module. This then makes the pmcputemp in Startup now work after its 'won't work' message on first-boot (two-birds/one-stone ).
4) Iscan and peasyscan need libtiff.so.4 to run on my networked Epson-WF2510 multifunction; fixed by making a link from the libtiff.so.5 in /usr/lib/. As peasyscan is included in BionicPup-32-Light, are other scanners working and/or also need this libtiff.so.4?
5) CUPS: neither the included pdf printer nor my added Epson worked, not able to print (screenshots of problems); don't have an answer for either failure but I for one need printing in both modes (normal BionicPups have been fine).
6) on first startup, date was right but Sydney time (Aus not Can) was a few hours fast; fixed with St date and time Menu tool
7) Dougal's Internet Wizard was connecting to my wifi modem via the USB dongle but not on a restart; BK's SNS (Simple Network Server) wizard looks OK on restarts; haven't tried any of the other internet connection wizards in BionicPup32-Light.

It's only the inability to print with CUPS on your otherwise very nice Pup-Light that is a serious problem for me. I don't have this problem with peebee's (now 'heavy'?) BionicPups .

Final screenshot is of my present Desktop on which everything is working , except CUPS .

David S.

Tackling the Cups problem first. I don't remember CUPS-PDF ever working for me, but "Print to File"->PDF always has. That said, I left out ghostscript , "An interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language, with the ability to convert PostScript language files to many raster formats, view them on displays, and print them on printers that don't have PostScript language capability built in;", because it is quite large in Bionic and my printer worked fine without it.

I did try installing ghostscript-8.15.4-w5c.pet which is tiny in comparison to the Bionic package. It required a symlink of libtiff.so.5.3.0->libtiff.so.3 and then I was able to run a couple of its scripts.

If that doesn't work the recommended ghostscript is "slackware current version 9.21". ghostscript-9.21-i586-1.txz

I did try my scanner. I don't remember symlinking to libtiff.so.4 but I may have. I'll include it in the next update anyway.

Time - glad you got that sorted. In all modern pups, going back to Precise I have been unable to get Canada/Pacific or America/LosAngeles to give me the correct time. Always off by 8 or 16 hours, depending on UTC setting. Canada/Yukon works fine, even though they're are all in the same PST time zone (end of rant)

I use PeasyWifi for all my wifi hookups. Scan -> Save -> Auto -> On has always worked on reboot.

Good Luck with the printer. I'm sure it can be solved. J

[musher0]

Hi jrb.(...)

Other remarks :
-- clicking on any partition in the "Places" menu leads nowhere;
-- clicking on the spreadsheet icon in the top panel leads nowhere.
Should they be removed to avoid confusion?

-- The pmount utility has incorrect labels when one chooses the tabbed
layout. Perhaps use the previous version, which, IIRC, has correct labels.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

IHTH

Thanks for testing musher. See post above about ICU.

I booted Peebee's upup32-19.03 and looked for a "qc" keyboard, didn't see it. Can you check that?

When I click on a partition (drive) on the "Places" menu it mounts and opens that partition in rox. Do your partitions open from the desktop drive icons?

The "Spreadsheet" icon should open a little yellow gxmessage saying "no spreadsheet installed". This will disappear once a spreadsheet with a /usr/local/bin/defaultspreadsheet is installed. I use spreadsheets quite a bit and click that icon regularly.

My pmount seems to be labeled correctly, can you attach a screenshot of what yours is doing?

Thanks, J

Hi jrb.

Thanks for your answers.

It took me some research and some figuring out, but the qc keyboard
problem on newer Pups is now essentially solved.

The partitions sub-menu do not open any ROX-Filer of said partitions.
It's like playing piano on a paper keyboard: you hear nothing! Could be
a typo in the corresponding jwm menu. Will have a look.

Please see the capture of the pmount tabs below.

BFN.

[sheldonisaac]

.. I thought I'd have a go at something more up to date. Not as small but it is performing well on my 1Gb Acer Aspire1 and it works with all the modern browsers I have tried.

Thanks a lot, jrb!

I need help with getting PUPMODE=13
which works in other Puppys, including Precise Light.

But this Bionic32-light makes pupmode of 5

Code: Select all

 kernel /upbblt/vmlinuz  pdrv=d58c24e4-7a41-4cb7-be6d-08c83a6e2105 pmedia=ataflash psubdir=/upbblt pfix=fsck

[musher0]

Hi jrb and all.

Some more testing of Bionic32-light reveals that...

- exchange between the CLI and GUI buffers is awful! It simply does not
work between leafpad and the terminal. Not even Shift-Delete and
Shift-Insert work.

Please find attached an xsel pet archive as an attempt to improve this
situation. I've seen this before, though, in DPupBuster. A solution was
provided in that thread, IIRC; it consisted of adding a udev rule or similar
somewhere in /usr/share/X11.

-- use of lxterminal is awful too (!), not to mention confusing for anyone
used to urxvt. Please replace the defaultterminal file at /usr/local/bin with
this real one:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
# defaultterminal
####
exec urxvt -sr -tr -tint NavajoWhite4 -sh 50 -b 20
# lxterminal "$@"

-- the ever useful replaceit utility is absent. Included as attachment.

IHTH.

[jrb]

Hi jrb.

I am tempted to congratulate you, but... no ICU?

I realize the ICU library is huge. However, the acronym ICU standing for
"International Components for Unicode"

My apologies musher. I thought it was NSA spyware, "I see you". Seriously I had only seen it referred to as a "database" to be used by various apps.

I'm attaching the ICU files that I left out, icu-60.2.pet Install this .pet, reboot and let me know what difference it makes. I'm wondering if there are some slimming possibilities here, but being barely monolingual myself I'll leave it up to you to do some testing.

Interestingly I see many broken symlinks in /usr/lib that point towards icu libs. I thought woofce was supposed to clean these out but in this case I'm glad it didn't.

Cheers, J

Hi musher, sorry I should have realized, after you install icu-60.2 you will need to reinstall libxml2. This is the more modern one that actually uses libicu. You can do that with the PPM.

[musher0]

No worries. Got it!

As to testing, I'll do my best. I'd feel more comfortable, though, if we
enlisted the help of people who use non-Latin languages ( Arabic, Asian,
Indi, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, etc., also Altaic and Aboriginal languages )
on their computer daily, to get a complete picture of what the ICU libs are
used for in practice.

Anyone out there who wishes to join the effort?

I agree that the ICU libs are huge. It would be nice to replace them with
something more compact. I looked briefly at alternatives, but there
seems to be none ATM that offer as wide a range of services. ( Although
I'm far from being a specialist in these matters. )

BFN.

[davids45]

G'day jrb,

Thanks for replying to both my previous posts.

I'll try various ghostscripts and see if any fix CUPS for me.
I already have a few old ghostscript pets of about 6-8MB but none as small as your first suggestion. The 'other' options seem to be 15-16MB which is getting big for a Light-Pup.

(Oh dear, I'm going off topic again ) But I'm intrigued by your economising/sharing of programs between your Pups as per your screenshots.
Is your method to have a dedicated "common" boot-mounted partition or folder that each of your Pups mounts on start-up. This has all the big programs and associated stuff.

How is each application, profile, etc. made run-able a new Pup? Automatically?

I do this with a single sfs of everything that sits in the Frugal-Puppies partition root/home so all I need do is sfs-load-on-the-fly this in a new Pup.
Software updates or new applications require I re-do the all-in-one sfs (I use sfs-combiner). And finding anything else I can change from taking up each Puppy's space into a link. Or profiles that can be synchronised this way for every Pup on the Frugals partition.

Still quite a few things to do "manually" for a new Pup that can't be handled this way but it beats multiple petting.

(Back to the topic ) I'll let you know how I go 'ghost-busting'.

David S.

[jrb]

I agree that the ICU libs are huge. It would be nice to replace them with something more compact.

One very viable option mentioned by sheldonissac is to place large libs on the harddrive and link them back into /usr/lib. I've done it in the past and it works nicely.

[jrb]

But I'm intrigued by your economising/sharing of programs between your Pups as per your screenshots.

Be a bit patient. It's more than I can explain in a single post or two. I'll try to start a new thread in "Cutting Edge" called "How I run Puppy" complete with teaching aids, hopefully tomorrow.

Cheers, J

[jrb]

.. I thought I'd have a go at something more up to date. Not as small but it is performing well on my 1Gb Acer Aspire1 and it works with all the modern browsers I have tried.

Thanks a lot, jrb!

I need help with getting PUPMODE=13
which works in other Puppys, including Precise Light.

But this Bionic32-light makes pupmode of 5

Code: Select all

 kernel /upbblt/vmlinuz  pdrv=d58c24e4-7a41-4cb7-be6d-08c83a6e2105 pmedia=ataflash psubdir=/upbblt pfix=fsck

Hi Sheldon, I remember wrestling with this years ago when I first started running without save files. I seems to me I used sed to change the settings in /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE. I'm quite sure I don't have any of those old installs around anymore. I'll play with it and see what I can do.

[davids45]

G'day jrb,

Thanks for the Light ghostscript pet. I tried it in a quickly knocked-up TESTING-Bionic32Light Frugal, first adding some possibly needed library file links:

in /usr/lib, libtiff.so.5.3.0 - two links made to it, libtiff.so.4 and libtiff.so.3 (the '4' for my scanner, the '3' you had suggested in an earlier post)

lib-ld-2.27 - link to this file in /lib needed for printing is ld-lsb.so.3 (or whatever the numbers are after the 'lib-ld-' - this varies from Pup/kernel to Pup/kernel but I need for my Epson printers in virtually every Pup)

Then I installed your ghostscript pet and ran CUPS.....
... but still no good .

I vaguely recalled an old problem like this and scrabbling through my Printers archive directory, I found two files provided by rcrsn51 a few years ago which had worked to fix a problem back then.
Another ghostscript pet (~6MB) and a gstoraster pet (~10k) [- full title gstoraster_533-9.0.5.pet, dated 2013].
Installing both these (over the top of your small pet) and printing now worked!

Remembering my post above mentioning "great minds and fools", and being no angel, I rushed in and restarted my TESTING-Bionic32Light Frugal anew but this time installed just your ghostscript pet and rcrsn51's gstoraster pet.

CUPS still worked with my networked Epson .
A Light solution to my printing problem.

Thanks to both of you Canadian wizards.

David S.

[jrb]

G'day jrb,

Thanks for the Light ghostscript pet. I tried it in a quickly knocked-up TESTING-Bionic32Light Frugal, first adding some possibly needed library file links:

in /usr/lib, libtiff.so.5.3.0 - two links made to it, libtiff.so.4 and libtiff.so.3 (the '4' for my scanner, the '3' you had suggested in an earlier post)

lib-ld-2.27 - link to this file in /lib needed for printing is ld-lsb.so.3 (or whatever the numbers are after the 'lib-ld-' - this varies from Pup/kernel to Pup/kernel but I need for my Epson printers in virtually every Pup)

Then I installed your ghostscript pet and ran CUPS.....
... but still no good .

I vaguely recalled an old problem like this and scrabbling through my Printers archive directory, I found two files provided by rcrsn51 a few years ago which had worked to fix a problem back then.
Another ghostscript pet (~6MB) and a gstoraster pet (~10k) [- full title gstoraster_533-9.0.5.pet, dated 2013].
Installing both these (over the top of your small pet) and printing now worked!

Remembering my post above mentioning "great minds and fools", and being no angel, I rushed in and restarted my TESTING-Bionic32Light Frugal anew but this time installed just your ghostscript pet and rcrsn51's gstoraster pet.

CUPS still worked with my networked Epson .
A Light solution to my printing problem.

Thanks to both of you Canadian wizards.

David S.

Well Done! Would this be worth including in an update? That is to say, is this a general fix? If so could you write a sequential list of your fixes.

I found gstoraster_s533-9.05.pet.

Also, I'd like a bit more detail on the lib-ld-2.27 link. How do you decide what is needed.

[jrb]

I need help with getting PUPMODE=13
which works in other Puppys, including Precise Light.

But this Bionic32-light makes pupmode of 5

Code: Select all

 kernel /upbblt/vmlinuz  pdrv=d58c24e4-7a41-4cb7-be6d-08c83a6e2105 pmedia=ataflash psubdir=/upbblt pfix=fsck

Problem located and, kludged. There is something amiss in initrd.gz. I substituted in Peebee's initrd.gz from bionicpup32-8.0+3-uefi.iso and your kernel line (with my folder name and uuid) booted to "PUPMODE=13".

You can go ahead and do that substitution if you wish but I will post an ISO update once @davids45 gets back to me about his printer fix.

Cheers, J

Edit: Problem found on line 1256 of init in init.gz, will definitely be updated.

[jrb]

Hi jrb and all.

Some more testing of Bionic32-light reveals that...

- exchange between the CLI and GUI buffers is awful! It simply does not
work between leafpad and the terminal. Not even Shift-Delete and
Shift-Insert work.

Please find attached an xsel pet archive as an attempt to improve this
situation. I've seen this before, though, in DPupBuster. A solution was
provided in that thread, IIRC; it consisted of adding a udev rule or similar
somewhere in /usr/share/X11.

-- use of lxterminal is awful too (!), not to mention confusing for anyone
used to urxvt. Please replace the defaultterminal file at /usr/local/bin with
this real one:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
# defaultterminal
####
exec urxvt -sr -tr -tint NavajoWhite4 -sh 50 -b 20
# lxterminal "$@"

-- the ever useful replaceit utility is absent. Included as attachment.

IHTH.

Hi musher, Can you give specific examples of these problems for me to try? That way I can do before and after testing with the fixes recommended. And maybe a link to the discussion in DPupBuster?

[musher0]

Hi jrb.

Thanks for your reply.

I should have turned my "pencil" seven times in my hand before writing
about reaction of the CLI buffers. I remember now: it has to do with my
using a track ball instead of a mouse. And because X has changed.

Sorry for the false alarm.

As I think I mentioned earlier, there is a udev script I have to add to
regain use of my middle click for buffering. It's in the DPupBuster thread
somewhere. When I find it, I'll put a link here: many people use a track
ball instead of a regular mouse, it seems.

~~~~~~~~

On the ICU front, I spent several hours yesterday evening compiling the
new version of ICU. In their doc they recognize that their libraries are big
and explain how to reduce their size.

I succeeded in compiling a static ICU with "files" instead of dynamic "so"
libraries, and without the collation and the older character conversions.

So I remove your icu package through ppm and try to install my new one.

Did you know that gtkdialog and ROX-Filer are compiled against the
dynamic version of ICU (the common "so" libraries). Also the ICU libs
being compiled with their version number as suffix, the apps require that
particular version of ICU compiled dynamically and no other. (Not sure if
that is clever.)

Anyway, petget didn't work, to install the new version of ICU!

Interestingly, though, the size of this static-with-files ICU is 12 Mb in total,
not the usual 33 Mg or thereabouts. (Zipped tree attached.)

So there's fish there! More about this later.

BFN.

[jrb]

On the ICU front, I spent several hours yesterday evening compiling the new version of ICU. In their doc they recognize that their libraries are big and explain how to reduce their size.

I succeeded in compiling a static ICU with "files" instead of dynamic "so"
libraries, and without the collation and the older character conversions.

So I remove your icu package through ppm and try to install my new one.

Did you know that gtkdialog and ROX-Filer are compiled against the
dynamic version of ICU (the common "so" libraries). Also the ICU libs
being compiled with their version number as suffix, the apps require that
particular version of ICU compiled dynamically and no other. (Not sure if
that is clever.)

Anyway, petget didn't work, to install the new version of ICU!

Interestingly, though, the size of this static-with-files ICU is 12 Mb in total,
not the usual 33 Mg or thereabouts. (Zipped tree attached.)

So there's fish there! More about this later.

BFN.

Congratulations on the compile, I'm impressed! As for the apps in bionic-light, since they work without ICU at all I suspect it is libxml2 that is the fussy one. I had to compile an older version with no dependence on ICU to get to a desktop. The apps seem happy with it although the copy function in rox sometimes seems very slow. I'm wondering if your comment, "exchange between the CLI and GUI buffers is awful!" may be the key.

I have in the past used patchelf to modify the dependencies of binaries. They're not always set in stone.

edit: changed "readelf" to "patchelf"

[musher0]

Hello all.

The correction for Logitech Marble track ball users is here

However, the way to integrate it will differ in Bionic32-light. The main
difference is that the file already exists. It's at
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf.
You will have to either prepend or append the Marble trackball segment.

This reactivates the copy by middle click between CLI and GUI apps for
users having a Marble track ball.

IHTH.

[musher0]

Hi jrb.

Thanks for the reply.

You wrote:

> since they work without ICU at all

Then, it's strange that when I un-installed the ICU pet you provided,
calling rox from CLI and gtkdialog stopped working. This ICU stuff is
very mysterious.

I double-checked the libxml and it was already in the upupbb-light.

BFN.

[jrb]

Hi jrb.

Thanks for the reply.

You wrote:

> since they work without ICU at all

Then, it's strange that when I un-installed the ICU pet you provided,
calling rox from CLI and gtkdialog stopped working. This ICU stuff is
very mysterious.

I double-checked the libxml and it was already in the upupbb-light.

BFN.

Did you remember to uninstall the new libxml2 which I forgot to mention in my first post about the ICU .pet?

[musher0]

Hi jrb.

I hadn't installed libxml2, since it was already there.

~~~~~~~~

I had to restart from scratch. My new ICU libs probably prevented me from getting
to X ( to be investigated why ).

One thing I noticed, working on ICU, is that your removal of ICU was not complete:
you still have ICU's unicode directory in /usr/include. Again to be instigated (I'm
talking somewhat through my hat here),
-- perhaps that explains why your removal of the ICU libs does not seem to have an
effect. But please don't remove this unicode dir!
-- I suspect the i18n at /usr/share may also play a compensating role.

So I created another pupsave and populated it a bit.

~~~~~~~~

On another subject, I can't live without the attached! I compiled the most recent
urxvt ( v. 9.22 as of this writing ) on and for your upupbb-light. The urxvt provided
in upupbb-light ex-factory is version 9.05 from 2008.

I compiled it with --enable-everything, which means it compiled against the
libperl.so.5.26.1 the upupbb-light is offering. Thus ready for any perl extension, and
it has the new fade and icon capabilities.

I need the recent urxvt because I have a number of scripts that make rather full use
of urxvt parameters. I've tried to base some scripts on lx-terminal a couple of times,
and it is not as malleable as urxvt. Lx-terminal has a much more limited set of
parameters; it cannot act as a pseudo-GUI like urxvt can.

To reassemble the three parts attached below, go to the download directory, open a
console there and type

Code: Select all

cat xa*.pet > rxvt-unicode-9.22_upbbl.pet

Then double-click on the rxvt-unicode-9.22_upbbl.pet and the pet archive will
install as usual.

Of course you're under no obligation, jrb, but if users want it, it's here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Finally, not having the traditional gtk-chtheme is a pain. Also attached.

IHTH.