First Skype. Now Gizmo

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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smokey01
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#41 Post by smokey01 »

mcewanw wrote:Wow, smokey, you take such comparisons very seriously
I believe if you are going to make a comparison then you must compare apples with apples not grapes with water melons otherwise all you are doing is misleading people.

Of course there are personal preferences and many other factors that dictate choice. Experience is probably one of the greatest persuasions. A bad experience will stay with you for ever, no mater how small.

I guess that's why Barry waited so long before he released puppy 4.0.

Did you know Barry had written a full GUI OS that fits on a floppy disk (1.44M)? Now thats what I call an achievement. If I remember correctly it had browsing and network capability too.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Charni, can you provide a link to the SFS file too please.

The SFS principle is another great idea. One click and you have a much expanded system.

I don't play games so windows is not missed around here. But it would be nice to have a SFS full of games for the times when the children want to play. I don't like to bloat my pup_save file.

Thanks

charnisingh
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gizmo

#42 Post by charnisingh »

Hello Smokey01,

Link: http://www.puppylinux.ca/members/Singh- ... ms_400.sfs

above is the link you asked for.

do post if the sfs work for you.

regards.

Charni.

PS. my other sfs files were too big as i mentioned before so i made this file which is only about 12 mbs.

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smokey01
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Re: gizmo

#43 Post by smokey01 »

charnisingh wrote:Hello Smokey01,

Link: http://www.puppylinux.ca/members/Singh- ... ms_400.sfs

above is the link you asked for.

do post if the sfs work for you.

regards.

Charni.

PS. my other sfs files were too big as i mentioned before so i made this file which is only about 12 mbs.
It worked like a charm but It obviously used some of my settings in the current installed frugal puppy 4.0.

I will try it from a clean CD boot and see how it performs.

Thanks

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HairyWill
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#44 Post by HairyWill »

I received lobsters voicemail, I only just read the instructions ;).
The notification arrives as an email with the message attached as a wav file. You can also retrieve voicemail by dialing 611 and then hitting 2 on the keypad tab.

For anyone that has the preferences working.
If they are stored in anything as accessible as a text/xml file. Can you send me an annonymised copy so I can access some of the settings with a text editor?
Will
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mcewanw
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gizmo preferences

#45 Post by mcewanw »

HairyWill wrote: For anyone that has the preferences working.
If they are stored in anything as accessible as a text/xml file. Can you send me an annonymised copy so I can access some of the settings with a text editor?
You should already have the default config files if you have installed gizmo and logged in at least once (they don't get written until you login with a registered account). I tried this in Dingo (for which Preferences access always causes a crash).

It isn't one config file though, there is one text/xml format file for each tab in the Preferences window, and there are about eight or ten tabs in that window. So what you are looking for is the directory containing one subdirectory for each one of these tabs, and one config file in each of these (always, it seems, called %gconf.xml). As I mentioned somewhere earlier you can find them in the following folder with default values already there:

/root/.gconf/apps/gizmo/settings

In "Preferences" there are tabs for:
General; Accounts; Audio; Status; Chat; Sounds; Dialling; Browser; Advanced; and File Transfer

In the above folder, there are subdirectories corresponding to most of these, as well as one called ui for user interface. I'm not sure where accounts info is held but I expect it is in .gconf somewhere.

As an experiment I manually edited
. . . settings/ui/%gonf.xml
changing the value= from true to false as follows:

<entry name="contacts_show_offline" mtime="1212726612" type="bool" value="false">

The result was as if I had ticked the corresponding check box in Preferences->User Interface tab, such that offline contacts were not shown in the main window.
[EDIT: Oops... No it wasn't; there is no Preferences->User Interface tab, but I'm sure you get the general idea. The result of the above was as if I had checked menu item View->Show Offline Contacts... :-) ]

Not exactly the most convenient procedure and no good for the novice user, but I think you can get away with never altering the defaults most of the time.

The easiest way of understanding the config file contents is to try gizmo out in one of the Puppy versions that actually works without crashing I'd say. For example, a frugal install of Puppy 2.17.1 is what I use for that (maybe 3.01 works too, but I don't know). Or perhaps someone cleverer than I at screen capturing could post screen dumps of the Preferences window tabs?

To be frank, the items other than true/false are not so easy, because you need to work out what value means what; that would have to be done by trial and error and a crib sheet written. Or... work it out by using Gizmo in Puppy 2.17.1 first and then you can write your crib sheet, but it would take a lot of time doing all that.
Attachments
prefs_tab_general.jpg
gizmo Preferences-&gt;&quot;General&quot; tab
Doesn't crash in Puppy 2.17.1 at least.
(51.53 KiB) Downloaded 814 times
Last edited by mcewanw on Mon 09 Jun 2008, 12:18, edited 4 times in total.

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HairyWill
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Re: gizmo preferences

#46 Post by HairyWill »

mcewanw wrote:The easiest way of understanding the config file contents is to try gizmo out in one of the Puppy versions that actually works without crashing I'd say.
that would be the easy way
ahh .gconf i was looking in .gizmo, now it all makes sense. As you say the defaults look ok
thanks for the pointers
Will
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smokey01
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#47 Post by smokey01 »

Gizmo works fine in puppy 3.01 too.

See attached screen shots.

mcewanw
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useful pdf for somebody

#48 Post by mcewanw »

smokey01 wrote:Gizmo works fine in puppy 3.01 too.

See attached screen shots.
Thanks for the above download of a pdf containing images of all the preferences tab screens. Might come in handy for someone trying to manually setup preferences in Dingo by editing the /root/.gconf files.

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#49 Post by Lobster »

Okay, I've very temporarily uploaded my new gizmo dotpet to the following location:
Thanks William - seems to be working OK :)
. . . and before I forget . . . I updated one of your early recording progs so it would work in Dingo
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 508#203508
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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HairyWill
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#50 Post by HairyWill »

Has anyone managed to run gizmo and listen to music at the same time?
Skyp seems happy to coexist but gizmo seems to want /dev/dsp all to itself.
Will
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Caneri
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#51 Post by Caneri »

Well I finally got to talk to Lobster. great!! Sound was good.

Hey...he sounds just like that guy who does the pawcasts....lol

Eric
[color=darkred][i]Be not afraid to grow slowly, only be afraid of standing still.[/i]
Chinese Proverb[/color]

mcewanw
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#52 Post by mcewanw »

Lobster wrote:
Okay, I've very temporarily uploaded my new gizmo dotpet to the following location:
Thanks William - seems to be working OK :)
. . . and before I forget . . . I updated one of your early recording progs so it would work in Dingo
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 508#203508
That's great Lobster. Personally, I gave up on arecord, because the quality wasn't so good. In Puppy 2.17.1 the sox program "rec" is available and linked in such a way that it can handle mp3 as well as ogg, so I used that later instead (in wiakdevrec, or whatever I called it...). I imagine that wiakdevrec will work in Dingo for ogg files at least (maybe mp3, depends how sox has been built). Come to think of it the program I created for foksyfeyer, called krecspeak http://wiakapps.freehostia.com/downloads.html has a gtkdialog3 version supplied with it (called wrecspeak); that was the best one of all of these wee recording programs I made, in my opinion. Again, it should work with ogg files at least in Dingo and maybe mp3. I didn't have any version of dingo until very recently so I haven't tried it (or foksyfeyer on Dingo for that matter) but I shall; I forgot about it all. I'm really busy planning a house move so wasn't meaning to do any computing, but I needed a Voice over IP app for when I'm away from home, and hence my sudden interest in gizmo...

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not a go go

#53 Post by mcewanw »

@Lobster:

I've now tried krecspeak/wrecspeak on Dingo and alas it is not working. Must have been a change to sox or something. I'll fix that sometime in the not too distant future.

As for foksyfeyer, apart from the one menu item krecspk, that "almost" works perfectly out of the box. It's important to read the installreadme file to understand how to set it up (I had to do that too, because I had forgotten!), but thereafter it just pretty much works. Even espeak started up reading back everything I typed straight away. One minor glitch is that speech-dispatcher can't find its log file in Dingo, so chucks all its output onto the rxvt terminal it was started up from, so you need to use a different terminal to actually run the main menu program "foksy". I'll fix that too, sometime soon. The fix is simply to create the missing empty directory by entering: mkdir /var/log/speech-dispatcher
Thereafter, speech-dispatcher will correctly write its logfile and not send any junk to the standard output terminal.

Actually, I already had it in mind to revisit foksyfeyer, to see if gizmo could be called up in some useful way, for a blind person, from the foksy espeak interfaced menu. The trouble is, gizmo, relies on a GUI, so I'd have to find a way of bypassing that and letting a user login purely via text... May or may not be easy.

I forgot what fun foksyfeyer is; magnifies X fonts in the rxvt window, and reads back any text cut from and X gui window, and the wee text editor provided is the best going IMO. OK, I'm painfully biased about its potential for its intended audience. Some of its internal programs are due an upgrade I expect.

[EDIT] Ah... there is no "sox" in Puppy dingo, that is why neither wiakdevrec, nor krecspk/wrecspk won't currently work. The solution presumably, will be to install sox... though sox can be built to support different codecs via the libraries it links to, so may or may not handle mp3 audio files depending on what exactly is installed along with sox.
I guess as an alternative I could write a version of krecspk/wrecspk to use arecord and lame (which are in dingo), but I never got such great quality out of that. Oh well, probably worth trying that latter option again though.

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sox from puppy 2.xx works on dingo, and includes mp3 and ogg

#54 Post by mcewanw »

Not directly to do with gizmo or skype, but just to complete the above post (which partly did concern gizmo possibilities...):

Okay, I installed sox-12.18.1.pet onto Puppy 4.00 (dingo) from:

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributio ... packages-2

I chose this version, from the Puppy 2.xx repository because it contains mp3 support as well as ogg support (the sox...pet from the Puppy 3.xx repostitory contains ogg support but not mp3 support).

Before installing sox, I opened up the dotpet to make sure it didn't contain anything that would overwrite anything in standard Dingo. It doesn't. All it contains are the four files: /usr/bin/sox; /usr/bin/rec; and /usr/bin/play. That is all, there is nothing else in the sox dotpet and none of these are present in standard Puppy 4.00
My feeling is thus that you can safely install this version of sox and remove it later if you wish. Why do I like sox? Because it is pretty handy, as the following hopefully show:

You can easily record an audio file from the command line by entering:
rec out.ogg
You can then play it back with: play out.ogg

Since this version of sox support mp3, you can also use: rec out.mp3 and play out.mp3

The above files are all nice and tiny (and you can additionally use alternative bitrates with rec as options if you wish).

arecord works similarly, but I just don't like it... since it doesn't perform so well when I've tried it.

***BUT NOTE WELL: krecspk and wrecspk do now work (to some extent) with this version of sox, but don't use either krecspk (or the GUI version wrecspk also in the krecspk dotpet) yet, because for some reason they are failing to terminate the sox program when you try to stop or quit recording. I'll fix that (it should be easy since both krecspk and wrecspk are nothing but simple shell scripts).

This Puppy 2.xx version/dotpet of sox itself seems fine though, and appears to work well in Dingo, unless someone finds and reports something back different! :-)
I'll definitely fix wrecspk though, since it includes a recording volume scaler and the recorder GUI interface is nice and tiny (and it hardly uses any CPU or memory resources at all whilst idle).

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#55 Post by Lobster »

Gizmo in Puppy wiki page (just started)
http://tmxxine.com/wik/wikka.php?wakka= ... xxineGizmo
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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wrecspk and krecspk now fixed. Also checked out gizmo wiki

#56 Post by mcewanw »

Good to get all the info on the wiki whilst things are being tested out.

I've also fixed krecspk and wrecspk (GUI version) of my tiny mp3/espeak enabled recording utility. I'm uploading a patch dotpet now to a new thread. You just need to install the previous krecspk-2.5.1.pet and then the patch and finally the version of sox from the official Puppy 2.xx repository. Then it all works fine in Puppy 400 DIngo (as then will foksyfeyer).

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#57 Post by smokey01 »

Does anyone know how to change the browser from Firefox in Gizmo?

I use the standard Mozilla that comes with Puppy 4.00.

I can't use preferences as it crashes. If I edit the xml file and change firefox to defaultbrowser that doesn't work.

Is there another place it can be changed. Surely it's not hard coded.

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#58 Post by HairyWill »

poking the xml didn't help me either
in the end I left it as firefox and just created a symlink from firefox to seamonkey

Code: Select all

ln -s /usr/bin/seamonkey /root/my-applications/bin/firefox
I am now managing to listen to music and have gizmo running. I was using madplay but using gxine instead works fine.

What time are people around tomorrow?
me
12:00-14:00 GMT
15:00-17:00 GMT
19:00-21:00 GMT maybe
Will
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new gizmo dotpets now including orbit and gconf libs

#59 Post by mcewanw »

smokey01 wrote:Does anyone know how to change the browser from Firefox in Gizmo?
I use the standard Mozilla that comes with Puppy 4.00.
In Puppy 4, I currently use Seamonkey too, so I can't test that either. Unfortunately, I can't easily test the matter out in my Puppy 2.17.1 either, even although Preferences works fine there, because it is a remastered Puppy 2.17.1 (though only so that I could have Firefox on it...). I can't try anything at the moment with gizmo because my dialup is already overloaded uploading new dotpets. The new dotpets are just the same as the previous ones (stdlibc++5 and stdlibc++6 versions) except that they contain the orbit and Gconf libraries plus gizmo all in a single dotpet package, since some apparently wanted that. The stdlibc++6 version for Puppy Dingo is already uploaded, the other is on the way. You can find them for download and testing, if you wish, at:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/foksyfeyer ... bit-gconf/

smokey, which version of gizmo did you use on Puppy 3.01? I don't have 3.01 anymore so can't check that myself and I want to include the info in my readme install file for the dotpets.

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smokey01
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#60 Post by smokey01 »

HairyWill wrote:poking the xml didn't help me either
in the end I left it as firefox and just created a symlink from firefox to seamonkey

Code: Select all

ln -s /usr/bin/seamonkey /root/my-applications/bin/firefox
I am now managing to listen to music and have gizmo running. I was using madplay but using gxine instead works fine.

What time are people around tomorrow?
me
12:00-14:00 GMT
15:00-17:00 GMT
19:00-21:00 GMT maybe
I can probably be available at:
12:00-14:00 GMT (20:30-22:30 Darwin Time)

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