What shall I work on first for the next CE release?

[Sit Heel Speak]

I second what dave surrey says. If you are feeling truly ingenious/masochistic, plenty of time/coffee on your hands, apply prodigious talents to getting the universal installer to not just look acceptable but to actually work as hoped in all combinations, particularly on a netbook: usb stick to usb stick, raw .iso directly to usb stick without an intervening cd-burn (maybe a dd'able straight raw writeable .img file, like Ubuntu uses, assuming you can somehow assure that the usb stick's own security, formatting et cetera internal electronics won't foil dd), usb stick to SSD "hard drive," and install directly from the network, with or without formatting the drive first. Plus what ttuuxxx asked for, CF-IDE, even while I was typing this.

Heh, I don't ask for much, do I. But...you are technosaurus...

[raffy]

Install should start from the readme.html inside the ISO (or in the download page). Unetbootin is one good start for this.

I've seen Atom processor-board combo available for as low as US$60, which should enable access to a decent 1G RAM PC by many people. I have one ready for these tests.

[technosaurus]

If memory serves me correctly the installer from the 3.0 series had some functionality that has since been lost - like specifying the location of the files and CF-IDE. Maybe dingo or our other 3.0 die hards can verify this. I have to admit though that I have not used the installer since version 3.01 and once during alpha testing of 4.0 - since then I have been doing manual frugal installs.

As for the startup, I set something up for the hsb to automatically do kb and mouse. just need to adapt that to video as well. maybe default to xorg and have a separate boot param to use vesa as a fallback

Looking at the remaster and the installer... both share a lot of the same functions, so perhaps they can be combined into one nice gui. I can't promise to make it as pretty as Zigbert's excellent work, but hopefully passable and at least functional. I try to have a single panel so that you don't have to try to figure out how to navigate the menus. My theory is if you can't fit it on a single page, it is too complex.

I seem to have overlooked the most desired feature in this thread - ability to load multiple sfs. Has anyone already done work on this for boot time? I know about choicepup, but that is post boot - perhaps that is acceptable though - in which case the dillo and jwm fans will get exactly what they need at boot and the rest of us are just a couple of clicks away.

@raffy - I was hoping someone would take that on - suffice to say that there are more potential puppy converts running winXX than anything else. A help.html and unetbootin would be great - I guess whoever actually still uses winXX would need to take this on. Are you up to it?

[Pizzasgood]

Its not a regular puppy version you know

Actually, yes it is. "CE" does not stand for "Deluxe", it stands for "Community Edition". It's produced by the community rather than Barry. That's it. So just because it's a CE release doesn't provide an excuse to go crazy.

I'm not saying anything about whether it should be bigger or not. I'm just saying that the "well, what the heck, it's a CE!" mentality is wrong.




@technosaurus: I only have one really big request: PLEASE handle the build tree correctly. On the outside WhoDo did a good job with 4.2.x, but he screwed up the tree. A number of packages don't actually match what was in the final version. And furthermore, there are quite a few issues with the packages themselves - particularly pinstall.sh scripts that used absolute paths. Another problem was packages that had overlapping files. Trying to get everything sorted out so I could build a proper puplet really ticked me off, and I'm still not sure I have it all fixed.

AFAIK Barry started over from the 4.1 packages when he made 4.3 (and just pulled in some of the 4.2 packages), so 4.3 should be initially clean of such problems. I haven't really looked at it yet though. Anyway, make sure you look through any packages you add to make sure they have sane pinstall.sh files, if any.

I'm mainly bringing this up for the sake of other people. The likelihood of me building a derivative of 4.4 anytime soon is pretty small. I have too many other projects that need doing, and I'm going to be spinning off on my own pretty soon anyway.

[technosaurus]

I have too many other projects that need doing, and I'm going to be spinning off on my own pretty soon anyway.

@Pizzasgood

I hope you aren't leaving Puppy in general - You have helped me (and others I assume) immensely to figure out how it all works - from pinstall scripts to editing the init script and various bash commands in general. You've been a big part of development in front and behind the scenes.

As far as the packages go I am keeping everything expanded in folders and will put them directly into the tree. I made a small script that will automatically build .pet and .pxt packages and am working on trying to patch woof to build a DOC and NLS sfs as well. My biggest issue with 4.2.X was the missing/mismatched devx_42X.sfs (made further development somewhat annoying) That is the biggest reason I have started compiling later versions of all of the packages and why I am integrating this standardized build structure into Pcompile.

I hope to see you around and value all of your insightful inputs, but I understand wanting to broaden your horizons. I did my distro-hopping earlier this year myself but I always end up back in Puppy as we all seem to - even AJ is back livening up the forum now. Best of luck in whatever you do, I am sure that whatever you learn in your endeavors will eventually make it back to Puppy.

[technosaurus]

I designed a simple gui for the installer that I can build from using some of ecomoney's work on recycling computers.

[Pizzasgood]

Nah, I'm still going to be around. Eventually I'm going to go distro and OS hopping so that I can use some of the more obscure things (I don't care about the non-obscure ones - those are boring by definition). Then I'll try my hand at making my own distro. But Puppy will still be what I fall back on. And anyway, that won't be for a while. Like I said, I have more interesting things to work on first. I decided that as long as the spammers are writing bots to spam the forum, I may as well fight fire with fire - I'm gonna write an antispam-bot to help clean it up.

[Lobster]

So just because it's a CE release doesn't provide an excuse to go crazy.

Too late (in my case)
Excellent Universal Installer Front end. Great advice from Pizzasgood. Considering the advice people make about the smaller browser . . .
The Truth is the first thing version 5 would have is a large browser implant. So maybe a small browser can be saved for a barebones puplet,
. . . a first and fruitful first improvement is emerging. Looking forward to testing

[raffy]

The installer really can't be done in haste with intent to modify hard drive partitions, so it is not really a matter of the installer GUI. I believe that this is a matter of educating users that an OS can be used without first being installed to hard drive. There should be other/easier and non-destructive options.

The first install option could be to install to media (USB, CF, hard disk) whose MBR is not being modified.

Beyond this, there ought to be a lot of warnings, and perhaps a separate install procedure about preparing the (flash, hard) drive and its MBR.

Nowadays for new PCs, 1G RAM PC is the bare minimum, so a CD/DVD or USB boot can be very convenient, as all essential files can be copied to RAM, especially if Puppy presents selectable sfs at boot time. Or load/unload sfs on the fly (see current work here).

What am saying is that if Puppy can have a versatile sfs handling, and especially when using Puppy in a PC with large RAM, installing to hard drive could be non-essential. (OK, if you don't have the RAM, then go use the hard drive.)

(While considering this, I recall that a Puppy with pup_save.2fs has /mnt/home for its home partition, whereas a Puppy with no pup_save.2fs but using a mounted pup_xxx.sfs has /initrd/mnt/dev_ro2 (?) for its home partition. This is a source of difficulty to the user in using a non-pup_saving Puppy.)

@technosaurus: Will try Unetbootin soon...

[James C]

I voted for a new GUI for the installer.

I mainly use full installs and I do a lot of testing so I use the installer almost daily. ( if you test Ttuuxxx's releases you get something new about every other day)

It works pretty well as is but could stand some visual improvement and a basic tune-up. I'll take the Puppy installer any day over Debian's....that thing is a pain.

I think a primary browser ( Firefox, Opera or SeaMonkey ) needs to be included as well. There are those who run live w/out any save file, are they expected to install a browser every session like Tiny Core?

Since it's working great in Puppy now. I'd vote for Firefox 3.5.3.

[Sit Heel Speak]

I like technosaurus's idea of combining remasterpup with the installer.

I also like raffy's idea of the user being presented, right away, the option of installing, straight from the welcome page. But I don't know how to implement what's needed, directly on the webpage. Not an html guru.

Perhaps if the webpage had a click-link to start the PUI's gtkdialog screen?

Here is my idea of a gtkdialog screen which could be called from the welcome page and embodies both the remaster and installer functions:

[Sit Heel Speak]

Here's the source which produces the above gtkdialog screen. It's just the mockup, no <action> or implementation code yet. The implementation code would be mostly copied straight over from the present PUI and remasterpup2:

[technosaurus]

oops I got distracted again and grokked a way to restore the man pages to the good ol' days

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search"

[Sit Heel Speak]

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search"

I would make that

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search" > /dev/null

Kind of fun though, to watch what happens in the rxvt window when you start it manually... (edit note: originally I forgot I was not in DOS and wrote "null" instead of "/dev/null"...)

[technosaurus]

SHS - All it is really missing is a button for gparted and maybe a help button. Possibly use radiobuttons or comboboxes vs. checkboxes just to tighten it up a bit. Looks greaty though - keep it coming. If you could get the bash part of it to work with your gui as well ... now that would be Puppy.

[jur]

Here a noob's perspective:

- I find the ROX right-click immensely valuable;
- I am longing for an Iron browser so I can have identical bookmarks and everything in both Windows and Linux, and love the way Iron saves screen area by putting tabs where the title bar is normally (using Iron Portable in win) AND it blocks ads;
- same with email - I use Thunderbird Portable in Windows (because I hate to install anything at all) and would argue for same in puppy for the local folders location that can be spe'ced to the same place so all my email stuff is unified. Currently I use TBP with wine. (Actually I find that enough so maybe scratch that.)
- a polished installer would be nice but not my priority - the current one works fine.
- VLC media player - same reason, I use it in Win and like to use the same apps in both cases so I don't have to learn everything all over again, plus it is fully self-contained having all necessary codecs etc.

[Sit Heel Speak]

SHS - All it is really missing is a button for gparted and maybe a help button. Possibly use radiobuttons or comboboxes vs. checkboxes just to tighten it up a bit. Looks greaty though - keep it coming. If you could get the bash part of it to work with your gui as well ... now that would be Puppy.

My preference is to keep gparted separate from the installer, because, for the 3-click recycler option, there is no need to start gparted, and for everyone else I think just a brief addition to the "Experts section" frame title, directing them to gparted's menu entry, will suffice: "Note: the partitioning utility, GPartEd, is under Menu-->System". One consideration involving gparted and the 3-click install which, AFAIK, no one has ever considered in any Puppy installer, is hibernation. It requires a swap space at least as big as physical RAM. I'll have to think a bit, about how to ask the question and handle the answers.

As for help, hopefully I can accomplish enough with hover-over tooltips. I too am a fan of the K.I.S.S. principle.

By the way--can someone tell me how to insert an apostrophe after the word "Experts" without bash+gtkdialog3 mistaking it for a delimiter? In other words...how would I modify this line

Code: Select all

<frame EXPERTS SECTION>

to put an apostrophe at the end of the word "EXPERTS", in the case where I can use neither the single quote character nor the double-quote character due their already being in use by my bash code? Is there a dedicated slash-combination?

As far as the checkboxes at bottom, I would prefer to keep them, unless it turns out that there are too many choices to fit the space, in which case we would be forced to resort to a combobox.

I thought about making that area a combobox in version 0.0.1 (above), but, I think it both looks and works better if the user can see every option all at once. Otherwise, using a combobox, the fact that there are two install-from choices and two remaster-from choices is certain to lead to errors / frustration / support-request messages by the dozens. I can think already of one more checkbox, "Clone the present installation" and so, real estate in that checkbox area is getting pretty tight I will admit. I may need to add code to force it to use a small font.

All the more reason, in my view, for omitting GPartEd.

I'll come up with version 0.0.2 and start adding implementation code to it. I *think* I'm competent enough, at this point...

On another front...keeping with the K.I.S.S. principle, I am against adding any further options whatsoever to the kernel boot line. Back in 1.nn and 2.nn days, perhaps a full 5% of the help requests on the forum had to do with ignorance thereof. And "improving" the boot line parameters with successive Puppy versions only made the situation worse, from needing to pin down which exact Puppy version was involved before the right answer could be supplied. Therefore, recognizing this, Barry spent a lot of time and effort eliminating the need for those, whittling it down to just a psubdir and sometimes a pmedia parameter. This hard-won sparsity makes life ever so much easier for the would-be Samaritan. Let us not return to the bad old days.

People who need to keep multiple .sfs versions on a multi-Puppy install to a single partition, using many psubdirs (I myself have thirty) are intelligent enough to keep them all in /mnt/home and simply rename the .sfs's to indicate squashfile version if need be, e.g.

openoffice2.20-sfs3.sfs
openoffice3.10a-sfs4.sfs

and use the Boot Manager to select just what each Puppy needs.

Or, are they? Feedback, criticism, potshots invited...

[Colonel Schell]

My opinion, for whatever it may be worth, is Firefox. Not necessarily 3.5, but Firefox.

Alternatively, I would settle for a choice, as with the Dillo backend. But that's only second best, IMO. I agree with TTTuxxx, a full browser would be preferred, and while I'm OK most of the time with Seamonkey, there are just so many add-ons to Firefox that I have learned to love.

Fluxbuntu downloads with something called Kazahakase, a lightweight browser I never, ever heard of before.

You speak of a hack of Opera, but I am under the perhaps mistaken assumption that Opera is freeware that is not Open Source. Please correct me if I am wrong. I do like using Opera, but I always feel a little like I'm cheating or something.

[Colonel Schell]

And the GUI for install would help Puppy grow into new 'markets,' or 'demographics.' (i.e., Windows refugees)
Ubuntu has certainly gotten this right: it's as easy as can be to install, as long as you don't want to dual boot!

[ttuuxxx]

Fluxbuntu downloads with something called Kazahakase, a lightweight browser I never, ever heard of before.

I've compiled it in the past, it was somewhat unstable and not all that small once you add all the deps to it. Firefox, Seamonkey done up nicely or Opera as a last resort. Midori wouldn't be bad if you could get it stable, I guess flash works on it now too.
ttuuxxx