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

[gyro]

I would make that

Code: Select all

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

or maybe

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#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search" > /dev/null 2>&1

gyro

[James C]

About browsers, Icebuntu (newly renamed to Spri Linux) uses Midori.... it doesn't appear ready for "prime time" yet.The potential is there though.

[Sit Heel Speak]

or maybe

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#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search" > /dev/null 2>&1

Heh. I can see that Bruce B's bash tutorial is on my upcoming reading agenda...

[raffy]

@SHS: Maybe the installer can issue an initial advice to the user to plug whatever media in which Puppy will be installed? And then soon after, the installer can present two major choices:

SIMPLE (your "Three-click"): Install to Flash Media or Frugal/Grub4DOS in WinXP. Perhaps there is no need to ask about filesystems here? That will be two-click: choose the drive and then Go!

EXPERT: This will be needed for a multi-partition setup in either hard drive or Flash Drive. All the various choices will have to be asked here.

Perhaps it will be good for the "Expert" section to be initially hidden so as not to intimidate the user?

[Sit Heel Speak]

@raffy: Good idea. That would save real estate for the expert screen.

One problem I see with a first screen that looks like this:

is that it inconveniences experts.

An alternative might be this. By composing the total button-labels text length to coincide with the width allotment for the descriptive text, it makes it look like the radio-buttons are centered. Does anyone know how to force gtkdialog3 to actually center radio-buttons?:


What do you think?

[technosaurus]

looks like someone beat me to the punch on /dev/null... I was busy compiling and packaging wine 1.1.30 - couldn't get libgsm to compile as shared - finally found a patch for it but not till after I got wine compiled, so I went ahead and posted the .pxt to http://www.puppylinux.asia/members/T/44 ... 0-i486.pxt
(note that it is less than 7MB)

here are a couple of things to note for install/remaster:
less than 256MB should probably do a full install... actually it should compare the size of the files to the RAM - this code actually already exists in Barry's init to check whether to load in ram ... I pointed this out to ecomoney and others a while back to make a Recycle me script. The swap drive should generally be 2x the ram. Puppy files should continue to go to a standard directory by default (pupXXX) to speed up boot and we should consider setting up a standard directory to install sfs files to be used by all puppies maybe just (sfs)

@ ttuuxxx - Midori has similar dependency issues - I still haven't had the patience to sit down and compile it all - it worked ok in absolute linux though.

[Michalis]

I have an idea about the puppy package manager but I'm not able to do it myself.

In order to keep the size of the installed packages small we could make the package manager whenever detects a pet with locales (NLS) to read which are the locales inside, and pop up a window asking which ones the user wants. The dialog can have the locales and a tick box next to each of them where the user tics the ones he/she wants to install. For example in my case I only want en (english) and el (greek), so every time I go later to the folder where the locales are installed and manually delete all the rest. In some cases this can be a reduction in size of Mbytes, for example in opera 10 all the locales are 8133 K and in transmission 1.75 1180 K.

The way it can be implemented is:
if pet has in the name NLS
extract, read the the folders names inside the /locale folder (/usr/share/locale or /usr/share/name_of_the_program/locale)
post the list in a dialog
install only the ones which are chosen.

[raffy]

@SHS: Good new layout, although please don't forget that the two-click option consists of "Choose the Drive" then press "Go".

Sorry, I have no idea how to handle gtkdialog. What I can recall is that the CD remaster fails at that stage when gtkdialog (?) could not show a CD in my eeePC.

Am still at a loss how remaster fits the installer - is this a pre-install option for the advanced install? Or an installer part 2 (customized setup)?

[technosaurus]

@Michalis - At least in 4.3 there is a "trim the fat" button that does this when you install, but maybe I am mis remembering (stuck on a win32 box right now)

[Michalis]

I don't see it anywhere , can you or somebody else help me locate it?


Off Topic:
Whenever I build a pet in the database dialog the automatically calculated size is always bigger than the real size of the pet extracted. Has anyone else noticed it? Maybe is it a minor bug?

[technosaurus]

If "Trim the Fat" is not there it can fairly easily be added using parts of the new2dir script - maybe even modify it to delete DEV, DOC and NLS.

I've never paid attention to the size, only the md5 on the end of the tar.gz that makes it a pet. (or tar.xz that makes it a .pxt)

[Sit Heel Speak]

Am still at a loss how remaster fits the installer - is this a pre-install option for the advanced install? Or an installer part 2 (customized setup)?

I don't know what technosaurus was thinking when he wrote the suggestion of the idea, but, the instant I read it, I too was at a loss for a few seconds, for it struck me as both a flood of beauty and an earthquake of genius.

The beauty of it is that combining the two functions breaks down, or at least softens, the Microsoft-like categorical divide between the person who made the distro and the person who is trying it. After all, in both remaster and install, the essential intent is to teleport the entire distro from one person's machine and mind to another's.

The genius of it manifested, to my mind, on several fronts in 1-2-3-4 fashion. One: if the two functions are implemented in a single executeable, then this enables the sharing of code between implementation of the two functions, in which there is quite a bit of overlap, thus furthering the Puppy philosophy of smaller-is-better. Two and three and four: once the possibility of blending the two functions into a single code file occurs, further ideas suggest themselves like chain-lightning: "Remaster from the currently-running installation," rather than having to first shoehorn everything into a temporary remaster subdir, with all the pitfalls that entails; "Clone the currently-running installation" which would preserve the existing bookmarks, network settings and so forth; and "Create the installation straight from the .iso." This would...in fact, all three would...eliminate the need to burn a CD.

No doubt, there are other possibilities I haven't thought of.

Sorry, I have no idea how to handle gtkdialog.

And you think I do ? The first prototype screen, is my first-ever foray into gtkdialog3, and you can see in my exchange with t and gyro above the incomplete state of my bash knowledge. However, I am quite mighty in similar older languages, e.g. DOS batchfiles and the Clipper dbms (still the best text-based table-oriented programming language there ever was),...so...this looks like an excellent opportunity for me to learn gtkdialog3 and bash, both at the same time. This is what has stimulated me to action.

What I can recall is that the CD remaster fails at that stage when gtkdialog (?) could not show a CD in my eeePC.

OK, thanks for the heads-up, I'll watch out for that. I have an Atom-based Mini-9 for which I am currently constructing a custom distro, so this issue of a lack of a CD drive affects me too. Though, I regret to inform you, mine has 2GB of ram and I intend to tune the kernel specifically for 2GB (I saw where your Atom board carries only 1GB).

@SHS: Good new layout, although please don't forget that the two-click option consists of "Choose the Drive" then press "Go".

Right-ee-o, I savvy. With logic to decide when physical ram is so small that a full install is necessary, otherwise a frugal install.

And now to go dance some more on the shoulders of giants...

[BarryK]

I think puppy should simply come with dillo as the standard browser and allow the user to easily add whichever 'real' browser they want. dillo could then be used as just the internal help browser. Really, it's so tiny, but still capable enough to let a newbie browse the repos and find the full-featred browser they want.
I have a patched version of dillo which uses GTK2 -even though the GTK1 version has more features. I don't like the new fltk dillo at all.

Dillo is not an option. Our internal browser, required for CUPS, PPLOG and QUISP, plus more, needs CSS and Javascript support. Even the main Help page has Javascript.

The other one, Netsurf, goes part of the way, with CSS support, Javascript is planned I think. It is also a GTK2 app and more suitable re the size and integration with Puppy's look-and-feel (compared with FLTK).

There are various browsers built with Netkit, that should be re-visited, including one coded in Vala.

[Max Headroom]

Also will it be X Org 7.4 ? & Perhaps Consider Pizzasgood & dejan555 X User TriX ( err Tricks

[musher0]

Hi, all!

I think PuppyLinux would benefit from adding secondary menus for easy and speedy access to

1) the disks on your computer

2) the Linux directory structure

As to # 1 above, we already have BK's event management system (the disk icons usually at the bottom left of the screen). However a true menu access to the disks with functions not already provided, such as

* a tree view (with ytree, for example) or
* last used date (for a directory or file),

might be useful to get to a specific directory or to get info on a particular file in a jiffy. Another commond use of this would be to avoid overwriting the backup of your pupsave file.

The possibility for # 1 is already partially present in LXDE or XFCE as plug-ins, but some prefer using some other task bar or wm -- jwm, not to name it! .

As for # 2, quick access to any user directory would be useful if you wish to quickly access the docs for a particular utility, the icons, your backgrounds, etc., etc., -- the list can be as diverse as the user's needs.

It probably could be done in a just few lines of dressed-up bash code linked to jwm or to ROX.

The aemenu utility can be used for this, and it does it well if you know how to populate it, but it's external and independent (meaning: it's not native to Puppy, you have to search, download and compile it), and you have to populate it (meaning: some work and knowledge are involved on the part of the user).

You'll find access to those listings by default in some bigger distros. MU's NYPup also has it if you use its simili-gnome panel -- and maybe some of the other puplets have this access too, depending on the panel they use. But it would be nice to have these accesses built-in in a regular Puppy.

Just a thought, of course.

Sincerely,

[charlie6]

Hi,
thanks for your suggestions!
I'd like get fixed some existing "bugs" (don't know if "bug" is correct) like:
- SQLiteManager freezing when selecting tols/options (works on ttuuxxx 4.31.1 - thanks ttuuxxx!)
- insert key killing Seamonkey
- fixing things that has been fixed in 4.31.1 (see ttuuxx 4.31 release comments)
- could not get OpenGl working on 4.30-k2.6.30.5 using xorg-xorg-full_dri-7.3.pet whereas it does on 4.30-k2.6.25.16; is xorg---full_dri.pet kernel sensible? Does this mean that existing pets should need being recompiled for the new kernel?
Thanks for your time and skills in advance!
cheers, charlie

[adi]

I didn't succeed to connect my usb 3G modem huawei e169 with puppy but it automaticaly detected by ubuntu 9.04. unfortunately ubuntu needs a lot of resources... Can this module be included in puppy network setup wizard?

[capoverde]

Lots of wise suggestions. OK for a full-featured browser, Netbook compatibility etc.; curiously, however, nobody (but Charlie6) seems to care about the silly but annoying little bugs like, say, the <Insert> key bug (it's in Puppybrowser too), the unprintable fonts in AbiWord or the "0,0GB" size declared when hovering with the mouse pointer over a disk icon.

IMHO, in a CE edition these things should disappear -- not only it's no time to get crazy as Pizzasgood says, it's time to get even small things right.
In 4.2, Whodo had even taken the time to correct the inconsequent "take affect" error; but it's back now.

And for me, well, a MIDI player should be ready and working out of the box...

My deepest appreciation for your involvement, Technosaurus &Team.

[aarf]

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say, the <Insert> key bug

where is there a need to use the insert key? the only time i ever use it is when pasteing into rxvt and there is no problem to do that. if you want to insert into a browser input field just click where you want to be and start inserting things. perhaps that is why no effort is spent to fix the bug.

[James C]

I rarely use the insert key either.

However, I hate bugs.