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

[mistfire]

Technosaurus i suggest to you that during developing the next puppy linux. Please include only necessary apps to prevent the bloating of puppy. Avoid some redundancy of apps. To prevent it, just use the multi-purpose apps. And try to replace rox-filer with better file manager such as Thunar. (If it is possible, because rox is good but it is difficult to use for beginners). Dont forget to implement the double click system, because it is hard to control the puppy when using the one-click system, especially on using the touchpad in laptops. Include also the SFS installer (created by trio) and Pcompile as core apps. It is very useful for puppy linux users. By the way, if you want to change the x window manager. I suggest to use the XFCE because of more user friendly appearance. Good Luck to your work

[01micko]

If possible, could some of the top devs help jrb and his Choicepup efforts so we can have sfs on the fly in an official manner (modular Puppy)?

Its ready and after a week and a half of testing I think its perfect. Check out SFS_Linker-431bk-1.0.

Those of you who really want SFS's on the fly should try this out and let me know what you think. It seems to have slipped under the radar, not a lot of testers so far.

(from another thread...)

Looks interesting

[raffy]

And try to replace [Rox] with better file manager such as Thunar. (If it is possible, because rox is good but it is difficult to use for beginners). Dont forget to implement the double click system, because it is hard to control the puppy when using the one-click system, especially on using the touchpad in laptops.

Yes, after much false clicks on the touchpad, I heartfully agree.

jrb's work on SFS_Linker is also good.

[sc0ttman]

I've read nearly all posts, and hope I'm not repeating anyone, but here's my 2 cents.. If it's worth even that...

The ISO filesize should be kept no larger than 105MB.. But it doesn't really matter too much though - it's how much has been packed into it that matters!

I don't think there needs to be drastic changes... Example:

The ChoicePup feature of adding and removing SFS files easily is a great feature, but not entirely necessary if it is easy and reliable to convert sfs to pet, which it should be in 4.4CE. Which brings me to my next point..

As some users have already stated, the right-click feature of ROX can be very useful indeed, especially for beginners (like me!!). I would like to see, quite simply, a lot of attention and effort put into making sure all the most convenient and useful options are available in right-click menus.

I'd like to see, as standard and at least, right-click features such as: sfs2pet, dir2pet, pet2sfs, pet2tgz, tgz2pet, mount/unmount XXX, open in terminal, rpm2tgz, deb2tgz, search here, copy to, plus lots of 'open with XXX' options...

I added lots of these to my install, and find them great time savers...

Needless to say then, I think ROX should definitely stay - think it's great. ROX should have double click - it's especially good for laptop users..

But I would love to see all mounted drives listed on the left in the ROX file manager, where it currently only lists 'root' or 'filesystem'... This is a pain in the neck if you use your mounted drives a lot!

Also, everyone has mentioned browsers, so I will too... I think that the Seamonkey Suite is great - if a little excessive for most peoples day to day use - but that's fine as it's so small for what you get!!

How about a customised, re-branded Seamonkey suite, with a few more addons and tweaks - Seadog!

Or you could replace Seamonkey with Firedog - this will (kind of) remove the need for the PuppyBrowser+Seamonkey combo we now have - Firedog can be used in 'kiosk' (or 'chrome') mode, too! But of course, I'm biased.

I actually like the idea of having only a small browser and letting people choose what they want, as long as it's easy, with good choices and is very fast and reliable! A simple Gui could do it..

I also like Sakura... Symlink rxvt to sakura and bang! You got an improved terminal..

I like PupSaveConfig - if cleaned up a little.. It would be a nice inclusion, especially if your doing a GUI for the Universal Installer...

If you could add a really small GIMP to the goffice apps, that would be nice..

And who actually plays the card games and minesweeper stuff? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you leave all that out, you might be able to remove a few things without upsetting anyone..

I think a communty edition should be, first and foremost, suitable for everyone in general (the community) - so it must be easy to use for beginners or it's missing the point!

I'm not saying 4.4CE is missing the point, BTW.. Just adding my blurb

[aragon]

with all of the new --with-system-XXX options in seamonkey2 we should be able to save enough space to use a minimal html viewer (dillo{1,2}, netsurf, etc.... I am partial to dillo2) with Seamonkey2. For Seamonkey1 or Firefox2 puppy browser. For Opera10 it has its own "kiosk" mode - or use the same as the viewer for SeaMonkey2... open to suggestions for the best matches.

i would recommend dillo as viewer, i've compiled and tried both (dillo and netsurf) and dillo 'feels' better.

if you include qt in the base i would use opera. if not, i would go with seamonkey 2.0.

aragon

[technosaurus]

Ok, now that I have a working Pcompile to test (the graphical frontend for compiling packages), it is time to move on for a bit.

I planned to test pizzasgood's multiuser pup and try to figure out the best way to incorporate Barry's woof improvements to it or vice versa, but it sounds like Barry may be adding this to his woof build system on his own.

... so on to the remaster frontend. After looking at it, it appears to be as easy as replacing all of the Xdialogs with 'if' statements that check for variables from the gtkdialog gui (since most are yes/no, so probably just a lot of checkboxes) It will be relatively easy to add a folder selector for the "original files" - they don't technically have to be the originals (you can do whatever modifications you want) Adding the full installer to this may prove to be a bit trickier than I thought, ... we'll see. There are so many niche cases in the existing installer that I haven't used that I am hesitant to hack on it too much without a good way to test it.

[Pizzasgood]

Small fix: the xorgwizard issue where it fails to work quite right for people whom Xorg decides have the ability to use multiple screens (not necessarily the same as people who actually have multiple screens - simply having a graphics card and an unused onboard video chip may be enough to trigger this (it did when I used my old computer anyway)).
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 477#357477

I provided both a patch and the actual patched script from 4.3.1 in the above post, so it can just be dropped in unless you've made other changes to xorgwizard already.

[Lobster]

Update on Progress:

I hope members of our team will make efforts to update the wiki
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy44Team

I hope technosaurus will forgive me for describing him
as a 'cyborg dinosaur' in a recent thread
and will make efforts to call on members of the above team
for anything he might need

Technosaurus you seem to be doing all the right things.

Guy (gposil) has drec in Dpup and other innovations (such as the
control panel) that might be of interest'
Grant Wilson recently sent me xvidcap-1.1.6-i486.pet
one of these screen recording facilities (like drec) might enable to upload tests or problems to youtube during the early stages? Just a thought.

Are we near a pre-alpha release for tests and reports and try outs?
Do you want a project name or happy with 4.4?

Thanks guys - seems to be going well

[raffy]

I've suggested Woofy as project name, as am having problems finding a "4.4" in the forum. Hope the name can be used, as this will be (?) the first community release based on Woof.

[Lobster]

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy44Team

We are woofy

Woof woof

[esmourguit]

Bonjour à tous,

Localization : The script xorgwizard, with the fix of Pizzasgood, localized (en, fr) with gettext (thanks to ljfr) is available here
If someone wants to test.

@Gposil,
Is it possible to localize PCP?

Cordialement

[technosaurus]

Raffy - Woofy sounds fine - i will leave those details up to the community for now. I am more concerned with the functionality than the look, feel and marketing aspects at the moment. That stuff should begin appearing in the beta releases. For the alpha releases I am trying to stay focused on usability issues including updates, upgrades and bugfixes.

esmourguit - being a native english speaker I have not done a lot with localization other than making the NLS pets available for those who need them. I assume for gtkdialog programs like PCP there needs to be a master program that checks $LANG and starts one of however many separate programs based on language? For example PCP would now be a script that checks $LANG and starts pcp_$LANG ... There is currently a "Control Panel" thread in the Pet's 'n Stuff area working on a generalized control panel to work across versions - I recommend contributing to that.

New Idea While helping with the Control Panel project, I had a novel idea. Why not use the .desktop files to automatically create a gtkdialog panel with all of the categories in separate notebook tabs containing icons for each program and descriptions in mouseover "tooltips". This would be a great advance for tablet and netbook users and much of the underlying code already exists as part of fixmenus and dir2pet.... Unfortunately I have learned that coordinating leaves me very little time for actual development, so I am putting this out there for anyone that finds it of interest and wants a project.

Anyone following/testing ttuuxxx's 2.X releases - please post any improvements that should be incorporated (same goes for the 4.2 series). Ttuuxxx seems to be doing great work on the series especially to support legacy systems. As such the 4.X series should especially try to focus on supporting newer hardware that 2.X does not, so if anyone has new hardware that is not supported yet, please make sure it gets on the google code issue tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/puppy-development/issues/list
[/u]

[raffy]

New Idea While helping with the Control Panel project, I had a novel idea. Why not use the .desktop files to automatically create a gtkdialog panel with all of the categories in separate notebook tabs containing icons for each program and descriptions in mouseover "tooltips".

I remember seeing MU's work on Muppy having something like this. Just an info lead for those interested...

[aragon]

New Idea While helping with the Control Panel project, I had a novel idea. Why not use the .desktop files to automatically create a gtkdialog panel with all of the categories in separate notebook tabs containing icons for each program and descriptions in mouseover "tooltips".

I remember seeing MU's work on Muppy having something like this. Just an info lead for those interested...

there is a tool called tabble (http://www.rillion.net/tabble/index.html) that 'looks' like what you're suggesting. but the usual setup for tabble is by hand and stored in a config-file. but maybe it is possible to create the entries of the tabble-config with a script that parses the desktop-files.

find attached a pet for tabble to 'play' with.

aragon

[aragon]

@technosaurus

Patriot's System Services Manager might be an interesting addition for woofy:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48337

aragon

[wuwei]

It took me a while to read through 8 pages of very useful entries here.
I agree with many of them, and would like to highlight rsp confirm a few items:

IMO making Puppy more nooby friendly would require...
> an easy to understand installation GUI (plenty said above)
> automatic internet connection for a regular DSL/router setup. Other distros can do this, Puppy should be able to do this, too.
> a full featured browser is a must. Whether this be Seamonkey, Firefox or Firedog would be up to the developers. Dillo or Pbrowser are a big turn-off for the unsuspecting newby.
I am not sure that I understand the importance of a 105MB ISO vs one of 110 MB or 115MB. Can 5 or 10MB be worth turning off the first time user?

Most anything else can be searched for on the forum or the Puppy search engine.

Much success technosaurus and colleagues!

[technosaurus]

I guess I should clarify something for the non-developers following this thread. We have both a defaultbrowser (Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey, Midori, etc...) for viewing online URLs (http://....) and a defaulthtmlviewer (puppy browser, netsurf, dillo...) for viewing local html files such as local documentation (which most find more user friendly than man pages)

[raffy]

A compromise browser may be essential, something that's already as good as a full-featured browser (useful for webmail as well as for downloads) but is still small. The user can then download his/her favorite (but large) browser suite with this built-in browser.

puppymartin has posted about Kazehakase:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48529

[aragon]

defaulthtmlviewer:
for me Kazehakase, puppybrowser and these have one downside: they are dependant on the existance of the libs/tools from special big browsers.

in opposite to this, dillo or netsurf may no be as nice but are independent.

aragon

[amigo]

I've suggested for a long time that dillo be used with a nice web-page interface for use as html/man page viewing -use during setup with a nice link to where anyones' favorite 'big browser' can be installed.

I have a kinda interesting interface I put together which I've made sure works with dillo. I run the thttp server and have some web-pages put together which use dillo. The page can be as fancy, or simple as you like. The page links run cgi scripts written in bash which can show anything you allow. I run stuff like namazu as a local search engine, ainebot chat with sysadmin features or other personalities and didiwiki is linked there. didiwiwi runs its' own server, but the web inerface is the thing.

Here's a really simple example:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash --
# time.cgi
echo -en "Content-type: text/html\n\n<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="5\;URL=/httpd/html/bash-cgi/time.cgi">\n"
echo "<html><head><title>OS Version</title></head><body><H1>"; /usr/bin/date
echo "</H1></body></html>"

The server runs all the time using maybe 1MB of memory. dillo needs 5MB but only when needed. Only the scripts you place in the servers cgi directory can be used and only the files under the www directory can be accessed. The overhead of the cgi scripts is minimal and -no perl, no ruby, no python, thanky.