Puppy Stardust 007

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zigbert
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#81 Post by zigbert »

prehistoric
The disappearing of the 'Mood-buttons' in the top-tray, is a bug, and already fixed for 008.

Geanys size is now set smaller.

Thanks for feedback.
Sigmund

Roy
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#82 Post by Roy »

I offer my apologies in advance -- I have not tried the last few versions of Stardust -- but I have to ask:

Is there an easy to use CD/DVD ripping program included in Stardust?

It seems that would be a very popular item that many of the younger folks would use a lot.

-Roy

dalderton
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#83 Post by dalderton »

Zigbert The times quoted in my previous post were all with Stardust versions that had been installed and had some use i.e. been booted at least 5 times.
Are these times representative of other full install boot times?
Regards Dennis.

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zigbert
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#84 Post by zigbert »

Roy wrote:I offer my apologies in advance -- I have not tried the last few versions of Stardust -- but I have to ask:

Is there an easy to use CD/DVD ripping program included in Stardust?

It seems that would be a very popular item that many of the younger folks would use a lot.

-Roy
You should look in the multimedia menu. Asunder (CD-ripping), Pdvdrsab (DVD-ripping) and Pburn (CD-audio/DVD-video copy and burn).


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zigbert
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#85 Post by zigbert »

dalderton wrote:Zigbert The times quoted in my previous post were all with Stardust versions that had been installed and had some use i.e. been booted at least 5 times.
Are these times representative of other full install boot times?
Regards Dennis.
Hmmmm, sounds strange. I need to check this further...... Thanks


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prehistoric
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pburn, CUPS spool

#86 Post by prehistoric »

Zigbert,

Just noticed that pburn in Stardust 007 is 3.1.7. Must be hard to keep up with that developer. :lol:

While trying different printers, I decided to print a copy of Alex Gotev's tutorial on installing Puppy 4.3.0, from the puppylinux.org site. The pdf displays properly in epdf, but the print job fails mysteriously after a couple minutes of heavy cpu activity. More important, my available memory decreased by hundreds of MB. CUPS never showed a job, so there must have been a crash before a complete job was added to the queue. A check of /var/spool/cups showed the large files filling memory. This spool is now linked to /mnt/home/var/spool/cups, taking it out of the virtual file system in RAM.

This kind of error could be the source of some complaints about Abiword failing on large documents. Pburn has a good message about putting large temporary files in the virtual file system, but nothing of the kind shows up when you use CUPS.

Attempting to open the tutorial in Abiword produced junk, and I still have not identified the cause of the crash on printing from epdf.

Barkingmad
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#87 Post by Barkingmad »

Hello

I've just tried Stardust and it looks like it will be a keeper for me but just one problem so far.

I wanted to install a Pet package of MPlayer that Big Bass compiled and released in the forum (sorry, I haven't imported my bookmarks yet so I can't ref the thread). I have installed and used this package download in Puppy 4.1.x and 4.2x versions OK.

In Stardust I click on the *.pet file in ROX, the package manager opens as it should, I click "OK" to "Install This Package?" and get a message window reporting "Error: package MPlayer-1.0rc2BB-486 failed to install".

I have successfully installed another package to update Seamonkey and this worked fine and as I expected.

Any ideas would be great -- do I need a newer version of MPlayer for instance? :?

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abushcrafter
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#88 Post by abushcrafter »

Try downloading it again. Its probably corrupted.

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`f00
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#89 Post by `f00 »

note: all xdeltas used from s1 to the current s7, all gooD results..

First look was good - seem to recall the text viewer thing wasn't read-only, so :|. Worked well out-of-box (and as long as you play within the strictures). Even slapped together a personal icon-theme since what's there was okay, but.. (and mostly I tend not to try and 'generify' apps to shoehorn them into a 'default' role - they are what they are and keep their own look icon-wise rather than go for a cohesive style .. but then again my desktops are fairly bare).

A liveCD discswitch-upgrade from s1 didn't go so well - too much too different. Personally, I'd rather see a jwm-specific 'base' menu system like some other wms use than the shutdown deal (both are limited, but a base makes more sense if you use other wms - shutdown-related and switching can be buttoned in a plogout-box for one-stop simplicity). As far as the utility menu goes, the stock interface for user-binding of hotkeys has never worked well for me.

Very minor - after 1st reboot, pup snagged 'first found' audio (usb headset that I never got around to unplugging) rather than the main SB audigy card (easy/lazy fix to blacklist it and all barking and "g'bye" on next boot/shutdown :) ).

..Playing about with a variety of wms (most of which are much simpler to manually edit menus), I'm struck by a few entries like printoxx - basically which category makes the most sense (since for me it doesn't seem like the 'usual' graphic tool, more like a design/composer since it meshes text and image layout). Hmm (yah, manual editing is probably not such a good idea if one wishes to stay within the original setup, but..), jwmconfig needs args or something now? Seemed simpler to access directly in other pup(let)s. On the other hand, trimming menus is much better now with pmenu (it's come a long way since earlier versions). Speaking of improved, pmusic is another good example.

Must say, Shinobar's jp updates for pmount and drive_all do really help - especially pmount is a bit more compact in the interface and seems faster (plus no more 'musical' disc-tray messing about :) ).

The black bg in geany (is it simply inverted? I can't seem to pref it back to a more usable bg for me..) may appeal to some. Don't know that much about modifying geany, but a full dead-black :( .. it's a true fact that such will usually 'swallow' fine visual differences (like dots and other small glyphs) that show better on other bg values. Whatever, lots of other tes offer more gui display choices (too bad, I usually rely on geany for some things :| ).

pcc is good .. but using it to find/use a few subs (example jwmconfig, which I usually put in a jwm 'base' menu like other wms have and are set up for) is kind of a defeating feature of the centralization (possibly I just haven't stumbled upon the correct method for that particular sub .. default wizard may be another). ppm may have an issue related to pets installed via local dl'd item (that or the following dotpet might not be properly spec'd?) - just installed imagemagick-6.5.6-10 dotpet and ppm only listed you2pup-1.3-2 (which is not even in my local store :roll: as far as I know, anyways). No biggie.

@zigbert - if your niece Ayla is still on-board the design team, screenshot 204k of the palette/selector part of ASWallpaper for a little taste of the as color gui.

davec51
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Stardust Desktop

#90 Post by davec51 »

With a name like Stardust, maybe you need a desktop picture like the one I have put on mine. It's the Whirlpool Galaxy, one of the most spectatular in the region not far from the Milky Way.

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prehistoric
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An extreme range of test machines

#91 Post by prehistoric »

Zigbert,

Today, I put Stardust 007 on the widest range of hardware yet. At the low end, I got out a machine literally rescued from curb-side trash pickup. This turned out to have an AMD K6-II processor, running at 550 MHz, (which isn't too bad.) The catch was that it showed 156 MB RAM in the BIOS. I scratched my head trying to come up with a combination of two DIMMs which would yield that number. When I eventually got two DIMMs matched up from my collection, it had 256 MB, which ran a lot better.

The 10 GB hard drive showed evidence of an incomplete Windows XP installation attempt. Removing this unsightly clutter, and adding a swap partition, left room for GRUB to boot a sampler of pupplets. While Stardust will run on this, you wouldn't like the speed. Best performance came from a stripped-down 412 with fluxbox, or 2.14R.

This evening, I stopped by to trade other RAM with a surviving friend who has been in the computer field longer than I have. He induced me to try Puppy on his latest quad-processor machine. (Running at perhaps 3 GHz.) I had only a USB flash drive with Stardust 007 to boot from. (I had left home in such a hurry I was lucky to remember pants.) This came up and ran, though I went through several bouts with the video, an Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 from PNY. This repeatedly rejected my attempts to limit resolution to the 1280x1024 of an LCD display, and insisted I really wanted 1600x1200.

Having to break out of several attempts at configuration exposed a problem I've seen in Puppy before, and not confined to Stardust, some of those processes started by xorgwizard are not killed by the signal, and remain lurking when you start the x window system again. When you shutdown, and try to save, there are two or more processes trying to grab input from the keyboard.

In the past, I've taken the approach of doing a killall of any processes spawned by previous calls to xwin before allowing it to start anything new. There must be a more elegant solution, but, at present, you can get in serious concurrency trouble when you go through video set up repeatedly. Sometimes you have to pull the plug or hit hardware reset.

Still, I did get Stardust 007 running on that machine, with the video at 1600x1200, and left my friend to increase the font size while he was playing with it.

That was my day, leaving aside the discovery that an HP Officejet 6000 E690a has significant differences in paper handling from an HP Officejet 6000 E690n, even though the same duplex attachment will fit both, and the computer which showed half as much memory with two similar DIMMs as it had with only one of them. :roll:

And, so to bed.

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zigbert
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#92 Post by zigbert »

prehistoric wrote:Just noticed that pburn in Stardust 007 is 3.1.7. Must be hard to keep up with that developer. :lol:
Thanks for mention, - I will contact the developer and get the latest :D

I appreciate that you dig into Puppy printing!!!!


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zigbert
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#93 Post by zigbert »

`f00 wrote:Must say, Shinobar's jp updates for pmount and drive_all do really help - especially pmount is a bit more compact in the interface and seems faster (plus no more 'musical' disc-tray messing about :) ).
Stardust doesn't touch builtin scripts, else I think of maintain my fork. That is the reason why Pmount is untouched in Stardust. If Shinobar is maintaining his Pmount fork, OR if Barry adopt his code, - I will consider to use it in Stardust. Where can I get it?


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Re: Stardust Desktop

#94 Post by zigbert »

davec51 wrote:With a name like Stardust, maybe you need a desktop picture like the one I have put on mine. It's the Whirlpool Galaxy, one of the most spectatular in the region not far from the Milky Way.
Nice wallpaper!!! I am sorry to say it will not be included into the iso. The reason is not the wallpaper itself, but its size. The 4 default wallpapers in Stardust is all together 10kb.


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#95 Post by zigbert »

prehistoric wrote:While Stardust will run on this, you wouldn't like the speed. Best performance came from a stripped-down 412 with fluxbox, or 2.14R
Yeah, Stardust is a bit bloated.....I know..... On the other hand, Stardust is the first Puppy (that I know about) that has a decent service manager. What if you turned off the things not running in a stripped down system.
- Pwidgets
- Services
- Tray services
- Event mamager
All this can be managed in the control center (Services tab)

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prehistoric
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bloat? + correction

#96 Post by prehistoric »

I'm betting the big overhead comes from Pwidgets. For efficiency, no system monitor I've tried comes close to gkrellm on small systems. And, it only requires gtk2 (or gtk1 in another version) libraries. Now, if someone would improve the appearance...

A correction: my problem with hpliplite-3.9.12 was due to a bad download. I'm testing now to see how well it performs.

I hope to finally take a crack at installing drivers for Epson and Canon printers today. When I have those under my belt, I'll feel up to putting out a call for people to report results for individual printers, as I had optimistically predicted I would do last week.

To quote an old friend who will remain anonymous: Everything takes longer than planned, except sex.

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Re: bloat? + correction

#97 Post by abushcrafter »

prehistoric wrote:I'm betting the big overhead comes from Pwidgets. For efficiency, no system monitor I've tried comes close to gkrellm on small systems. And, it only requires gtk2 (or gtk1 in another version) libraries.
Agreed.
prehistoric wrote:Now, if someone would improve the appearance...
There are some good themes, Look at what comes with LightHousePup.

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prehistoric
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low-end stardust

#98 Post by prehistoric »

Zigbert,

Now posting from Stardust 007 on that machine saved from landfill. By swapping DIMMs I have found a set which maxes out its memory at 380 MB. This makes a significant difference.

During that initial installation, you can go for coffee while it generates icon sets. Once past installation even Pwidgets seem to be acceptable, though the system is faster without them. The PCC takes time to come up, and allow you to change things, so I doubt anyone would use Stardust on this machine unless they had prior experience on a faster one.

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#99 Post by zigbert »

I doubt anyone would use Stardust on this machine unless they had prior experience on a faster one.
Good point.

The pcc startup time is improvable. I have plans for this.

The Stardust installation is just a matter of choice - How much would we like to generate. We could go through the whole rainbow, or skip the entire generation. The updating of menu-structure is the only critical part. This is necessary for Stardust to work.


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Barkingmad
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#100 Post by Barkingmad »

Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

I have tried three different ones so far on Stardust 007 and they all fail in different ways as follows.

First try: this release by big-bass that I've used on Puppy 4.1. This won't install at all -- Petget says "Error package failed to install"

Second was this one by tempstuous. This appeared to install OK and put an entry in the Multimedia menu but nothing appears to happen on clicking it. Trying to run it in a terminal reports a missing library -- libXvMC.

Lastly I tried something newer by MU (Mark). First installing the player then his frontend for it. The controls run but won't play anything so I tried this in the terminal and found a different library missing -- libXxf86dga.

I am about at the limit of my Linux knowledge so any suggestions would by helpful, thank you

Will

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