Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[playdayz]

[kevin bowers]

Playdayz,

I am what Minnesota called a "non-computer expert", so by his definition I'm a testing expert. Or maybe I took that one a bit too far? Anyway here's my take on the subject.

I place bugs into two classes, major and minor. Any one major bug is a showstopper; it takes an accumulation of minor ones for me to abandon a distro. I can run tests for all possible major bugs in a matter of a few hours, and usually do. Minor bugs may not become apparent until I've used the distro regularly for a month or so. If I haven't found it in a month of regular use it doesn't qualify as a bug for me.

Major bugs are readily apparent. Kernel panic on first boot is the worst I can think of; that happened to me recently, I'm afraid Jemimah's Puppeee is not compatible with my new Toshiba netbook even though it has a Celeron. Luci 509 runs it very well. Video problems come next, there has to be a video driver that gets the resolution right in both x and y directions, with no anomalies, and is stable. The Xorg-high drivers had stability problems on the new Toshiba but the default drivers work fine (Intel). Sound has to work and still be working on reboot (everything has to work on reboot, no reconfiguring on each boot). Network interfaces! Wired ethernet cards seem to almost always work right but wi-fi has been a nightmare in Linux. Part of this of course is that most chip manufacturers don't publish Linux drivers, and the state of the art is changing at an unbelieveable pace, so it's hard to keep up with it. But I'm not going to tear apart a good machine to replace the wi-fi card because one distro won't work with it. On the new Toshiba I wound up using NDIS wrapper with the Windows XP drivers.

Minor bugs are just that, and every OS has them. Have you been following the problems with Open Office crashing while starting a slideshow? (It looks like 01Micko is right, the problem is with JWM.) Someone else noticed this before I did; this is why we need lots of testers. This is what I would call a minor bug. I have another: when the netbook had 5.0.9 and the desktop had 4.3.1, CUPS in the netbook immediately found the Deskjet 895c connected to the desktop. After I upgraded the desktop to 5.1 (actually a clean install, not an upgrade) the netbook can't see the printer anymore. Yes, I suppose I could simply hook the printer directly to it... but it sure was nice... Again, a minor bug.

So far I've seen no majors and only a few minors in Luci, and some of the minors have already been ironed out. At the risk of alliteration: Far out!

Keep up the good work, and as always, thanks!

[playdayz]

[playdayz]

All of our users are international users of one kind or another, and we expect them to be well-served and pleased with Lucid Puppy 5.1 which is the most language aware Puppy ever. It is a very easy thing to change one's Language and Locale and just as easy to change one's keyboard layout--using tried and tested Puppy code. Further, many of the main programs, the word processor, the media player, the text editor, the spreadsheet, Quickpet, and several of the browsers are language aware by default. 01micko spent numerous hours organizing and implementing the internationalization of Quickpet--and it is beautiful and great fun to use.

[omskates]

[playdayz]

Today is the 5th day for Puppy at #2 on the Distrowatch 7 day ranking. This is also due to Puppeee which was released a couple of days before Lucid Puppy 5.1. The Puppy total has increased from about 1250 to the current 1571 over the 5 days and should increase for at least 2 more days.

[jemimah]

[Lobster]

As Larry says the best internationalization and testing ever has occurred with Lucid 5.1 We even have Hebrew and Arabic fonts - wow, must be a lesson in there somewhere . . .

Severe Bug Warning ahead
- may corrupt your save files
So do try this at home - we are penguins


. . . meanwhile I have been downloading and running gridwars2 (in the software games section) It is not compiled for Puppy Lucid but seems to work.

Seems . . .

It would crash the computer to the level of a total black screen and lock the computer up not allowing any software reboots.

Now it has corrupted further (I am assuming it is this program - could be the new beta 4 of Firefox but had no problems with that)

Look at the enclosed image - all those save.sfs are getting a kernel panic, including the latest save file which is almost pristine apart from Gridwars2 and Firefox 4 beta

I have never come across such severe incompatibility

Puppy Bugs
Bigger, better - Banished!

[thefixer]

sorry, GPU drive is fail. First boot, desktop loads, but everything is a VERY dark grey, black and whitish, no colors, just a dark dark grey that is hard to see anything, sticking with 4.3.1.

Integrated ATI inegrated GPU x1200 on an Intel socket 775 motherboard.

[omskates]

[Ray MK]

hi

playdayz wrote:
And since Open Office will have to be an sfs rather than a pet, we will need an easy one-click process for installing sfs's.......

We have one - JRB's sfs loader - works really well.
Load / unload sfs's on the fly - no need to reboot etc.
Seems to have no limit to number of sfs's that can be loaded simultaneously.
IMO it should be part of every puppy.

It's built into 4.4 and is so useful.

Just my 2cent's worth.

Very best regards - Ray

[ICPUG]

Some disparate comments:

Ray MK

I agree that JRB's SFS Loader is brilliant and should be a standard feature if possible.

Can you confirm it works with Lupu 5.1? JRB has not been on this forum for quite a while (not logging in anyway).

thefixer

Very interesting. You have ATI graphics.

Barry is having problems with ATI in Quirky and Wary.

Sage is having problems with something. He has gone into rant mode both here and on Barry's blog so it is difficult to know precisely what graphics he is using and whether that is the problem. Saying Lupu doesn't work on many of his machines is not helpful in trying to isolate the problem. As Sage uses a lot of old hardware it may be that the advances in the Linux Kernel and Xorg have just gone too far for his hardware as I thought was the case with Intel 855 until the solution was found! If you are reading Sage it would be nice to know what graphics cards/chips are used on the machines you have problems with.

We also need someone with ATI to stick around and test any possible solutions with Lupu while they use 4.3.1 as their working puppy.

Playdayz

Your thoughts regarding the comment on non-US users suggest a nerve was struck! The quote should, of course, have said non-US KEYBOARD users and was nothing to do with national prejudice. Now it was Shinobar who raised this point and has created the quick setting Lupu. As I respect Shinobar it seems there may be a very valid problem here which should not be dismissed, especially if solving it is just a matter of introducing Shinobar's code.

The problem I have is that I thought Shinobar was very happy with the direct to desktop approach of Lupu and I do not precisely understand the difficulty that Shinobar has that requires his code to solve. Perhaps understanding that will provide the encouragement to make Lupu better.

[noryb009]

[kevin bowers]

jemimah,

where do you find time to read, let alone contribute to, all these forums? I appreciate your taking time to point out the solution to my lone little problem, I'll try Fluppy out.

Incidentally, I saw Lobster's Lucid video, didn't anyone tell you that women are not allowed to be both beautiful and intelligent, let alone hard-working?

[Stripe]

[/quote]

Stripe R U running Full or frugal on that machine?[/quote]

Frugal at the moment

Stripe