Pussy: potentially a Puppy with a perfect package manager

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sickgut
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Im asking for help and a favour

#1781 Post by sickgut »

ok one more post before my 3 day sleep holiday or whatever.

As ive said many times, i have no idea how normal people use a computer.

Over the next few days i wont be checking the forum but there is something i want to ask the Puppy/ Pussy community to do for me.

I need to know exactly what apps you use. Be selfish, post here what you want in an awesome and capable out of the box OOTB Pussy solution. Pussy is still in development and application selection in a standard Pussy is still something i am experimenting with.

If you have the time please post here all the apps you expect to be in an awesome OOTB Pussy. There is 10 different apps for everything, choosing the best one of the 10 is the real trick.

Pussy is for this community, its not advertised anywhere else. I want to include all the apps that YOU want, YOU being anyone who is remotely interested in Puppy and Pussy.

Now that the skeleton base ISO is finished the next thing for me to do is install all the apps/ desktop/ networking stuff etc.

It would be really helpful to me if in 3 days time or so i come back to this thread and some people have listed all the apps they use.

a source of easily addable apps can be searched and found at:

http://packages.debian.org and select "testing" or "wheezy" to do your searches.

Pussy doesnt HAVE to stick to the debian repos, in the old pussy some apps where installed statically in their own folders. So if you favorite app isnt in the debian repos but can be download from some other site, then please tell me the app and maybe the site.

Like i said, be selfish. If you dont use an office suite then dont feel you have to say that you want openoffice or freeoffice or whatever. Please dont feel like you have to mention an office package just because every other OS has one or you are catering for the needs of others. Please just list the apps you wanna use, and screw everyone else. This information it critical for the next step of developing the new pussy. I simply are not familiar with newer packages and i dont have much of an idea what new fancy things are out there.

List YOUR apps, as this OS if for YOU. A DVD sized Pussy has room enough on the DVD to include ANYTHING you want in Pussy.

Example. DVD is 4GB or so in size, apps are installed in the OS and then compressed in a squashfs file. Squashfs compression is so much that it is completely reasonable to actually have 10 to 15 or maybe even 20GB of actual OS storage space to use all on a 4GB DVD.

I dont want Pussy to just include "general generic application that every other OS has but no one ever uses" so being very average and mediocre you can please the most amount of people a little bit.

I want Pussy to be the opposite of this. I want to make the Pussy community 100% happy and screw everyone else.

Pussy told me today that he doesnt want to please a million average users only 50% , he told me that he wants to please a lesser group 100% and he doesnt want crappy apps that where chosen because they are the smallest to fit on the ISO and only offer mediocre useability that force you to install something that is actually useful. Pussy want to please you all with a true ultimate OOTB experience that has everything in it to begin with.
Pussy also came home drunk and smacked me around a bit and then told me he wants WINE in the OS, so if there is free Windows apps that run on WINE that anyone wants to use and its not available in Linux there is no problem. if your favorite app only made for Windows there is no shame in setting it up to use WINE

i know all these different apps will use a bit more ram,especially network related apps that are running all the time in the background etc, or a bluetooth app that just sits there in RAM until it detects a bluetooth device.

The trick here is edit the start routine, All the RAM hog apps like that can be removed from the boot sequence in the catroll-panel.
Large disk usage of an OS doesnt equate to lower performance or higher RAM usage. The only thing that really matters is how many programs/ apps/ daemons you have loaded/ running in RAM. Clicking on a simple catroll-panel will permanently disable the things you dont need, and if your using persistence or full HDD install, you can uninstall the these apps from the OS permanently with the click of a mouse. I think all the silly bluetooth stuff will be enabled and work on first boot, so people can connect their device immediately and it just works. For an OOTB experience that makes sense and the user can disable if the like. I think its better than not having these kind of RAM hog apps disabled so the user trying to connect his blueteeth doesnt have to hunt around or look online or go to a irc chat room to ask people how to enable blootoof.

Ok im rambling again, time to sleep.... post people, post your prefered apps.

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greengeek
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#1782 Post by greengeek »

Ok, here's what I want:

I want every app you can fit in. I want both Libreoffice AND Freeoffice2012 because they both appeal to different users. I also want Dillo, and Seamonkey, and Opera and QTWeb browser; but I want the lightweight ones to be in a separate submenu.

This would be a useful feature for a distro intended to be run live, because lets face it, the user will be trialling Pussy on all sorts of hardware with widely differing specs. If there is a separate menu for apps known to be lightweight (and therefore having fewer features perhaps) it would enhance the useability on some machines. No point waiting 2 hours for Libreoffice to load because you already know that there is a quick alternative in the "lightweight" submenu.

Maybe users could suggest their favourite fully featured heavyweight apps and also a separate list of lightweight stuff? Here's mine:

Fully featured heavyweights:

Seamonkey (latest preconfigured with Flash)
Libreoffice
VLC
Pmusic
Deadbeef
Draftsight
Gimp
Inkscape
LMMS or similar

Lightweight:

Freeoffice2012
Dillo
Opera
xhippo
Mplayer (one of the cutdown versions from Technosaurus etc)
MTpaint
mhwaveedit

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Ray MK
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Joined: Tue 05 Feb 2008, 09:10
Location: UK

#1783 Post by Ray MK »

Here is my list

Heavy
Google Earth
Skype
Chrome

Mid
Dropbox
Gdrive
Opera

Light
QtWeb browser
Midori
Dillo
Grub4dos
Pfind file searcher
FileRoller
Flsynclient touchpad config
GatoTray monitor (temp+cpu)
Gparted
Htop
Hardinfo
Pmount (or Mut) (prefer both)
Galculater
Osmo
Viewnior

Many thanks and very best regards - Ray
[b]Asus[/b] 701SD. 2gig ram. 8gb SSD. [b]IBM A21m[/b] laptop. 192mb ram. PIII Coppermine proc. [b]X60[/b] T2400 1.8Ghz proc. 2gig ram. 80gb hdd. [b]T41[/b] Pentium M 1400Mhz. 512mb ram.

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Q5sys
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Re: Im asking for help and a favour

#1784 Post by Q5sys »

sickgut wrote:Example. DVD is 4GB or so in size, apps are installed in the OS and then compressed in a squashfs file. Squashfs compression is so much that it is completely reasonable to actually have 10 to 15 or maybe even 20GB of actual OS storage space to use all on a 4GB DVD.
If you manage to get a SFS file to work over 600 mb... please let me know what you've done to make it work. I find that after about 500~600mb in a single SFS... md5 sums for the files when expanded tend to start to fail hash check.
I havent looked into the problem much... because Ive only dealt with it a few times here or there... but if you're able to find it and resolve it, I'd be interested in how you did it.

btw... how exactly are you going to manage the boot time to load everything into ram? loading a 4gb dvd into ram is going to be painfully slow. And running from a DVD is painfully slow as well. most dvd players max out at just over 16mbit/s read rate. So for a 4gb dvd... you're looking at over half an hour load time. As for using lots of SFS files, have you worked any speed benchmarks for loading, say 16gb, into a layered file system? I dont know if anyone's attempted it before, so I'm curious.


Or are you planning on pussy being a strict 'install to HD' release, thus forgoing the above speed issues?

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sickgut
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Re: Im asking for help and a favour

#1785 Post by sickgut »

Q5sys wrote:
sickgut wrote:Example. DVD is 4GB or so in size, apps are installed in the OS and then compressed in a squashfs file. Squashfs compression is so much that it is completely reasonable to actually have 10 to 15 or maybe even 20GB of actual OS storage space to use all on a 4GB DVD.
If you manage to get a SFS file to work over 600 mb... please let me know what you've done to make it work. I find that after about 500~600mb in a single SFS... md5 sums for the files when expanded tend to start to fail hash check.
I havent looked into the problem much... because Ive only dealt with it a few times here or there... but if you're able to find it and resolve it, I'd be interested in how you did it.

btw... how exactly are you going to manage the boot time to load everything into ram? loading a 4gb dvd into ram is going to be painfully slow. And running from a DVD is painfully slow as well. most dvd players max out at just over 16mbit/s read rate. So for a 4gb dvd... you're looking at over half an hour load time. As for using lots of SFS files, have you worked any speed benchmarks for loading, say 16gb, into a layered file system? I dont know if anyone's attempted it before, so I'm curious.


Or are you planning on pussy being a strict 'install to HD' release, thus forgoing the above speed issues?
Ah huh, you make a good point and what you are asking about is very well explained and definately warrants a good explanation. Thanks for posting your question.

Running from RAM is a secondary thing in Pussy. Ofcause, it doesnt matter how fast your computer is, 4gb to copy to RAM is just plain stupid. However, it will be an option in the boot sequence for "why the hell not-ess".

100mb or 200mb copy to RAM is painless. 600MB is a pain. 4GB is like grinding your blueteef down a chalk board so the scratching sound gets o your nerves and you have terrible teeth pain with permanent damage.
I dont think Pussy can even live that long, even with a Powerful RADAR treatment with magnets, a wizard and stem cells.

The only reason anyone would want to do that is if you only have 1 DVD and you have 8GB of RAM or more and you are at your friends house and you want to show him how the OS works on his other 3 computers too.

In early to mid 2000's DSL and Puppy took the world by storm. 128MB RAM with 400mhz CPU was common. And if you where awesome enough to have 256MB RAM then copy to RAM is great, because once its loaded up there is no HDD slowing everything down. And HDD's and USB sticks where small and slow. RAM was fast, always has been. Even these days the fastest SSD has way more seek time than very old EDO 4MB RAM. HDD access is measured in milli seconds, RAM is nano seconds, even very old RAM.

It makes sense to load all your OS to RAM if you have double the recommended RAM required to run these 2 OSes.

But things have changed since 2006. USB sticks with USB version 3.0 are so fast and once you have clicked your mouse around your screen for a minute or two, so much information has been cached into RAM already, way more than what a computer could do in 2006. This setup is so fast, that the 20 or 30 seconds needed to copy to RAM from a frugal HDD install is just wasted time. Old Pussy could boot to the login screen in less than 11 seconds and your up and running. However using copy to RAM on Pussy Xtra which is a full sized CDROM ISO, is just a minute or 40 seconds wasted time and the performance increase over simply running the OS from a USB stick with USB 2.0 that is 4GB in size or a frugal HDD install this makes not real difference to the user experience. You boot into the OS quicker with no copy to RAM, and once you are booted into the OS, all you have done is waste 600MB of your RAM and there is no noticable difference in speed once your all loaded up and ready.

However, yes, DVD and CDROMs arent anywhere near as fast as USB or HDD. Here, if you do use copy to RAM, it will be faster once you are loaded. Live CDROM or DVD is not a real option for permanent you, it is a complete option in that it does everything right, but it is slow.

When i was developing the last version of Pussy, i mainly just used a Live CDROM at my neibours house when i went there for dinner and used his computer while everyone else either watched DVD's or played online FPS with me but i would always have an hour or two to spend on Pussy deving.

CDROM and DVD is an easy peasy newbie solution for using a computer without damaging anything. And using a USB stick that is the save file means that everything is saved and safe. For me, because i am patient i didnt care about the slower boot times etc, also i would copy the disk 4 times and everyone would load up Pussy with me when we played games. No save file, just running from the DVD or CDROM. Assault cube was the FPS game included in Pussy and we played online like that for months.
When compared to playing games on a Playstation 2, the load times arent anything to complain about and everything was guaranteed to work as we all had the same version of everything. These where all Windows computers and they had no interest in linux at all (half of them could even read, so you get my drift here, Tasmania isnt New York, you dont even need to finish highschool to work in the mines here and you get paid more than a high end IT guy) and it was still easy, click on the blood splattered icon in the middle of the screen, BOOM. Game on.

Live CDROM/ DVD is clean, safe and practical, excellent for Lan Parties as you know it will all work and if it doesnt just reboot. You cant damage the system no matter what you do. Its also an excellent way to preview the OS and for me, it was an excellent way to develop the OS when moving from computer to computer. But, we never used copy to RAM. It would actually add to the amount of time you could fire up Assault Cube by a fair margin.

Maybe DVD and data transfer speeds will be something different in 8 years time (anyone have an idea how fast bluray is when running Pussy Blueray edition? I have no idea. Will wait and see.)

So in summary:

1) copy to RAM is a feature that will be available for all Pussies large and small and it will work better than last Pussy and you can get it to only load one squashfs, not the entire partition or live media as with old Pussy.

2) Its simply not practical to use copy to RAM on Pussy DVD. We dont expect people to do this. A CDROM ISO isnt too bad however and if you have one CDROM and 4 computers you need to run that day, then copy to ram on all four will probably only add 10 or 15 so minutes to your 4 computers booting up. Pussy server should load into RAM very quickly.

3) I dont really care about loading into RAM much, its not something i would bother to improve and i will just take what the debian live people have setup. With full featured Pussy OSes that have everything in them (ie 600MB CDROM ISO) then copy to RAM starts to drag on a bit. Best to just run off of the HDD or USB stick. CDROM/ DVD is just to preview or install the OS. Or to use other peoples computers without them getting mad at you. However, i run Live CDROM and DVD most the time just coz i feel like a bad ass using my own Live OS.

4) The squashfs over 4G in size is something of a concern when using FAT32 USB sticks or frugal installs etc. Making working squashfs files that are 4GB on an NTFS or EXT2,3,4 partition is trouble free. Also, i know everyone hates me for this but i dont really care about MD5 SUMS. If it dont work for you downloading, message me, email me or even post here and ill send you a free Pussy DVD or CDROM. No questions asked.

When this new Pussy is finished ill be getting some actual paper manuals printed. And create a box set that includes the CDROM, a 8GB USB stick and a DVDROM and a few Post cards and stickers, this will be available to purchase from the website for like $20 and is pretty much my cost. Users who buy one of these kits will also have a reference number they can redeem for free one on one tech advice with me via email or skype or the chatroom that will kinda have some game elements to it on the website or support icon on the desktop like Puppy has or used to have. Users will get to talk to sickgut himself about any prob and ill help best i can.

(the game stuff tends to keep people calm while they wait for people to reply to stuff.)

HDD install that is not live (the installer itself rips the guts out of the live system at the end of install) is not a good thing for developers, who want to make special OS containing squashfs, it wont work. Static installed single app squashfs will still work. This sets up all the GRUB dual boot stuff as well as any other leading Linux brand. I wont ever use this, but many many people will. Especially newbies, as the install is freakishly simple. This HDD install will boot and use only like 48MB or something of RAM as the Live system takes up atleast 50 or MB of RAM. Low RAM computers with say 10GB HDD space will love this. But the DVD HDD install will probably nees 15GB space or 20GB to make it usable so you can actually save all your stuff for a year or so.

Sorry for the over long reply but i am not just addressing you, im kinda recounting the whole thing for everyone on the forum who comes here.

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sickgut
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#1786 Post by sickgut »

ill be back here in the next day or two, had 2 real long sleeps, almost feel human again. Ok back to holiday tyme :)

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sickgut
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#1787 Post by sickgut »

Another quick note:

When i was trying to make Pussy DVD edition with Debian Squeeze, there simpy wasnt enough interesting stuff to fill it. Wheezy has much more things that are good and not just something a IT student rigged up to show he can code in C++ that was never meant to actually be used because its so crappy.

Where im going with this is even with all the suggestions (keep em comming btw), this isnt going to fill 4GB of squashfs DVD.

so.....

We may end up with 64bit and 32 bit PAE option at boot up, OR the 64 bit option may only be for HDD install.

In my experience the only time 64 bit has helped me is using Virtual Box with more than one session running and using maybe 1GB RAM each and playing online games at the same time and websurfing and watching movies or youtubes when not playing games all the while there are atleast 8 XTerm sessions open and active.

This brings me to something else, hey... WTF.. thats not freaking what anyone using Pussy ever does. And you would probably be right.

So.... this sounds a little developerey.....?

OK yes. And in the past i have said that Pussy be sized to use all of the portable media that its used on. The server edition will not fill an entire CDROM. However, the server edition would, if as an optional extra it has a 64 bit "developer edition" sitting on the CDROM ... OR.... DVD along side it.

No newbie or normal person ever uses the server edition. But people who would run the server edition are generally technically minded developers of some kind. So you can "Develop" your own Linux OS and there may be documentation to help people know how to manipulate all the squashfs stuff and GRUB and other things. Debian branding will remain, but the OS is a debian and will be fully compatible with it and i dont think its too much to ask of a developer to change the debian branding themselves if they dont like it. Documentation will be included to tell any developers where the debian branding is so they can change it. Note that without the debian branding, no one would have a clear idea what branding they can add and change. If you see a debian logo or "Welcome to Debian whatever" or MOTD "Welcome to this Debian FTP server, be nice please" then you will know where the branding does occur thoughout the system and know that you can infact add your custom stuff and change it.

Console only FTP ssh web telnet samba etc server that is pussy server will never be needed to be pushed to its limits. 32 bit here is fine, and maybe not even be the PAE kernel. So your old AMD K6 350 with 64MB RAM can run it no promises on that tho, im a little unclear as to if non PAE kernels support multiple cores.

2 different OSes on the same cdrom or dvd, but aimed at the same users who are likely to use each. The server would be Pussy branded. The development station will not. The development station WILL be 64 bit. And is specifically meant to be a beast of a thing that can run 5 or 6 Virtual Box sessions and maybe GIMP (for icon editing etc) and run all the server stuff and consume maybe 8GB of RAM while doing it all. Note: You will be fully able to develop 32 bit OSes with this development station. And "starter ISO and maybe Images will be included to help you get to work immediately with your sweet ass Pussy inspired abomination."

Im hopefully going to get myself some abomination tonight if all goes well. They know they like it.

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Q5sys
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Re: Im asking for help and a favour

#1788 Post by Q5sys »

sickgut wrote:Maybe DVD and data transfer speeds will be something different in 8 years time (anyone have an idea how fast bluray is when running Pussy Blueray edition? I have no idea. Will wait and see.)
Interestingly I was just reading a link the other day that shows that BluRay speeds are actually slower than 12x DVD speeds. Well 4x Bluray was faster, but the 1x, 2x, and 3x were actually slower. Let me see if I can find it. It'll be interesting to see how much faster BluRay drives will get.
EDIT: Found it. http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/s ... er=skektek
Image
sickgut wrote:1) copy to RAM is a feature that will be available for all Pussies large and small and it will work better than last Pussy and you can get it to only load one squashfs, not the entire partition or live media as with old Pussy.
gotcha.
sickgut wrote:2) Its simply not practical to use copy to RAM on Pussy DVD. We dont expect people to do this. A CDROM ISO isnt too bad however and if you have one CDROM and 4 computers you need to run that day, then copy to ram on all four will probably only add 10 or 15 so minutes to your 4 computers booting up. Pussy server should load into RAM very quickly.
I've never quite understood the live cd/dvd crowd. But there people that love it and swear by it.
sickgut wrote:3) I dont really care about loading into RAM much, its not something i would bother to improve and i will just take what the debian live people have setup. With full featured Pussy OSes that have everything in them (ie 600MB CDROM ISO) then copy to RAM starts to drag on a bit. Best to just run off of the HDD or USB stick. CDROM/ DVD is just to preview or install the OS. Or to use other peoples computers without them getting mad at you. However, i run Live CDROM and DVD most the time just coz i feel like a bad ass using my own Live OS.
I've always prefered USB over optical disks, but thats just me. So I'm guessing you have no plans to implement live cd/dvd with ability to save back to the drive? Or will it be there for the same reasons of 'why not'.

sickgut wrote:4) The squashfs over 4G in size is something of a concern when using FAT32 USB sticks or frugal installs etc. Making working squashfs files that are 4GB on an NTFS or EXT2,3,4 partition is trouble free. Also, i know everyone hates me for this but i dont really care about MD5 SUMS. If it dont work for you downloading, message me, email me or even post here and ill send you a free Pussy DVD or CDROM. No questions asked.
Ive got all my drives formated in ext4, and I still cant get squash files over around 600 mb to work properly. They are created fine, but dont wory properly. I'm not talking about the actual file size limitation within the File system. I'm thinking there is something going on with using an SFS of that size. I dont know if its an issue with the layered file system, or something else. I mentioned the MD5 sums becuase it shows that something is definately going wrong somewhere along the chain. Example, I made an SFS of the package Xonotic (FPS game), its 900mb.
When I take the tar package of the files and extract them and make a SFS package... when I reboot and load the SFS package it wont run, the md5 sums are different than what they should be for all the individual files. I can check this by simply MD5suming the files inside the tar and comparing that to the Md5sums of the files in the SFS. (no Im not just comparing the tar to the sfs). I've run into this problem repeatedly when trying to make large SFS packages.
sickgut wrote:Sorry for the over long reply but i am not just addressing you, im kinda recounting the whole thing for everyone on the forum who comes here.
No need to apologize. I appreciate your lengthy comment. Sometimes people on this forum leave such a minimal comment that its hard for me to understand everything they are thinking because so little is written. So lengthy replies are always welcome in my book.

The only small piece of recommendation I'd give, is if you're doing all this work and size isnt important to you... please do something about the appearence. Pretty much everytime I hear someone talk about Puppy in the rest of the linux world... I get flooded by comments of 'its so ugly', 'I feel like its 1995 still', 'its fugly'. So if you can make it all nice and shiny... I'm sure it'll help win over lots of people who currently see Puppy as just being ugly. Stu's done alot in this area... might be worth taking some ideas from him.
I'd love for there to be a beautiful puppy system to show people.

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greengeek
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#1789 Post by greengeek »

sickgut wrote:No newbie or normal person ever uses the server edition.
Just the word "server" is enough to frighten people - and yet it would be fantastic if Pussy did have a "homeserver edition" on the dvd that was newby-friendly: it could be capable of live booting a castoff laptop/PC (everybody has something they don't use anymore don't they?) and would serve up media files across the home network and wireless, and receive everyones files for storage. (so a combined NAS and media PC all on live dvd or CD)

Just plug in an external usb hard drive, boot pussy homeserver edition and it's all go. If you rig it so there's no actual "servery" configuration to do anyone will be able to use it. (and maybe you could add the ability to be a PXE boot server so that it offers "Pussyboot" to any interested PC booting on the network that would be great too...)
anyone have an idea how fast bluray is when running Pussy Blueray edition?
One of my workmates has a blueray player and he says pussy is no different to normal speed. Sounds like there is a bit of jerking sometimes too. I'm going to stick with VHS.

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sickgut
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Re: Im asking for help and a favour

#1790 Post by sickgut »

Q5sys wrote:
sickgut wrote:Maybe DVD and data transfer speeds will be something different in 8 years time (anyone have an idea how fast bluray is when running Pussy Blueray edition? I have no idea. Will wait and see.)
Interestingly I was just reading a link the other day that shows that BluRay speeds are actually slower than 12x DVD speeds. Well 4x Bluray was faster, but the 1x, 2x, and 3x were actually slower. Let me see if I can find it. It'll be interesting to see how much faster BluRay drives will get.
EDIT: Found it. http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/s ... er=skektek
Image
sickgut wrote:1) copy to RAM is a feature that will be available for all Pussies large and small and it will work better than last Pussy and you can get it to only load one squashfs, not the entire partition or live media as with old Pussy.
gotcha.
sickgut wrote:2) Its simply not practical to use copy to RAM on Pussy DVD. We dont expect people to do this. A CDROM ISO isnt too bad however and if you have one CDROM and 4 computers you need to run that day, then copy to ram on all four will probably only add 10 or 15 so minutes to your 4 computers booting up. Pussy server should load into RAM very quickly.
I've never quite understood the live cd/dvd crowd. But there people that love it and swear by it.
sickgut wrote:3) I dont really care about loading into RAM much, its not something i would bother to improve and i will just take what the debian live people have setup. With full featured Pussy OSes that have everything in them (ie 600MB CDROM ISO) then copy to RAM starts to drag on a bit. Best to just run off of the HDD or USB stick. CDROM/ DVD is just to preview or install the OS. Or to use other peoples computers without them getting mad at you. However, i run Live CDROM and DVD most the time just coz i feel like a bad ass using my own Live OS.
I've always prefered USB over optical disks, but thats just me. So I'm guessing you have no plans to implement live cd/dvd with ability to save back to the drive? Or will it be there for the same reasons of 'why not'.

sickgut wrote:4) The squashfs over 4G in size is something of a concern when using FAT32 USB sticks or frugal installs etc. Making working squashfs files that are 4GB on an NTFS or EXT2,3,4 partition is trouble free. Also, i know everyone hates me for this but i dont really care about MD5 SUMS. If it dont work for you downloading, message me, email me or even post here and ill send you a free Pussy DVD or CDROM. No questions asked.
Ive got all my drives formated in ext4, and I still cant get squash files over around 600 mb to work properly. They are created fine, but dont wory properly. I'm not talking about the actual file size limitation within the File system. I'm thinking there is something going on with using an SFS of that size. I dont know if its an issue with the layered file system, or something else. I mentioned the MD5 sums becuase it shows that something is definately going wrong somewhere along the chain. Example, I made an SFS of the package Xonotic (FPS game), its 900mb.
When I take the tar package of the files and extract them and make a SFS package... when I reboot and load the SFS package it wont run, the md5 sums are different than what they should be for all the individual files. I can check this by simply MD5suming the files inside the tar and comparing that to the Md5sums of the files in the SFS. (no Im not just comparing the tar to the sfs). I've run into this problem repeatedly when trying to make large SFS packages.
sickgut wrote:Sorry for the over long reply but i am not just addressing you, im kinda recounting the whole thing for everyone on the forum who comes here.
No need to apologize. I appreciate your lengthy comment. Sometimes people on this forum leave such a minimal comment that its hard for me to understand everything they are thinking because so little is written. So lengthy replies are always welcome in my book.

The only small piece of recommendation I'd give, is if you're doing all this work and size isnt important to you... please do something about the appearence. Pretty much everytime I hear someone talk about Puppy in the rest of the linux world... I get flooded by comments of 'its so ugly', 'I feel like its 1995 still', 'its fugly'. So if you can make it all nice and shiny... I'm sure it'll help win over lots of people who currently see Puppy as just being ugly. Stu's done alot in this area... might be worth taking some ideas from him.
I'd love for there to be a beautiful puppy system to show people.
OK,sorry to quote the whole post and make it super long, bit worn out from everything happening today so im going in quick and easy.

1) Thats a bit of a let down about blueray speeds.

2) Its the cheapest option. A disc costs nothing basically. USB sticks, while much better (and can be run live with no save file on other peoples computer just like CDROMs or DVDs but way faster) cost way more $8 or $12 or something for a 4GB, more from a supermarket. Preview the OS and to give to friends, CDROM or DVD a good option for poor people. I have a fixation with CDROM/ DVD because i am trying to work out a Playstation 2 type game system that lets you use your PC with the same "put the disk in and just freaking play", is very appealing. Even a USB stick formatted to be a save file/ partition would complement this kind of setup and replace the Playstation memory card. Im off track now but i cant stop thinking about this and maybe, well not only do it with games.

3) re: Live CDROM/ DVD not saving back to drive...... there will be a preconfigured save file on the CDROM or DVD that you extract to the drive, this drive can be a USB stick or HDD or SD card, anything as long as its in the "cd / " of the drive, not root dir of the drive as in /root, i mean the highest possible directory "/", ie not in any directory/ folder, loose on the highest level of the drive... and if you use the CDROM/ DVD this will automatically find and use the save file. You can ofcause make your own save files. The default size for save file will be 1GB, but because this save file will be zipped and is basicly blank other than a single config file, it zips down to 1MB or maybe 3MB at most. Spiffy how compression knows how to deal with blank space. Extract this to the top level of any drive and you basicly just setup a frugal/ CDROM/ DVD system. However, yes USB is faster. (pussy started life as simpley the best USB stick image to fit 2GB sticks without a thought of installing to HDD or CROM, i discovered by accident that the same squashfs file worked on CDROMs.... then everything changed, and changed again when nooby and john3voltas told me how to setup HDD install with GRUB and squashfs).

4) Ok, MD5 sums, only done this like once for a few addon squashfs. Never seemed to me to be any thing i was interested in doing. In my experience, unless your using dial up then an ISO either works or not. Ive never run MD5 sums on my own stuff. I simply am unfamiliar with this. I dont learn new things quickly but i am resourceful with what i already know. Maybe i should learn more about thing kind of thing. I can tell you with over 100% ensureness (we are getting into the realm of betting my right nut on a pair of jacks here....) i have never had unworking sfs or squashfs files (puppy sfs and squashfs are just different names for the same thing, one puppy, one debian, they are even intercompatible in format, but ofcause not content). Ive even had success with 3.8GB or so sized squashfs on Fat32 file systems, 10 or so GB on NTFS and i actually squashfsed my entire 80GB NTFS HDD once (just the files in the drive not like an image of the drive) and then copies it over to a new 750GB HDD and keep the data in the squashfs, i mount it sometimes to look at old ideas i was thinking at the time. Will ANY of these pass a MD5? I have no idea whatsoever. I just know they work. Now im the newbie here and newbies ask stupid stuff... i know nothing about MD5 really, is there a change that the squashfs you make over 600MB or so are erroring out because they are actually corrupted or because there is something wrong with the MD5 not liking the squashfs some how? Does the squashfs that failed the MD5 still work? My experience is it will either work or something very obvious and bad will happen and it doesnt. This is my own gauge for reliable squashfs here. I tend to take the actually mksquashfs errors very seriously. If there are no errors, my experience tells me that the squashfs is fine. And i probably just annoyed 100 different people just then but thats my experience however i dont use computers like normal people do so, take what i have said here with a grain of salt. I may have no idea what im talking about, im first to admit this. The only quality insurance i implement is testing the ISO and every program/ app extensively before uploading. Yes i have had bad ISO's but this has always been because i did something bad in the OS, not due to network errors creeping into the ISO. It is my maybe flawed understanding that the MD5 of the tar you downloaded, become completely invalid once the file is changed by 1 byte.
Extracting the tar then creating a squash out of its contents will cause the MDP to fail because its a different file altogether. Even changing the file name of a file will cause it to error out. But like i said i may have misunderstood something and i am pretty much missing my right nut now.

5) I know Pussy looks like sh** and definately not even washed or hygenic, many people have had eye rabies from looking at Pussy. This is by design. We are out of Alpha (now its stable) and into Beta (more technical stuff to work on, package selection, catroll panel stuff, the poin and click/ left click/ right click stuff, the interface etc). Next step is Full Release Retail version that will be listed on distro watch. Asthetics get worked on at the end of beta, then the beta is re-released to make sure it doesnt blind people and if this passes the test then we are at Full Finally Finished FFS what do i do with all this Fame and Awesomeness Level. Now, i have told the people helping me to refrain from asthetic features, simply because at this point Pussy is forever changing, no use making awesome super JWM brilliance if we decide to move to OpenBox, no point in editing all the Rox-Filer stuff if we go with LXDM. Better to leave it as the last thing. We arent looking for general popularity yet, it isnt even user friendly enough for newbies. Asthetics will be taken care of (not by myself, im color blind and have no sense of visual form and function at all. This will be done by whoever wants to take on the job and no doubt like every other OS, we will have a variety of themes to choose from.) I know this may frustrate users but Pussy isnt at that stage yet. Im basicly going to somehow grab the attention of the artists in this community and have a free for all. And the artist gets fame and recognition in return because the background has his or hers web address and or email clearly visible and even a text file in a "about Pussy" or "about the developers of Pussy" or whatever and people will read it, this can be as long as the artist likes (its very hard to make a 50MB text file) and maybe in return for their effort, some more business may come their way.

OK thanks for your questions and posting. If you want to ask anything else then please do. Or if i havent explained things correctly then please let me know and ill have another shot at it.

Peace out buddy.

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#1791 Post by sickgut »

greengeek wrote:
sickgut wrote:No newbie or normal person ever uses the server edition.
Just the word "server" is enough to frighten people - and yet it would be fantastic if Pussy did have a "homeserver edition" on the dvd that was newby-friendly: it could be capable of live booting a castoff laptop/PC (everybody has something they don't use anymore don't they?) and would serve up media files across the home network and wireless, and receive everyones files for storage. (so a combined NAS and media PC all on live dvd or CD)

Just plug in an external usb hard drive, boot pussy homeserver edition and it's all go. If you rig it so there's no actual "servery" configuration to do anyone will be able to use it. (and maybe you could add the ability to be a PXE boot server so that it offers "Pussyboot" to any interested PC booting on the network that would be great too...)
anyone have an idea how fast bluray is when running Pussy Blueray edition?
One of my workmates has a blueray player and he says pussy is no different to normal speed. Sounds like there is a bit of jerking sometimes too. I'm going to stick with VHS.
OK you hit on sumpfink there bud

To normal people, a pussy server user must need and exorcist or something.

The thing is, the normal, even the old base Pussy, not just the Xtra version, has all the same server features as the server edition anyway, but it runs in the background and the server stuff dont take up much RAM etc. Webserver, ssh server, ftp server, telnet server is all working out the box already in every single Pussy released to date, except the Wheezy Base iso (thats not even a Pussy its a dev tool).

So in theory, a separate catroll panel option that lists "Home Server" stuff, and an icon on the desktop that does the same thing... as well as a menu entry..... newbies would use Pussy, be happily clicking away and trolling chat rooms and the be like.... hmmmm whats this home server thing...... and there would be various options there, with a start and stop feature for every server app, aswell as options to edit their settings etc.... this would introduce the newbie into the server stuff. hmmmmmmm

this may be the most sane thing ive read anywhere this year. Well done buddy, this is definately do able and very easy do able. Ill need to learn things about samba but im sure it wont be a problem. All the stuff is already there, and to introduce this idea, its just like 20 or so separate scripts with a decent description or icon containing things like start, stop, restart, use this port, enable this, enable or disable that and share out this drive or share whatever..

See i dont think of things like this. So props to you bud.

Samba wasnt included in last Pussy, neither was CUPS but these will be included.

Normal server edition is supposed to be used by people who already have 50 servers and only one monitor between them, insta booting OS lets you login immediately via the network to configure it. The home server would be more like the everyday person server.

thanks again

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#1792 Post by sickgut »

I updated the first post in this thread btw. Maybe i was a little crazy from sleep dep when i did it. If you cant thing of anything to say, then say something crazy that doesnt make sense and call it humor,

seriously tho, thats one smart cat. Took me and Pussy 3 months to track it down, extract DNA and intimidate it enough not to report us and to never speak of this again. All it took was some cat biscuits, wow, it seems very easy to bribe a cat. I had catnip on me for a backup bribe but nope, 2 cat biscuits later and your being cloned and turned into a computery linuxy thing.

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#1793 Post by sickgut »

Please keep posting your favorite and complete application list that you would like to see in Pussy or you use yourself.

Also we are going to need a theme song and a few older .mod and .midi style sound files (for testing purposes, so you know your sound is working).

I thought about having a sound file triggered when pussy boots to the console, and it would be really cool if it just purred for a minute or something. It would be super cool to have pussy purring when the desktop X windows thing is loading and for a little bit after it is loaded.

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#1794 Post by nooby »

I would love to get MakeHuman going on Pussy.
http://www.makehuman.org/
Their download page has a Debian .deb thing
but it lack some library thing if I get it and
I fail to figure out how to know what is needed to do.

so if you could make something like that to work it would be "Super"
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

gcmartin

#1795 Post by gcmartin »

In my experience the only time 64 bit has helped me is using Virtual Box with more than one session running and using maybe 1GB RAM each and playing online games at the same time and websurfing and watching movies or youtubes when not playing games all the while there are atleast 8 XTerm sessions open and active.
There's a lot of good info here is demonstrating the power of Pussy.

I agree with @Greengeek about the scare that seems to embrace many in the community about the word "server". Even though many of us do understand that it merely means an offering to others in your LAN community, it still bring fear of all types.

Probably best to make a claim somewhere to assist readers in understanding that server does not have negative connotations, but does bring good benefits to the use of one's PC system.

For instance, Microsoft, since Windows95, has gotten away with a LAN sharing without ever calling it what it truly is...."a Windows server", like SAMBA. (They also probably wanted to differentiate Windows desktop server component from their flagship server which they sell for $1000s) Either way, one can assume they didn't want to scare users.

I think it would be nice if there is some way to express Puppy/Pussy server services without having the community shutter in discomfort. Many of us know this but still many others react in horror.

Maybe others have some suggestions of methods of presenting server features of any PUP in a way that does not have the fear association.

You also ask for ideas of subsystems for next project
(Censored - I would much prefer a little alcohol, a funny smoke with my Pussy. But, notwithstanding, I will take a multimedia desktop with a sharing feature (server???) so that others on my LAN can see and use anything available.)

An idea
JamesBond has been instrumental in the presenting one of his tools for our use in Puppyland. It is called Netboot'ing. I have run a DVD based 64bit system since his introduction with this feature. Since I rarely reboot my 64bit system(s), I use this tool so that other PCs on the LAN can boot without ever using their HDDs or their CD-DVD. They start and boot directly from the "Netboot server" (there goes that word again) about as fast as they do from a HDD. You may want to consider including his tool in your base so that it can extend boot service to any PC on your LAN which chooses to boot this way.

When its running, they is no impact on the server in any server PC's desktop operations when a LAN PC is booting or when the server is sitting idly in wait.

Cheers! :D

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#1796 Post by greengeek »

gcmartin wrote: I use this tool so that other PCs on the LAN can boot without ever using their HDDs or their CD-DVD. They start and boot directly from the "Netboot server" ...You may want to consider including his tool in your base so that it can extend boot service to any PC on your LAN which chooses to boot this way.
Definitely a useful function. "Puss n Boots" !! Even a diskless PC could grab it's boot code from the live Pussy CD/DVD running on another system on the network. A whole network furball of pussys all started from one DVD. Gaming, chatting, whatever.

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#1797 Post by sickgut »

gcmartin wrote:
In my experience the only time 64 bit has helped me is using Virtual Box with more than one session running and using maybe 1GB RAM each and playing online games at the same time and websurfing and watching movies or youtubes when not playing games all the while there are atleast 8 XTerm sessions open and active.
There's a lot of good info here is demonstrating the power of Pussy.

I agree with @Greengeek about the scare that seems to embrace many in the community about the word "server". Even though many of us do understand that it merely means an offering to others in your LAN community, it still bring fear of all types.

Probably best to make a claim somewhere to assist readers in understanding that server does not have negative connotations, but does bring good benefits to the use of one's PC system.

For instance, Microsoft, since Windows95, has gotten away with a LAN sharing without ever calling it what it truly is...."a Windows server", like SAMBA. (They also probably wanted to differentiate Windows desktop server component from their flagship server which they sell for $1000s) Either way, one can assume they didn't want to scare users.

I think it would be nice if there is some way to express Puppy/Pussy server services without having the community shutter in discomfort. Many of us know this but still many others react in horror.

Maybe others have some suggestions of methods of presenting server features of any PUP in a way that does not have the fear association.

You also ask for ideas of subsystems for next project
(Censored - I would much prefer a little alcohol, a funny smoke with my Pussy. But, notwithstanding, I will take a multimedia desktop with a sharing feature (server???) so that others on my LAN can see and use anything available.)

An idea
JamesBond has been instrumental in the presenting one of his tools for our use in Puppyland. It is called Netboot'ing. I have run a DVD based 64bit system since his introduction with this feature. Since I rarely reboot my 64bit system(s), I use this tool so that other PCs on the LAN can boot without ever using their HDDs or their CD-DVD. They start and boot directly from the "Netboot server" (there goes that word again) about as fast as they do from a HDD. You may want to consider including his tool in your base so that it can extend boot service to any PC on your LAN which chooses to boot this way.

When its running, they is no impact on the server in any server PC's desktop operations when a LAN PC is booting or when the server is sitting idly in wait.

Cheers! :D
ah yes these days gigabit networking is pretty much no different from HDD
speed.

This netbooting is a subject that i need to research, i have no idea how to do it at this time so i will find out.

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#1798 Post by sickgut »

What do you guys think of a background wallpaper that lists all the terminal/ console/ command line interface commands?

maybe some people might learn the commands subliminally or something?

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#1799 Post by Atle »

maybe some people might learn the commands subliminally or something?
Lovely idea... If added a text to speech feature on can also learn command line while sleeping :D

But be aware your moving into the turf of MK Ultra here :?

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#1800 Post by Q5sys »

sickgut wrote:I thought about having a sound file triggered when pussy boots to the console, and it would be really cool if it just purred for a minute or something. It would be super cool to have pussy purring when the desktop X windows thing is loading and for a little bit after it is loaded.
If you're looking for an example of this, check out Sabayon, they had this feature in like v6 or v7 I think.

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