Fatdog64-620 Final (17 April 2013) and 621 (9 May 2013)

[Ibidem]

FWIW, I had a similar problem, recently, at my auto dealership's open network. My trusty laptop booting Live FD621 would NOT connect under any circumstances. I tried normal boot with save-sessions AND I also booted without save-sessions(native). So, I removed the booting LiveDVD and booted Windows which happily connected.

Probably would have spent some time in research, but, my car was complete within 30minutes. I did think it odd, though.

Questions

• what would be the recommended approach to assist development when these occur?
• Is there some specific reports/commands development would like to see the results of when this occurs?

...I've gotten the impression that's usually a driver that can't initialize the hardware. To check, run these commands:

Code: Select all

ifconfig
#see if there's an interface
#if yes:
cat /sys/class/net/<iface>/device/modalias
#if not:
rfkill list all #If you see anything here, you can unblock manually
lsmod |grep 80211
lspci |grep -ie net -e wire

If all of those are silent, I find that a reset is needed (disconnect all power sources/batteries, hold the power button down for a while). If the last is silent, the drivers aren't autoloading.

[gcmartin]

Thanks for the driver tip and the next time it happens I will provide the findings. One thing to note: I did check for IP at the time....nothing! And the laptop "saw" the open network at the dealer, using FD tools. But the system would NOT negotiate an IP/connection.

BUT
Forgot to mention this, as it is probably important. At home, over wireless, my laptop works fine. Just that I found at the dealership, FD621 would not connect for some odd reason....but rebooting the laptop into Windows, the wireless connected and worked.

Hope that provides some helpful information

[heywoodj]

Thanks for the driver tip and the next time it happens I will provide the findings. One thing to note: I did check for IP at the time....nothing! And the laptop "saw" the open network at the dealer, using FD tools. But the system would NOT negotiate an IP/connection.

BUT
Forgot to mention this, as it is probably important. At home, over wireless, my laptop works fine. Just that I found at the dealership, FD621 would not connect for some odd reason....but rebooting the laptop into Windows, the wireless connected and worked.

Hope that provides some helpful information

When my laptop didn't connect with FD, it seemed to be related to distance from the router. It wouldn't connect at a preposterously short distance of 20 feet(~6 m). The network wizard couldn't even see the router. Win8 had no problem connecting, as have all of the other laptops running other OSes (Win, OSX and a lot of Puppies).

Maybe as an experiment, you could try to move away from your home router and see what happens?

FWIW, my laptop in question is a Lenovo G585 with an Atheros AR9285 card.

[kirk]

That might be a problem with dhcpcd. Fatdog64 includes the older dhcpcd. If it happens again open terminal and type:

Code: Select all

# killall dhcpcd
# dhcpcd-3.2.3 wlan0

You'll need to replace wlan0 with your interface name. If that works for you, you might think why not just use the old dhcpcd? Because it doesn't work with all dhcp servers ether.

[nooby]

Guys hope you can forgive me Could you help this guy I link to
here in Puppy forum? As is obvious from my user name
I truly am a Newbie so I should not have tried to help
a FatDog user I should have told him about this thread instead.
Sadly I got carried away. Over confident it was simple.

Here is the thread he started. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 703#708703

he asks this

Ok, one big complication from the get-go: I'm playing with Fatdog on an Intel Mac Mini (mid 2010).

Anyway, I used "dd" to create a Live USB stick from the Fatdog64-621 ISO file, and then successfully booted Fatdog64 from the USB stick. When I went to reboot the computer, Fatdog64, of course, asked me if I wanted to create a savefile. When I got to the part where I was supposed to pick a partition for the savefile, I picked the partition for the USB stick itself, rather than the hard drive -- which seemed like a good idea at the time. However, Fatdog wouldn't let me put the save file there.

i read that several of you have booted on USB so would be cool
if any of you can help him out with the save file.

[gasem]

USB

I made my USB as follows

GPARTED my flash into 3 partitions, made the first bootable. I do this because I am always fooling around and I can store downloads onto the second or third or turn the third into a swap if needed

I use ext2 for the first partition as opposed to fat32 and this is where I install fatdog

used the fatdog64 insatller

Step 1 check device info to make sure you are on the right drive
tick use small intrid (my preference)
choose do not re-format

Step 2 I chose option install boot loader on partition This is a freshly Gparted USB drive so there is nothng to damage

Step 3 Install from CD/DVD

Step 4 Click install and go get a cup....

Once installed load Grub4Dos

Choose your device on the drive list
Choose within only this device
click OK

You will see

frugal install
fatdog64 (sdxx) ....where xx is the drive and partition
options pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck

Click OK

Click OK again

click edit menu list

under frugal install

title Fatdog64 (sdd1)
uuid 5118a4b3-b0c8-4cb6-9713-b7f1ff7d8f89 (or whatever your UUID is)

next to pfix=fsck in the kernal line add

savefile=ram:uuid:uuid5118a4b3-b0c8-4cb6-9713-b7f1ff7d8f89

or whatever the uuid of your particular drive is eg:

kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck savefile=ram:uuid:uuid5118a4b3-b0c8-4cb6-9713-b7f1ff7d8f89

This will cause fatdog to include the USB drive in the search, find the savefile and load into ram

My menulist entry looks like this

# Frugal installed Puppy

title Fatdog64 (sdd1)
uuid 5118a4b3-b0c8-4cb6-9713-b7f1ff7d8f89
kernel /vmlinuz pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck savefile=ram:uuid:uuid5118a4b3-b0c8-4cb6-9713-b7f1ff7d8f89
initrd /initrd

no carriage return on the savefile line its all one long line intrid/intrid is on its own line

SAVE THE MENULIST FILE

I reboot set the bios choice bootlist choices for my USB stick as the first choice in the boot list, save F10,OK and it reboots to my USB drive. After fatdog completely boots, I do a default savefile into the partition where the rest of the fatdog files are

so far this has given me the most stable and reliable boot experience

[Snail]

Just installed to NTFS partition on my Lenovo Thinkpad t400 laptop. My first Fatdog! Everything seems OK, wifi, speakers, mouse, trackpad. Downloaded Libre Office SFS and wow it's fast to load! Minor gltch when loading it on the fly, the menu doesn't get updated first time, is there a fix for that?

Only major problem is the buit-in mic is not working with either the Skype pet or mhWaveEdit. My blundering around in the control panel sound section has only made things worse, now the Skype test call won't even start. Initially the call went normally except that my voice wasn't recorded and played back., now I get "Problem with audio capture" as soon as Skype answers my call and the call terminates.

Anybody got any thoughts on this?

[jamesbond]

WillM, much thanks for the Gimp SFS.

Snail,
delete /root/.asoundrc and /root/spot/.asoundrc and you're as good as new.

The libreoffice menu not showing is a known problem. Kirk devised a fix which fixed many other SFS packages but apparently not this one. We'll see what we can do. For the time being, if you press Alt+F2 and type "libre" followed by a Tab (or just type "libreoffice") and then press Enter, you'll launch libreoffice, to which you can just drag and drop documents to open, etc.

Thanks for all others who have chipped in to help the (new or not so new) users. Your help is appreciated. I and kirk are rather occupied with Real-Life (tm) and can only respond sporadically for the time being. That being said, Fatdog development is still continuing, though at a much slower pace.

cheers!

[Snail]

Hi Jamesbond,

As a clarification, the LibreOffice menu problem seems to be a one time only one. I'm not sure, as my recent boots are loading the sfs at boot and not on the fly, but I think that unloading andd reloading on the fly also resulted in the menu loading.

I did not and still do not have a /root/.asoundrc file. I do have a /root/spot/.asoundrc, which I renamed. It made no difference, Skype test call fails immediately after Skype "picks up" the call, with the message "problem with sound capture". As I described before, this was not the original problem but occurred after I fiddled with alsamixer.

I will start again with a clean boot and try your suggestion again.

Peter

[Snail]

I restarted with a clean no-savefile boot. Set up again and made a new savefile. There are no .asoundrc files. The "Problem with sound capture " message no longer appears but problems remain, the mic is not usable. It is working in both Skype and mhWaveEdit, but the gain is tiny, mhWaveEdit shows almost a flat line when recording.

Speaker volume is a bit low too but is bearable, mic is not.

The soundcard is a HDA Intel Chip: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)

The mic works fine when running win 7 ultimate (64bit), on this lenovo T400 laptop, about the only thing in Windows that does!

Here are my alsamixer settings:

[Ibidem]

I restarted with a clean no-savefile boot. Set up again and made a new savefile. There are no .asoundrc files. The "Problem with sound capture " message no longer appears but problems remain, the mic is not usable. It is working in both Skype and mhWaveEdit, but the gain is tiny, mhWaveEdit shows almost a flat line when recording.

Speaker volume is a bit low too but is bearable, mic is not.

The soundcard is a HDA Intel Chip: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)

The mic works fine when running win 7 ultimate (64bit), on this lenovo T400 laptop, about the only thing in Windows that does!

Here are my alsamixer settings:

Ty turning down the right side capture (press "c").
Odd, but for some hardware it's needed.

[Snail]

My mic/sound working at all but so poorly reminds me of a driver issue I had using Win 7 ultimate on this same laptop. The mic lost gain all of a suddden. It was not nearly as bad as it is with Fatdog, it was still usable but I had to speak very loudly to use Skype. Googling revealed that the problem was a driver update pushed by Lenovo and a roll back to the previous driver was a total fix. Since this proves that there is at least one very bad "official" driver out there, presumably written by Conexant, maybe the Linux driver is also a dud? Is there another driver i could try?

[Snail]

Hi Ibidem,

Thanks for your reply. Can you clarify? I do not understand your instruction.

[chapchap70]

I restarted with a clean no-savefile boot. Set up again and made a new savefile. There are no .asoundrc files. The "Problem with sound capture " message no longer appears but problems remain, the mic is not usable. It is working in both Skype and mhWaveEdit, but the gain is tiny, mhWaveEdit shows almost a flat line when recording.

Speaker volume is a bit low too but is bearable, mic is not.

The soundcard is a HDA Intel Chip: Conexant CX20561 (Hermosa)

The mic works fine when running win 7 ultimate (64bit), on this lenovo T400 laptop, about the only thing in Windows that does!

Here are my alsamixer settings:

I have had problems getting Skype to work in Linux in the past while other video applications were working. How does your mic work with VLC?

VLC recognized and was able to record with an old camera but Skype did not record/capture using video1 like VLC did.

[Snail]

Hi chapchap70,

Skype seems to be working fine. The camera is also fine. Note, I'm using the camera and mic that are built-in to this laptop, not a separate camera. The sound problem isn't confined to Skype, mhWaveEdit has the exact same problem. So either there is a mic driver problem or I'm doing something wrong . I'm hoping the latter but have no idea at the moment.

I'm not familiar with VLC. The Fatdog version doesn't appear to offer sound recording. There is no sign of a record button.

[smokey01]

I'm not familiar with VLC. The Fatdog version doesn't appear to offer sound recording. There is no sign of a record button.

Under the View Menu item, tick advanced controls. Now you can record anything you can watch.

[chapchap70]

After opening VLC, click on "Media" then "Open Capture Device". If you click "Play" on the bottom of the window, you should be able to see yourself via your built in camera and any noise you make should play through the computer speakers if your mic is working.

The dropdown menu by the "Play" button should have a "Convert" choice. That will enable to save a recording as a file.


I don't have to enter anything into my "Device Selection" fields but the defaults on mine are:

Video : dev/video0 (I believe dev/video is a symlink to dev/video0)
Audio is hw:0,0



Edit: If you have access to a USB webcam, VLC should see this as dev/video1 and hw:0,1

I would think that if the USB webcam plays in Skype with sound, than that would confirm that it is a driver issue with your built in mic.

[Sage]

Surprising to see so many folks still using Skype since it was acquired by M$, especially as so much work and advice has been given previously on (P)SIP. Maybe one can't stop GCHQ and the CIA from intercepting video footage of one's beautiful countenance (and use it match with CCTV coverage?!), but I'd prefer that it didn't get added to the Hanford server farm repository...

[DC]

Hi everbody,

Could somebody remind me how to set the numlock to on at boot up

thanks

DC

[Snail]

Thanks to you all for the help so far. VLC records and plays video just fine, although not great for rapid movement on my system. Plays both video at full speed and sound from .wmv file and sound from .mp3 files. Sound is not recorded, or at least not at audible levels.

So still no success with the mic. Seems pretty certain now that it's a driver issue.

Help! I really don't want to have to use Windows on this system any more, Quite apart from the distasteful ethics of MS, the OS is just crawling now. Setting up Fatdog wasn't all plain sailing but it was a breeze compared with trying and failing to delouse win 7 and keeping it deloused will be an ongoing battle even if I succeed this time. All except this mic issue that is.