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

[Snail]

There is a Numlockx pet in the package manager.

[DC]

Hi Snail,

I know about the pet,
But I've a memory of fatdog asking do you want numlock in the start configuration. Implying the function is built in. I can't find any reference to it. In other words how do you rerun the start configuration?

thanks

DC

[Snail]

It works! I feel really dumb. I didn't realise that for sound capture, the initial alsamixer screen is useless. I just discovered that hitting "F4" you get an entirely new screen that had most of the mic sliders at zero. I just set them all to 100% and now it works.

In my defense, the alsamixer interface is just horrid. What for instance is the function of the mic slider on the playback screen for heavens' sake? And hitting the speaker icon on the taskbar opens alsamixer not maximised, which hides the two RHS sliders, and there is no slider at the bottom to indicate that there is anything more to see. I've wasted hours on this crap and it was completely unnecessary.

[Snail]

Hi DC,

Sorry, I can't find it myself.

Why can't every pup developer just implement upgrades to the Lucid 528 user interface? Playdayz and 01micko did great on that one, nothing else I've seen since is quite as good, as far a user help and interface friendliness goes. Not knocking Fatdog, it's still wonderful, especially the speed, but I'm spending a lot of time learning my way around the differences. A bit more help with the initial installation would make it a lot more accessible for win refugees too.

[smokey01]

Snail there is quite a lot of help built in that explains most things.

In my repository there is a help file called "how to do stuff in Fatdog" that should be of assistance.

Retrovol is also in my repository, which I find better than Alsamixer.

In the Fatdog package manager select smokey01.com

Cheers

[Sylvander]

In my repository there is a help file called "how to do stuff in Fatdog"...
In the Fatdog package manager select smokey01.com

How would I get to your repository, to get to the help file?
Chose smokey01.com in the Fatdog package manager, but that seemed to be of no help.

[CatDude]

Hi

How would I get to your repository, to get to the help file?
Chose smokey01.com in the Fatdog package manager, but that seemed to be of no help.

Here you go mate: http://www.smokey01.com/software/Fatdog64-600/other/Howto-do-stuff-in-FatDog.pdf
It appears as though the package manager does not look inside of sub-directories.

CatDude
.

[Hans]

On the verge of nagging:

It can't handle wallpaper names with spaces. Rename a wallpaper in /usr/share/backgrounds so it has a space in the name, select, apply.
Then again start the wallpaper setter in the control panel and nothing happens. Remove the space from the name and do ctrl alt backspace and you get an error that the wallpaper is not there, well, that is to be expected. But the wallpaper setter is working again.

The script breaks of at the end at GTK-DIALOG when it stumbles on the space.
I think it is good practise to avoid spaces in names in general but other people might get confused, so on the verge of nagging I decided to post this bug, sorry

cheers to all

[Sylvander]

Here you go mate: [url=http://www.smokey01.com/software/Fatdog ... FatDog.pdf]

Oops...
Went to save that pdf in my /mnt/home directory, and found I already had it saved there; must have been some time earlier.
Now to read it [yet again?]

[Ibidem]

Hi Ibidem,

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

I see you figured out the problem, but for anyone else...
In alsamixer, you have at least 3 screens: output, input, and all. You need the screen for input or all.
Each slider has 2 sides, so it can control stereo sound.
Tab to change screens/right or left arrow to change selected slider till you get to the "Capture" slider.
Up/down arrow to change volume; 0-9 are shortcuts to set both sides to 00%,10%,...90%.
After that, if you don't get sound in, try setting one side (in my case, the right) to 0% or as close as you can get; this requires pressing Z or C to reduce the volume of the left or right side.

Code: Select all

Left  Both  Right <- Side to change
 Q      W      E  <- Increase volume
 Z      X      C  <- Reduce volume

If you need to know more, press "h" to see the keys to use.

[Snail]

Thanks Ibidem.

I make a suggestion? I realise that all the misery I have gone through, was my own noobish fault, not RTFMing the instructions on the ncurses screen.. However, on behalf of all persistent noobs such as myself, I wonder if it would not be better to have the speaker icon right-click menu open alsamixer both full-screen and in F5 mode, i.e. with both capture and output sliders shown?

I can't seem to see how to do this, sorry. I tried changing alsamixer-launch to

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
#This script is called from lxpanel's volumealsa plugin by selecting "Volume Control Settings".

rxvt -maximized -e alsamixer.sh -V all &
 

It didn't work. rxvt ignores both the -maximized and +maximized options. If just the -V all is used, clicking on alsamixer-launch in the directory /usr/bin opens alsamixer in F5 mode but it doesn't make any difference to what happens when the speaker icon right-click is menu used. i suspect that alsamixer.sh is dumping the -V parameter but I am out of my depth there.


If anyone was looking for work, using a later version of alsamixer and making sure that ncurses was working properly with the terminal, by showing the bottom slider when window not maximised, might be more elegant. Not really necessary though.

[Snail]

Looking for Fatdog documentation, found this!

http://gorgeaccess.net/fatdog/ro/index. ... e=Sandbox9

Strange!

[edoc]

I burned the Fatdog64-621 ISO to a DVD and booted.

It handled the UEFI nonsense in the HP Pavilion g7 fine then processed for awhile, popping-up screens from time to time, including "Activating radeon workaround" which took a while, finally generating a badly garbled screen.

I'm guessing that I'll need to force generic video parameters at Fatdog64-612 boot so that I may get to where I can get them to set up correctly?

How do I do that, please?

BTW: I noticed this in the "Detailed changes from Fatdog64-611: Updates: Add 3 sets of missing Radeon firmware"

Does this mean that the Radeon drivers should be working OK?

Thanks! David

[jamesbond]

It appears as though the package manager does not look inside of sub-directories.

It doesn't.

It can't handle wallpaper names with spaces. Rename a wallpaper in /usr/share/backgrounds so it has a space in the name, select, apply.

Don't be sorry. We will never know if you don't report. On the other hand, please don't expect that all problems will be solved, too I'll note this but this would be rather low-priority.

Looking for Fatdog documentation, found this!

http://gorgeaccess.net/fatdog/ro/index. ... e=Sandbox9

Strange!

If you look at the directories above, that is at http://gorgeaccess.net/fatdog/ you will see that is a wiki created by one of the forum members here (I can't recall who), that has fallen victim to spam

I'm guessing that I'll need to force generic video parameters at Fatdog64-612 boot so that I may get to where I can get them to set up correctly?

pfix=xorgwizard.

Have you tried any of the options on the boot menu?

[Snail]

Hi jamesbond,

The wiki was created by murga-linux forum user TekVahana. I've PMed him and asked him to fix this.

The offending pages are linked from the puppylinux wikka here:

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Fatdog

Maybe someone with access could remove the link?

Can anyone suggest any solution to my attempts to modify the alsamixer display mode from the panel? I've also looked at editing the panel options, but edit doesn't seem to affect anything.

[edoc]

I'm guessing that I'll need to force generic video parameters at Fatdog64-612 boot so that I may get to where I can get them to set up correctly?

pfix=xorgwizard.

Have you tried any of the options on the boot menu?

The boot sequence is rather different than what I am used to, plus the UEFI activity further clutters things.

Before I went in and made a mess I wanted to ask in case this UEFI-handling version did things somehow differently.

I will give it a try and report back ... thanks!

[Snail]

I have been trying to understand why my edit of alsamixer-launch didn't work. Adding beeps to the scripts as a debugging aid shows that right-clicking the speaker icon on the taskbar and selecting "Volume-Control" Settings runs neither alsamixer-launch nor alsamixer.sh. Instead it appears to call alsamixer directly.

Changing alsamixer-launch to:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
#This script is called from lxpanel's volumealsa plugin by selecting "Volume Control Settings".

rxvt +sb -geometry 157x25 -e alsamixer.sh -V all &

would seem to do the trick, if only it was actually called. Can anyone give me some advice on where to read up on modifying the behaviour of the Fatdog 621 taskbar please?

PS The second double quote mark on the menu seems to be wrongly placed - "Volume-Control" Settings should be "Volume-Control Settings"?

[Snail]

I found that right clicking a blank area on the taskbar allows access to panel settings. From there, panel applets can be added, removed and edited. However, all the applets in the system tray part of the taskbar can be edited - except the volume control. The edit button is not greyed out, which a web help page says means it should be editable. However, clicking that button simply runs alsamixer.

Another oddity. There are two directories for lxpanel plugins(applets), /usr/lib64/lxpanel/plugins and /usr/lib/lxpanel/plugins. They are not symlinked but their contents appear identical.

[Snail]

If you backup the save file by renaming and copying it in the same directory, you often want to rename the file so the boot script doesn't recognize it. Rox confuses me by clearly flagging files with "ext4' extension as savefiles. However, the boot script recognizes any file with fd64save as a savefile. For instance, I had 3 copies of the save file in the boot drive root, named fd64save.bak, fd64save.ext4 and fredbloggs.ext4. Rox flagged the second two as save files. However, during boot, I was given the choice between the first two.

[Snail]

I installed Fatdog by using dd to make a USB stick into a bootable ISO. I ran fix-usb.sh and it seemed to go well. After booting, I decided that the USB was a bit small and so I installed to my Win 7 partition instead. Now I cannot completely clear out the ISO file table on the USB. Even after completely repartitioning and reformatting the USB flash drive as FAT16, using GParted in Fatdog, when I plug the stick in Fatdog sees sdb as an ISO partition and sdb1 as the Fat partition, both using the full size of the drive. I can see the full original ISO file structure in Rox. Rox reports the original file sizes but if I try to open a text file in Geany there is nothing there. There couldn't possibly be any room anyway as I completely filled the Fat partition. How do you clean the ISO stuff out? Note, it may not be a critical issue, as the Fat files seem to work as one would expect and Win 7 and Precise Puppy are not aware of the ISO stuff at all.

I did discover another issue. In Fatdog, I selected a big directory and copied it to the half Gig USB just to see if there was the reported space in the Fat partition. For some weird reason, the process filled up my savefile and locked Fatdog up completely. I ended up using my backup savefile to recover. This did not happen doing the same thing with Precise. Why would this happen? Surely the copy shouldn't be buffered inside the savefile?