How to setup Pipelight in Precise Puppy v.5.7.1

[shadower_sc]

Hello Again Everyone,

I got Pipelight working in Precise Puppy v.5.7.1 and figured I would share. heywoodj's post on how he watches Netflix on Puppy was helpful, especially in noting that Wine-Compholio is installed in a place Puppy does not expect it to be.

Here are links to the Installation Instructions:
Step 01 - Preparation
Step 02 - Setup Firefox for Pipelight Usage
Step 03 - Setup Wine-Compholio for Precise Puppy
Step 04 - Setup Pipelight for Precise Puppy

[shadower_sc]

Step 01 - Preparation:

Part A - Update Puppy Package Manager

Open the Puppy Package Manager by navigating the menu and clicking on the appropriate entry:
Menu->Setup->Puppy Package Manager

Update the Puppy Package Manager:
Click on Configure
Click on Update
Press the ENTER key a few times as directed. The process will take a few minutes depending on the speed of your internet and your computer.
Press the ENTER key to exit once the Puppy Package Manager has updated.

Click ok to close out of the Configure package manager.

Click Exit Package Manager to close the Puppy Package Manager.

While we are here, we will need to use the Package Manager to install a few required files for pipelight to work with Puppy Linux.

Start the Puppy Package Manager again.
Menu->Setup->Puppy Package Manager

Part B - Install Packages from Puppy Package Manager

Use the find box on the bottom left of the window to find and install the following items:
cabextract, zenity (Should be optional), and firefox

Choose to search all repositories when it asks.

I found cabextract_1.4-1 and installed it.

I found multiple entries for zenity and installed zenity_3.4.0
Make sure to select examine dependencies and then download-and-install selected packages.

I found multiple entries for firefox as well and installed the top one which was firefox_30.0+build1.
Make sure to select examine dependencies and then download-and-install selected packages.

[shadower_sc]

Step 02 - Setup Firefox for Pipelight Usage

Part A - Spoof Firefox's User Agent

Start Firefox.
Menu->Internet->Firefox Web Browser

Install User Agent Overrider in Mozilla Firefox: (user_agent_overrider-0.2.4-fx.xpi)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... overrider/
(I had to download it with Seamonkey for some reason and then drag and drop the file into firefox.)
See this page for reference: http://pipelight.net/cms/installation-user-agent.html

It should add a new button to your toolbar with a drop down menu.
Select Windows/Firefox 29 as the User Agent. (Or whatever version of firefox that it associates with windows.)

(Silverlight will ignore your browser, if it thinks you are using a Linux Browser.)

Part B - Spoof Firefox's Platform

Edit about:config and add a platform override in case the site checks the platform as well:
general.platform.override|user set|string|Win32
Again, see this page for reference: http://pipelight.net/cms/installation-user-agent.html

Firefox should now be ready once you have wine-compholio and pipelight installed.

(Some websites may also check to see what Platform you are running.)

[shadower_sc]

Step 03 - Setup Wine-Compholio

Part A - Download the Current Wine-Compholio Package

Navigate to the launchpad site for pipelight.
https://launchpad.net/~pipelight/+archi ... /+packages

Select wine-compholio-1.7.XX~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb where XX is the current version.
Click on the Package file wine-compholio-1.7.XX~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb where XX is the current version to download.
Click on the Package file wine-compholio-i386-1.7.XX~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb where XX is the current version to download.
(I downloaded mine to my flash drive, so I could have access to them later.)

Part B - Install and test the Wine-Comholio Package

Install the pre-built precise packages where XX is the current version:
Open Rox-Filer and navigate to the location you saved the files.
Single click on each file to install them.
wine-compholio-1.7.XX~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb
wine-compholio-i386-1.7.XX~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb

Make a symlink for Puppy, since wine is installed to /opt/wine-compholio/bin, instead of /usr/bin:
ln -s /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine /usr/bin/wine

Check to make sure you have done it correctly:
wine --version

It should display something like:
wine-1.7.21

[shadower_sc]

Step 04 - Setup Pipelight

Part A - Download the Pipelight Pacakge

Navigate to the launchpad site for pipelight.
https://launchpad.net/~pipelight/+archi ... /+packages

Select pipelight-multi-0.2.7~ubuntu12.04.1.
Click on the Package file pipelight-multi_0.2.X.X~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb where X.X is the current version to download.
(I downloaded mine to my flash drive, so I could have access to it later.)

Part B - Install and test the pipelight plugin

Install the pre-built precise packages where X.X is the current version:
Open Rox-Filer and navigate to the location you saved the files.
Single click on the file to install it.
pipelight-multi_0.2.X.X~ubuntu12.04.1_i386.deb

Check to make sure you have done it correctly:
pipelight-plugin

It should display the help for pipelight-plugin.
(This also displays what plugins are supported.)

Part C - Setup Pipelight for Firefox

Setup the Pipelight Plugin for mozilla:
pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins

Enable the Pipelight Plugins you want:
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
pipelight-plugin --enable flash

Navigate to http://fds-team.de/pipelight/ and do a test for each plugin you have enabled.
It should force Firefox to initialize the plugin and provide feedback, if something didn't work.

Bouncing Balls/Bubbles Test:
http://bubblemark.com/silverlight2.html

[shadower_sc]

I saw solo's post where he used a benchmark to test PepperFlash in Firefox and that got me curious as to how well pipelight worked. The following are benchmarks from the same place he used and specs for each machine.

Flash Benchmark 2008:
http://www.snailsanimation.com/benchmark08_play.php

Machine#1:
CPU: Intel i5 CPU M520 2.4GHZ Dual-Core
RAM: DDR3 533MHZ 4GB

Benchmark #1
OS: Windows 7 32-bit
Browser: Firefox 30.0
Flash Version: 13.0.0.214
Benchmark Score: 17,240
Lite: 66.34fps - passed
Medium: 62.66 fps - passed
Heavy: 32.34 fps - passed
Ultra: 11.06 fps - failed

Benchmark #2
OS: Precise Puppy Linux v.5.7.1 - Retro / No-PAE
Browser: Firefox 30.0
Flash Version: 13.0.0.214
Benchmark Score: 15,970
Lite: 61.18 fps - passed
Medium: 57.67 fps - passed
Heavy: 29.5 fps - passed
Ultra: 11.34 fps - failed

Machine #2
CPU: Intel Atom CPU N280 1.66GHZ Single Core
RAM: 1GB RAM

Benchmark #1
OS: Lubuntu 13.10
Browser: Firefox 24.0
Flash Version: 11.2.202.335
Benchmark Score: 4,270
Lite: 29.46 fps - passed
Medium: 13.24 - failed
Heavy:
Ultra:

Benchmark #2
OS: Precise Puppy Linux v.5.7.1 - Retro / No-PAE
Browser: Firefox 30.0
Flash Version: 13.0.0.214
Benchmark Score: 5,186
Lite: 36.57 - passed
Medium: 15.29 - failed
Heavy:
Ultra:

[slavvo67]

This looked great until you brought Wine into the picture. It's a big, bloated program that I never cared for. Still, good luck with this. I have a few Silverlight pages that I would have liked to run.

Best,

Slavvo67

[shadower_sc]

I tested flash on 2 different machines.

The first benchmark of each machine was with the officially supported version of flash for each machine. The second benchmark was with the pipelight version of flash installed.

In the case of the faster Windows 7 machine there was a slight drop in performance of about 2 to 5 frames per second on average. In the case of the slower Lubuntu 13.10 machine there was a slight increase in performance of about 2 to 5 frames per second on average.

My initial test results suggest that Wine is slowing the playback down, but by a very small amount. Especially taking into account the fact that Puppy+Pipelight actually ran faster than Lubuntu+Official Adobe Flash for Linux.

Wine is the only option, if you want anything that is "Windows Only" to ever work on Linux.

[shadower_sc]

Silverlight + DRM needs Xattr support. Aufs and vfat do not support Extended Attributes. As such any site that uses DRM with silverlight will not work from a Live-CD or system that is a vfat / Fat32 filesystem. Most USB Flash Drives are formatted to the Fat32 filesystem. You can easily re-format the USB Flash Drive to NTFS from a Windows system.

A Frugal install on a NTFS or Ext4 Format USB Flash Drive should work.
A Full install on an Ext4 filesystem should work.

Moving the .wine-pipelight folder to an external drive that has an ext4 or NTFS file system and then creating a symlink to it should work.
Example:
mv /root/.wine-pipelight /mnt/sdb1/
ln -s /mnt/sdb1/.wine-pipelight /root/.wine-pipelight

You might be able to use the symlinking option to get DRM working from a Live-CD. This option could be useful for a Kiosk in which the Live-CD would be used on a single machine.

This thread has a lot of discussion on the topic:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 3&start=15

[heywoodj]

I'll have to say that after dabbling unsuccessfully for quite a while to figure out how to get Netflix to play on a frugal install, ext4 partitions on USB flash drives don't seem to boot, at all.

One way that might work is to boot on a ext2 partition on the USB, and run WIne off a second ext4 partition on the same drive. It may involve making a chroot jail. I tried for a while, but decided it was too much work, and much easier to have a full install on a ext4 drive.

[pemasu]

Oops. My intention was to post about how to get Netflix working in Puppy...but that needed extra step was posted already. Sorry about this post. I was too hasty and didnt read yesterday posts properly. Sorry.

The trick is to move /root/.wine-pipelight folder outside of the savefile...for example to the /mnt/home and symlink it back. As posted earlier. Sorry of this double information post.

Getting Netflix to work in Puppy by following above instructions is correct and tested that they are adequate by me. Just watched Netflix movie.

Cheers.

[michaellowe]

Silverlight + DRM needs Xattr support. Aufs and vfat do not support Extended Attributes. As such any site that uses DRM with silverlight will not work from a Live-CD or system that is a vfat / Fat32 filesystem. Most USB Flash Drives are formatted to the Fat32 filesystem. You can easily re-format the USB Flash Drive to NTFS from a Windows system.

A Frugal install on a NTFS or Ext4 Format USB Flash Drive should work.
A Full install on an Ext4 filesystem should work.

Moving the .wine-pipelight folder to an external drive that has an ext4 or NTFS file system and then creating a symlink to it should work.
Example:
mv /root/.wine-pipelight /mnt/sdb1/
ln -s /mnt/sdb1/.wine-pipelight /root/.wine-pipelight

You might be able to use the symlinking option to get DRM working from a Live-CD. This option could be useful for a Kiosk in which the Live-CD would be used on a single machine.

This thread has a lot of discussion on the topic:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 3&start=15

Also Thank you to everyone else who has contributed to this post and of course everyone behind pipelight and compholio etc. thank you!
I was in a bit of trouble after all the installations with wine - Naturally!
but your little mv command sorted it out immediately! Thank you! I had about 35mb left of my savefile after trying to stream from now tv and then got the error message shown in the screen shot provided. so read further in your thread and did the mv command and symlinked it.will now go and try again and see if I have any luck? will keep you posted...[/img]

[Barkingmad]

Hello

I would like to say a big "thank you" to shadower_sc for posting this "how to" and add a little extra info that might help someone.

I followed the thread and installed pipelight etc to a Puppy 5.7.1 frugal install on a NTFS internal hard drive using my existin sfs of Firefox. After this Silverlight worded but Flash did not, showing a plugin error in Firefox > Tools > Addons.

After reading the pipelight FAQs etc http://pipelight.net/cms/page-help.html]here and https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight]here I ran Firefox from the terminal and the output suggested that updating pipelight's plugin database should fix it. I tryed

Code: Select all

pipelight-plugin --update

which failed with a report about security certificates for bitbucket.org. After help from Micheal Muller at the pipelight project https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight]help page and finding a post here about certificates I worked out the following extra steps over Shadower's orrigional instructions that should allow pipelight to update when required.

Do all this with your browser closed, only start it again when done
1) From Puppy's package manager install "ca-certificates_20130906" and any dependancies from the Ubuntu-pricise-main repo.

2) In the terminal run

Code: Select all

update-ca-certificates

to make them active

3) From the package manager install "gnupg2" and its dependancies.

4) In /usr/bin make a symlink pointing to "gpg2" and name it "gpg". The Pipelight update scriptlooks for gpg (apparantly not included in Puppy) and dosn't find the later release gpg2 but the link fixes this.

5) Now

Code: Select all

pipelight-plugin --update

followed by

Code: Select all

pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins

should get you the latest Flash (and presumably others if available) when you next start Firefox.

Sorry that looks like a bit of a marathon but it should be quicker to do than to remember and type

Will

[Semme]

Someone slow on the draw? Quoting Will..

==

Hello,

I would like to say a big "thank you" to shadower_sc for posting this "how to" and add a little extra info that might help someone.

I followed the thread and installed pipelight etc to a Puppy 5.7.1 frugal install on an NTFS internal hard drive using my existing sfs of Firefox. After this, Silverlight worked, but Flash did not, showing a plugin error in Firefox > Tools > Add-ons.

After reading the Pipelight and launchpad FAQ's, I ran Firefox from a terminal and the output suggested updating Pipelight's plugin database. I tried:

Code: Select all

pipelight-plugin --update

.. which failed with a report about security certificates for bitbucket.org. After help from Micheal Muller at the Pipelight project help page and finding a post here about certificates, I worked out the following extra steps over Shadower's original instructions that should allow Pipelight to update when required.

Do all this with your browser closed. Only start it again when done.

1) From Puppy's package manager install "ca-certificates_20130906" and any dependencies from the Ubuntu-precise-main repo.

2) To make them active, run the following in the terminal:

Code: Select all

update-ca-certificates

3) From the package manager install "gnupg2" and its dependencies.

4) In /usr/bin make a symlink pointing to "gpg2" and name it "gpg". The Pipelight update scriptlooks for gpg (apparently not included in Puppy) and doesn't find the later gpg2. This link gets your puppies in a row.

5) Now these two should get you the latest Flash (and presumably others if available) when you next start Firefox:

Code: Select all

pipelight-plugin --update
pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins

Sorry this looks like a bit of a marathon, but should be quicker to do than remember and type.


Will

[Barkingmad]

Hello

I'm not sure what's been going on here.

I tried to post some extra info to this thread on 23rd Dec but the forum only gave me a blank post when I pressed "submit". Now I see that Semme has quoted exactly what I was trying to post but how I don't know as I am still seeing only a blank post on my screen so sorry for things looking a bit confusing.

Will

[Semme]

Will, these are nono's when using text for hot links >> <url>link]word</url>

Code: Select all

[url]http://pipelight.net/cms/page-help.html]here[/url]

What you want here is to replace your second bracket with an =

Code: Select all

[url=http://pipelight.net/cms/page-help.html]here[/url]

If it were the url itself, this works <url>link</url>

Worded link >> <url=link>text</url>

Capiche?

[Barkingmad]

Semme

Thank you for explaining how to format links on this forum. I thought I had got the syntax right but it is a bit different to how it works on another forum I use quite often so I got confused.

Thanks again and note taken for future use.

Will