Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

BarryK · Posted: Tue 16 Jan 2007, 07:48 Post subject:

I'm blown away by all of this! What I think is particularly great is the spirit behind, it, not that you're using Puppy (well, that's good to!). I think that your individual positive and practical contributions send out wider ripples than you might think.

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4636 Location: Manila

Gn2 · Posted: Tue 16 Jan 2007, 23:09 Post subject:

The world desparately needs help - clean environment, water, food - shelter -
and shared knowledge.

Fortuitous Alignments of the stars is regarded in Scientific fields -
As the extremely rare opportunity to increase world knowledge.

Projects as listed here - may/will have potential to more Practical Impact
Esp. for underprivileged of the whole world.

Congratulations - IMHO > It cannot be stressed adequately - You are Cool

A L L contributing
to world aid goals ~ In best of OSS founders principles

ecomoney

Wow thanks guys for the words of encouragement. I really am just the delivery boy of this supurb software, it is you who have built it. Thank you for allowing me to take your puppy out for a walk!!!

Ive already seen today quite a few examples of how this technology fitting in with the local community and the difference it can make. Several people have done CV's, while others have been searching for jobs. One spanish came in and we were able to find her old solicitors in spain via google, and ring them with skype for 3 British pence (she needs the number for a forthcoming childcare case). Weve had several other small children in with their mums whos first experience of a computer was with Gcompris.

We also started a new teaching class of fresh puppy recruits who have been tapping away into tuxtype and Gcompris to get up to speed for the classes next week. One of them is an "intermediate" who will be updating a new website for the community centre with Joomla from her puppypc at home. Weve already raised £120 towards our target of £200 for starting the wireless community LAN through the sale of the old cybercafe P.C.'s.

Its 4:35.am here and Ive just finished the next major update to the cybercafe. It been rolled out via ftp to four of the computers here on the network in under half an hour thanks to puppy's small size an speed. Ive also started the job of uploading it to my webspace, gFTP says it will take eight hours so Im turning in for the night, its nearly a whole gigbyte (wow huge!). This is two complete and hopefully fully configured operating systems (puppy 2.02 seamonkey based with openoffice, games etc and [puppy 2.11 based Edupup 1.1)

The file is literally a zipped copy of all of the files on the cybercafe's computers hard disk. All someone would have to do is boot in memory, format to ext2, install the grub bootloader then download the files. It would then be a matter of unzipping to the hard disk, rebooting and running xorgwizard (and perhaps ALSA wizard) and they would have a clone of one of the systems here.

My www.servage.net web server (£5.25 per month) seems pretty fast to download from and Ive certainly got lots of bandwidth and hosting space spare to do it (will be monitoring my bandwidth tho!). If anyone more technically knowledgeable than I would like to download it to a spare hard disk (I think it should be set to primary master for the bootloader to work properly come to think about it) I would be very grateful to hear from them.

Right, I must be off to take the volunteers home! Thanks again for all your hard work you have put in over the years to enable this to happen Very Happy

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4005 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

A Cyber Cafe like this is exactly the thing I had in mind with LanPuppy...
Except with diskless PCs, users have USB flash drives for personal data.

This is a also a perfect arrangement for multi seats on one PC.
Each PC has 4 video cards & 4 sets of USB keyboards & mice.
1ghz to 2 ghz PCs are perfect, & even slowers PCs work well!
The project is called: "BackStreet Ruby".

When LanPuppy is an up & running distro. I plan to integrate it into it.

mechmike · Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 88 Location: Pelham, AL

It is now on Digg - we'll see if that gets you and Puppy some attention...

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ten_computer_cybercafe_for_30UKP_or_about_60_USD

ecomoney · Posted: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 18:24 Post subject: Updates

Sunburnt, LANpuppy seems like an interesting project for small kiosks. I will look forward to testing it out when you have it finished. Certainly around here though old P.C.'s are a big disposal problem so given access to sufficient networking kit (and smoothwall) it is more beneficial to use the older pc's for as long as possible before they must be finally thrown away.

Weve decided to roll out our new updates gradually over some of the PC's. Heres a poster we have put up.

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4005 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

ecomoney; The old original version of Puppy would work well in an open environment (no login).
Keosks of the public type have no login, as do many special purpose terminals.

As to old PCs, I'm still using a P-200mhz as my LanPuppy client PC for testing.
With 64MB of ram it runs Puppy very well with no hiccups at all.

ecomoney · Posted: Thu 18 Jan 2007, 23:07 Post subject: Kiosks

Ahh I see, so you have a setup a but like what is possible with Edubuntu, with a central, reasonable power computer with terminals of very low spec attached? To make updates it would just be a matter of updating in one place (the central pc)?

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4005 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

It's a distributed processing setup, so weak server & strong clients.
Web browsing isn't too bad on old PCs though, heavy apps. like OO are slow.
I'll make a server centric setup after LanPuppy, strong server & weak clients.

Both types only have software on the server as the clients are diskless.
This makes admin. easy as only the server needs any changes at all.
The only thing the clients need is the replacement of failed hardware.

A multi seat setup has the advantage that the cpu is split between 4 users.
This evens out the cpu load so a 1ghz cpu acts like a 700mhz to each user.

Q; Does your Cyber Cafe have user logins? Or is it an open usage setup?
Puppy doesn't have a login, so I'm thinking that your setup doesn't have them.

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4636 Location: Manila

ecomoney · Posted: Fri 19 Jan 2007, 16:41 Post subject: Logins

At the moment there are no logins. We have instructed people to email important files (such as CV's) that they want to save to themselves as attachements (I know! crude but effective!). They use the yahoo webmail service for this, which means they can pick them up anywhere, even between their windows machines at home thanks to puppy's compatibility. If someone goofs up one of the machines it is a ten minutes to set it back up again. It also means that we can have several different versions of puppy running on the same machine, and roll out new upgrades gradually.

Eventually I would like a setup script that runs as a seperate OS from the boot menu (perhaps "onebone" puppy?) that will download a new/fresh setup an ftp server on the network and unzip. I this case the GRUB screen would look like this

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4005 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

raffy; I only have 10 PCs in my house (Only?), one's a movie PC & one's a jukebox.
So I have no way to know just what the equivilent server load is for ANY setup.
I'd be REAL interested in someone testing on a LARGE network to get an idea.
Like I wondered what a dedicated Quake3 server needed for cpu & memory, nobody knew.

For the server centric setup I thought about VNC, but I've read it's not suited for this.
I'll have to look into it more to get an idea of the best arrangement for it.
The server's power in this case would be: (number of clients) x (apps. used).
So most likley a very powerful PC for the server ( 4ghz for 32 clients? ).

I had invisioned the client PC being a little box hanging on the side of the monitor.
For LanPuppy I want a NAS box to boot & run it, but for VNC etc. a REAL server's needed.
LanPuppy's server is just a boot & Samba server, that's all... The clients run the apps.
But for a server centric setup the clients are "terminals" & the server runs ALL the apps.

Flash storage isn't needed for LAN booting, & as to the server's memory...
it's setup dependant, but for server centric... ALOT is a good guess.

Running as root would depend on the setup too, but LAN clients are usually in a "box".
With LanPuppy everyone's "root", but they ONLY can access their HOME & the Squash file,
so being root doesn't matter if you can't get at anything else.
LanPuppy is unique in this aspect as it operates over the network, not just locally.
The new LanPuppy will have login & will be "almost hacker proof" from the client PCs.
Hacking through the firewall will be as usual, so a good setup there is needed.

LanPuppy will be able to swap sfs files in & out with my app. sfsManager.
If my ideas for improved sfs files take hold, it'll be really trick with dynamic menus.
The main Start menu and/or Desktop icons change for the apps. in the loaded sfs files.
I think I'll post in Suggestions & outline the improvements I have in mind.

ecomoney; I also invision a notebook PC with no HD or flash, no storage at all!
It boots to a web server selector menu & then it boots the OS from the web.
Like LanPuppy, personal storage would be USB flash/HD devices plugged into
the USB port on a USB keyboard, & the USB mouse plugs into the keybd also.
Cyber cafes & libraries could really benefit from multi seat PC setups.

ecomoney · Posted: Sat 20 Jan 2007, 00:21 Post subject: Internet booting

Sunburnt:- This "internet booting" Invision notebook you have is very interesting...I had the idea long ago that with puppy's small size (obviosly Doze would be right out of the window...) and increasingly fast and cheap webspace/Broadband connections that this would be possible one day. Have an idea how this is done? It would obviously need a BIOS flash of some sort. Technically this is possible?

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4005 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

Yep, a flash is needed to make a prototype, but mass produced it'd be in ROM.
There's 3 or 4 different muliprotocol thin client setups (PXES, NetStation, etc.).
Most connect to: X, Citrix, RDP, & VNC type of servers, ROM size'd be 10+MB.
Bootup shows a menu of servers that respond & the protocols that they support.
64MB to 256mb of memory is all that's needed as big apps. run on the servers.

Basically a standard NoteBook computer with: WLAN & USB-2 ports,
and no: drives, drive controllers, or any other interfaces.
So it's simple & would cost ~$100 at the store! With a free OS that's still $100!

So... is it technically possable, they already exist, but they want $$$ for them.
The trick'd be getting an Asian co. to make them en masse so they'd be cheap.
I'll look around & see what I can find, it seem like there'd be something close.

The other end of this setup is the web server to boot to, not much of a problem.
My friend just got a domain for $7 a month with 400GB & 32GB access a week.