Xenialpup64 CE 7.5 / 25 Nov 2017

[Sailor Enceladus]

@sszindian: Something to consider. Newer versions of htop show higher memory usage. Here's a screenshot showing:

- htop 1.0.3 on the top (shows 101MB used)
- htop 2.0.2 in the middle (shows 250MB used)
- busybox 1.23.1 top on the bottom (shows 635MB used)

All running at the same time.

[LateAdopter]

It looks like it's a kernel 4.6 regression. I just built 4.6.3 using the same DOTconfig as for 4.4.4 and it performs the same as your 4.6.3. So maybe MSR doesn't matter after all.

Hello 666philb
Xenialpup64 is working very well and I have installed tvheadend, mpv, gnome-mpv, Kodi17 alpha2. No problems from Xenialpup64..

I have investigated the media player performance problem with the 4.6.3 kernel. It looks as though the Intel p-state governor is more broken than usual, at least with Braswell. It does not clock up to maximum turbo before the media player starts noticeable skipping. I have tested kernel 4.7.0 and that has the same problem, but 4.4.4 works properly.

My workaround is to disable pstate and use cpufreq ondemand. However, with its default settings, ondemand is worse than pstate, but they are adjustable. Increasing sampling_down_factor to 80 makes it work properly.

So I have
intel_pstate=disable as a kernel boot parameter, and
echo 80 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_down_factor in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Note: Modern Intel processors with hardware power management (Sandy Bridge onwards) make up their own mind about core clock frequencies. The numbers reported by cpufreq are quite different from those reported by turbostat which reads back from the CPU.

Thanks for Xenialpup64

[live]

@sszindian
All 3 shows:
* different RAM usage
* different CPU usage
* different nb of processes

Have you tried to monitor which each of them separetly, as maybe they are accessing the same data at the same time and this could lead to wrong measurements.

[sszindian]

@live

Those graphics are from Sailor Enceladus, not me. I don't know what configuration he used or what all was running at the same time?

At any rate, doing some research, Distrowatch has a recent article about this subject and it's their belief that having as much in ram as possible is 'better' contrary to what I believed over the years. Makes one wonder?

Sure is a fast/responsive program and operates without major issues so far.

>>>---Indian------>

[rufwoof]

@sszindian: Something to consider. Newer versions of htop show higher memory usage. Here's a screenshot showing:

- htop 1.0.3 on the top (shows 101MB used)
- htop 2.0.2 in the middle (shows 250MB used)
- busybox 1.23.1 top on the bottom (shows 635MB used)

All running at the same time.

Reporting memory utilisation is subjective. Looks like the different versions/apps chose to report in different ways. htop I believe counts cached and buffers as being 'free' i.e. they can be dumped at any time by the system to make space for other things (being used, but free to be used elsewhere).

Debian Jessie KDE 64 Frugal, running kinfocenter alongside htop (see attached).

htop mem coloured bars correspond to used, buffers, cache in different bar colours. Which in my case seems to conflict with what kinfocenter is suggesting

# free
provides other source of information.

Its all a relative type thing. If application data is near filling up memory and there's little free/cache/buffer allocations, then its at a stage where swap is being needed and the system isn't running efficiently. i.e. in htop that would be if the mem green bars were running right across and the numeric figure was low.

[mcewanw]

Actually, decisions were made higher up in the LInux hierarchy regarding how memory statistics should more correctly be reported. Fred and I both noticed the different reporting of not only free versus htop but also some versions of htop versus others. In particular, the reporting mechanism was noticably different between the htop used in MintPup and that used in the newer XenialDog.

SInce a statistic about memory usage, system performance is only as good as the tools used to measure it, I considered this an important matter to get to the bottom of. I ended up reading the free and htop source code just to see what the differences were in the newer htop reports and documented it back in May here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 344#904344

The differences are all very technical, but absolutely not imagined or accidental. The summary is that the measurements are now being calculated differently in newer versions of these utilities because the inner-circle kernel developer guys believe the new reporting mechanism is more realistic in terms of how much Mem really is free and so on. The end result is that we cannot use htop to reliable indicate performance/resource-usage of different distributions since the measurement tools themselves are now reporting different things.

William

[Belham]

Actually, decisions were made higher up in the LInux hierarchy regarding how memory statistics should more correctly be reported. Fred and I both noticed the different reporting of not only free versus htop but also some versions of htop versus others. In particular, the reporting mechanism was noticably different between the htop used in MintPup and that used in the newer XenialDog.

SInce a statistic about memory usage, system performance is only as good as the tools used to measure it, I considered this an important matter to get to the bottom of. I ended up reading the free and htop source code just to see what the differences were in the newer htop reports and documented it back in May here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 344#904344

The differences are all very technical, but absolutely not imagined or accidental. The summary is that the measurements are now being calculated differently in newer versions of these utilities because the inner-circle kernel developer guys believe the new reporting mechanism is more realistic in terms of how much Mem really is free and so on. The end result is that we cannot use htop to reliable indicate performance/resource-usage of different distributions since the measurement tools themselves are now reporting different things.

William

Hi William,

As long as htop keeps providing the correct PID (only ever open it to find the pid when I need to kill something), I guess I'll keep on using it...haha


P.S. I see in your murga-linux sig, it says "New Zealand'. You have any knowledge of the LinuxLite crew in NZ doing their developments? Some months back I downloaded their latest LinuxLite (3.0). I saw that the Firefox they included still had everything set (in its about:config file) to antipodian browser search urls/settings and such. Have been pleasantly surprised with their distro, as it's clean and everything works, which is high praise with all these recent distros popping up that leave users floundering.

[greengeek]

Booted a Toshiba M700 laptop successfully (from CD) but I have two issues so far:

1) If i click an mp3 file it does not play at all.

2) If i rightclick an mp3 file and select "send to" deadbeef it plays fine but when I click the "close" cross the deadbeef gui disappears but leaves the audio still playing. Have to use pprocess to kill it.

[Sailor Enceladus]

2) If i rightclick an mp3 file and select "send to" deadbeef it plays fine but when I click the "close" cross the deadbeef gui disappears but leaves the audio still playing. Have to use pprocess to kill it.

Heheh that also happens to me in pupradio. I have to remember to press stop instead of close first. I wonder if that's by design (in case you want it to keep playing without having the program staying open)?

[greengeek]

Some months back I downloaded their latest LinuxLite (3.0)

Based on your comment I had a look at LinuxLite and the wikipedia page says the following:

Software developed by Linux Lite:
- Lite Info: an application that retrieves hardware information from the users computer and shares it with the community

Do you have any idea if that utility can be disabled? Or is it a function that runs automatically and shares your hardware info invisibly in the background?

[Moat]

I wonder if that's by design (in case you want it to keep playing without having the program staying open)?

Likely so, and I do believe Deadbeef's preferences allow setting it to either minimize to tray or close - and usually a Deadbeef install defaults to minimizing, not closing. I like having the tray feature with the GUI hidden, myself, and right-clicking the tray icon for basic play controls.

IOW - give the preferences a peek...

Bob

[ravi23681]

need support to my usb wifi ralink wifi and usb bluetooth dongle to work...

[jd7654]

There appears to be some problem with the suspend with Xenial pup on my machine. Once suspend is initiated, initially it seems normal as hard drive churns, screen goes blank and power led goes off, but only for a split second before it immediately wakes up again.
Actually, this same problem carries over from Tahr Pup too. But I also have Ubuntu Tahr installed on this machine, in the form of elementary OS, and suspend works just fine there.
Suspend does work fine with Slacko64 and Fatdog too so I know its not a hardware problem.

Also, noticed some BIOS beep in the bootup process. Can't see exactly where as the screen is blank during that time, but its somewhere late in the process, between the login prompt and the desktop appearance. Don't know if this is some kind diagnostic beep for alpha version?



▶—— BASE SYSTEM ——◀

PC Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
Product Name: HP Pavilion dm1 Notebook PC

Motherboard Vendor: Hewlett-Packard
Product Name: 1611

BIOS Vendor: Hewlett-Packard
Version: F.12
Release Date: 04/26/2011

AMD E-350 Processor
Max Speed: 1600 MHz
Current Speed of Core 0:1600 MHz, 1:1600 MHz
Core Count: 2
Thread Count: 2

Frequency governor : ondemand
Freq. scaling driver : acpi-cpufreq


Linux Kernel: 4.6.3 (x86_64)
Kernel Version: #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jun 27 19:59:25 BST 2016

Distro: xenialpup64 7.0.7
Window Manager: JWM v2.3.5
Desktop Start: xwin jwm

[LateAdopter]

As a refugee from Opera 12.16 I'm trying out Vivaldi, but I want to get it to run as spot before I let it loose on the internet.

If I try run-as-spot it fails. In a terminal I get this:

Code: Select all

root# run-as-spot vivaldi-stable
su: can't execute '/bin/sh': Permission denied

But sh is a symlink to bash which has execute enabled for everybody.

Any ideas what the real problem is? Thanks.

Vivaldi will run OK as root, as long as I specify a user directory on the command line.

EDIT:

Code: Select all

su spot

gets the same error. So its nothing to do with Vivaldi.

EDIT2: I was wrong. It was installing Vivaldi that broke SPOT.

EDIT3: It seems the chromium post install script breaks SPOT. Extracting the vivaldi files and moving to them to /opt they work without problems.

[Sailor Enceladus]

Vivaldi will run OK as root, as long as I specify a user directory on the command line.

Oh yeah, that was the issue with root. I had to add --user-data-dir to the end. It's all coming back to me now - Celine Dion

[gcmartin]

How was Vivaldi installed in your system?

[LateAdopter]

Download vivaldi-stable_1.3.551.38-1_amd64.deb from the Vivaldi website. Click on it in Rox filer.

I don't think there were any missing dependencies.

EDIT: Warning! Installing this way does break SPOT.

EDIT2: What works so far...

Starting from the beginning again. Right click the deb - Open Archive - extract to a temporary directory

Move .../opt/vivaldi to /opt/vivaldi

There are only three other files to move: vivaldi-stable symlink to put in /usr/bin
the .desktop and .menu files to put in /usr/share/... They need editing to add run-as-spot to the command.

This works well so far. I haven't tried running as root again in case the chromium startup script breaks spot.

[hacker85]

we need version NoPAE cpu

plaese make "NoPAE" version for 32bit

thk

[gcmartin]

@Hacker85, this thread (notice the title) is a PUP distro which is designed for 64bit PCs. There is a 32bit XenialPUP thread, here.. And, using the correct bootparm, PAE PUPs will run on Pentium-Ms. You should be able to obtain 32bit XenialPUP help there, if needed.

Hope this is helpful.

[hacker85]

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/test/xenialpup/

In the link above, I download a file——xenial-7.0.4.iso. This file is a virtual machine running, tips are as follows:

this kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:PAE

Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.