(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Sylvander wrote:First attempts with R-Pi.
1. See this post in my thread on this topic.

2. Tried to boot "Puppy Raspberry Pi alpha 4" [on a 16GB card], and got NOTHING!

3. Wheezy [on a separate 16GB card] boots OK on the same hardware setup, but I think I've corrupted it by a previous improper power-off when I couldn't see the password characters going up on screen as I typed them.
Duh!
I didn't know at that time that they are NEVER displayed, and that is by design.

See on page 13, Woodenshoe explains how to make Puppy to boot

/ L

The kernel in SAP is obsolete and won't run on newer Pi's.

The easiest way to get Puppy on the Pi is to use Berryboot. Google for it.

There is another thread for it on here too.

As far as I know, there is no way to get flash to run on the Pi, no matter what OS you use.

WOOHOO!
Berryboot is brilliant!
So easy to do, and works really well.
I used it to install Puppy and 1 other OS.
Puppy runs just fine.
Fills the screen.
Icons are a good size [I'd like to be able to see stuff OK from the far side of my livingroom].
May need to increase the size of text.

Thanks guys.

BTW: How should I run Youtube videos on this Puppy?
Will Flashplayer install/run?

Edit: typing this from SAP for R-Pi...
Only some of the keys on the keyboard work [right-side keys don't]; don't know which keyboard to specify.
Flashplayer won't download/install using getflash...
Installed Gnash, but that seems to not work.
Iceweasel rather slow.
Zoom has enlarged Iceweasel display.
Global increase of text size has improved matters here and there.
Some text is tiny. e.g. In Xfe.

Has the Puppy for RPi initative expired?

When I first tried to buy a RPi in February 2012 I was told that the device was temporarily unavailable. In April I was allowed to put my name on a waiting list and in June I was allowed to place an order. The device was finally dispatched to me in December.

I experimented with the 'official' Debian for RPi, but of course what I really wanted was Puppy. Over a period of time I made several attempts at getting Alpha 4 up and running without even the slightest success. In addition to Debian I've been running Fedora and openELEC on my RPi. Fedora is less awful than Debian and openELEC is actually quite good (it more or less turns the RPi into a worthwhile purchase). But none of them are Puppy.

Although I've dived into this thread several times, it wasn't until a few days ago that I found the post from woodenshoe on page 13 that explains how to get alpha 4 to boot on an RPi version 2.

So OK, I've now managed to get Alpha 4 to boot up. I'm online and I can browse the web.

The instructions that woodenshoe gave come in two parts. Making changes to the boot partition of Alpha 4 is easy. Even my Win2000 system can do it. But the changes to the puppy partition are a different matter.

My Lucid Puppy 525 system can't mount the puppy partition on the SD card. It gives an error. My Mandriva system can recognise the puppy partition as ext4 but can't mount it. I tried running SolusOS from a live CD. It can mount the partition but SolusOS is a Debian derivative. It won't give me write access.

So my first question is: Is there a Puppy version that can mount the Alpha 4 puppy partition? If there is, I will happily download the iso file.

The next issue is: woodenshoe talks about switching kernels to 3.2.27. But the world has moved on. If you now download the rpi-firmware-master from https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/ ... master.zip it does not contain the 3.2.27 kernel. It now seems to reference Kernel version 3.6.11.

My attempts at switching to Kernel version 3.6.11 have all collapsed ignominiously. Of course it's probably my fault. I'm not a Linux geek, just a hobbist who happens to love Puppy Linux.

So my second question is: Will there ever be a version 4.0.1 of the Alpha 4 img.xz file that incorporates the changes that woodenshoe described?. It would be a great help people like me who want to load Puppy on their version 2 RPi's.

As for an Alpha 5, I dont even dare ask the question.


Posted from my RPi running Alpha 4.

I ran into the same problem with the second partition not mounting if I clicked on the drive icon, but strangely enough it would mount from the command line.
Replace sdb2 with whatever is correct for you.

After mounting you can just click on the drive icon to look at the partition, and unmount it from the menu like normal, it is only mounting that doesn't work.

This worked for me in lupu 528. In racy 5.5.1 there was no problem in the first place, but you don't need to download a new version of puppy if the mount command above works.

Since it sounds like you can boot with the original kernel, you could try downloading or copying the rpi-firmware-master.zip from a usb stick to the Raspberry Pi and unpack the new kernel modules there. You can have several versions of kernel modules in /lib/modules (each in their own directory) but a new kernel won't boot without a matching set of it's own modules. (Actually I have booted a new kernel I had compiled for my laptop and loaded the wrong savefile that didn't have the new kernel modules in it and it booted up to the desktop just fine except that the mouse and keyboard didn't work... )

I did try the new kernel 3.6.11+ and it does work too. The second boot is faster than the first, for some reason it needed to look at my mouse and keyboard several times during the first boot. The pinboard didn't load on the first boot either, just a black screen with the task bar at the bottom. Simply rebooting fixed it though.

The file /tmp/bootkernel.log would give you an idea if any firmware is missing. Booting by itself my Raspberry Pi wasn't missing any, but depending on what kind of wifi dongle you attach you may need additional firmware to make it functional. As far as I know firmware files are architecture independent and could be copied from any distro that has the right ones.

Many thanks for these notes.

I think I'm going to have some fun later this week with another round of experimentation ...

How come the Puppy for RasPi doesn't include the raspi-config command?
So how should I change the RAM-split?

The raspi-config command edits various config files but the one that defines the gpu_mem setting is config.txt.

It can be found on the first (boot) partition of the SD card. If running Puppy click on mm0p1 in the bottom left corner of the desktop.

A description of all the various options can be found here http://elinux.org/RPiconfig.

@woodenshoe: Thank you for your help. I've had alpha 4 running with the 3.6.11+ kernel for a while now and it's going reasonably well.

For anyone who is interested, here is some feedback on what I've been seeing.

What works?

Let's start with the good stuff. Within 3 hours of first boot I was satisfied that there was enough functionality that simply worked 'out of the box' to make it worth trying to develop the system. Specifically, e-mail, web browsing (+ ad blocking), bit-torrent, playing audio (music) and streaming internet radio all worked at the first attempt. There are blemishes, odd bits of functionality that don't quite work as they should, but the mainline functionality is present and correct.

Since I've run both Debian and Fedora on the RPi, I can happily confirm that (as you would expect) Puppy is an order of magnitude faster than those systems. That's not to say Puppy is fast, but it delivers fairly acceptable response times rather than being forever painfully slow.

What doesn't work

Looking at the system I soon realised I was missing an image viewer. Viewnior wasn't in the system. The package manager listed a Viewnior pet package as being available but could not download it. So I went to the repository and downloaded it manually. It's been omitted for a simple reason. It does not work.

While looking at the repository I noticed the ntfs_3g-20111121-static-armv6.pet package and wondered if it was in the build. I've needed to add it manually on other Puppy systems. It's the same for alpha 4. Fortunately the ntfs_3g package does work and after installing it I could write to my NTFS formatted drives.

Clock

The RPi does not have a hardware clock so the functionality to set the hardware clock from an NTP server (which is in the build) seems a little superflous. Unfortunately the 'set date and time' function also seems to be faulty. I can set the date but not the time. Changing the date resets the time to 00:00. There is no other option. If I change the date at midnight I can have the correct date and time for as long as I keep the RPi powered up. But of course after a power-down the time is wrong once more.

Network and optical drives

If I plug a disc into the back of my router I can access it via NAS on most of the systems I use (including Lucid Puppy 525) but it does not seem to work on alpha 4.

I have a couple of old optical drives with their own power supplies. I tried them with alpha 4. When I inserted a CD or DVD nothing happened. However opening a console and mounting the disc from the command line does work (although there is no icon on the Pinboard). Nevertheless, you can make the data available to an application that needs it.

Package Manager
edit -- this paragraph is only half correct, see two posts further.

The Puppy package manager in alpha 4 isn't a great deal of help. The one useful thing it will do is uninstall any unwanted packages you may have tried out as an experiment. I asked the package manager to download database information for the repositories it knew about. It did that quite successfully and then threw up a syntax error for each entry in the databases. That took about 90 minutes. In other words, downloading from the Debian squeeze armel repository via the package manager is off the menu.

Adding applications

Installing Debian applications manually is tedious. Made worse by Debian's habit of splitting everything up into large numbers of tiny packages. But so far I've not found any other option. So I browsed the repository looking for something both small and useful. An image viewer to replace Viewnior seemed the obvious choice. GeeQie is two packages with 9 dependencies. Pfind was able to tell me that three of the dependencies were already resolved. The remaining six dependencies have a further five dependencies of their own (none resolved). So I downloaded the 13 packeges and installed them in more or less bottom up order. I'm happy to say the GeeQie viewer runs very nicely on alpha 4 (and it's a much more capable viewer than Viewnior). I used Geany to edit the 'defaultimageveiwer' script so as to launch 'geeqie-standard' and all is working well.

A real bug?

The various bugs and blemishes I have encountered have been benign. Various little things that don't work as they should, but don't to any damage to the system either. There is one exception. I did once loose the system and need to do a complete re-install. There is something wrong with the functionality that allows the user to make cosmetic changes to the Pinboard. For example, if you select an alternative icon theme, Puppy thereafter shows all drives as unmounted. On the occasion I lost the system the sequence that led up to the crash was: I changed the icon theme, and then edited one of the icons so that it launched a different application. I then noticed that all the drives were being shown as unmounted and decided to switch back to the standard icon theme. A few seconds later X died and took the system down permanently. It was back to the dd command.

To GPU or not to GPU?

The hardware information function tells me that Puppy can see all of the RAM but apparently can't see the GPU. This becomes immediately obvious if you ask Gnome Media Player to play a video. It's clearly trying to render video using the rather slow main processor rather than using the super-fast GPU. I'm also running openELEC on the RPi and have been impressed by the RPi's ability to play h.264 encoded HD video. Even 1920x1080 BD rips play smoothly most of the time. So Puppy seems to be ignoring the RPi's main asset. Then again, I guess that's OK. It's easy enough to swap SD cards and boot the RPi up in openELEC when I want to watch video. What I need from Puppy is a system that will do normal everyday computing tasks on the RPi and in that respect, alpha 4 looks quite promising.

I am running SAP Alpha 4 using Berryboot. I've updated it to the most recent kernel that Berryboot uses.

The automatic clock setting from the internet seems to work for me, but I did have to reboot.

As far as the graphics acceleration, the only way to get accelerated video on the R Pi is to use "omxplayer" which is the custom player made for the R. Pi. It seems to be more or less a command line equivalent to mplayer.

So any reasonable video solution is going to have to be some sort of front end for omxplayer. This is what they did to make xbmc work. I don't know how hard it would be, but gmplayer and also the gtk-youtube application might be able to be adapted to use omxplayer as its backend instead of mplayer. I assume that would fix the video issues.

As far as what works, I'd add that CUPS and rdesktop both work well. The main thing I have been using it for is as a print server (freeing my laptop from the desk) and as a thin client to my Windows XP machine.

I installed rdesktop and grdesktop from the Puppy Package Manager without any problem.

dancytron wrote:I installed rdesktop and grdesktop from the Puppy Package Manager without any problem.

Yes, I need to make a correction to what I wrote. As noted above, I screwed up the Puppy Package Manager while trying to update the repo databases. But since then I've made a complete re-install. The Package Manager in it's out of the box state works. I should have left well alone.

So I've been adding applications from the Debian squeeze armel repository. QMMP audio player and Pan newsreader. Both seem to work OK.

A few days ago, quite by chance, I noticed a new skeleton for RPi had been posted in the Quirky repository. Just out of curiosity, I downloaded it and wrote it onto an SD card so that I could take a look.

Not very exciting, but I did notice one thing: A gpu_mem=64 command has been added to the end of the config.txt file.

I believe that form of the command is now out of date (though I presume it will still work on older type A RPi's).

During my experiments with alpha 4 I've tried loading the RPi with applications running on all three desktops and it not too difficult to get to the point where resource depletion slows response times to a crawl.

But what the hardware info panel tells me is that no matter how overloaded alpha 4 is, it's still using slightly less than 256Mb of RAM. Hardly supprising since alpha 4 pre-dates the introduction of the type B model RPi.

Given that alpha 4 can't play video and the hardware info panel does not even mention the existance of the GPU, I started to question the value of allocating 64Mb of RAM to the GPU. So I added a gpu_mem_512=16 command to my config.txt file.

That makes a difference. alpha 4 is (of course) still not using the top 256Mb of RAM, but it is now using 240Mb (rather than 192Mb) of the bottom 256Mb of RAM. For things like web surfing and reading newsgroups, there is a modest but noticable improvement in performance.

When I was setting up my alpha 4 system on the RPi one thing I noticed was that the unrar function did not work. The Puppy archive manager said it could not find the unrar program. I went to the Debian armel repository and installed it. That made no difference.

At the time there were quite a few things I was trying to sort out and investigating the unrar function was deferred. Once I started doing 'real work' on the RPi the lack of an unrar function became an irritation. Fixing it proved to be fairly simple.

The Debian armel package installs a program called 'unrar-nonfree' in /usr/bin. The Puppy archive manager is looking for a program called 'unrar'. I made a copy of the unrar-nonfree program under the name unrar. Now the Puppy archive manager is able to find it and the unrar function works. The graphical on-screen feedback to show that an unrar is in progress does not work but the 'task completed' message is shown as normal.


A few other odds and ends that come to mind:

The built in Ctorrent works, but can't seem to open the listening port. I switched to Transmission. That works well on the RPi and for the sake of installing libupnp3 you can get Transmission to open the listening port.

Xfe file manager works well on alpha 4. As does Pan newsreader. There is a command line version of the Par2 utility in the Debian armel repository which is simple but effective.

If you add in mhWaveEdit (which is standard in many Puppies but has been omitted from alpha 4) and then augment it with the Lame mp3 package (see the Debian armel backports repository) you'll be able to encode mp3's on your RPi. Though it's slow going.

The weakest part of running Puppy alpha 4 on RPi is web browsing. There is probably no clever soloution to this, the main processor is simply not fast enough. I gave up on Chromium fairly quickly. I now have Midori and Links2 installed and swap between the two depending upon which web sites I am trying to access. There is a build of Links2 in the Puppy quirky arm6 repository. Perhaps it's a shame it was not in the build.


To my amusement, I find I'm now making real use of the RPi. I bought it as a toy. Now I have two of them. One running openELEC and the other running Puppy alpha 4. I'm dumping bit-torrent and usenet work onto the Puppy alpha 4 system rather than have those functions eat up resources on my main laptop.

It's a real shame pnethood does not work on alpha 4.

I did get Pnethood working with the following pets, and tested it on a samba share from a Puppy computer.

I don't know if it will work with Windows 9x/XP/Vista/7/8. There are a lot of variations of the SMB/CIFS protocol and different authentication methods. I did not compile all of them into the smbclient program.

The new kernels only come with the cifs.ko kernel module so there is no smbmount command anymore. The smbclient program comes from samba-tng, it's a lot smaller than the version from samba.

01micko was experimenting with network_roxapp on the Raspberry Pi and warned about some kind of bug that could cause data loss.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 606#661606
I don't know any specifics about it, whether it was a samba problem or a kernel module. I am using the 3.2.27+ kernel, and the checksums on all of the test files I transfered checked out OK.....

Personally, I'm thinking of trying to get this up and running on my Pi, and see what's the case with it.

Perhaps I might be able to do something... Though I do wonder what this is built on-top of, if it is Woof + Raspbian? If so I'll try to figure out the version, or perhaps get the Woof scripts onto Raspbian, and build a Woof-based puplet off that, but I would need to figure out how stable it would be.

Hi Woofers,
I'm unsure if this is the appropriate place to post this information.
If someone knows a better place please advise me and I'll repost.
Thanks

The life of Pi: Intel to give away Arduino-friendly 'Galileo' tiny-puter

Intel is now actively attempting to recruit the maker community to aid it in its battle against ARM.

Today at a major gathering of European hardware hackers in Rome, the chip giant announced it has cooked up a Raspberry Pi-style board computer with the blessing of Arduino.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/03 ... _computer/

amj wrote:...What doesn't work...

+1
Let me add just one issue:
german keyboard layout in X: up, down,rigjht,left and level3 not working (@ ²³{}\|)

At console (ALT-F2) it is OK.

Has anyone in the community picked up the mantel of continuing development of Puppy for the Raspberry Pi?

Whant to know if some have make an img with Woof2 of the Raspbian Wheezy packages?

I try... But something happens in Building part and not finnish the task ...?

Need some help!

Raspberry Pi Rev Model B Rev 2 Ram 512 MB
Would cost me only 349 SEK which is low price

andI want one but thesoftware for Puppy or Debian?????