(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I like technosaurus's idea of combining remasterpup with the installer.

I also like raffy's idea of the user being presented, right away, the option of installing, straight from the welcome page. But I don't know how to implement what's needed, directly on the webpage. Not an html guru.

Perhaps if the webpage had a click-link to start the PUI's gtkdialog screen?

Here is my idea of a gtkdialog screen which could be called from the welcome page and embodies both the remaster and installer functions:

Here's the source which produces the above gtkdialog screen. It's just the mockup, no <action> or implementation code yet. The implementation code would be mostly copied straight over from the present PUI and remasterpup2:

oops I got distracted again and grokked a way to restore the man pages to the good ol' days

technosaurus wrote:

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search"

I would make that Kind of fun though, to watch what happens in the rxvt window when you start it manually... (edit note: originally I forgot I was not in DOS and wrote "null" instead of "/dev/null"...)

SHS - All it is really missing is a button for gparted and maybe a help button. Possibly use radiobuttons or comboboxes vs. checkboxes just to tighten it up a bit. Looks greaty though - keep it coming. If you could get the bash part of it to work with your gui as well ... now that would be Puppy.

Here a noob's perspective:

- I find the ROX right-click immensely valuable;
- I am longing for an Iron browser so I can have identical bookmarks and everything in both Windows and Linux, and love the way Iron saves screen area by putting tabs where the title bar is normally (using Iron Portable in win) AND it blocks ads;
- same with email - I use Thunderbird Portable in Windows (because I hate to install anything at all) and would argue for same in puppy for the local folders location that can be spe'ced to the same place so all my email stuff is unified. Currently I use TBP with wine. (Actually I find that enough so maybe scratch that.)
- a polished installer would be nice but not my priority - the current one works fine.
- VLC media player - same reason, I use it in Win and like to use the same apps in both cases so I don't have to learn everything all over again, plus it is fully self-contained having all necessary codecs etc.

technosaurus wrote:SHS - All it is really missing is a button for gparted and maybe a help button. Possibly use radiobuttons or comboboxes vs. checkboxes just to tighten it up a bit. Looks greaty though - keep it coming. If you could get the bash part of it to work with your gui as well ... now that would be Puppy.

My preference is to keep gparted separate from the installer, because, for the 3-click recycler option, there is no need to start gparted, and for everyone else I think just a brief addition to the "Experts section" frame title, directing them to gparted's menu entry, will suffice: "Note: the partitioning utility, GPartEd, is under Menu-->System". One consideration involving gparted and the 3-click install which, AFAIK, no one has ever considered in any Puppy installer, is hibernation. It requires a swap space at least as big as physical RAM. I'll have to think a bit, about how to ask the question and handle the answers.

As for help, hopefully I can accomplish enough with hover-over tooltips. I too am a fan of the K.I.S.S. principle.

By the way--can someone tell me how to insert an apostrophe after the word "Experts" without bash+gtkdialog3 mistaking it for a delimiter? In other words...how would I modify this lineto put an apostrophe at the end of the word "EXPERTS", in the case where I can use neither the single quote character nor the double-quote character due their already being in use by my bash code? Is there a dedicated slash-combination?

As far as the checkboxes at bottom, I would prefer to keep them, unless it turns out that there are too many choices to fit the space, in which case we would be forced to resort to a combobox.

I thought about making that area a combobox in version 0.0.1 (above), but, I think it both looks and works better if the user can see every option all at once. Otherwise, using a combobox, the fact that there are two install-from choices and two remaster-from choices is certain to lead to errors / frustration / support-request messages by the dozens. I can think already of one more checkbox, "Clone the present installation" and so, real estate in that checkbox area is getting pretty tight I will admit. I may need to add code to force it to use a small font.

All the more reason, in my view, for omitting GPartEd.

I'll come up with version 0.0.2 and start adding implementation code to it. I *think* I'm competent enough, at this point...

On another front...keeping with the K.I.S.S. principle, I am against adding any further options whatsoever to the kernel boot line. Back in 1.nn and 2.nn days, perhaps a full 5% of the help requests on the forum had to do with ignorance thereof. And "improving" the boot line parameters with successive Puppy versions only made the situation worse, from needing to pin down which exact Puppy version was involved before the right answer could be supplied. Therefore, recognizing this, Barry spent a lot of time and effort eliminating the need for those, whittling it down to just a psubdir and sometimes a pmedia parameter. This hard-won sparsity makes life ever so much easier for the would-be Samaritan. Let us not return to the bad old days.

People who need to keep multiple .sfs versions on a multi-Puppy install to a single partition, using many psubdirs (I myself have thirty) are intelligent enough to keep them all in /mnt/home and simply rename the .sfs's to indicate squashfile version if need be, e.g.

openoffice2.20-sfs3.sfs
openoffice3.10a-sfs4.sfs

and use the Boot Manager to select just what each Puppy needs.

Or, are they? Feedback, criticism, potshots invited...

My opinion, for whatever it may be worth, is Firefox. Not necessarily 3.5, but Firefox.

Alternatively, I would settle for a choice, as with the Dillo backend. But that's only second best, IMO. I agree with TTTuxxx, a full browser would be preferred, and while I'm OK most of the time with Seamonkey, there are just so many add-ons to Firefox that I have learned to love.

Fluxbuntu downloads with something called Kazahakase, a lightweight browser I never, ever heard of before.

You speak of a hack of Opera, but I am under the perhaps mistaken assumption that Opera is freeware that is not Open Source. Please correct me if I am wrong. I do like using Opera, but I always feel a little like I'm cheating or something.

And the GUI for install would help Puppy grow into new 'markets,' or 'demographics.' (i.e., Windows refugees)
Ubuntu has certainly gotten this right: it's as easy as can be to install, as long as you don't want to dual boot!

Colonel Schell wrote:
Fluxbuntu downloads with something called Kazahakase, a lightweight browser I never, ever heard of before.

I've compiled it in the past, it was somewhat unstable and not all that small once you add all the deps to it. Firefox, Seamonkey done up nicely or Opera as a last resort. Midori wouldn't be bad if you could get it stable, I guess flash works on it now too.
ttuuxxx

Sit Heel Speak wrote:I would make that

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search" > null

or maybe gyro

About browsers, Icebuntu (newly renamed to Spri Linux) uses Midori.... it doesn't appear ready for "prime time" yet.The potential is there though.

gyro wrote:or maybe

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
defaulthtmlviewer "http://www.google.com/search?&q=man+"$1"+site:linux.die.net&btnI=Search" > /dev/null 2>&1

Heh. I can see that Bruce B's bash tutorial is on my upcoming reading agenda...

@SHS: Maybe the installer can issue an initial advice to the user to plug whatever media in which Puppy will be installed? And then soon after, the installer can present two major choices:

SIMPLE (your "Three-click"): Install to Flash Media or Frugal/Grub4DOS in WinXP. Perhaps there is no need to ask about filesystems here? That will be two-click: choose the drive and then Go!

EXPERT: This will be needed for a multi-partition setup in either hard drive or Flash Drive. All the various choices will have to be asked here.

Perhaps it will be good for the "Expert" section to be initially hidden so as not to intimidate the user?

@raffy: Good idea. That would save real estate for the expert screen.

One problem I see with a first screen that looks like this:

is that it inconveniences experts.

An alternative might be this. By composing the total button-labels text length to coincide with the width allotment for the descriptive text, it makes it look like the radio-buttons are centered. Does anyone know how to force gtkdialog3 to actually center radio-buttons?:


What do you think?

looks like someone beat me to the punch on /dev/null... I was busy compiling and packaging wine 1.1.30 - couldn't get libgsm to compile as shared - finally found a patch for it but not till after I got wine compiled, so I went ahead and posted the .pxt to http://www.puppylinux.asia/members/T/44 ... 0-i486.pxt
(note that it is less than 7MB)

here are a couple of things to note for install/remaster:
less than 256MB should probably do a full install... actually it should compare the size of the files to the RAM - this code actually already exists in Barry's init to check whether to load in ram ... I pointed this out to ecomoney and others a while back to make a Recycle me script. The swap drive should generally be 2x the ram. Puppy files should continue to go to a standard directory by default (pupXXX) to speed up boot and we should consider setting up a standard directory to install sfs files to be used by all puppies maybe just (sfs)

@ ttuuxxx - Midori has similar dependency issues - I still haven't had the patience to sit down and compile it all - it worked ok in absolute linux though.

I have an idea about the puppy package manager but I'm not able to do it myself.

In order to keep the size of the installed packages small we could make the package manager whenever detects a pet with locales (NLS) to read which are the locales inside, and pop up a window asking which ones the user wants. The dialog can have the locales and a tick box next to each of them where the user tics the ones he/she wants to install. For example in my case I only want en (english) and el (greek), so every time I go later to the folder where the locales are installed and manually delete all the rest. In some cases this can be a reduction in size of Mbytes, for example in opera 10 all the locales are 8133 K and in transmission 1.75 1180 K.

The way it can be implemented is:
if pet has in the name NLS
extract, read the the folders names inside the /locale folder (/usr/share/locale or /usr/share/name_of_the_program/locale)
post the list in a dialog
install only the ones which are chosen.

@SHS: Good new layout, although please don't forget that the two-click option consists of "Choose the Drive" then press "Go".

Sorry, I have no idea how to handle gtkdialog. What I can recall is that the CD remaster fails at that stage when gtkdialog (?) could not show a CD in my eeePC.

Am still at a loss how remaster fits the installer - is this a pre-install option for the advanced install? Or an installer part 2 (customized setup)?

@Michalis - At least in 4.3 there is a "trim the fat" button that does this when you install, but maybe I am mis remembering (stuck on a win32 box right now)

I don't see it anywhere , can you or somebody else help me locate it?


Off Topic:
Whenever I build a pet in the database dialog the automatically calculated size is always bigger than the real size of the pet extracted. Has anyone else noticed it? Maybe is it a minor bug?