(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Posted: **Sun 04 Feb 2007, 10:38**

Bert,
How did you get the power consumption of eBox-38xx of 28Watts?

Hi Nyu,

I don't have an eBox 38xx, but I've build a similar, but bigger box based on the Via 2000+ motherboard. ( see my signature)
In our house we're trying to get our energy consumption down to an absolute minimum, without loss of comfort. That's a journey of many small steps. One of these steps I hope to realize is to run my bedroom-office on solar energy

That's why I am very interested in new developments towards more power efficient computers like the eBox.

Bert

Posted: **Sun 04 Feb 2007, 11:24**

Bert wrote:One last thing, Pakt, on my box I could indeed not detect a speed difference between eBoxPup and full Puppy 2.13.

No you wouldn't

I have simply replaced the applications that I felt were too 'heavy' for the eBox-2300 with 'lighter' ones that run reasonably well. It would take a tremendous amount of work to get Puppy to run faster on the eBox-2300 and I believe the difference would still be small. The problem here is the 200MHz CPU. Apart from possibly trying to 'overclock' the CPU, only a faster computer will improve performance I'm afraid

Bert wrote:I switched back to Puppy Standard, as my bank doesn't allow netbanking from Opera and because my girlfriend wants to continue composing colourful html emails, something Opera can't do.

Bert, you're running a faster machine so you'll find Seamonkey reasonably fast. On the eBox-2300, there is a noticeable delay in Seamonkey when typing e.g. a URL - it takes about a second before the character appears on screen

Opera, on the other hand, runs much faster and has no noticeable delay.

Paul

Posted: **Tue 06 Feb 2007, 16:53**

Hi pakt, I've bought a TU-40 and I would like to install your ISO image on it, but I'm a newbie in Linux so I don't know how to proceed after I have downloaded the file from here http://puppyfiles.org/isos/eboxpup-2.13-0.1alpha.iso
How do I put it on my 4GB CF card? Do I need simply to extract the files and copy them on the CF after formatting it with fat32? How do I make the CF bootable (if needed)? Or do I need to masterize the iso on a CD, then attach the CD through usb port, boot it live and then install on the CF via Puppy Universal Installer? Or is there another procedure?
Moreover I noticed that the BIOS sees the CF as primary slave IDE hard drive, do I need to change some settings in the BIOS too?
Sorry for my dumb questions, I hope you can help me! Thank you very much!

Posted: **Tue 06 Feb 2007, 17:17**

Cheetah wrote:Hi pakt, I've bought a TU-40 and I would like to install your ISO image on it, but I'm a newbie in Linux so I don't know how to proceed after I have downloaded the file from here http://puppyfiles.org/isos/eboxpup-2.13-0.1alpha.iso
How do I put it on my 4GB CF card? Do I need simply to extract the files and copy them on the CF after formatting it with fat32? How do I make the CF bootable (if needed)? Or do I need to masterize the iso on a CD, then attach the CD through usb port, boot it live and then install on the CF via Puppy Universal Installer? Or is there another procedure?
Moreover I noticed that the BIOS sees the CF as primary slave IDE hard drive, do I need to change some settings in the BIOS too?
Sorry for my dumb questions, I hope you can help me! Thank you very much!

If you can, open up the case, and attach a cdrom drive to the TU-40 via the ide connector...
Set the bios to boot the cdrom 1st, and with the cflash card in the slot, format it with a fat32 partition...
Then follow the directions in the installer..

Bob

Posted: **Tue 06 Feb 2007, 17:57**

Cheetah wrote:Hi pakt, I've bought a TU-40 and I would like to install your ISO image on it, but I'm a newbie in Linux so I don't know how to proceed after I have downloaded the file from here http://puppyfiles.org/isos/eboxpup-2.13-0.1alpha.iso
How do I put it on my 4GB CF card?

This is the way I do it. Burn the iso to a CD and boot into Puppy from the CD on another PC. Then put the CF card in a CF-to-USB adapter, plug it into the PC and run the Universal Installer.

Choose 'USB CF Flash drive, later move to IDE-adpter'. For Bootstrap loader, choose 'sys-nopart.mbr' (by JustGreg) and then choose 'syslinux' to make it bootable (just press 'Enter' in the warning window that comes up afterwards). Always works for me

Cheetah wrote:Moreover I noticed that the BIOS sees the CF as primary slave IDE hard drive, do I need to change some settings in the BIOS too?

You may not have to. Try the default setting first.

Paul

Posted: **Tue 06 Feb 2007, 21:49**

(Bert, you're running a faster machine so you'll find Seamonkey reasonably fast. On the eBox-2300, there is a noticeable delay in Seamonkey when typing e.g. a URL - it takes about a second before the character appears on screen :!: Opera, on the other hand, runs much faster and has no noticeable delay.)

pakt..This might interest you..on Barrys' developer forum

http://www.puppyos.net/forum/?1170794341

I commented about Seamonkey's slow page rendering on Barry's blog so I decided to do a bit more investigation.
It turns out the "--enable-pango option in the build config is the culprit. Note: you can see the build options by typing about:buildconfig in the address bar. The official Seamonkey binary does not have pango enabled by default.

(Billcnz

I tested disabling pango by adding:
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
to the mozilla-bin file before it calls the seamonkey-bin. It makes a huge difference on older pc's with slow cpu's. My load time for rendering Barry's blog page went from 35 seconds down to 7 seconds.) Bill

Regards Chris

Posted: **Wed 07 Feb 2007, 07:41**

cthisbear wrote:I tested disabling pango by adding:
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
to the mozilla-bin file before it calls the seamonkey-bin. It makes a huge difference on older pc's with slow cpu's. My load time for rendering Barry's blog page went from 35 seconds down to 7 seconds.

Thanks for the link, Chris. I just tried the mod on the eBox and it makes a big difference

Still not as fast as Opera, but it's a lot closer in performance.

Paul

Posted: **Thu 08 Feb 2007, 23:45**

I've got a brand new epatec e3800 with puppy 2.13 (I'm posting from it). Everything works out of the box with the regular puppy, except playing videos: both, gxine and mplayer die, with errors like:

Code: Select all

The program 'gxine' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadAlloc'.
  (Details: serial 375 error_code 11 request_code 140 minor_code 19)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

Do you know if it's necessary to install some module for the graphic card to work for videos?

Thanks in advance

Posted: **Fri 09 Feb 2007, 06:25**

Congrats on putting this together for the ebox/tu-40. I am writing this via Opera on a box that I flash booted.

The only thing I don't have working so far is audio output?

I tried running alsaconf but it says it fails to find any devices.

How do I load the driver for the onboard ac97 audio?

As this build is meant for the ebox, perhaps auto-configuring the network for DHCP and auto-configuring the sound is a luxury we can enjoy since the hardware config won't change?

Your assistance is appreciated.

-Jeff

Posted: **Fri 09 Feb 2007, 07:21**

jac1d wrote:The only thing I don't have working so far is audio output?

Jeff, you didn't forget to put zdrv_213.sfs on the CF card? That file contains almost all of the Puppy driver modules. It is also needed if you want to run Xorg (recommended, instead of Xvesa) on the eBox/TU-40. Xorg uses a video driver specifically for the SiS graphics chip giving you best performance - Xvesa is a general video driver, not optimised for any graphics chip.

jac1d wrote:As this build is meant for the ebox, perhaps auto-configuring the network for DHCP and auto-configuring the sound is a luxury we can enjoy since the hardware config won't change?

Sound works out of the 'box' (no pun intended) with zdrv_213.sfs. You may need to raise the volume.

The eBox can also be used with dial-up networking, so auto-configuring the network is not such a good idea. It so simple to set up so it doesn't really matter anyway

Welcome to the 'Puppy on a thin client' club

Paul

Posted: **Sat 10 Feb 2007, 11:38**

I have a 4GB microdrive in a CF/IDE adapter mounted in the 2.5" drive tray an there´s no noise from the unit. Now I just have to figure out how to do a convention hard drive install so I can use the whole drive and get a swap partition setup. Any pointers here would be greatly appreciated.

I can give you mine simple how-to, as i had really hard time with others. After reading the how-to forum or other people test i was simply not able to have it running, and i really don't know why. But i finally found ONE way really working very good.

The need i had was to install puppy on a USB hard disk or on a USB key and to have it also read/write able for windows. So i could download puppy distros and test them without burning cd, and erase and do it again with another distro. It works the same on IDE hard disk, or compact flash cards with adapter.

How-to install PUPPY distribution on hard disk (USB or IDE/SATA) or USB key

1. format disk to FAT32, or format USB key using the HP tools (download here:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files ... 23839.html )

2. download a distro and extract every file from the ISO to the newly formatted disk.
3. take your text editor and create a text file contaning the following line inside (uncomment the line for your context) and save it to SYSLINUX.CFG

Code: Select all

#default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=initrd.gz PMEDIA=idecd
#default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=initrd.gz PMEDIA=usbflash
#default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=initrd.gz PMEDIA=usbhd
append QPM=true

4. use syslinux.exe to make your disk bootable. You might need to use the -f switch to force it, it's ok.

exemple if your disk is seen as e: use the command:
syslinux e: -f

5. reboot your computer and ensure your bios is ok to boot on usb device if you are installing on usb.

*****

This simple method works great. If you want to change and test another distro all you have to do is download another distro and extract all files from ISO and copy them on your usb device. It works the same for IDE hard disks, just select the fine PMEDIA parameter.

Another real good thing is someone using windows and loading your usb device is not able to read your own files saved in puppy ! Though the sfs are not encrypted windows users can't read them.

Perhaps someone may also give us a tip on how-to encrypt the files ?
You can use your puppy linux distro with complete usability and even store your work and increase the storage puppy space. But by formatting in FAT32 you will not be able to use very large store files, the limit is around 4Go i think (?) Perhaps you can use ext3 or reiserfs if it suits best your needs.

Best regards,
Laurent.

Posted: **Sun 11 Feb 2007, 05:55**

That's a very useful new procedure in installing Puppy, Laurent. Thanks a lot!

Posted: **Sun 11 Feb 2007, 12:11**

Before I buy an ebox 38xx I'd just like to be certain that these devices has high speed USB (480 Mb/s) support, and that they can boot from the USB-port (so you can choose USB as 1st, CF-slot as 2nd and IDE as 3rd boot device f.ex.). Could some of you confirm this? I suppose its pretty mandatory these days, but I'd like to be certain

Also, for those of you in Norway or Sweden, it will probably be cheaper (and easier) to shop through http://www.wdlsystems.com and forward with http://jetcarrier.no . I only have positive experiences with them.

Thirdly, could someone recommend a suitable miniPCI WLAN card or USB-adapter for my ebox-puppy? I'd be very happy if you could point me to a good cheap american online shop at the same time

Additionaly, those looking for more power saving boxes, should check these out:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yuge92
made by these guys:
http://www.dt-research.com/
I'll be happy to do some translating for those who need, but I suppose Google language tools will take you just as far.

And lastly, keep up the good work! I love it!

Posted: **Sun 11 Feb 2007, 12:39**

Thanks for the links.

Yes, it boots from USB. The speed of transfer depends on whether it is USB type 1 or 2, and you can check the specifications (see the sites for the specifications).

Posted: **Sun 11 Feb 2007, 13:21**

Well, it is supposed to have USB 2.0 so I suppose that's correct then

Anyway, for those interested, the processor in the DT research boxes is a AMD Geode LX 800. According to a white paper I found on ZDNet, even though it is 500 Mhz it should equal an 800 Mhz processor. I've attached the paper.

My understanding is also that they have a miniPCI slot or can be equipped with one ("optionales WLAN (miniPCI)"), that they have a 44 pin IDE slot ("Notebook-Festplatte oder FlashROM (DOM)"), and possibly that the DDR ram is "modular", not fixed ("gestecktes RAM Modul"). See:

http://www.dt-research.com/dt166_set.htm

They also seem to be nicer to foreigners, as you don't have to pay German VAT if its shipped outside Germany.

Posted: **Sun 18 Feb 2007, 23:59**

raffy wrote:That's a very useful new procedure in installing Puppy, Laurent. Thanks a lot!

Is there a way to export my message to the HOW-TO forum section so others can benefit from it too ?

Best regards,
Laurent.

Posted: **Mon 19 Feb 2007, 00:03**

Hi Pakt,

I have been using it since a while and i noticed the following problems:

1. the locale script does not work and abort after a download so users can never choose from the locale list...

2. the mkisofs is missing

i will keep on testing it and will report if i find something

Best regards,
Laurent.

Posted: **Sat 24 Feb 2007, 09:36**

Thanks, Laurent, I'll look into those issues and put them on my list to fix.

Paul

Posted: **Fri 02 Mar 2007, 20:07**

Hey! Just got my emb2300 today from WDL Systems, but the eBoxPup is not found at the link in first post.

Can I get it somewhere else??

Posted: **Fri 02 Mar 2007, 20:31**

Get it from http://bexa.org/pup

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

eBoxPup-2.13-0.1alpha released

installing the iso, how to?

Re: installing the iso, how to?

Re: installing the iso, how to?

very useful

Questions about the ebox 38xx, and much more

Boots from USB

More about the DT Research boxen

Re: very useful

bexa.org