4.2 Meeting - Here

[Lobster]

My vision for 4.2 is to come up with an official Dingo release at least as small, up-to-date, workable and bug free as one of Barry's own releases. That's not an easy task either, but I'm sure it will make Dougal happy, among others.

You will notice that Dougal and others are still providing updates for 4.11
So Warrens (WhoDo) vision makes perfect sense and flows into 4.2.

At the moment, code is made available on the forum and Barry uses that in the updates

Warren, in terms of scripting and updates for 4.2
is there anything that we can offer for Jay (Puppyluvr) to work on?
Better still, Jay is there anything you would like to work on?

[zigbert]

One of the (small) disappointments about 2.15CE for me was that I couldn't get it all in under 132Mb, even though it had a whole different focus to a normal release. I'd like to see 4.2 meet Barry's targets and stay well below 100Mb.

I'm VERY glad for that statement.

Thank you WhoDo!
Sigmund

[Eyes-Only]

Just voicing my 2 centavos here and agreeing with Zig, who in turn agrees with Warren, and Lobster, who in turn agrees with Warren, and... umm... what was that again? LOL! Okie, okie! I do agree with y'all (especially Warren) that 4.2 should be "business as usual". So you've got my vote Warren.

But then and again---don't you always?

Amicalement/Cheers!

jimmi
"L'Peau-Rouge"

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
Well, as I said, my scripting abilitys leave a lot to be desired, although I do have some great ( I think ) ideas for a few things, If they come out good, Ill certainly submit them.
However, eye candy being my thing, I would love to do a theme for JWM, with matching icons ect. .and I think the theme switcher should switch icons/backdrops as well, to match...
I would love to see Puppy have a wider choice of themes/icons/backdrops by default, to allow the end user to quickly find a style he/she likes..
But really, Id be thrilled to have even a single icon included in an official release...

As for scripts, ect...I`ll PM Lobster, (OK?) with a few ideas, seeking advice, and we`ll see if anything comes of that..

Im still learning my way around "under the hood", but till then, Id love to help with the "paint job"..
...................Jay...................

[Lobster]

`ll PM Lobster, (OK?)

OK

[WhoDo]

Warren, in terms of scripting and updates for 4.2 is there anything that we can offer for Jay (Puppyluvr) to work on?

Usability. One of the ongoing programs for Puppy has been the constant press for improvements in usability. We modified the crash recovery and Ctrl+Alt+Del output in 2.15CE and it worked well for refugees especially.

One of the things I thought about recently was how we modify certain config files ... manually. For example, wbar is a great addition to usability, but to add or remove icons you have to manually edit its config file. A script that opened the config file in geany or leafpad and allowed users to simply make the necessary changes is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

If you check out the quick launch menu in IceWM there are a couple of calls in there that do the same thing; edit the startup file and edit the quicklaunch menu. Sure we could simply add the wbar option in there but not everyone uses that menu or even knows its there. IMHO it would be better for usability if the script was found directly from the main menu. That means creating an appropriate .desktop file for the xdg menu system and allocating a relevant icon in that too. If we could get dvw86 (Dan) to resurrect his Puppy Control Panel, such items could be included there instead.

That's just one very small idea that explains what I mean about usability ... I hope. It doesn't necessarily imply that wbar or IceWM will be an integral part of Puppy 4.2 per se. If Jay or anyone else sees such opportunities for Puppy 4.2 and decides to create the necessary script(s), I'll be very grateful.

Cheers

[cthisbear]

One thing I would like is not having to type

puppy pfix=ram .....for example at bootup.

Surely this is not in the league of Science Fiction.

Why not some additional boot settings for problem laptops etc
so that we have more options...and less forum requests
to getting Puppy to boot.

Also ...ten seconds to read the boot screen
or just hit enter to boot straight away.

For the additional bootup options......
that would be in numerical order of the most
likely to be in current use after the traditional
Puppy enter Option....
maybe you could just type.......say

go 1
go 2

etc...etc..

and a hit esc option to keep reading the Boot Screen.

That certainly would make Puppy more user fiendly
for Windows Refugees.
To me the present boot options are a bit crude.

Chris.

[ttuuxxx]

Warren, in terms of scripting and updates for 4.2 is there anything that we can offer for Jay (Puppyluvr) to work on?

Usability. One of the ongoing programs for Puppy has been the constant press for improvements in usability. We modified the crash recovery and Ctrl+Alt+Del output in 2.15CE and it worked well for refugees especially.

One of the things I thought about recently was how we modify certain config files ... manually. For example, wbar is a great addition to usability, but to add or remove icons you have to manually edit its config file. A script that opened the config file in geany or leafpad and allowed users to simply make the necessary changes is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

If you check out the quick launch menu in IceWM there are a couple of calls in there that do the same thing; edit the startup file and edit the quicklaunch menu. Sure we could simply add the wbar option in there but not everyone uses that menu or even knows its there. IMHO it would be better for usability if the script was found directly from the main menu. That means creating an appropriate .desktop file for the xdg menu system and allocating a relevant icon in that too. If we could get dvw86 (Dan) to resurrect his Puppy Control Panel, such items could be included there instead.

That's just one very small idea that explains what I mean about usability ... I hope. It doesn't necessarily imply that wbar or IceWM will be an integral part of Puppy 4.2 per se. If Jay or anyone else sees such opportunities for Puppy 4.2 and decides to create the necessary script(s), I'll be very grateful.

Cheers

When the time comes, I could compile icewm and maybe a new blinky icon, if you want icewm. What ever you want. But the last icewm package I built for 4.0 does work on 4.1 what ever you decide I'm here to help. By the end of the weekend I'll have 1 pc with Slackware 12.1 installed and a free 750 gig hard drive for series 5.0
and another second pc with with 4.1 installed with a free 500 gig hard drive. So I have the space and room to do just about anything to help.
ttuuxxx

[WhoDo]

When the time comes, I could compile icewm and maybe a new blinky icon, if you want icewm.

I'm not thinking of IceWM as the default WM ... at least not unless the overwhelming community response is to go that way and I don't think it will be. OTOH, Puppy used to have both FVWM95 and JWM by default, so if we could make IceWM small enough not to blow our size budget then I would certainly consider it as an included alternative WM. Puppy, and Linux, is all about choice and making choosing easier IMHO. What's the current size of your working cutdown IceWM, ttuuxxx?

Furthermore, since $CURRENTWM is fed from a plain text file, we could perhaps make the boot options include a WM preference ... or not, as the community wishes. Just thinking about Chris' (cthisbear's) request for clearer boot options on first boot; he's right that it should be easier to follow and a simple boot menu would help. Maybe we could have only 3 or 4 common choices in plain English with the more complex ones concealed behind an "Advanced" option. I was going to ask Pizzasgood about the current state of Pebble, too, but that's another issue!

@Lobster - can we start a wiki page for a wish list and another for an application/script developer's ToDo list where those who want to help out can pick and choose the things they want to contribute? The wish list should carry a statement that we're NOT looking for MAJOR changes to Puppy's drive train ... just looking for usability features and easily added, simple functionality.

I'm not going to start a browser preference war like we had with 2.15CE either, and I don't want us to get into a debate over the relative merits of Abiword vs. OpenOffice or KOffice or whatever. Just the opposite. As I've already stated, I believe Puppy 4.2 should be business as usual but with as many usability and functionality refinements as we can reasonably include.

I hope that makes sense for everyone. Cheers.

[ttuuxxx]

When the time comes, I could compile icewm and maybe a new blinky icon, if you want icewm.

I'm not thinking of IceWM as the default WM ... at least not unless the overwhelming community response is to go that way and I don't think it will be. OTOH, Puppy used to have both FVWM95 and JWM by default, so if we could make IceWM small enough not to blow our size budget then I would certainly consider it as an included alternative WM. Puppy, and Linux, is all about choice and making choosing easier IMHO. What's the current size of your working cutdown IceWM, ttuuxxx?

I hope that makes sense for everyone. Cheers.

The last one I made for 4.0 was 2.6MB pet but that included 86 menu icons ,3 themes, and a gtk2 theme, new blinky and updated freememory applet(with right click options, Once again) that didn't disappear. I packed a lot in that 2.6MB pet
So it could be easily stripped and reduced to about 1.5MB +/-
ttuuxxx

[Pizzasgood]

I was going to ask Pizzasgood about the current state of Pebble, too, but that's another issue!

I would not call it suitable for an Official Puppy. CE editions, sure. Personal editions, sure. But for an Official Puppy, I think it should have built-in support for pressing a key to disable it on the fly.

Splitscreen would also be nice.

I plan to eventually "add" those features for version 2 (I quote that because I actually plan to mostly start over from scratch, but copy-paste some existing code back in, to give it a much better internal structure. Currently it is somewhat of a hack-job.). Split screen is not possible with the current implementation. A keypress to switch it off may be possible currently, but it would be a crude hack if it is.

I hadn't planned to resume development on it in the near future. Given enough demand, I could be motivated to. It would be interesting. But I have other stuff I want to work on for now.



As for an "advanced" boot menu, that is trivial. I posted a guide about that sort of thing on the forum last winter. Along with that, I suggest including the screen in USB installs, as I recommended back then. I wrote code to handle it for Puppy 3.01 back then also. Porting it to 4.1 probably wouldn't be a big deal.



What I am working on now is a volume mixer, since I remain unimpressed with the one Puppy has, both in terms of displayed sliders (an easy fix) and the sliders themselves (not such a simple thing). I'm working on this within the Puppy SVN repo on SourceForge, so anybody can check out the latest nightly. It is semi-functional now - as long as you only have one sound card, and it doesn't use 64 bit integers, then the current code should load and display a working "retro" slider for every volume control. Still needs support for specifying which controls are to be visible, and for things that aren't sliders (mute, input selection, labels, numerical display of the volume, etc.). Also planned is support for specifying the color scheme it uses. And I haven't even touched the applet part yet (which I plan to make icewm and scroll-wheel compatible, if at all possible).

I don't really care if Puppy uses it. I'm mainly doing it for myself, because the only volume mixer besides Alsamixer that I've ever remotely liked was Xtmix, which we dropped long ago and wasn't all that great anyways.

Afterwards, I intend to fix the bug in Xorgwizard that causes it to not work with a dual-head configuration (by 'not work' I mean you can't even start X with the file it produces - this is not a fluff or power-user thing. I just want it to handle that situation properly to bring up at least one screen, rather than none. But if I can get them all going automatically, all the merrier.)


Those are my near term things. I'd also like to add Pet-Be-Gone functionality to PETget itself, but first I need to figure out what is broken in Pet-Be-Gone itself, so I don't repeat the error. (I am working on finding that bug tonight. Meant to do it last weekend, but homework took longer than I expected.)

[Lobster]

I'm not thinking of IceWM as the default WM ... at least not unless the overwhelming community response is to go that way

JWM works
If it ain't broke don't fix it
IceWm maybe for 4.3 IMHO (JWM not being developed)
Ideas about usability far more relevant

@Lobster - can we start a wiki page for a wish list and another for an application/script developer's ToDo list

Sure.
Links to new pages now available here.
http://www.puppylinux.org/wiki/archives ... ep-thought

[drongo]

Second cthisbear's request. Seasoned Puppy users are not worried by the list of options on the initial boot screen. We know we have 10 seconds to type anything to stop the boot process and then we can type puppy pfix=ram or whatever.

A new user sees a screen full of text and by the time s/he has read and understood it the boot process has ceased pausing and is now off and doing "something".

I used to have a Nokia mobile 'phone. When I received a text message I only had to press one button and then I was in a screen which allowed me to reply to that message. It's almost as if the designers thought "What's the most likely thing for someone to want to do after receiving a test message?"

My new mobile requires going through about four menus to achieve the same thing.

Whilst I have the greatest respect for all of the developers who have freely contributed their time to Puppy I don't think GUI design is necessarily their forte.

A developer looks at a screen full of options and/or buttons and will keep adding to them as they add features. Only when the list scrolls off the screen or the buttons eat up all the real estate do they even consider splitting a list or adding tabs.

I don't design GUIs for a living but I have used plenty of other peoples' GUIs and most of them have simple and annoying errors.

Barry's early wizards were always a model of clarity. Not only were the options explained in simple terms, he'd usually explain the bad consequences of a decision and give a recommended option.

As option has piled upon option I think some of this initial clarity has gone.

I'd like to suggest some guiding principles which you are all quite at liberty to ignore.

If a user doesn't make a selection in time (because they are frozen in fear by having to read a list of a gazillion confusing options) Puppy should take the action which does the least harm to the computer.

Default behaviour should probably be equivalent to "puppy pfix=ram". This doesn't mount any disks, it didn't even use to look for pupsaves (although now I think it does?) and doesn't write anything anywhere.

Your initial menu could probably be "hit any key for boot options or do nothing and we promise not to destroy your hard disk" which would default to puppy pfix=ram. (Might need to work on the wording slightly.)

Boot options menu would again only have two or three options. as you delve further and further into menu-cyber-space the options could become more complex wordier because the only people in those menus would be people with those particular problems.

You could have different time defaults for each menu so that the options that people were most likely to use booted up quickest. Pfix=ram quickest, pupsave next quickest etc.

Every option on a wizard should have a "Whoa, go back, I didn't want to do this button".

You might want to have different paths through some wizards. Setting up networking for the first time would be different from changing a static IP address, changing from DHCP to static, or adding an additional card etc.

I'm not saying that I personally have any problems with the existing menus and wizards but I feel that they have gradually become more complex over time and now might be a good time to re-evaluate them from the perspective of a new user.

Don't overwhelm people with choices, that's fine for someone whose been using Puppy for 3 or 4 years but won't suit most users. (Most users are newcomers.)

Guide them down the most probable path. What's the most likely thing that someone wants to do at this point in the menu/setup. Secondary consideration would be which option is least likely to annoy long-term users who just want to skip through everything? I know it's a pain to keep clicking through a boot-up sequence, but it will be dificult to make Puppy all things to all men. Don't do that. Keep it small, fast etc and able to boot on RAM-challenged dinosaurs.

We want slick, not confusing for newcomers and usable. And we want it yesterday.

Incidentally, I think menu design is one area of Puppy where a committee might actually make sense. 3-6 people could probably make quite a good job of this where one person might miss something obvious. Most other things are probably better designed by a committee of one!

It's not that I'm fanatically opposed to democracy or every single Puppy user voting on every single decision, but, be honest, if you voted on everything we'd all be using Microsoft XP or Vista. (And I mean at home as well as at work.)

So my vote is for no votes. Maybe a small committee for menu design and everything else decided by benign/brutal dictators.

I'd be happy to make more detailed suggestions about menu options, if you think that would be useful. Not sure I can contribute anything useful on the scripting/graphics front however, as I think the learning curve might be a bit steep if I'm trying to catch up with the rest of you.

drongo (see I've signed my post - ban me!)

[WhoDo]

JWM works
If it ain't broke don't fix it
IceWm maybe for 4.3 IMHO (JWM not being developed)
Ideas about usability far more relevant

If ttuuxxx gets IceWM down to 1.5Mb-2.5Mb then it would be worth including IMHO. At that rate 4.2 would still be well below 90Mb and that's a good thing. We'll see.

@Lobster - can we start a wiki page for a wish list and another for an application/script developer's ToDo list

Sure.
Links to new pages now available here.
http://www.puppylinux.org/wiki/archives ... ep-thought

Great work, Ed! As usual you don't let any grass grow beneath your feet!

[zigbert]

I get rather upset by all the icewm-chat. It could be my absence of knowledge ..... I then apologize.

JWM pet package is 69 kb.
If ttuuxxx can strip down Icewm to only 1500 kb ... then include it in the official Puppy

Can anyone explain what we get of new features after adding 1431 kb.

There is a lot of goodies we could add if 1.5 mb were available.

Sigmund

[ttuuxxx]

I get rather upset by all the icewm-chat. It could be my absence of knowledge ..... I then apologize.

JWM pet package is 69 kb.
If ttuuxxx can strip down Icewm to only 1500 kb ... then including in the official Puppy

Can anyone explain what do we get of new features after adding 1431 kb.

There is a lot of goodies we could add if 1.5 mb were available.

Sigmund

Hi zigbert

One thing you could get is user "willhunts" 176 themes pet package
http://hostfile.org/icepak.pet
Plus just the looks blows away JWM even with gtk2, if you ever seen my my default themes in 3.0.2 with the puppy paws to close pages and golden dog bones to lower or minimize pages, Thats truly unique to puppy and took for ever to design and figure out.
Plus if you want to change the menu button, taskbar, and ,menu background its just 3 simple images and makes the theme look completely different, Its simple to change and no code involved. Which is excellent for new users. Also icewm has a lot more of configurations compared to jwm. for 1.5 mb I think its a keeper, actually I might be able to even make it smaller. maybe 1MB. I personally think its the most user friendly WM available to Linux. You have around 100 options if you want to change settings and the Best part Zigbert is ---------- Gxine works fullscreen, you can change the aspect ratio without borders or crashing. It just generally works much better.
ttuuxxx

[Lobster]

There is a lot of goodies we could add if 1.5 mb were available.

Exactly so
Petch
and Precord
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 508#203508
are two examples that are under 10k.
Do we have others?

[HairyWill]

@zigbert,
I can completely sympathise with your view on jwm vs ice. In many respects jwm's limited themeability is an asset, I personally like the clean straight lines. I have also invested effort in hacking the jwm source which is fairly easy to understand.

I know of two functional problems with jwm from the puppy perspective. These are fullscreen problems for gxine and flash (I have provided a patch for flash) and lack of support for the gtk SKIP_TASKBAR_HINT. Neither of these are show stoppers but the lack of activity on the jwm mailing list may be a problem in the future.

Personally I don't think an extra 1.5MB for icewm is worth it, but for those that like to demonstrate their themeing skills the cost seems justifiable. Generally the puppy philosophy would seem to be to use the lightest functional complete option. Applying this logic, for the vast majority of people, jwm as default, with icewm in the repository would seem to be the best option. When I'm scraping my rear along the ground trying to run a usable puppy on a 300MHz CPU the last thing I care about is what the window titlebar controls look like.

Here we go again, the window manager wars, openbox anyone

It just generally works much better.

What does this mean. I've specifically listed the two functions icewm deals with better than jwm that I am aware of, are there any more or are you just handwaving.

[ttuuxxx]

@zigbert,
I can completely sympathise with your view on jwm vs ice. In many respects jwm's limited themeability is an asset, I personally like the clean straight lines. I have also invested effort in hacking the jwm source which is fairly easy to understand.

I know of two functional problems with jwm from the puppy perspective. These are fullscreen problems for gxine and flash (I have provided a patch for flash) and lack of support for the gtk SKIP_TASKBAR_HINT. Neither of these are show stoppers but the lack of activity on the jwm mailing list may be a problem in the future.

Personally I don't think an extra 1.5MB for icewm is worth it, but for those that like to demonstrate their themeing skills the cost seems justifiable. Generally the puppy philosophy would seem to be to use the lightest functional complete option. Applying this logic, for the vast majority of people, jwm as default, with icewm in the repository would seem to be the best option. When I'm scraping my rear along the ground trying to run a usable puppy on a 300MHz CPU the last thing I care about is what the window titlebar controls look like.

Here we go again, the window manager wars, openbox anyone

It just generally works much better.

What does this mean. I've specifically listed the two functions icewm deals with better than jwm that I am aware of, are there any more or are you just handwaving.

Well Hairy lately you've shown that you are generally against anything that I say, If its a personal vendetta, and if so maybe lets work it out as gentleman in PM. If by coincidence you have made 2 negative post in a row against me, then Its ok. any which way, have you figured out the Gxine problem and made a patch??? I have seen tons of users really mad at Gxine or would your solution be add another 5-10 MB and change media players to Mplayer or VLC? or add less than 2MB or even around 1MB and make everybody happy? Plus lets not forget most of our popular derivatives are icewm, Like macpup, My series, lighthouse, some of Mu's, the most popular ce ever 2.15 and soon to be 302, The list is endless, Plus I personally don't think 1MB is going to topple a 300MHz CPU, what is your pc doing a balancing act, what happens when you open a flash game, does it crash? Come on, we aren't talking about 30MB. Icewm is the most popular aftermarket wm that puppy has, look how popular Ezpup is plus my versions like
my lite versions have been downloaded around 800 times
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=27358
then my icewm 4.0 series http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 0de68e6054
which Eric would have the download stats on that, but I am sure its really high also.
So lets summarize the benefits for 1MB_/+
new users will have a OS that the video works properly, They can customize the os by adding one pet theme to make it look like windows 95,98,xp,vista,mac. something they feel comfortable with, Just one pet package, or they can use your route, have something that looks foreign, that is 5+MB larger to actually play video right, and kind of confusing to change a window manager, most need guided help to do that. All for 1MB not a real thought out plan Hairy.
ttuuxxx

[Eyes-Only]

Hi Will!

I'm sitting here in my chair waving my hand for Openbox/LXpanel. Do you see me? LOL! Of course that's simply my personal preference and I can't give a reason as to "why" it would be better, yada, yada...

Folks? I've been a supporter of IceWM ever since I came to Puppy a year before I joined the forum (<---listed over there somewhere). But Will and Zigbert both bring up a very valid point here and that is that JWM---which I don't use---is very lite-weight and takes up little room at all to manage the windows. Check in top/htop and compare the difference. Plus as Lobster and others say, you can add more of these helpful programmes in that are lite-weight in place of even the 1meg IceWM. Maybe not the Windows Refugee will be using those little 10kb programmes, yet sometimes we do have to stop and think of US along the way as well, don't we? And it's a lot easier when booting into RAM to fix a disk problem to have those 10kb programmes installed than to take the time to make the connection and HOPE you can get it from one of the repos. (Voice of experience here for when I need to check my reiserfs partitions using 4.0 booting in RAM!)

And yet I've never minded, when wanting to make a major improvement to my Puppy once I've created a pup_save.2fs or hard drive install, to then connect and get my various window managers from the repos if need be. It's always been for me anyway "The Puppy Way": Small on the disk---plentiful in the repos because as a Puppy owner we all have .pets. Okie, bad pun. Lobster started it!

Of course, that's just my own opinion and there are 6.5 billion others in the world...

That aside: I'm glad the person (drongo?) brought up about the boot-up sequence! AMEN BROTHER! For those whose first language is not English (You thought mine was? -tsk! tsk!-) that's a dreadfully-frightening sight to behold and then before you can even get through the first two lines---Puppy's up and booting! ACK!

What a wonderful idea he brought up! I set all my English grubs for 60seconds. Hell, I can't even MOVE faster than that! That gives me time to select which one of the six systems or 5 options I wish to boot into in the morning. Nice! Or, I can accept the default and press "enter". I loved his idea with the "go 1: go 2:..." etc. and the default being RAM so as not to mess up what we have. Go through the Beginner's Section here and how often do you see, "I couldn't read fast enough, the new disk started, and I corrupted my save file..." or similar?

Okie, I've "manger les mots" (chewed the fat) for long enough. Thanks for allowing me the space!

Amicalement mes amis!

jimmi
"L'Peau-Rouge"