(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

oh wait there you are in the IRC now testing it.

Q5sys wrote:oh wait there you are in the IRC now testing it.

yep

anyway, I shortened it a bit, it's just "slacko${RANDOM}" .. now, so the max will be 12 chars.

Cheers

01micko wrote:BTW, we got a prompt woof fix

And it's in the new Precise service pack.

Hopefully, jades will confirm that it solves his problem in Slacko.

rcrsn51 wrote:Hopefully, jades will confirm that it solves his problem in Slacko.

I'll report back tomorrow once I've had a chance to test it, hopefully in the afternoon. Not my turn on the Pentium D today, and new puppies other than Wary haven't worked on the K6 for several months due to lack of cmov.

With regard to 01micko's comment about saving to NTFS being a bad idea, I do see the point but thought it would be a more common thing than it seems to be. The theory is that a user would be booting LiveCD with the pupsave on the hard drive as a way to try out Puppy without interfering with their existing Windows install. This is basically the situation with the Pentium D, which I share with my brother. I do have some saves on USB stick and my phone, but prefer to use the hard drive as it's quicker and also I don't need to remember where I left the stick I need this time.

My K6 machine does have an assortment of partitions on it, but that's my personal machine and I needed to partitiion the drive anyway since it was bigger than the size limit supported by Win98 (effectively 20GB) - the main aim with that machine was to play old games natively rather than messing about with DOSbox and the like.

Several folks are reporting NTFS issues with different Puppies at this time. Not sure I subscribe to the above rationale. Testing these distros on a Windoze machine is a fine idea, but it doesn't strike me as logical to save alien OS files on there. If folks like what they see, there might be much better options. Top of the list has to be Gparted Wdoze into oblivion, it isn't difficult even for neophytes. My experience of a range of ages and abilities is that folks finishing with the devil's OS once and for all makes them ecstatically happy! Alternatives, esp. if the machine in question is shared, include second HDs which are dirt cheap on eBay for the size demands of Puppy, caddies, USB sticks (mentioned above), external HDs, other solutions also available. Most of Puppies' finest attributes can be had within modest confines. Why not another -[ oh, yes, older! ] - piece of hardware from the local boot sale, neighbour's spoilt kids, in the loft/garage/under the bed, for example. Just what is it that folks want to do that needs another Echelon in this world! Anyone living within range is welcome to select from my retinue of entirely suitable machines, gratis. Or I'll build to their spec. at cost.
Slackware is the oldest continuously supported open distro and defers to many of the classic tenets of the genre; Slacko provides best-of-breed in the compact distro kennel.
It seems to do games, videos & musak editing, which, although not its prime directive, would normally be accomplished on larger machines/distros, games consoles, studio sets and the like.
Horses,courses.

Sage wrote:Several folks are reporting NTFS issues with different Puppies at this time. Not sure I subscribe to the above rationale. Testing these distros on a Windoze machine is a fine idea, but it doesn't strike me as logical to save alien OS files on there. If folks like what they see, there might be much better options. Top of the list has to be Gparted Wdoze into oblivion, it isn't difficult even for neophytes. My experience of a range of ages and abilities is that folks finishing with the devil's OS once and for all makes them ecstatically happy! Alternatives, esp. if the machine in question is shared, include second HDs which are dirt cheap on eBay for the size demands of Puppy, caddies, USB sticks (mentioned above), external HDs, other solutions also available. Most of Puppies' finest attributes can be had within modest confines. Why not another -[ oh, yes, older! ] - piece of hardware from the local boot sale, neighbour's spoilt kids, in the loft/garage/under the bed, for example. Just what is it that folks want to do that needs another Echelon in this world! Anyone living within range is welcome to select from my retinue of entirely suitable machines, gratis. Or I'll build to their spec. at cost.
Slackware is the oldest continuously supported open distro and defers to many of the classic tenets of the genre; Slacko provides best-of-breed in the compact distro kennel.
It seems to do games, videos & musak editing, which, although not its prime directive, would normally be accomplished on larger machines/distros, games consoles, studio sets and the like.
Horses,courses.

Are people just saving their save files to a NTFS drive... or are they saving it to a drive that they use windows on? The reason I ask is that its possible windows (when running) is doing something with the safe file which is making it unreadable by puppy. Perhaps trying to move it when it tries to defrag, etc. If its just sitting on a dormant non OS ntfs drive, then the possible issues are different.
I've never saved a safe file to NTFS, so I cant answer either way.

..windows (when running) is doing something...

- reminds me of that (in)famous Gatesian quote "...even we don't understand how it works...", or words to that effect.
Time for world+dog to move on.

I am glad you have solved the ntfs problem but there is something I don't understand.

I use FAT Slacko which appeared AFTER Feb 2012. It is frugally installed on an NTFS hard drive with a save file in the same directory as the sfs files. I do not have a network.

According to previous discussion those without a network are supposed to get a problem all the time.

I had no problem creating the save file and I have no problem on reboot with icons gone.

Does the umount command not get executed in this configuration? If so that would explain why I have no problem. If the umount DOES get executed then why do I not have a problem?

ICPUG wrote:I had no problem creating the save file and I have no problem on reboot with icons gone.

In my tests here, the umount script was accidentally unmounting an NTFS partition.

In /etc/rc.d/rc.shutdown, this occurs on Line 225. However, on Line 436, Puppy starts to create a save file on a partition that is already mounted on $SMNTPT from /usr/sbin/shutdownconfig.

If that's an NTFS partition, it was unmounted on Line 225. Bad things are going to happen, assuming that I am reading this correctly.

Why it doesn't happen all the time is a mystery. Also, it should have been happening in previous 5.3 Puppies. But IIRC, jades had no problem in Slacko 533.

In my tests where the save file was on an NTFS flash drive, the problem occurred every time.

rcrsn51 wrote:Why it doesn't happen all the time is a mystery. Also, it should have been happening in previous 5.3 Puppies. But IIRC, jades had no problem in Slacko 533.

It's possible that 5.3.3 came out in the period when I didn't have a functioning hard drive on the Pentium D machine, so I wouldn't have been able to test it on an NTFS parition. I was mainly working off a USB stick. My current 5.3.3 saves are upgrades of ones from earlier versions. The only other 5.3x Puppy I've been testing from around that time was Wary, but that was on the K6 machine which doesn't have NTFS partitions on either of the drives (FAT32 Win98 parition, ext3 data partition and a couple of full installs on ext4).

I did manage to create functioning saves on some of the versions between 5.3.3 and 5.3.7.7 so I am a little confused - but that's probably normal for me when trying to test Puppy.

UPDATE:

Tested creating a new save on NTFS with Slacko 5.3.3, and as rcrsn51 suspected it had the same problems as I've seen with some but not all of this round of Slacko test builds. Wary 5.3.90 also had a seemingly faulty save in that it ran the initial setup dialogues again, but once it got to the desktop the icons and backdrop were intact.

OK, as promised, the results from testing of the prospective fix for the NTFS save problem.

All tests LiveCD with Slacko 5.3.7.7 non-PAE, pfix=ram and saved to 160GB NTFS parition with WinXP on. Drive defragmented and error checked in XP first. On pfix=ram boot at start of each test, deleted save from previous one where the name and location would be the same.

Test 1.

Accepted all defaults on initial QuickSetup screen. No other changes apart from changing some ROX options and copying the replacement rc.shutdown file from a memory stick after decompressing it. Chose Reboot, created save using all default options (so save to sda1, ext2, 512MB, non-encrypted and save on root of partition). Selected No when asked to copy SFS file. Save working after boot, checked rc.shutdown date, still 26th November 2012.

Test 2.
Chose following QuickSetup options:-

Locale: en_GB
UTF-8 off
Timezone: Europe/London
Hardware clock set to UTC: off
Keyboard: UK
Num-lock: on

Rest of test same as Test 1. First attempt had same save problem as reported before, and rc.shutdown dated 4th November 2012. Possible that I either forgot to copy rc.shutdown or dropped it in the wrong place on the failed attempt. Ran this another four times, producing working saves successfully. Last three attempts with a different name each time.

Test 3.
Encouraged by the previous successes, I went for a full setup this time. QuickSetup settings as for Test 2. Set up wireless networking with Frisbee, installed Flash Player, set up Opera and installed CUPS driver for Deskjet 720C. Copied new rc.shutdown and chose reboot. Save file options were for 512MB unencrypted ext4 save in directory PuppyFiles on sda1. Boot completed without any problems and everything was remembered.

Test 4.

As Test 4, but with the wireless set up with Network Wizard rather than Frisbee. Save worked first time after reboot.

To summarise, it looks like the altered rc.shutdown does solve the problem - provided, of course, that I make absolutely certain I did copy it before reboot. 01micko forgot to mention uncompressing the file before copying it but I realised I needed to do that straight away. A new test build with the fix incorporated could be useful now, even if it needs to go back to being a beta rather than an RC.

Thanks Jades

Since your tests seem positive the next will be RC2. It's not a big change, only a couple of lines of code and it fixes a bug. I should have made it a .pet to make it easier for you to test.

Regarding your connection, Frisbee has an option that keeps the connection up if it's flakey. I have never used it but I believe you can set it up to 15 seconds. The daemon that is responsible for this has been patched in Slacko to accommodate that feature of Frisbee. It is designed to help in your particular situation. I'll have to add that to the release notes so at least it's documented.

Cheers

01micko wrote:Thanks Jades

Glad to help.

01micko wrote:I should have made it a .pet to make it easier for you to test.

The only thing you left out was the need to decompress the .gz file, but I'd been working with .gz files recenty so knew how they worked. You gave the rest of required info. I'm equally as likely to forget to install a pet as I am to copy a file to a given location.

01micko wrote:Regarding your connection, Frisbee has an option that keeps the connection up if it's flakey. I have never used it but I believe you can set it up to 15 seconds. The daemon that is responsible for this has been patched in Slacko to accommodate that feature of Frisbee. It is designed to help in your particular situation. I'll have to add that to the release notes so at least it's documented.

I'll give it a shot. It's probably an odd firmware issue. Where Frisbee does score over using Network Wizard when the connection seems to have dropped is that the former has a nice "Reset Connection" button. On the latter, I have to load the profile again and then go and enter the IP address details again.

01micko wrote:Cheers

My pleasure.

Slideshow presentation application

Imagination 3.0 works nicely on the latest slacko.
I downloaded the debian packages from launchpad.com and
made a pet package.

Available here
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82575
_______________________________________________________

The homepage for carl9170 seems to be http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170. I'm not sure which version is currently in Slacko 5.3.7.7 or how to check.

modinfo carl9170

pemasu wrote:modinfo carl9170

Thanks. Version in Slacko is 1.9.4 if I'm interpreting the output correctly. Latest version for Linux 3.1 and above is 1.9.6 according to that carl9170 page I referred to earlier.

modinfo output for carl9170 in Slacko 5.3.7.7 below.
The Netgear WN111v2 has Vendor ID of 0846 and Product ID 9001.

Jades

About that "dropwait" thing in Frisbee.

To access it you must click the "Wireless Diagnostics" tab in the main GUI. You are then presented with a row of buttons at the bottom of the GUI. There is one there (sorry forget the label ) but it is self explanatory. Click it and you get a box popping up asking you to enter the number of seconds before being disconnected. The default is 15. Leave it at that and see if if it makes a difference for your situation.

As far as you dmesg goes, I see a lot of activity regarding wlan0, but no critical errors as such. Rather peculiar.

Cheers

01micko wrote:As far as you dmesg goes, I see a lot of activity regarding wlan0, but no critical errors as such. Rather peculiar.

Rather! The really odd thing is that the network icon on the taskbar still shows that it's connected even though nothing's happening. Is there any chance of you including v. 1.9.6 of carl9170 in RC2? It might not fix the problem but it could be worth a shot.