(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Zigbert,

Today, I put Stardust 007 on the widest range of hardware yet. At the low end, I got out a machine literally rescued from curb-side trash pickup. This turned out to have an AMD K6-II processor, running at 550 MHz, (which isn't too bad.) The catch was that it showed 156 MB RAM in the BIOS. I scratched my head trying to come up with a combination of two DIMMs which would yield that number. When I eventually got two DIMMs matched up from my collection, it had 256 MB, which ran a lot better.

The 10 GB hard drive showed evidence of an incomplete Windows XP installation attempt. Removing this unsightly clutter, and adding a swap partition, left room for GRUB to boot a sampler of pupplets. While Stardust will run on this, you wouldn't like the speed. Best performance came from a stripped-down 412 with fluxbox, or 2.14R.

This evening, I stopped by to trade other RAM with a surviving friend who has been in the computer field longer than I have. He induced me to try Puppy on his latest quad-processor machine. (Running at perhaps 3 GHz.) I had only a USB flash drive with Stardust 007 to boot from. (I had left home in such a hurry I was lucky to remember pants.) This came up and ran, though I went through several bouts with the video, an Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 from PNY. This repeatedly rejected my attempts to limit resolution to the 1280x1024 of an LCD display, and insisted I really wanted 1600x1200.

Having to break out of several attempts at configuration exposed a problem I've seen in Puppy before, and not confined to Stardust, some of those processes started by xorgwizard are not killed by the signal, and remain lurking when you start the x window system again. When you shutdown, and try to save, there are two or more processes trying to grab input from the keyboard.

In the past, I've taken the approach of doing a killall of any processes spawned by previous calls to xwin before allowing it to start anything new. There must be a more elegant solution, but, at present, you can get in serious concurrency trouble when you go through video set up repeatedly. Sometimes you have to pull the plug or hit hardware reset.

Still, I did get Stardust 007 running on that machine, with the video at 1600x1200, and left my friend to increase the font size while he was playing with it.

That was my day, leaving aside the discovery that an HP Officejet 6000 E690a has significant differences in paper handling from an HP Officejet 6000 E690n, even though the same duplex attachment will fit both, and the computer which showed half as much memory with two similar DIMMs as it had with only one of them.

And, so to bed.

prehistoric wrote:Just noticed that pburn in Stardust 007 is 3.1.7. Must be hard to keep up with that developer.

Thanks for mention, - I will contact the developer and get the latest

I appreciate that you dig into Puppy printing!!!!


Sigmund

`f00 wrote:Must say, Shinobar's jp updates for pmount and drive_all do really help - especially pmount is a bit more compact in the interface and seems faster (plus no more 'musical' disc-tray messing about ).

Stardust doesn't touch builtin scripts, else I think of maintain my fork. That is the reason why Pmount is untouched in Stardust. If Shinobar is maintaining his Pmount fork, OR if Barry adopt his code, - I will consider to use it in Stardust. Where can I get it?


Sigmund

davec51 wrote:With a name like Stardust, maybe you need a desktop picture like the one I have put on mine. It's the Whirlpool Galaxy, one of the most spectatular in the region not far from the Milky Way.

Nice wallpaper!!! I am sorry to say it will not be included into the iso. The reason is not the wallpaper itself, but its size. The 4 default wallpapers in Stardust is all together 10kb.


Sigmund

prehistoric wrote:While Stardust will run on this, you wouldn't like the speed. Best performance came from a stripped-down 412 with fluxbox, or 2.14R

Yeah, Stardust is a bit bloated.....I know..... On the other hand, Stardust is the first Puppy (that I know about) that has a decent service manager. What if you turned off the things not running in a stripped down system.
- Pwidgets
- Services
- Tray services
- Event mamager
All this can be managed in the control center (Services tab)

Sigmund

I'm betting the big overhead comes from Pwidgets. For efficiency, no system monitor I've tried comes close to gkrellm on small systems. And, it only requires gtk2 (or gtk1 in another version) libraries. Now, if someone would improve the appearance...

A correction: my problem with hpliplite-3.9.12 was due to a bad download. I'm testing now to see how well it performs.

I hope to finally take a crack at installing drivers for Epson and Canon printers today. When I have those under my belt, I'll feel up to putting out a call for people to report results for individual printers, as I had optimistically predicted I would do last week.

To quote an old friend who will remain anonymous: Everything takes longer than planned, except sex.

prehistoric wrote:I'm betting the big overhead comes from Pwidgets. For efficiency, no system monitor I've tried comes close to gkrellm on small systems. And, it only requires gtk2 (or gtk1 in another version) libraries.

Agreed.

prehistoric wrote:Now, if someone would improve the appearance...

There are some good themes, Look at what comes with LightHousePup.

Zigbert,

Now posting from Stardust 007 on that machine saved from landfill. By swapping DIMMs I have found a set which maxes out its memory at 380 MB. This makes a significant difference.

During that initial installation, you can go for coffee while it generates icon sets. Once past installation even Pwidgets seem to be acceptable, though the system is faster without them. The PCC takes time to come up, and allow you to change things, so I doubt anyone would use Stardust on this machine unless they had prior experience on a faster one.

I doubt anyone would use Stardust on this machine unless they had prior experience on a faster one.

Good point.

The pcc startup time is improvable. I have plans for this.

The Stardust installation is just a matter of choice - How much would we like to generate. We could go through the whole rainbow, or skip the entire generation. The updating of menu-structure is the only critical part. This is necessary for Stardust to work.


Sigmund

Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

I have tried three different ones so far on Stardust 007 and they all fail in different ways as follows.

First try: this release by big-bass that I've used on Puppy 4.1. This won't install at all -- Petget says "Error package failed to install"

Second was this one by tempstuous. This appeared to install OK and put an entry in the Multimedia menu but nothing appears to happen on clicking it. Trying to run it in a terminal reports a missing library -- libXvMC.

Lastly I tried something newer by MU (Mark). First installing the player then his frontend for it. The controls run but won't play anything so I tried this in the terminal and found a different library missing -- libXxf86dga.

I am about at the limit of my Linux knowledge so any suggestions would by helpful, thank you

Will

zigbert I have both 007 and 009 now on my HDD in frugal install. Works well out of the box both of them.

Among the few puppies that do LAN instantly. Even survives my NVidia graphics.

The only thing I miss is Firefox 3.6 and Opera 10... and Iron the free of Google nosiness version of Chrome.

Is this the best for beginners Puppy there is now?

I have to test pup431JP too he seems to be confident that that one is a good one.

I remastered the startdust 007 cd and now the drive icons are too low and the id text is covered by the lower panel but the icons are still visible. Anyone have any idea how this might have happened or what I can do to fix it in a new custom cd burn?

gawth_slacker
Change the value from 16 to 1: in /root/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/ROX-Filer/Options


Sigmund

Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

Sorry if this is not the place to ask this -- were would be better?

Will

Barkingmad wrote:

Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

Sorry if this is not the place to ask this -- were would be better?

Will

This one was built with more formats enabled:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 81&t=26511

This one has less formats enabled but as Multi-core support.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 81&t=47198
The Gnome Mplayer front end GUI crashes though. You can use Smplayer though which is more advanced:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 8&start=15

You can have both versions installed. The names of the executables without the GUI are:
Mplayer with Multi-core support = "mplayer-mt".
MPlayer-1.0rc2 = "mplayer". It's GUI is named "gmplayer".

For MPlayer-1.0rc2 menu entry look at my post:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 079#377079
and MinHundHettePerro post:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 797#380797

Thanks, abushcrafter for your interest.

The reason I'm asking is that I can't seem to get those pakages to install/run on Stardust so I'll quote my older post for refference.

Barkingmad wrote:Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

I have tried three different ones so far on Stardust 007 and they all fail in different ways as follows.

First try: this release by big-bass that I've used on Puppy 4.1. This won't install at all -- Petget says "Error package failed to install"

Second was this one by tempstuous. This appeared to install OK and put an entry in the Multimedia menu but nothing appears to happen on clicking it. Trying to run it in a terminal reports a missing library -- libXvMC.

Lastly I tried something newer by MU (Mark). First installing the player then his frontend for it. The controls run but won't play anything so I tried this in the terminal and found a different library missing -- libXxf86dga.

I am about at the limit of my Linux knowledge so any suggestions would by helpful, thank you

Will

I have used bigg-bass's version OK before but on 4.1 series Puppies so I was wanderig if something Zigbert has changed for Stardust is the problem.

Thanks again for your help
Will

Barkingmad wrote:Thanks, abushcrafter for your interest.

The reason I'm asking is that I can't seem to get those pakages to install/run on Stardust so I'll quote my older post for refference.

Barkingmad wrote:Hello

Is there a package of MPlayer that works with the 4.3 series Puppies?

I have tried three different ones so far on Stardust 007 and they all fail in different ways as follows.

First try: this release by big-bass that I've used on Puppy 4.1. This won't install at all -- Petget says "Error package failed to install"

Second was this one by tempstuous. This appeared to install OK and put an entry in the Multimedia menu but nothing appears to happen on clicking it. Trying to run it in a terminal reports a missing library -- libXvMC.

Lastly I tried something newer by MU (Mark). First installing the player then his frontend for it. The controls run but won't play anything so I tried this in the terminal and found a different library missing -- libXxf86dga.

I am about at the limit of my Linux knowledge so any suggestions would by helpful, thank you

Will

I have used bigg-bass's version OK before but on 4.1 series Puppies so I was wanderig if something Zigbert has changed for Stardust is the problem.

Thanks again for your help
Will

sounds like your missing a system link from /usr/X11R7/lib to /usr/lib
Those missing files should be /usr/X11R7/lib
but sometimes they are in other locations in other distros.
ttuuxxx

Thanks

No time to look at this now but thats something to check

will

Read the MPlayer-1.0rc2 post, the is MPlayer-extra-libs.pet in the main post to fix that.

abushcrafter wrote:Read the MPlayer-1.0rc2 post, the is MPlayer-extra-libs.pet in the main post to fix that.

Are you sure about that? The missing libs are X-server drivers. That are usually included in older puppy version like 2.14X and 3 series, 4 series doesn't have them by default.
/usr/X11R7/lib/libXvMC.so
/usr/X11R7/liblibXxf86dga are both in 2.14X

but I did find the libXxf86dga and libXvMC.so drivers located in the 20MB full xorg pet. here's the missing 2 deps.

If you need more than those 2 you posted maybe install the full 20MB pet Xorg, but first test the ones I provided below from that large package.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ri-7.3.pet
ttuuxxx