X-Slacko Slim 4.4r49 (unique, stable, and flexible)

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clerk_gabel · #871 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Wed 29 Aug 2018, 16:18

Hi, I am new here.I also could not boot the isos from neither archive-dot-org nor google drive burned to DVD or CD on two laptops.Otherwise a great idea with a basic slim puppylinux based on Slackware.Instead now on a fresh install of Slacko 6.3.2 I found it possible to slim down the distribution by deleting Abiword and updating Firefox to 45 including u-block and Flash etc. with help of the provided tools.Some leftovers though must be deleted manually. I have known Slackware for many years and remember from my last "night owl spell" with a Puppylinux based on Slackware 12 how impressed I was over the the power of the Puppy package manager combined with Slackwares own pkgtool.The Puppy package manager could install rpms from RedHat so it was not that hard to update libraries and their source to versions beyond Slackware 12.In that way Puppy for me at that time worked as a small Slackware (without TEX and much other otherwise mandatory Slackware stuff) with nearly only apps build on the system installed.
Pls. move on with X-Slacko Slim where I will give it a try after figuring out taking a disk image, where my windows based bare metal restore CD have problems reading what it see as a RAW partition on this old laptop I just got my hands on.

mistfire · #872 Post by **mistfire** » Fri 31 Aug 2018, 02:08

@clerk_gabel what boot error message did you got upon booting the disk image?

clerk_gabel · #873 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Fri 31 Aug 2018, 06:31

@mistfire - very similar to the problem sage reports, just a black screen with a prompt in upper left corner.The machine is a Vega+ laptop with Intel Celeron 1.5 GHz and ATAPI CD-ROM Model: DVDRW SOSW-833S. No problems with other CD/DVD media so far as it boot up a Windows PE based rescue CD and Slacko 6.2.3 in the usual way.

mistfire · #874 Post by **mistfire** » Sat 01 Sep 2018, 01:17

@clerk_gabel upon booting the iso image does it shows the boot menu?
If yes, then when selecting to boot does it shows message like these?

Code: Select all

loading vmlinuz..............
loading initrd.xz...............

clerk_gabel · #875 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Sat 01 Sep 2018, 12:19

On the Vega+ laptop with slacko 6.3.2 installed on a ext2 filesystem nothing happens when booting the iso burned to DVD or CD. Only a blinking cursor (not prompt) in upper left corner, no boot sequence. From within Slacko 6.3.2 the X-Slacko slim boot CD is recognised / mounted in a usual manner.
The Vega+ has 1.5GB of RAM installed.
To my pleasure X-Slacko booted flawless on a Dell dual core Intel running XP on a NTFS file system. With 4GB of ram no problem loading into RAM, where starting X took a few minutes, in the first instance fooling me to believe the system had frozen. A very nice operating system I will configure and explore now there is an option to burn changes made back to DVD - I am impressed! - and thanks for efforts.

Puppyt · #876 Post by **Puppyt** » Sat 01 Sep 2018, 22:15

Hi clerk_gabel,
I feel your pain, regarding Puppy "failing to launch" on your old laptop. Congratulations for persevering and getting it working on your desktop computer. Was it the same CD that you booted from in both computers? I have kept dozens of CD's that I burned Puppy isos onto, in the past. I found that there were many strange variables that affected my success in booting across different computers. These included burn speeds that were too fast for the older cd drives, age-related hiccups in old cd drives (e.g., dust and natural component fatigue), and even the quality of the blank CD made a difference. I switched to USB-type installs, and if you are new to the game of distro-hopping may I suggest you try Yumi https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-mult ... b-creator/ - assuming that you are familiar with the Windows environment? Might I also suggest you use diagnostic CD's like Hirens or UBCD to ensure that your laptops' hard drive, ram etc is in good order? Good Luck

https://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

EDIT:

just saw that you've already used rescue cd's successfully on that laptop...

Sage · #877 Post by **Sage** » Sun 02 Sep 2018, 08:42

Nice to have some helpful comments, misty, but I fear the answer is just as elusive. We could ask folks to send you lists of their video equipment to try to find where the most pressing issues might be. However, this might just exposes the limits in the packaged drivers - an increasing shortcoming presently being lamented by many distro developers. In this case, you might find it necessary to double, or more, the included drivers. Tail chasing, though, because you could find the whole distro ballooning so much that the very desirable objective cannot be achieved, viz. a small, compact and fast offering that boots to everything.
In the meantime, could be useful to have everyone in your neighbourhood report their successes/failures on a wider range of machines. Unfortunately, I can only offer negative results from about thirty different ones, not necessarily all with different video cards.
Some sort of more detailed code analysis might disclose why most other Puppies (even the older ones), will boot, some needing specific cheat codes, but yours do not? Well beyond my abilities!

clerk_gabel · #878 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Sun 02 Sep 2018, 11:32

As you say, Puppyt, the explanation may be so simple as the optical drive not recognising this particular CD-brand (SilverCircle).The iso was burned with CDburnerXP on XP.
My present system support my wireless GPRS modem as well as wi-fi at home, so I believe I will stick to it. Basic needs are e-mail and a browser, where I lately have had concerns about identity theft after hearing how hard it was for a person to tidy up after such an event. I hope Google docs will serve when it comes to .docx documents, have not tried yet.
Digression - the development environment work out of the box where adding xbitmaps was the only extra needed to build Motif on this microlinux.
I am astounded!

mikeslr · #879 Post by **mikeslr** » Sun 02 Sep 2018, 13:36

Hi clerk_gabel,

"My present system support my wireless GPRS modem as well as wi-fi at home, so I believe I will stick to it. Basic needs are e-mail and a browser, where I lately have had concerns about identity theft after hearing how hard it was for a person to tidy up after such an event. I hope Google docs will serve when it comes to .docx documents, have not tried yet."

You didn't mention what is your present system. Perhaps you could consider just switching its kernel to one which has the meltdown & spectre patches, and installing a current openssl. It may also be necessary to install Mike Walsh's gtk3 lib in order to run firefox quantum, both found here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 010#978010.

I don't know which zdrv associated with a recent kernels may include the drivers/firmware for you GPRS modem.

mikesLr

clerk_gabel · #880 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Sun 02 Sep 2018, 18:49

A sideslip from the thread, forgive me mistfire. But mikeslr, thank you for the info regarding the meltdown and spectre processor vulnerabilities. I had not read about them until yesterday and was not aware they could be mitigated via a Linux kernel upgrade. The kernel on my system running Slacko 6.3.2 is 3.14.55 and probably outdated as these processor issues was revealed only a few months back?.
I picked this old laptop up on the final day in our vacation we spent in our hut. There we use a Huawei 4G wireless GPRS modem with a prepaid SIM card for internet, and it works really well eg. on my sons Win 10 laptop.
The Win XP this little known Vega+ 1.5 GHz machine came with was broken with missing drivers etc. where a full install to HDD of Slacko, funny enough, worked perfect, including 4G GPRS after Huawei's Mobile Partner Suite for Linux was added (exist as .sps). Now at home also wi-fi works without hassle.
I am trying out Firefox Quantum 61.02 and latest Seamonkey where both are less stable than Firefox 45.9 who appear rock solid.
There is some way to walk with troubleshooting browsers and replacing the outdated kernel before the system meet standards. Again sorry for the derailment, and thank you for advice.

Sage · #881 Post by **Sage** » Mon 03 Sep 2018, 08:54

There may be another possibility. Reading today's DWW, Jesse remarks in relation to his Redcore review: "When attempting to run Redcore on my desktop computer, the distribution was unable to boot at all in Legacy BIOS mode." He also had a few problems with UEFI, but did get a screen show. UEFI was originally (yet another) M$ ploy in combo with manufacturers to (i) deal another blow to Linux (ii) eliminate the remaining rotating machinery in favour of all-ss. Some of these aspirations may well be laudable, but the impetus was $$$-driven by casting off perfectly reliable and adequate HW to landfill. Bit like the modern motor car - stuffed full of electronics, {kiddie with a powerful electromagnet could destroy the lot!} when all one needs is a steering wheel, accelerator, gearstick and a brake. Excuse the diversion but the question for misty is: are you working from an UEFI machine? Best testbed for your magnum opus has to be something you picked out of a skip/dumpster, at least 10-15yrs of age (the old ones are always the best!).

johnywhy · #882 Post by **johnywhy** » Mon 03 Sep 2018, 18:33

Sage wrote:Best testbed for your magnum opus has to be something you picked out of a skip/dumpster, at least 10-15yrs of age (the old ones are always the best!).

Awesome comment!

mistfire · #883 Post by **mistfire** » Tue 04 Sep 2018, 22:45

Hello I found out some flaws on sns and I fixed it. I noticed that it uses mac address matching. That process was pointless for me so I removed that rountine. sns was lack of setting static ip and DNS and Im thinking on how to implement it on sns.

mistfire · #884 Post by **mistfire** » Fri 14 Sep 2018, 01:48

New X-Slacko Slim iteration released

Changes:
* Improved Simple Network Setup. The selected network interfaces has now the option to use DHCP or Set static IP.
* PPM can translate tazpkg install and remove scripts
* Some bugfixes

Download:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cvq0fF ... sp=sharing

MD5 Checksum: d35201c2c61dc82291c80320934d7fa2

Sage · #885 Post by **Sage** » Sun 16 Sep 2018, 11:28

Afraid it's another dud, misty. On three out of four machines, it will boot to the ISOLINUX header, sometimes the disc light still flashes, but mostly it just stops, although my trusty 32bit machine did the courtesy of cyclic hard resets. Like I said, if you really want to get some traction for your excellently conceived project, it'd be best to get some different machinery and stick to CD .iso with BIOS booting because the choice with modern UEFI, SD & USB HW have so much choice of distros and diagnosis systems, there may not be a useful market for your present offerings?

clerk_gabel · #886 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Sun 16 Sep 2018, 21:08

With the sept. 13 slacko-slim-4.4r22.iso burned to CD there was fast boot up on Intel Celeron single core 1,5Ghz and Win7 Asus F7L dual core 2008 laptops, on a Toshiba Satellite L360 dual core laptop boot up halts after "not found "puppy_....sfs". A menu with option for saving error log then pop up (

).The Satellite is equipped with -SCSI Disks- ATA WDC WD3200BEVT-0 PIONEER DVD-RW DVRTD08A. A frugal install on the Celeron works with OK Wi-Fi / browser / Puppy Package Manager etc.

Billtoo · #887 Post by **Billtoo** » Sun 16 Sep 2018, 22:14

I installed to a 16gb SDHC card, computer is an Acer Revo nettop:

video-info-glx 1.5.3 Sun 16 Sep 2018 on X-Slacko Slim 4.4 Linux 4.17.6-slim32 i686
0.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation ION VGA (rev b1)

X Server: Xorg Driver: nouveau
X.Org version: 1.14.3
dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (507x285 millimeters)
depth of root window: 24 planes

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 9.1.7

Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz
Core 0: @1599 1: @1599 2: @1599 3: @1599 MHz

Haven't tested much yet, computer is connected to a 32" TV via hdmi
cable, don't have sound via hdmi yet so using external speakers.

That's it so far,
Thanks.

mistfire · #888 Post by **mistfire** » Mon 17 Sep 2018, 08:58

@clark_gabel I check the debug file that you submitted. It looks that the optical drive on your machine that you booted from does not find what kind filesystem is. Thats why it does not boot from CD drive. I make some tweaks on probepart to fix that error.

mistfire · #889 Post by **mistfire** » Tue 25 Sep 2018, 04:11

New X-Slacko Slim iteration released

Changes
* bugfixes on probepart command (both initrd and main sfs)

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12qsxaQ ... sp=sharing

MD5 Checksum: f81b065643df945102eb51b185f13aa6

clerk_gabel · #890 Post by **clerk_gabel** » Wed 26 Sep 2018, 15:22

When burned to CD and not finalised the latest iteration of X-Slacko works fine on a Dell dual core intel laptop, but again no boot and instead splash screen for saving logfile on the Toshiba Satellite. To me it seems as if similar problems are general to many Puppy flavours, not only X-Slacko. As operating system Puppy works great (browser, thunderbird, wordprocessor etc.) but the unreliable boot up from CD / USB of Puppy unfortunately spoils (no secure way for restoring backup).

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X-Slacko Slim 4.4r49 (unique, stable, and flexible)

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