Puppy's big problem with woof and woof CE

[oui]

Puppy is actually a medium-sized distro packaged to look small. Given its versatility, I frankly see nothing wrong with Puppy being "medium-sized".

Puppy came as "the" absolutely TINY distro!

not as medium-sized, that is only YOUR invention because you would welcome rebuild fresh Puppy's but are note able to do that...

the word "DOG" is now occupied by our new neighbours from the dog series...

go away with you big pseudo puppy's and find a new name for them, I would say MIDDLE-SIZED-LINUX-DERIVATED-ANIMAL!

[musher0]

Those numbers I did NOT invent, oui.

Have you tried the awk formulas I gave above on your
Puppy? What results do you get?

Also, if you'd be kind enough to remember that I am NOT
a member of the woof-CE group.

Oh, I almost forgot. If it can improve your mood, give me
your postal address: I'll send you a punching bag with
my picture on it. I'll do anything to help a fellow Puppyist
out of his depression, you know.

BFN.

[Colonel Panic]

Just my take on this; when I first downloaded a copy of Puppy in June 2006, it fitted on a single CD-R as about half of Linux distros did in those days. Now, in 2019, Puppy still does although most other distros no longer do. Something to be thankful for IMO.

[oui]

Amendment to your friendly message dear Colonel Panic:

Just my take on this; when I first downloaded a copy of Puppy in June 2006, it fitted on a single CD-R as about half of Linux distros did in those days. Now, in 2019, Puppy still does although most other distros no longer do. Something to be thankful for IMO.

As you did download your first ISO of Puppy in June 2006, it probably did continue to fit on a

credit card sized business cd

or on a

3" = 7,7 cm single CD

(like SliTaz continue to fit on them both today - perhaps for the last time, but the actual version SliTaz 5.0 Rolling continues and it is probably the only one version with 64 bit kernel fitting on those mini-CD's)!

It was possible to get such Puppy's until version WhiteFang (VESA only!), 49,7 MB, really a great (but not all the scope of Puppy applications) relatively modern Puppy for VESA able machines.

Puppy 2.0 with Open Office did have the size 99 MB.

One of the best modern Puppy's is and stay to be Slacko-5.3.3 (recommendable also for machines with big RAM) with a few more than 110 MB). Slacko-5.3.3 is absolutely top! All newcomers with old and small machines have to test it (accede using the micko page and ibiblio)! It continues to be one of the best Puppy's at all but would need a new browser or an extension like SliTaz offers for SliTaz with his package libfirefoxESR and some midori or analog making such old browser able to do what actual surfers often need, as the in Slacko-5.3.3 built in Seamonkey 2.9 has really to much limits and actual versions are not directly able to be use in Slacko-5.3.3 ...). Slacko-5.3.3 offers all the usual Puppy app's.

Quirky did also offer versions with real little size (with of not with all the scope of usual Puppy applications) but separate from the Puppy line.

[jd7654]

Puppy came as "the" absolutely TINY distro!

That's not what Puppy was known for. It wasn't famous for being the tiniest distro. It was revered as the absolute king of the lightweight distros because Puppy was a complete, fully featured, lightweight, portable, and it "just worked" in all kinds of install scenarios.

As you probably know, tiny was the realm of Damn Small Linux (aka Tiny Core) or Slitaz for business card CD, or Slax for mini CD. Puppy was small too, but not the smallest. It was, however, fully featured while still being small, and extensible to having the capabilities of a full distro.

I also don't get this obsession with small size lately. Size is relative. Small compared to what? A full size distro? Well, back when a distro barely fit on a single CD, Puppy was under 200MB. And today where distros are around 1.5-2 GB DVD size, Puppy or Fatdog is around 300-400MB. So it's stayed around the same relative size, 20-25% the size of a full distro.

Look, progress marches on. Computers advance.(albeit more slowly now these days) As others have said before, newer computers and technologies demand more modules and libraries and firmware. Sure, you can make a distro small by leaving all that annoying functionality stuff out, but what good is that?

In my mind, it's kind of...how do I say...dishonest? to brag about a 50MB size distro that can't do squat until you add a whole bunch of stuff to it, like Office, graphics, audio and video, full web browser, tools and utilities. Its a bait and switch.

And old is relative too. Old computer is a sliding scale that today the bottom end is a Pentium 4 with less than 1GB ram. That was the high end in the early Puppy days. Sure you can design a distro to work with less than that, but for what? A very small audience and a very painful computing experience, not worth the effort.

[Burn_IT]

When I started using Puppy, back before I died, I particularly liked it because even though it was not large, if you wanted to do something there was a tool for it AND ONLY ONE.
It wasn't cluttered with multiple browsers and such, you got one way of doing things, like it or lump it.

[wanderer]

this is just a question to the gurus ( mikeslr )
if they read this

would it be doable (better to prevent burnout )
to just have a basic woof-ce
that only accesses 1 repository

then you would only have to update it for that one system
but the main woof-ce components would still be available if needed

wanderer

[wanderer]

better to have a very small base
to run as fast as possible

and just add stuff as needed (sfs files)

I will never use a lot of stuff
don't even know its there


wanderer

[musher0]

Hi wanderer.

Except you and I and most of the members here have Linux experience: we know
where to look if we need app X or Y.

For newbies, not so. An already populated Pup will be a lot less stressful for them.

A lot of members here are on the cutting edge of Puppy and/or Linux, and thrive on
it. Which is all well and good: through our exchanges here, we come up with this
and that great new idea for Puppy, etc., and that nurtures the design of new Pups.

However, if we want Puppy to be readily accessible to the general public, we have
to get out of our specialist mentality and "think generalist". That's what ttuuxxx did
with his Fire Hydrant Pup, a variant of Puppy 3.1. It was a full CD, chock-full of
programs: comparable to any other Linux distro.

I think that openness to the needs of the computing public contributed at the time
to the rise of Puppy in the top ten list at DistroWatch.

It was like saying: sure, we're nerds, but we're also receptive to people's needs.
IMO, if Puppy stays out of touch from the general public, I'm afraid we won't last
much longer.

BFN.

[wanderer]

I agree musher0

newbees need a full featured version
because they will not know how to add things at first

but the system should be able to be reduced to a core and additions
once people decide what the want in their own version

useful for both newbees and oldees

and both low end and high end machines

wanderer

[mikeslr]

I agree with musher0. If a Puppy is to attract the attention of a newbie, it should contain 'real-world' applications at least sufficient to enable anyone to carry out the real-world tasks everyone is likely to engage in. Newbies are not going to woof their own Puppies. Which applications will accomplish that is a decision of the Dev creating the Puppy. (S)he should not have the additional burden of removing (or not choosing to incorporate) applications Woof would install by default.

One of the insights Barry K had in creating Woof was to relieve Puppy of the burden of maintaining repositories for applications and using the bandwidth needed to deploy them. The 'promise' of a Puppy's binary-compatibility was that a Puppy user could access the repositories of compatible distro version and install the applications already created for that distro version. That promise may have been 'wishful thinking' during the initial implementations of Woof. Thanks to the efforts of those working on Woof, at least since 2014 with Tahrpup and perhaps earlier with Slacko 5.7 that wish has been pretty-much fulfilled. And that condition has existed before ITSMERSH developed PaDS and Scottman created Pkg-Cli.

It seems to me that while it may have been necessary when woof was created that it include basic applications, that necessity no longer exists and woof has not been modified to remove it. Failure to do so complicates the work of the Devs who create Puppies. But it also increases the burden on those who maintain Woof. Regardless of how small a burden that may be, it still involves at least carrying forward code which is no longer needed (and serves at best as a distraction) and at worst modifying that code to select the 'right' version of the application for inclusion.

[oui]

wanderer, you are right (are you perhaps BK under an anonym pseudo?)

«Newbies are not going to woof their own Puppies.»


certainly but newbies use the wrong difficult puppies BLIND made by the different woof's distro builders... and have great difficulties. that, what I often read in the first subdivision of the forum is terrible...

their are billions of old PC's on the world. in USA 1/3 of the population has no Internet (in France too!).

if one decide to try, please, give him a chance to realize a dream...

[wanderer]

hi mikeslr and oui and musher0

do you think having a woof-ce
that is set up to be a simple basic run
with only one repository selected
no choices need to be made at first

would be of any value to the puppy community
as a starting point

for newbees the full isos would already be made
so they would just have to download them

but as they got more into it
they could try the simple woof-ce
and go from there

wanderer

[Colonel Panic]

When I started using Puppy, back before I died, I particularly liked it because even though it was not large, if you wanted to do something there was a tool for it AND ONLY ONE.
It wasn't cluttered with multiple browsers and such, you got one way of doing things, like it or lump it.

That's right, and that was why it managed to stay small despite having so many applications. From memory, my first Puppy was 2.00 and that one had Seamonkey for both the internet and e-mail, and Abiword and Gnumeric for general office work (Abiword wasn't for some reason as buggy then as it is now).

I think it had Dillo as well for browsing the internet, but I didn't use it as much. All in about a 100 MB iso.

I can't really comment on the technical questions regarding woof etc. as I don't know enough. I think jd7654 makes some good points concerning how the bar concerning what counts as being an old computer has shifted over the years, but I believe Puppy should retain the goal of being able to run well on machines that would run the latest version of Windows badly if at all (and it does).

[wanderer]

yes the old ones were great

i started with 201
and remastered it

but i also tried the others
and tried to simplify and minimize stuff
micromuppy and i forget all the names

like i said
i started out with what was already made
and learned a lot and got deeper into things

but for me the attraction was
puppy was small and hackable

the other distros couldn't be hacked

i think it would be a good exercise
to make a minimal woof-ce
and then build on it
so other people can have the same experience we had

i am going to play with it
since hopefully i will now have a little time
i probably will not get far but it will be fun
maybe people will help me

i am going to start with dpup as philb666
has suggested

corepup already does all this
but it is not puppy based

wanderer

[darry19662018]

It is easy enough to produce your own cut down Pup I have done so with Stretch doing the following:
1, Use buildins which thankfully now allows you to remove more than 1 app or libraries. I end up with a basic pup which browses and playback with a portable gmplayer thanks to Fredx181.

I then rebooted with a savefile once I had used buildins utility.

2. removed savefile once rebooted then used remaster program,

3. This produced a folder with new Stretch sfs and zdrive and I deleted a drive, I used the isomaster program to insert these new sfs to the iso, produced a new onebone iso and frugal installed and hey presto with a bit of work a very basic system. So If you want a basic iso and system using static apps or self contained sfs the work I did was worth it.

I will upload the iso later with download details.

[wanderer]

thanks darry

i will look into both systems for the same iso

woof-ce and remaster like you did

like i said i have the time if not the expertise
so what is there to lose

wanderer

[darry19662018]

Well mate,

Put it this way If hate pulse-audio like I do and other cruft with a bit of sweat you can have a system easy to maintain and just add what you want as puppy has the tools like listDD and check dependcies of a pkg to help you thats pretty awesome.

[oui]

with only one repository selected
no choices need to be made at first

the thing with the dedicated source of binaries (*1 is following:

- Debian would be the best one without limit but today making heavy politic manipulation of the events... And the difficulty to decide if stable or testing or full SID (= diffferent visions of that what a little copy has to be...)

- the Slackware world is searching a new balance and is not really an example of good organization. To extend your working field is sometimes very difficult for end users!

- RedHat and all friends (Suse etc.) seems to be closed for us (as also we are not really a best example of good organization!)

- LFS seems to be difficult (NuTyx publishes all binaries (*2 of LFS and BLFS but it is an one man show for each part! The base made by Thierry Nuttens, the Swiss creator, and each one for the other parts esp. Pierre for the heavy KDE, bothe are the base of the best NuTyx...)

- Arch and gentoo are rollings. Rollings are possible but require to make somewhere a complete copy not being rolling itself and this fact has to be clear for all... They are probably with SID the most open Linux ressources and not so manipulated by some Debian gurus as SID/testing itself!

- Ubuntu, sorry, that is "my" last one really and terrible dangerous as to often contributors did use time limited versions under maximal development energy not being reproduced after that with some next LTS, but not extensible any more out the short time Ubuntu depositories...

(*1 as the sources of the clone of Android for PC are all published as well for 32 as for 64 bit, it would be in the theory possible to rebuild Puppy completely based on the Android clone , but was never matter of discussion in our community!

(*2 and full sources and build receipts! This is probably the only one distro encouraging to build from sources as LFS is stuff from sources. The first one, Debian, is only theory: How has really rebuild his system and translate it for ex. to an other CPU using aptbuild? I suppose no one in the Puppy community (Iguleder (*3 perhaps? I assume he continues to look from time to time here!). In the past did Slackware always offer all source but also did discourage to build with them!!! I don't know any more what the status about this details is in Slackware. Divers things seem to be erased like the second serie for IBM/MS-dos environment etc. ...

(*3 contributor Iguleder did be the last one I know declaring to compile (yes, in assembler sources) his Puppy's himself! Or are since this time new ones known (this is important! Compile themself is an extreme time occupation. This is only realistic possible if you use scripts and that is the kik: such scripts well working and good written can be precious for a community to recover contact with full rational compiled Puppy's as BK did made himself in the past...

.

[wanderer]

yes darry i will try to learn your system

its like the old puppy but better

and maybe it will lead me to have the knowledge to make a minimal woof-ce

yes oui debian strech looks like the best candidate

wanderer