NOP (Nearly Office Pup) 3.01 final available for download

[Henry]

Gray,

Many thanks for r3. But the menu editor seems to have got lost?

I think using Pburn is still premature. I tried burning a 512Mb CD again, and it not only failed with the insufficient memory error message but pmount/mut would no longer work until rebooted. Looks like Grafburn is preferable. Mark Ulrich uses it in his great new Muppy, and I guess he has a reason.

In fact I have just now installed Grafburn v.1.1 and set up the burn-in and burn-out folders in home, outside the config file. Anyway, it works.

Now if I had the menu editor I could remove Pburn. ;-)

Henry

[gray]

Darn it . I used Pburn 0.6 to produce a nearly full music CD and it worked fine for me, so I thought it was fixed and included it in NOP (again). Do you try to burn on the fly or using temp storage? If the latter you need to change from the default to somewhere with enough space on your hard disk. If the former you probably need plenty of RAM .

Regarding the menueditor, I never used it so to try and save space it was removed. The way to add menu items is to produce a .desktop file in /usr/bin/applications.

[klu9]

@gray re opera crashing

I've noticed the exact same problem with Opera 9.24 in Freespire, and I think it only happens when using Opera as a BitTorrent client. (EDIT: It doesn't happen using 9.24 in Windows as a BT client)

I've looked at the changelog for 9.25 and BitTorrent isn't mentioned. (of course the version I'm really looking forward to in NOP is 9.5: the online bookmark syncing is a match made in heaven for a "use-anywhere" LiveCD.)

and supposedly 9.5 has improvements to their bittorrent implementation too, altho I don't if that would solve my crashing problems. For the moment I'm using Pupctorrent in NOP & Azureus in Freespire.

[Henry]

Thanks, Gray,

Sorry, my mistake!. I finally figured out how to set up the temporary file. Equivalently the same as in Grafburn but different instructions.

Back to Pburn. Apologies to Zigbert. Editing my earlier note.

By the way, I'm sure you meant /usr/share/applications ;-)

[azieser]

I have added a torrent to Linux Tracker for R3 in a zip file that includes the ISO and MD5 Sum. Hope that this helps, I will continue to seed for at least a week.

[klu9]

@gray
R3 out already... have you considered Xdelta patches, so people don't have to redownload the whole ISO to get the few updated parts: see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24238

@azieser
what is the benefit of zipping it? did it make it smaller?

[setecio]

I have a frugal install and would like to update, when updates come out, without having to burn a CD. I suppose this question is relevant for all versions of Puppy ..... is there a way of making the iso extract the 4 frugal files PUP_301.SFS ZDRV_301.SFS INITRD.GZ VMLINUZ so that I can just copy them to ny hda1 partition ? Thanks.

[azieser]

@gray
R3 out already... have you considered Xdelta patches, so people don't have to redownload the whole ISO to get the few updated parts: see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24238

@azieser
what is the benefit of zipping it? did it make it smaller?

I wanted the Checksum file to be included with the iso so people could verify that it has not been tampered with. That is the only reason otherwise I would have to post a torrent for that file as well.

For the moment I just wanted to make the ISO more available and it was not on Linux Tracker at the time. Linux tracker has a lot of people who browse its pages and it may bring more attention to this version of Puppy.

[gray]

klu9: I will look at xdelta - I didnt even know such a thing existed! It looks very interesting.

setecio: You could use the isoeditor to extract the files that you want from the iso. The only difference between 'revisions' of NOP 301 is the pup_301.sfs file.

[setecio]

Is there one built into NOP, or in PSI, or is this the best one to use ?

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12271

EDIT : Yep I see it now in multimedia section.

[klu9]

I wanted the Checksum file to be included with the iso so people could verify that it has not been tampered with. That is the only reason otherwise I would have to post a torrent for that file as well.

Zipping then torrenting the ISO makes it difficult/impossible for people to seed the file if they got the ISO by other means, e.g. they downloaded it via HTTP from puppylinux.ca. With a torrent for an unzipped ISO, they could just start the torrent and point to their existing ISO, the torrent client would check it and then they would be sharing it with others, contributing to the file's distribution.

with BitTorrent you don't need to zip multiple files into one file to share them in the same torrent; just create a folder/directory with both the ISO and the MD5 in it, then create your torrent for that folder. When people download the torrent, they will get both files in the folder and no zipping or unzipping needed.

For an example, here's the Linuxtracker page for the torrent for puplet Fire Hydrant Featherweight 3.0b. If you scroll down you will see a row "Num Files" and looking at the list you see both the ISO and the MD5; 1 torrent for 2 files. No zipping/unzipping required and people who already have the ISO can become seeds (as long as they have the ISO in a folder with the same name and point their torrent client to it).

Another possibility: post the MD5 in the torrent description. I did that with NOP 301 r2: http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=5017

For the moment I just wanted to make the ISO more available and it was not on Linux Tracker at the time. Linux tracker has a lot of people who browse its pages and it may bring more attention to this version of Puppy.

I definitely agree. I think every puplet should be posted there.

[klu9]

Download an xdelta patch to turn your NOP-r2.iso into NOP-r3.iso
http://www.easyshareonline.com/310678
it's only 7MB in size, instead of the 90MB to download a whole new iso.

EDIT: MD5
efad71eea7a2c22e6ef7dd52a4f1c841

more info on xdelta:
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/XdeltA

[Henry]

A small question (maybe not small but unimportant), Gray

I guess it's probably related to Xfce rather than Opera or Nop 3.01r3.
The Opera tray icon does not display properly, sometimes not at all (except a space), correctly, or partially in varying degrees. However it seems to work correctly if I just click on the space. Have you observed this? Changing the height of the panel does not affect it.

Here's a related item in the Xfce forum -
http://forum.xfce.org/index.php?topic=3 ... 2#msg13772

Henry

[Scoticus]

I have been attempting to add the OpenOffice.sfs but can't find /mnt/home. No doubt it is something too simple for my but could someone advise (at the risk of a horrible pun) where should I put Openoffice-2.3.0.sfs.

Many thanks

[Henry]

Gray,

I've been using NOP 3.01(now r3) since it was announced. It's the best puppy I've used and the only one I'm using. No problems but one concern I don't understand -

I use the live CD with HDD config file. If I start with say 270Mb in the free space monitor in the tray, this decreases by several Mb from time to time, up to maybe 25Mb in a day or so. Of course it will occasionally increase (as when I clear Opera cache, email, etc., but the trend is inexorably downward, and I cannot find why. If I reboot, hoping to "flush" something, there is usually no significant change.

Of course all my normal data files are kept outside the pup_save.2fs and they are not a factor as far as I know. Naturally I expect newly installed programs to decrease the free space - I'm not talking about that.

As you know, I'm no expert at this. Is this normal? Should I be running e2fsck? If so how? Thanks for any advice.

Henry

[gray]

Scoticus: Resisting the temptation to tell you where to put it ...Any sfs file should be in the same folder as the puppy save file (pup_save.2fs).

Henry: Yes I have noticed odd things with the Opera Icon in the tray. It always seems a pixel or so lacking in height. Must be an Opera thing as nothing else behaves like that.

Regarding your pup_save file filling up, I dont seem to have the problem, but there are similar reports elsewhere in the forum I think. Are you changing file permissions, cos that has a similar effect to adding a whole new file, as I found out to my horror when I did a recursive permissions change on a directory one time and filled up and corrupted my pup_save file Since then I made sure all my user data was stored outside the puppy file system and backed up the pup_save file when I was happy with the setup.

You can check the pup_save file using e2fsck by booting puppy using the pfix=ram option so that the pup_save file is not in use, then in the terminal change directory to where the pup_save.2fs is stored and type e2fsck -fy pup_save.2fs.

Give it a try but I dont think this will 'free' your lost space, I have a feeling that there are some bugs with this version of unionfs that may be the cause.

[Henry]

Gray,

Well, I ran e2fsck as you suggested. _Lots_ of errors scrolled through the terminal and were corrected automatically. When I then booted up normally the free space shown in the tray changed from 247Mb to 403Mb !!

Henry

[Scoticus]

Gray

Thanks for your reply. Looking at it I should have said that I am currently working with a multisession DVD. With the new file manager I have been unable to find the pup_save.2fs location. Could you please advise the path to sucess

Many thanks

[Henry]

Gray,

I am still euphoric about the results of e2fsck. I have several different historical config files that I can select from at boot. I fixed another of these with similar results. It seems I can fix a different config than the one I am using without booting pfix=ram. Does this sound right?

I still get some small drops in free space, apparently when using Opera. For example, the 403Mb decreased to 395 after a few hours of browsing, reading email,etc. This was brought up to 403 again by rerunning e2fsck. Note that I had been careful to purge cache and completely delete email.

Such Opera data is about the only "user data" that is in pup_save.2fs. Is there a way to move this outside? It was always easy with Seamonkey to use Local Folders that way. Doing this would mean that email did not occupy config space and would be accessible from whichever config was being used.

Thanks, Henry

[gray]

Henry, it is easy to set up a mail folder outside the pup_save. You need to edit the opera6.ini file in the ./opera folder in the root directory. Near the bottom of the file, under the [Mail] heading add the line Mail Root Directory=path_to_your_mail_folder.

eg
[Mail]
Mail Root Directory=/mnt/home/mystuff/mail

Then set up the mail account(s) in Opera. If you already have the accounts setup you can cut the mail folder from ./opera and place this in the new location.

Regarding e2fsck, it should work on whichever save file you are not currently using. This check was done automatically at boot up in standard puppy 301, but I commented it out to speed up the boot - looks like I should have left it alone .