URGENT re: 3.02 Alpha community project

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Lobster
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#16 Post by Lobster »

This is not a criticism of you Kirk - thank you for providing the info
But it takes a great stretch of imagination to say gxine works

Imagine if MS offered a 'feature' that only 'worked' if you pressed a mysterious combination before using a feature. Well OK they do that - for example clicking "Start" to shutdown but you know what I mean . . . 8)
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#17 Post by WhoDo »

Lobster wrote:This is not a criticism of you Kirk - thank you for providing the info - But it takes a great stretch of imagination to say gxine works
Well, this is a community edition, so we're not stuck with gxine if we don't want to be. I've found mplayer works great on my 3.01 install, so I don't see why it wouldn't work just as well on the 3.02Alpha1. Just a thought.
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#18 Post by Lobster »

What exactly is the attraction of gxine? Is it smaller? Theoretically better? This has come up again and again, people have problems with gxine, they use mplayer and are happy . . . :?:

Thanks for all the answers in the following threads guys :)
Last edited by Lobster on Wed 06 Feb 2008, 12:22, edited 1 time in total.
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#19 Post by kirk »

Oh yes, it's a problem. Just saying it can be worked around. Xine-ui in dingo seems nice. As far as why Xine over Mplayer, it's Xine's DVD features.

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#20 Post by prit1 »

Just an update from me. Other than the bugs I reported earlier, there are some great things I noticed in this puppy.

1 - Fastest boot time. This puppy boots up the fastest on my Averatec 3200 series laptop. I had an option to disable serial detect when creating the pup_save file. Also, the DHCP to get the IP while booting seems to be a flash. I must admit that I did not try 3.01 because the network on my laptop was not supported out of the box.

2 - Power off. This is the only puppy that powers off my laptop after shutdown.

Thanks for the great work Barry and all.

I am waiting for the final release with a good multimedia player and streaming media support.

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#21 Post by mcewanw »

Lobster wrote:What exactly is the attraction of gxine? Is it smaller? Theoretically better? This has come again and again, people have problems with gxine, they use mplayer and are happy . . :?: .
The Mplayer graphical user interface that I've seen/use also comes across as less-than user-friendly. When I first tried mplayer I thought it didn't work, when in fact I simply wasn't understanding how to use it. Pity, because, it is such a great program. Indeed, I always use mplayer in preference to gxine - dvd playback in gxine never works well for me, whereas with mplayer it works flawlessly/stutterless even on my old Celeron 400MHz Puppy 2.17.1 machine (with a suitable cache). Admittedly I always just play the full dvd movie on it and don't care about whether or not it provides a good functionality for accessing different parts of the dvd.

Mind you, vlc works perfectly under win2000pro (oops) on the same machine too... Much though we may criticise Microsoft, I must say I think W98SE and win2000pro and excellent in their own ways (look how long ago they were produced...). But at least we now have the likes of Puppy Linux which blows both of them away when it comes to installation/size, and more than that: it IS Linux.

One thing I'd dearly like to see is the official Puppy distribution being released in a different form:

as a BareBones Puppy plus addon (sfs or whatever) to give its overall functionality. Personally (being on dialup, and for other reasons) I'm tired of the plethora of Puppy isos; I'd rather see a plethora of addons for a BareBones Puppy (each creating a different user/community-created Puppy flavour). Indeed, one of the things I love about the existing Puppy Linux is that it can be turned into a small development system simply by downloading an addon dev sfs. So why not produce the whole distribution in that terrific form? Dotpets don't do that job - at least not with frugal distributions, because they bloat the pupsave file (leaving any overwritten stuff still in the pupsave and thus, potentially, in RAM).

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core

#22 Post by raffy »

Since a lot of people are happy with a different media player (and possibly browser), I wonder if this version and kernel (2.16.18 ) is the good place to start a new Puppy core (barebone?).

Most of the 2.14R improvements should be easy to port to this version as the kernel is the same.

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#23 Post by MU »

Mplayer has skins, that can give it a different way to use it.
http://images.google.de/images?hl=de&q= ... uche&gbv=2

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#24 Post by ttuuxxx »

As xine-ui goes its always worked great for me other than streaming video like .asx where VLC pickups from there. I did get fullscreen to work on xine-gui one time when I was playing around with the code. Also as VLC goes, some of the streams I get these strange red lines in it, Also I noticed a newer version has been released 0.8.6d the latest one compiled for puppy is 0.86c, so maybe someone could make that package up? http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
also you can do video streaming with it. I was thinking it would be great if we could somehow get the VLC codeC's to work on other media players like xine-gui or Mplayer, Since VLC do have the widest range of playable file format.
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#25 Post by tronkel »

Time is disappearing fast. Before we know it, Barry will be back from his holiday. Would be nice if we could show him some progress on Puppy CE

Who leads the job ist mir egal, but lets get started on something in the meantime.

How about making a start on say the basic repairs required on the core module?

Also anything from Dingo that should be backported here? Re-compiling to both Retro and later kernel versions may be necessary. Testing needed here to establish this. Folks interested in contributing recompiles of Dingo packages are very welcome.

Requirements:
1)Make suggestions about trimming/enhancing the core module.
2)Thoroughly test the core functionality of Chihuahua (barebones 3.02Alpha1) and discover where the problems lie. Post your findings here. I can think of Multisession and frugal install for starters. Any experts in this sort of area are cordially invited to contribute fixes to this crucial core functionality.
4)Driver module problems. Testing and re-compiling if need be. CE version needs to work with as many systems as is possible.

ttuuxxx wrote:
I was thinking it would be great if we could somehow get the VLC codeC's to work on other media players
If VLC could be sorted out in this regard, I reckon that would be a good choice to include in Lassie. Go for it ttuuxxx?
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#26 Post by Lobster »

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#27 Post by tronkel »

We need to think about maximum sizes for the modules.

The core module, based on barebones should be around 76MB or even less.

The Lassie module IMHO should be no bigger IMHO than say 75MB.
So thats a total of say around 150MB for a normal CE version. For those who would like a single download, these could be combined together. Doesn't want to be any bigger than that due to memory constraints in older hardware.

I see in the forum that MU is working on a script that would be able to convert a pup_save.2fs file to a pup_save .sfs squashed file. This could perhaps be run from a main menu item as the user pleases.

Could this be a solution to the often requested facility to be able to resize the pup_save when space starts to run out? The user could have several of these (max 3). When more space is required, these 3 could simply be rolled into one by using the "combine.sfs" script and start again. Ought to be simple enough for the novice user. All he would have to to is to restart the machine and the extra space would then be available.
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URL and size of barebones

#28 Post by raffy »

In case the reader is wondering what URL Tronkel is discussing, it's here:
http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/tronkel/

I made some computations and checked the size of FAT-Free2.17 = 53 MB. My calculation shows 55-60 MB. This assumes:
- no big applications (GUI word processor, spreadsheet), no big browser, no big media player
- zdrv is included

Is this the barebones that we want (code-name Chihuahua)?

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#29 Post by tronkel »

That's correct Raffy. Chihuahua=barebones 3.02Alpha1 but fundamentally reworked a la 2.14R

In the normal course of events Barry would have released a stable final, say 3.10, whereupon this would be given the CE treatment by the community.

This time though, he seems to be leaving the job of making the stable final plus the CE enhancements to the community - a task never previously attempted. The big job here IMHO is the Chihuahua module. It's taken a year of hard graft to get 2.14R to where it is now and I don't think the job is even nearly completed yet - so don't expect a final CE anytime soon. Although it's the smallest module of the three, it will entail the biggest effort to get it right. This is really the treatment that the Chihuahua module really needs. Of course while all this work on Chihuahua is going on, work on the other 2 modules, i.e. Lassie and Boxer can proceed. I could visualise there being several Boxer modules eventually - catering for different user areas - SOHO, multimedia, programming, gaming or anything else you can think of.

Browser for Chihuahua: I would visualise the Chihuahua module as being able to stand on its own two feet, if all the user really wants is a minimal but highly functional Puppy. In that case, the Netsurf browser doesn't cut it at all. Could well visualise that Skipstone would be very handy to have here.

In many ways, the Chihuahua module is the most interesting module of all three. It will be a real work of art getting the mix of apps right. considering the very tight space restrictions. Really innovative solutions needed here. Ideas are welcome on this aspect. Please do contribute ideas. This distro is being built by and for the community. If you want the tool, you need to help to build it. Impossible to cater to every whim and desire because of the essential restrictions on size so that the core Puppy philosophy is adhered to, but we can have a good try at having our cake and eating it. It will be a real balancing act getting this one right.
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#30 Post by prit1 »

The networking stuff at bootup (DHCP, getting the IP) is extremely fast in 3.02.

Any idea on how this can be done in 2.15CE or 2.17.1?

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#31 Post by John Doe »

prit1 wrote:The networking stuff at bootup (DHCP, getting the IP) is extremely fast in 3.02.

Any idea on how this can be done in 2.15CE or 2.17.1?
probably by upgrading dhcpcd.

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3.02alpha

#32 Post by eccentric »

Just to let you know i have tested network, PPPoE, Cups HP920c printer, Alsa sound all working OK. i cannot test dial-up or wireless. I have imported the skipstone browser this is working very well. I had to correct the time and date.

Edit.i am using a C/F card as "pupsave 2fs sda1 but when i re boot from cold it has not saved the correct time or date, also i have to type xorgwizard to start again, as this is not saved. i did not have this problem with 3.01 seamonkey. is it something i am doing wrong
or has a bug crept in.
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#33 Post by gerry »

Anyone thinking about fixing Abiword so that "Print" works properly? That would be a worthwhile bugfix!

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#34 Post by tronkel »

Gerry wrote:
Anyone thinking about fixing Abiword so that "Print" works properly?
Yes that would be a good thing to do. It does print to the default printer using lpr -P "yourdefaultprinter" (if it exists) though.

It would be possible to alter the default in Abiword so that it points to a dummy printer. This dummy would then have to be replaced by the user with his particular printer default name. This is done in Abiword's printer dialogue - not difficult.

Hacking the Abiword code to make it similar to say, Openoffice is also possible, but I would have to take some time out to research that.
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#35 Post by tronkel »

Skipstone seems like an ideal default browser for the Chihuahua module in 3.02CE.

Maybe tuuxxx could upload his package?

Work can also commence on Lassie. Just to recap, Lassie is an sfs plugin module for Chihuahua that "converts" it into the standard 3.10CE version.

Boxer modules are optional sfs modules that are not so size-constrained as the other two. This would allow us to indulge the requests for larger or specialist packages that users come up with.

Chihuahua + Lassie combined ought not to exceed 140MB so that the basic Puppy philosophy of size/speed trade-off is adhered to as far as is practical.

I suggest a trial Lassie module containing just 2 items to start with - Firefox and Mplayer. This of course would be added to over time to eventually arrive at an agreed finalised Lassie sfs module.

Feel free to have a try at this. I'll have ago at it when I get some breathing space from family, cats, work etc.etc. You know the score ...lol

Don't want to tread on the toes of Talking Stick. They need some breathing space to get to the final version. The community also need time to take on-board and absorb all these different versions. So there's no rush for 3.10CE IMHO.
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