Minisys-Linux Muppy 008.3 F (July, 12th, 2008)

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MU
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Minisys-Linux Muppy 008.3 F (July, 12th, 2008)

#1 Post by MU »

Hello,

it took really long this time to build this version (around 2 months).
Nevertheless not ALL wishes could be implemented - simply because we will need more time for it.
But the current status is quite an advantage over version 008.2, so I heavily recommend to use 008.3.
So there remain goals for version 008.4, and you are invited, to test and report - or simply use it :)
MANY thanks for all the feedback, that helped us very much to improve Muppy!

NEW:
4 versions:
- Embryo
- Server
- Mini
- Live

Optional: KDE extension.

NEW:
Minisys OS-WebDesk (in the Internet-Menu)
Remote-control Muppy or share folders for a Windows-Network comfortably in your Webbrowser.

NEW:
Several Program Updates, and some new like Muppywebcam, Skype, Internet Explorer (online-installer) and more.

Optional: FRENCH / DUTCH:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 3&start=90

NOTES:

- If you use an old save-file (msy_save.2fs), DO BACKUP that !!!
I cannot tell you, if an upgrade runs smooth.
I recommend, to use a new file instead, and then copy stuff from the old one (just click on it to mount it).
TIP: create in the same folder where msy_save.2fs is located, an empty textfile called: msy_save-DUMMY.2fs
Then Muppy offers a menu, to choose a file to load at startup.
There you can choose "0" (no file) to use none, then a new one is created on shutdown.


- If you want to try a "full" installation, use Muppy-Minisys-Linux-Live (formerly called "Standard").
It now includes all kernelmodules in the msy_083.sfs.
But we still do recommend a frugal installation instead, we did not test full installations ourselves.
"Full" still has limits, e.g. you cannot use additional sfs-files (except you mount them and copy their content).

Webpage (english and deutsch):
http://minisys-linux.de/


Enjoy :P

Mark

--------------------------------------------
Build-System:
Developers can download again our buildsystem, from here:
ftp://ks301128.kimsufi.com/Muppy0083/buildsystem/

--------------------------------------------
Unresolved Issues/bugs:

nothing severe at moment.
Some things are reported in this thread, and will be resolved step by step.
Last edited by MU on Fri 25 Jul 2008, 19:20, edited 23 times in total.
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Lobster
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#2 Post by Lobster »

Congratulations Mark :)

OK I will wait till 12:00 AM
but I think that 'Standard' is the one to download.

I will be interested if my webcam works
I did get it working in the 2 series
Skype with webcam was not available at that time . . .

I found the games disk you recently released
was a bit hit and miss but the underlying Muppy OS
(which I believe was mostly 00.83?)
was very polished. I liked it a lot.

I think your clients will be very pleased with the new Muppy :)
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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#3 Post by Sage »

Absolutely terrific, thanks, Mark. Opera and MUT - what more could anyone wish for. Am using it already. Standard is still uploading rather slowly. Now you have permission to sleep till noon!
Personally, I prefer a rising menu to dropdown, and there's scope for some icon rearranging and resizing, but all that is trivial. There's a lot of developers out there who would be better spending their time on getting stuff to work rather than pfaff around with colours and pictures!
Masterful.
Just needs scsi.....

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#4 Post by Lobster »

Sage wrote:Absolutely terrific, thanks, Mark. Opera and MUT - what more could anyone wish for.
:)
Is that 'Mini' Sage?
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
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#5 Post by Sage »

Yes. The Std. was only half-uploaded, but is complete now. Will burn up that one later. However, it is going to be very difficult to surpass the mini for regular tasks.

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Terrific!

#6 Post by prehistoric »

This is terrific, Mark!

I'll be comparing some things in this with corresponding things in Chihuahua a6 that are giving us trouble. This couldn't have come at a better time.

Aside: I have a question, more for information than anything else, (because it isn't a good idea to ask for more just after you finish a tremendous amount of work). I know the standard edition contains the same information as the mini + sfs files. Is there any fundamental reason the standard ISO could not actually contain the mini file system and sfs files? In that case it could build a unified file system in RAM if enough is available, or fall back to a mini installation otherwise. I'm asking because this approach might allow us to sidestep some cases in 3.02 of loading code into RAM which will never be used on a particular machine or by a particular individual. This would give us some ability to meet conflicting demands without abandoning low-end machines.

Congratulations!

prehistoric

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#7 Post by Lobster »

I downloaded the mini because standard expects 1GB of Ram
You then also need the suggested sfs and it becomes the same as standard but works with 256MB or less of ram

Muppy is very different.
It takes a little getting used to . . .

Mark do you feel there are elements that would be useful in the 3 series community edition that Prehistoric is asking about?

I think you have provided the specialist versions
required by clients as well as providing us
with a free version that will suit many users

:)
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#8 Post by Sage »

Just got the standard version running in 512Mb + 200swap. Goodness gracious me, Mark - did you forget something?! ** [For those whose first language is not English - that's rhetorical - a joke!].

Marvellous. This could be an all-time winner when I get it installed FULL mode! I seriously think you are underrating your work by not supporting this option, although I've yet to experience any problems with FULL installations with earlier releases. Puppy is sufficiently robust at HW detection and, more importantly re-detection upon HDD swapping, that you could sell discs with it already installed - two cables, four screws to rid one of Billy's bent OS forever?

**Oh yes, there is something. Everyone will surely appreciate instant streamtuner music (never had that before - no fiddling with mixers, loading alsa, etc.) but you didn't add wwoz.org - jazz direct from The Quarter (it's the Jazz Heritage Festival this week) and krvs.org for Cajun/Zyedco/stuff to the list of mandatory selections.

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#9 Post by MU »

Thanks for the overwhelming feedback 8)

Concerning full installations:
I soon will buy a new harddisk, as mine are full.
Then I will have a closer look at full installlations, and what had to be improved for that.
At moment, the focus was on frugal, and trying to deal with the problems it has (unionfs bugs).
Concerning the bugs, I think we now did what could be done, errors that remain, might need newer Kernels/Unionfs-drivers.
I will keep an eye on Dingo to see, if its Kernel can offer improvements in this concern.
So as we depend on the driver developers so far, it will be important, to check alternatives - the full installations.
This is one important point on my todo-list for the next version.

---------------------------------
Menu:
I plan to add a setup-dialog, to choose among GtkBasic-Panel or LX-Panel.
LX-Panel uses a "classic" menu, and is very fast. I just want try to add some slight tweaks, e.g. that it does not show "dead" entries.

----------------
Sage:
but you didn't add wwoz.org - jazz direct from The Quarter (it's the Jazz Heritage Festival this week) and krvs.org for Cajun/Zyedco/stuff to the list of mandatory selections
Not sure, can you tell me, how to do that? I then will add it :)

----------------
Prehistoric:
If you tell me, what you need, I can make packages.
Some stuff in Muppy is not available yet as dotpup (or existing dotpups are out of date). But it would be no problemto create some, for use in other Puppys.
There is just so much stuff, that I need priority requests.
If you need help to port something to chihuahua, let me know :)

Mark
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#10 Post by Sage »

WOZ is very forgiving and will open on most multimedia apps from :
http://wwoz-sc.streamguys.com:80
It can be added easily to streamtuner from the menu.
KRVS is fussier, probably because it's part of the PBS:
It works in MPlayer in all distros by adding:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/krvs/ppr/krvs.m3u
to the menu item that allows new URL s. It should work from streamtuner, but you know how these things are!
It would be useful if the BBCWorldService - truly the very best (non-music) radio that was ever broadcast, was copied from MPlayer into streamtuner, probably along with BBCRadio4. It is our free gift to the world. In the bad old days of the Soviets, it was every comrades' desire to have a clandestine shortwave radio to listen to unbiased and complete newscasts from the BBC World Service. There have been cuts, of course, but it still goes out in most of the major languages - yes, even English and German!

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#11 Post by prit1 »

I am a Muppy lover. Some bugs I found in this:

# epdfview
epdfview: error while loading shared libraries: libcups.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

# gxine
gxine: error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

NTFS partition mounts as read-only in hotpup (similar to Dingo)

I love the menu. Great Job !!

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#12 Post by MU »

Sage: thanks, I'll try to add this.

Prit: I think you run Mini without addons.sfs
Cups and mozilla (Seamonkey) are not in the Mini, but in addons.sfs.
You need to download that, to solve your issues.
Alternatively a dotpup could be made, containing these libs.

I can try that next week, as I am offline from tomorrow morning until saturday night.

BUGS in general:
We will release a 008.3b next week.
There also will be a bugfix-Dotpup for the current version, so you must not download everything again.
It will have no new features, only bugfixes.
So please report any bugs and missing libs you find.

Muppy-Build:
If you want to build your own Muppy.
Uploaded all scripts and files, see updated first message.

Have a great weekend!
Mark
Last edited by MU on Tue 29 Apr 2008, 23:40, edited 1 time in total.
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#13 Post by prit1 »

@MU: I prefer smaller size versions. So I have used MiniMuppy always. I can download the missing libs and fix the issue. I reported so that you could fix it in the version so that folks using the Mini version will not have any issues.

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#14 Post by MU »

ok, thanks.
I will look how much size they take, then I should add them to the Mini.
I think they will not be big.
Many thanks for your hint :)
Mark
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Re: Minisys-Linux Muppy 008.3

#15 Post by tlchost »

MU wrote: UPDATES - KNOWN BUGS:
This release will be followed by a 008.3b next week..
Thanks for the release...looks good.

Some issues:
In 008.2 I used DVD+RW media....now with Pburn, when I burn a DVD as R-W, the system will not let me save to the DVD. Should I be using DVD-RW media?

The CUPS doesn't give me an option of installing a usp printer (HP Laserjet4 Plus).....but an older version of MUPS does work.

Thanks for all the efforts.

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#16 Post by MU »

Concerning Pburn, please ask zigbert.
He releases new releases so quickly, that I could not test them in detail.
I just added the newest 1.5.0.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23881

USB-printers: can someone confirm problems with other models, too?
With what version does yours work?
Do you have a link handy for the Cups, that you installed?
It might help tofind out, how I could enhance the included one, or we could just recommend it for persons with the same problem.

Thanks, Mark
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Posting from Mini-Muppy 008.3 on problem machine

#17 Post by prehistoric »

@MU,

I'm back! This time posting from the machine which has been causing us grief in testing Chihuahua. Once again, Muppy looks great, and seems to have avoided several problems we ran into. This gives us a good idea of where to look for causes.

HotPup is in the doghouse, again. It started off with drive icons in the upper left corner, and, when I tried to change the default location, with the setup HotPup utility, it kept telling me it couldn't change and was restoring the previous setting. Every change brought this response.

The only other "bug" is the choice of volume control on the panel. By the time it comes up, (on a 500 MHz machine with 128 MB RAM, running a frugal install on the hard drive,) I might have done several other things, even launched it repeatedly.

Muppy does not suffer from the blank screen on exit problem I've had. This appears to be specific to our set up.

The fact that you also use Icewm, conky, blinky and HotPup gives me hope we can sort out the source of our troubles without giving up everything new. Having working current versions of the same things to examine is just what we needed.

Thanks Mark!

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#18 Post by MU »

Hotpup:
Muppy uses a modified /usr/sbin/fixPuppyPin:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

#-- too buggy, removed for muppy
;)

For this reason it also has no icons on the right side of the screen.
Without fixPuppyPin, they would not be re-aligned when you change the screen-resolution (what happens if you choose Xvesa the first time).
I think fixpuppypin might be problematic with hotpup.
I had removed it long before, because it sometimes messed up my Icon-layout.
Maybe this is, why Hotpup works in Muppy.

You also could try to use the one from Dingo.
I have seen, that Dingo now uses Hotpup, too, so maybe Barry modified fixpuppypin.

Mark
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#19 Post by accessdenied »

Brilliant work MU!!!

Damn, I think I stained my shorts... :? :wink:

Downloading Mini & Standard now with all SFS files.

Going test Mini on an old laptop with 192mb ram.... This could be interesting...

-cheers

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Question asked earlier

#20 Post by prehistoric »

@MU,

I appreciate your offer earlier of packaging things as pets and helping with porting. I hadn't intended to ask for help from someone who is already 110% committed, just wanted an opinion on feasibility. The idea of making the standard ISO image as an actual mini plus sfs files was what I was thinking about. Do you think this is reasonable? Is there some catch that hasn't occurred to me, or is this something nice you might do later?

At this point I'm just trying out ideas, my coding days are pretty much behind me. We've been having arguments about what "must" be in Chihuahua and what size limits "must" be observed. Making Puppy compatible with Slackware 12 binaries was a good thing, but it came at a price - the libraries required take more space.

When I'm installing on a machine with limited memory I tend to create a swap partition larger than other people use. Partly, this is for testing software, as the final result of some extremely obscure problems is a slow accumulation of unused pages in swap. Mostly, I do this so unused parts of the file system get swapped out. This doesn't address the problem of getting that first file system built in RAM. Building a mini system in RAM and mounting sfs file systems only while needed seems promising.

Currently, we have "Chihuahua" for minimum size and "Lassie" for the full size. If we can live with memory restrictions, I don't think the difference in ISO sizes is a big deal. That's why I'm considering an ISO which includes the "Lassie" sfs w/o always loading it into RAM. This could be handled like a multisession CD/DVD. Am I making sense?

prehistoric

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