Puppy 4 DINGO

[ttuuxxx]

To all Puppy Developers

Wishes
1. I am quite unhappy with Sylpheed as mail program?
Will there be a pet-package for Seamonkey-Mail?
Am I able to recompile Seamonkey including Mail/News without messing up Puppy Linux?

Cheers

Hi I found a seamonkey package for puppy 4 its bigger than the cutdown no mail version, so it looks like the one your searching for.
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributio ... -1.1.5.pet
ttuuxxx

[BarryK]

Yes, I welcome feedback about whether Sylpheed is "up to it". I may compile the full SeaMonkey suite for the next release of Puppy, if that's what users want.

[rcrsn51]

When Dingo 3.96 came out, I briefly tried Sylpheed. But I could not get the security settings (SSL, TLS, etc) to work with my ISP. So I went back to Thunderbird, which always runs perfectly.

[Henry]

Yes, I welcome feedback about whether Sylpheed is "up to it". I may compile the full SeaMonkey suite for the next release of Puppy, if that's what users want.

Yes, Barry, that sounds good. May as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb! If you're deternined to use the Seamonkey suite, put the whole thing in, including the ability to use the gnupg extension.

Sylpheed is compact, but cannot handle in-line gpg. It also treats attachments weirdly. I've tried it a few times but always drop it.

My heartiest congratulations for 4.00. The advances are most impressive.

Henry

[alienjeff]

First an admission/confession: I really wanted to hate Dingo. However, the default mousepad tap off "feature" wasn't enough to keep the fire of hatred going ...

I've done a Universal Installer method frugal install of Dingo V4.00 with the standard kernel and am very favorably impressed with this version. The test bed it my old Gateway Solo 5150 laptop -- 233 MHz MMX PII with 288M of RAM.

Regarding Gxine, I loaded up a 260M mpg video from both USB stick and CD, and not only did it play flawlessly, but also in full screen (CTL-F) mode.

Only real issues thus far in early testing are:

1) mousepad tap off by default (yeah, I'm not willing to let that one go...);
2) 3com 3CRWE62092A wifi card won't play;
3) memory footprint is rather large and system starts using swap very quickly - even with 288M of RAM;
4) can't seem to get sound to work; and
5) i810 video problems with the desktop box.

Congrats, Barry. The six-months of development and testing have made for a much more impressive and sturdy OS distro. I appreciate your efforts.

[Sage]

Yes, I welcome feedback about whether Sylpheed is "up to it". I may compile the full SeaMonkey suite for the next release of Puppy, if that's what users want.

Disaster waiting to happen? The groundswell to remove SeaMisty grows daily on this Forum. It is truly terrible both in terms of bloat and shocking UI. So many folks are decamping to derivatives without it. Even Firefox would be preferable.
Sylpheed is a great email client, Easy to use, clean, intuitive and comprehensive. Can't account for other folks' finger troubles. Nothing would persuade me to use the internal emailers of SM, nor Opera. Thunderbird stands as the greatest failure of the Mozilla Foundation - absolutely appalling. Nevertheless, we need to wait and see what they make of the gift of Eudora, which was always the favourite of truly professional users.

[FuturePerfect]

Barry:

Have I missed any recent references to a barebones Dingo?

Back in October in your developer blog, you talked about having an official barebones Dingo.

I think this might reduce the size of the Puppy folks need and be of great use to those non-technical people like me who are nervous about trying Unleashed to get a Puppy with less stuff.

Thanks for your consideration of a barebones Dingo now or in an upcoming Dingo release. Without SeaMonkey?

[cthisbear]

" First an admission/confession: I really wanted to hate Dingo "

alienjeff:
No need to be nice now.
Everyone will remonstrate with you for changing your act.
Next Michael Jackson will sing opera as opposed to singing
on Oprah.
Stay on the Darkside please.
And stick with my plan.
I don't discriminate...I hate everybody.
Cuts out the middleman and the hangers on.

Regards ....Chris.

[alienjeff]

@cthisbear

I'm not being nice. I'm being honest.

Never fear ... it's still early in the testing stage. There has to something that will get me all bent out of shape.

[alcy]

I just found out that some of my private wireless profiles made it into the default config file for Puppy 4.00! Wow!

The problem is not that if you happen to be at Berlin, Alexanderplatz every Puppy-Linux-User can surf the internet (profile: "alex") . No - - - the problem is, that one of these profiles has a wrong line count. This will prevent the network wizard from working correctly. So please replace your file /etc/WAG/profile-conf with the version provided as a attachment.

Happy surfing!
Urban

Hey thanks for the fix, but there's a problem. I have to manually set up the wireless connection in the Network Wizard every time the system is started. I do check the option for saving the configuration for next boot, but somehow it doesn't work. Any suggestions ?

[Henry]

Sage, Barry, et al,

My comment above about putting in the whole Seamonkey was strictly predicated on Barry's historical determination to use Seamonkey. Otherwise it would certainly not be my recommendation.

Three best of breed programs that that I have used forever (almost literally) are Opera, Eudora, and WordPerfect. I still use them professionally daily. Eudora and WordPerfect are windows programs that will not work in Linux even with that makeshift Wine. (The Eudora Linux project is going nowhere.) Optimally initialised, Opera is the unbeatable browser. I use 9.27 in both windows and linux with the same profile.

Puppy is so attractive and elegant I also use and tinker with it daily and have for years. The "bare bones" approach is the one I would prefer, with a minimal utility browser to get started, then choosing the real browser and whatever. (This is not good for the masses, who do not know what to choose, so yes, we also need a typical "starter" version.)

For that we need a package manager that works (thoroughly) and provides useful descriptions of packages. Barry has made great advances here, but it's still a long way from working thoroughly.

By far my favorite is Nop 3.01, which approaches "bare bones" but includes the best browser, Opera, and the best file manager, Thunar. Thunar, unlike Rox, is easy and understandable by most. Xfce further includes a clipboard stacker and a trash bin that actually works. By contrast, Glipper is not even accessible from the Dingo 4 package manager.

I have gone to the trouble to run windows on Nop with Qemu, which is a workaround for WordPerfect, but the inelegance of mixing the two OSs is inevitable. Truth is, Linux just doesn't have all the right applications. (Except for many ordinary blokes, for whom Puppy is perfect.)

[8-bit]

I do not know if ohters are experencing this, but on a frugal install of Dingo to an ext2 partition, I get a message on booting that says
Filesystem check, Please filesystem check.
It appears on every boot. When I boot up puppy 3.01 or boot from the live cd of Dingo with pfix=ram, and do a check of the UNMOUNTED file system, It says the date is in the future and the partition was not cleanly unmounted.
I do the fix on the partition and it does not seem to stay because the next time I boot, I get the same message.
So is e2fsck broken or is the shutdown/ reboot script broken?
I do not get this with puppy 3.01 frugal.

[Sage]

Snap, Henry! My preferred three apps., too, and the main reason I keep an old W98 running. WP is a tale of tragedy, ruined by appalling interference from the sidelines by guess who and utter incompetent managements. Remember 5.1 - the de facto industry standard?!
Qualcomm's Eudora would also have gone down the tubes had it not been for their wider operations. In both cases there might have been additional scope for interest by the USDoJ?
As for Opera - despite it's pseudo proprietary nature, it is difficult to find a more open, honest, hardworking and cooperative nation than Norway. Fortunately, they did retain their commercial interest and are able to earn a crust from their extensive embedded solutions. They are a company one can easily make a exception for in the open SW debate?

[mouldy]

Sylpheed is a great email client, Easy to use, clean, intuitive and comprehensive.

I've used Sylpheed for long time. Very robust and speedy. Only problem I ever ran into was when I put Puppy on an old loaner computer for my ex who is AOL fan. This was stopgap until she got new windows computer (she really likes AOL bloatware). AOL email is accessable only by either web, their software, or IMAP. Sylpheed had some problems with IMAP or at least that version did, but that was couple or so years ago so it may work fine now.

I've used both the Opera email client and thunderbird. I dont like my email client closely intertwined with my browser so wasnt real fond of the Opera version though I regularly use Opera as my main browser. Thunderbird is bloated and slower than Sylpheed but did work flawlessly even with IMAP. There used to be an upscale version of Sylpheed meant to be more like Thunderbird or Evolution. Called Sylpheed-CLAWS or CLAWS-Mail or some such. It might be good choice for those wanting more eye candy but relatively small size. I couldnt say, never tried it since regular Sylpheed does all I need in an email client.

[tempestuous]

There used to be an upscale version of Sylpheed meant to be more like Thunderbird or Evolution. Called Sylpheed-CLAWS or CLAWS-Mail or some such.

Yes, "Claws Mail". I provided Claws Mail 3.3.1 here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26598
I enabled IMAP4 support, plus spellcheck support with English dictionary.
I did not enable encryption support, because this required significant extra libraries.

[Sage]

Some distros use Sylpheed, some Claws - both are excellent.
Hey, guys - we're incredibly lucky - we aren't American and we don't live in America, so why the h*ll would we want AOL Time Warner and their funny systems. Presumably none of us use those crazy diddy local banks emanating from the USA, either? You know - the ones who sell bad mortgages and bundle worthless SiV financial instruments.
All my American friends have endless grief with AOL, banks and IMAPI, inter alia. I tell the ex-pat ones to dump it and come home, but pride guarantees that their pain will continue. The native-born sons-of-the-free have a more difficult task leaving the sinking ship, but we take all comers here. Puppy users especially welcome....

[tempestuous]

IMAP is, of course, not unique to AOL. It's a perfectly sensible method of remote mail storage, and is offered by many ISP's. It suits people who need to check their messages from multiple workstations in different locations.

[SirDuncan]

Well, I just installed Dingo last night. The first thing I always do when setting up a new save file is to install things like Gqview, Firefox, Opera, and IceWM. So I opened up PetGet and, WOW, what a big change! It seems like a serious improvement. I love having things sorted and easy to find.

JWM has been greatly improved, but I still like IceWM a little better (thanks for the package Ttuuxxx!).

As for Opera, I assume that it isn't in the repository because it is not qt4 yet. I'll probably just try the versions of qt3 and Opera from Puppy 3.

One issue I noticed:
The Firefox package in the repository is not regular Firefox. I wouldn't care, except that it won't update. What's up with that?

I've never really used a POPmail client, so I can't say anything about what client is good. The browser, however, I do have an opinion on. Both Firefox and Opera are very strong browsers. Seamonkey has always seemed somewhat lacking, though. It's not as powerful as Firefox, nor as fast as Opera. If I could only use one browser, it would probably be Opera. The problem is that Opera requires qt. That seems to make Firefox the better choice for Puppy. Still, I have no problem installing my preferred browser, so I have no problem with Seamonkey as the default.

Re: AOL problems
People still use AOL? Talk about masochism.

To sum up the main point, Dingo seems far more stable than other early series releases based upon my short use and it definitely seems like a good release. Congrats Barry!

[jonyo]

As for Opera, I assume that it isn't in the repository because it is not qt4 yet. I'll probably just try the versions of qt3 and Opera from Puppy 3.

You could try the latest slackware package ( I extract to usr/lib) from the official site & I'm using qt3 from the 3xx series.

And yes, I still use aol.

(Edit - I might have used the Opera 9.27 pet from the Canuck site ..forget.)

[pop-pop]

My Dell laptop with an Intel 82845 video chip has worked fine with recent Puppy versions using the i810 driver selected by the wizard. The only video that works on this machine with Puppy 4.0 is xvesa and then only at 640x480x16 which is basically unusable.

The Xorg video wizard selects the intel driver which fails in all modes. The problem appears to be that the i810 driver (/usr/X11R7/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/i810_drv.so) is simply a symbolic link to intel_drv.so.

Barry, could a "real" i810_drv.so driver be included with the next Puppy update?