First Skype. Now Gizmo

[HairyWill]

The easiest way of understanding the config file contents is to try gizmo out in one of the Puppy versions that actually works without crashing I'd say.

that would be the easy way
ahh .gconf i was looking in .gizmo, now it all makes sense. As you say the defaults look ok
thanks for the pointers

[smokey01]

Gizmo works fine in puppy 3.01 too.

See attached screen shots.

[mcewanw]

Gizmo works fine in puppy 3.01 too.

See attached screen shots.

Thanks for the above download of a pdf containing images of all the preferences tab screens. Might come in handy for someone trying to manually setup preferences in Dingo by editing the /root/.gconf files.

[Lobster]

Okay, I've very temporarily uploaded my new gizmo dotpet to the following location:

Thanks William - seems to be working OK
. . . and before I forget . . . I updated one of your early recording progs so it would work in Dingo
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 508#203508

[HairyWill]

Has anyone managed to run gizmo and listen to music at the same time?
Skyp seems happy to coexist but gizmo seems to want /dev/dsp all to itself.

[Caneri]

Well I finally got to talk to Lobster. great!! Sound was good.

Hey...he sounds just like that guy who does the pawcasts....lol

Eric

[mcewanw]

Okay, I've very temporarily uploaded my new gizmo dotpet to the following location:

Thanks William - seems to be working OK :)
. . . and before I forget . . . I updated one of your early recording progs so it would work in Dingo
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 508#203508

That's great Lobster. Personally, I gave up on arecord, because the quality wasn't so good. In Puppy 2.17.1 the sox program "rec" is available and linked in such a way that it can handle mp3 as well as ogg, so I used that later instead (in wiakdevrec, or whatever I called it...). I imagine that wiakdevrec will work in Dingo for ogg files at least (maybe mp3, depends how sox has been built). Come to think of it the program I created for foksyfeyer, called krecspeak http://wiakapps.freehostia.com/downloads.html has a gtkdialog3 version supplied with it (called wrecspeak); that was the best one of all of these wee recording programs I made, in my opinion. Again, it should work with ogg files at least in Dingo and maybe mp3. I didn't have any version of dingo until very recently so I haven't tried it (or foksyfeyer on Dingo for that matter) but I shall; I forgot about it all. I'm really busy planning a house move so wasn't meaning to do any computing, but I needed a Voice over IP app for when I'm away from home, and hence my sudden interest in gizmo...

[mcewanw]

@Lobster:

I've now tried krecspeak/wrecspeak on Dingo and alas it is not working. Must have been a change to sox or something. I'll fix that sometime in the not too distant future.

As for foksyfeyer, apart from the one menu item krecspk, that "almost" works perfectly out of the box. It's important to read the installreadme file to understand how to set it up (I had to do that too, because I had forgotten!), but thereafter it just pretty much works. Even espeak started up reading back everything I typed straight away. One minor glitch is that speech-dispatcher can't find its log file in Dingo, so chucks all its output onto the rxvt terminal it was started up from, so you need to use a different terminal to actually run the main menu program "foksy". I'll fix that too, sometime soon. The fix is simply to create the missing empty directory by entering: mkdir /var/log/speech-dispatcher
Thereafter, speech-dispatcher will correctly write its logfile and not send any junk to the standard output terminal.

Actually, I already had it in mind to revisit foksyfeyer, to see if gizmo could be called up in some useful way, for a blind person, from the foksy espeak interfaced menu. The trouble is, gizmo, relies on a GUI, so I'd have to find a way of bypassing that and letting a user login purely via text... May or may not be easy.

I forgot what fun foksyfeyer is; magnifies X fonts in the rxvt window, and reads back any text cut from and X gui window, and the wee text editor provided is the best going IMO. OK, I'm painfully biased about its potential for its intended audience. Some of its internal programs are due an upgrade I expect.

[EDIT] Ah... there is no "sox" in Puppy dingo, that is why neither wiakdevrec, nor krecspk/wrecspk won't currently work. The solution presumably, will be to install sox... though sox can be built to support different codecs via the libraries it links to, so may or may not handle mp3 audio files depending on what exactly is installed along with sox.
I guess as an alternative I could write a version of krecspk/wrecspk to use arecord and lame (which are in dingo), but I never got such great quality out of that. Oh well, probably worth trying that latter option again though.

[mcewanw]

Not directly to do with gizmo or skype, but just to complete the above post (which partly did concern gizmo possibilities...):

Okay, I installed sox-12.18.1.pet onto Puppy 4.00 (dingo) from:

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributio ... packages-2

I chose this version, from the Puppy 2.xx repository because it contains mp3 support as well as ogg support (the sox...pet from the Puppy 3.xx repostitory contains ogg support but not mp3 support).

Before installing sox, I opened up the dotpet to make sure it didn't contain anything that would overwrite anything in standard Dingo. It doesn't. All it contains are the four files: /usr/bin/sox; /usr/bin/rec; and /usr/bin/play. That is all, there is nothing else in the sox dotpet and none of these are present in standard Puppy 4.00
My feeling is thus that you can safely install this version of sox and remove it later if you wish. Why do I like sox? Because it is pretty handy, as the following hopefully show:

You can easily record an audio file from the command line by entering:
rec out.ogg
You can then play it back with: play out.ogg

Since this version of sox support mp3, you can also use: rec out.mp3 and play out.mp3

The above files are all nice and tiny (and you can additionally use alternative bitrates with rec as options if you wish).

arecord works similarly, but I just don't like it... since it doesn't perform so well when I've tried it.

***BUT NOTE WELL: krecspk and wrecspk do now work (to some extent) with this version of sox, but don't use either krecspk (or the GUI version wrecspk also in the krecspk dotpet) yet, because for some reason they are failing to terminate the sox program when you try to stop or quit recording. I'll fix that (it should be easy since both krecspk and wrecspk are nothing but simple shell scripts).

This Puppy 2.xx version/dotpet of sox itself seems fine though, and appears to work well in Dingo, unless someone finds and reports something back different! :-)
I'll definitely fix wrecspk though, since it includes a recording volume scaler and the recorder GUI interface is nice and tiny (and it hardly uses any CPU or memory resources at all whilst idle).

[Lobster]

Gizmo in Puppy wiki page (just started)
http://tmxxine.com/wik/wikka.php?wakka= ... xxineGizmo

[mcewanw]

Good to get all the info on the wiki whilst things are being tested out.

I've also fixed krecspk and wrecspk (GUI version) of my tiny mp3/espeak enabled recording utility. I'm uploading a patch dotpet now to a new thread. You just need to install the previous krecspk-2.5.1.pet and then the patch and finally the version of sox from the official Puppy 2.xx repository. Then it all works fine in Puppy 400 DIngo (as then will foksyfeyer).

[smokey01]

Does anyone know how to change the browser from Firefox in Gizmo?

I use the standard Mozilla that comes with Puppy 4.00.

I can't use preferences as it crashes. If I edit the xml file and change firefox to defaultbrowser that doesn't work.

Is there another place it can be changed. Surely it's not hard coded.

[HairyWill]

poking the xml didn't help me either
in the end I left it as firefox and just created a symlink from firefox to seamonkey

Code: Select all

ln -s /usr/bin/seamonkey /root/my-applications/bin/firefox

I am now managing to listen to music and have gizmo running. I was using madplay but using gxine instead works fine.

What time are people around tomorrow?
me
12:00-14:00 GMT
15:00-17:00 GMT
19:00-21:00 GMT maybe

[mcewanw]

Does anyone know how to change the browser from Firefox in Gizmo?
I use the standard Mozilla that comes with Puppy 4.00.

In Puppy 4, I currently use Seamonkey too, so I can't test that either. Unfortunately, I can't easily test the matter out in my Puppy 2.17.1 either, even although Preferences works fine there, because it is a remastered Puppy 2.17.1 (though only so that I could have Firefox on it...). I can't try anything at the moment with gizmo because my dialup is already overloaded uploading new dotpets. The new dotpets are just the same as the previous ones (stdlibc++5 and stdlibc++6 versions) except that they contain the orbit and Gconf libraries plus gizmo all in a single dotpet package, since some apparently wanted that. The stdlibc++6 version for Puppy Dingo is already uploaded, the other is on the way. You can find them for download and testing, if you wish, at:

http://www.puppylinux.ca/tpp/foksyfeyer ... bit-gconf/

smokey, which version of gizmo did you use on Puppy 3.01? I don't have 3.01 anymore so can't check that myself and I want to include the info in my readme install file for the dotpets.

[smokey01]

poking the xml didn't help me either
in the end I left it as firefox and just created a symlink from firefox to seamonkey

Code: Select all

ln -s /usr/bin/seamonkey /root/my-applications/bin/firefox

I am now managing to listen to music and have gizmo running. I was using madplay but using gxine instead works fine.

What time are people around tomorrow?
me
12:00-14:00 GMT
15:00-17:00 GMT
19:00-21:00 GMT maybe

I can probably be available at:
12:00-14:00 GMT (20:30-22:30 Darwin Time)

[charnisingh]

Hello all,

i just had a gizmo talk with crusty_lobster and happy to report that it went very well.

i used puppy 4 , gizmo version ending with libstdc++6

puppy 4 i have is clean frugal install on a fat-32 partition. so i used only

sfs files , first sfs is about 334 mbs. and contains olden greats , like office-

2.20, with the addition of firefox version 3b4 with java+flash, then old pgs

with modification and added some libs for gtkam etc. to work in puppy 4

but i had to remove xaraLX as it was not working in pupp 4,then i added

dvx 400, plus all my needed applications-like vlc-xmms-mplayer and

audacity plus the inclusin of gizmo-project complete, skype complete.

thus a sfs of 334 mbs.

my second sfs file which is about 44 mbs. and it contains all other applc-

ations like rp-pppoe complete with tcl,tk and MaraDNS. 2. SFS-Combiner

bit modified by me to add dir2sfs+pet2sfs. 3. puppy package manager,

4. picasa, 5. EZpup-4. 6. wxDfast-downloader, this is all total 44 mbs.

this way i did not have to install any other pkg. and i am working with sfs files only.

my save file is 256 only and every application is working very well.

gizmo talk was quite OK. (for information to others)

Charni.

[tombh]

Been away for a bit, but around all day today, the next 12 hours or so.

[rodrigt]

May 23rd Lobster wrote:

Because people are already using Skype . . .
It has been compiled for Puppy 4

Could someone please post where to find the compiled Skype for Puppy 4 (and how to install it)? Thanks.

PS- I'm a Windows renegade riding Dingo as if it were a bicycle with training wheels.

[smokey01]

May 23rd Lobster wrote:

Because people are already using Skype . . .
It has been compiled for Puppy 4

Could someone please post where to find the compiled Skype for Puppy 4 (and how to install it)? Thanks.

http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/bugs/skype-2.0.0.63.pet

[rodrigt]

Lobster,

Thank you! By gosh, that Skype PET (http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/bugs/skype-2.0.0.63.pet) worked the first time (on Dingo) for logging into my Skype account and the sound was already set up. (I haven't tried the microphone beause on this first test I was simply calling my home answering machine.)

PS- Sharing 'learning curve' - In the interest of keeping my Puppy lean I examined the files that came with the PET... OMG, included were 201 picture files of cute Skype icons with sun glasses, party hats, etc, First thing I did was to delete the entire Picture folder, then I started to test Skype and it worked fine.