Puppy 4.2 - Trim the bloat

Message

#16 Post by **Pizzasgood** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 16:54

IMHO, a desktop OS without a half-decent spreadsheet program is worthless. That's one of those fundamental things that really should be built in. One of the main selling points of Puppy is that it includes all that basic stuff already, and in a small space. Removing it would make Puppy just another mini-version that left out most of the functionality.

SirDuncan · #17 Post by **SirDuncan** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 17:44

aragon wrote:by the way: does the average puppy-user use samba-shares (as an example: i don't).

I do, but I don't know if I count as average.

Pizzasgood wrote:IMHO, a desktop OS without a half-decent spreadsheet program is worthless. That's one of those fundamental things that really should be built in. One of the main selling points of Puppy is that it includes all that basic stuff already, and in a small space. Removing it would make Puppy just another mini-version that left out most of the functionality.

Yes, one of Puppy's greatest strengths is that it is ready to go right from the start. When deciding what to cut, we need to be careful that we don't remove the muscle with the fat.

aragon · #18 Post by **aragon** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 17:55

that's it of course: obtain the muscles.

if we could sort out the fat, the muscles will even work (and look

) better. but to follow pizzasgood: some fat is needed to transport the flavor!

by the way: i'm writing this in dillo2, well a little little more fat...

cheers
aragon

Lobster · #19 Post by **Lobster** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 17:59

I do, but I don't know if I count as average.

No 'averages' in Puppys
All unique.

"Puppy - When 'Average' is not enough"

dogone · #20 Post by **dogone** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 18:31

If Puppy's mission is to be small but highly useable... and Puppy can be designed to accomodate many .sfs modules at boot... why not make Puppy more .sfs based? That done, all that's required to accomodate low-RAM systems (or Puppy users that visit them) is boot-time control of .sfs loading. That is, if you're Puppy loads 500MB of .sfs and you boot a 256MB RAM system, you can select those you wish to load for the session.

So, yes. Put Puppy in a diet and let user fatten it up with .sfs biscuits.

zigbert · #21 Post by **zigbert** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 19:26

I had to bloat the wallpaper up to 2 hole kilobytes to get best quality.

These very stretchy wallpapers works best with 24 bits colordepth.
The challenge will be to make a good 1kb-wallpaper that also works with 16 bits systems.
Do YOU take the challenge.

Please take a look at this one. You can right-click on the image and save it to /usr/share/backgrounds. Then it's ready for the wallpaper setter.

technosaurus · #22 Post by **technosaurus** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 20:17

@dogone - have you been reading my first post to the forum? That was my first ever suggestion. Since then I have learned that 2.15 CE could load on the fly, that you can name files zdrvXXX.sfs to trick it and you can even further trick it using symlinks. I am hoping that 5.0 will have these types of features in a much cleaner fashion - the 2.6.27 kernel thread and 255 sfs file support may be a good starting place. I think my efforts are better spent on the web desktop for 4.2, but I will try to figure it out with lots of help hopefully once I get all the various aspects of our portal page to an acceptable level for inclusion in an official release.

hillside · #23 Post by **hillside** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 21:12

If Puppy's mission is to be small but highly useable

That's a mission with built in conflict.

I can see several futures. There are probably a lot more, but these are the ones whacking me on the head with a big chunk of lumber.

1. Have an extremely thinned down, but fully functional base Puppy. It finds your hardware and configures everything to work, but with few actual applications. Applications are loaded as packages or sfs (I love those). Some people will continue to make puplets with various levels of "fullness". Lots of choice. The world is good.

2. Puppy continues to walk the tightrope. It's pretty darn small, but it has a good number of decent, but not always full fledged applications. You can load "better" applications as necessary. This has worked pretty well. This is probably the easiest Puppy for the just-getting-introduced-to-linux crowd.

3. Realize that in this day and age, a 200 or 300 meg operating system with all the applications most people need is hardly a bloated system. Go for the fluff -- but within reason.

Personally, I think #1 is the best option. You have the smallest possible Puppy and yet with package management and puplets, you get exactly what you need, when you need it and how you want it. It's a happy day.

#24 Post by MU » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 21:26

Sigmund,
that looks great

Mark

zigbert · #25 Post by **zigbert** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 22:01

Thank you Mark

This one fits 16 bits colordepth.
Well, not 100% yet, but very close. I need to ask Raymond for some more help. Friendly guy

It should be mentioned for those on a slow connection that this wallpaper is almost 4 kb

Greetings to rastapax who made this dog!

WhoDo · #26 Post by **WhoDo** » Fri 12 Dec 2008, 23:07

zigbert wrote:The wallpaper in the screenshot is below 1 kb. And we save another 100 kb.

Could we live with something like this ??????

Wow, Sigmund! That looks great in stretched mode! IMHO even better than the one in your original thread! The only suggestion I would make is that we would need more colour in the Pwidgets to offset the relatively plain desktop background, but I think the combination with the launch bar you created and Pwidgets would look awesome!

Here it is in my Puppy 3.01 installation with IceWM, Wbar and Gdesklets. You can see that the extra colour in the Wbar icons and Gdesklets helps. Of course I don't expect or want Pwidgets to look like Gdesklets, and JWM will be the default WM, but a little more orange would help the overall look IMO.

Cheers

Lobster · #27 Post by **Lobster** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 02:51

There is one other way to reduce bloat
I would be cautious with this suggestion

It is to remove a 'chunk' of Seamonkey (with total removal in 4.3)
and substitute Firepup

Why do I say chunk? Well I recently tried a puplet that was using Firepup. I needed to use help - the system link was to mozilla instead of default browser (or some such reason)
Basically I would be worried about breaks in programs that are Seamonkey code dependent

Barry has said that we are less dependent or not dependent on Seamonkey since the new structure in the 4 series. We would lose a wsywig html editor - which I find useful on occasion and some people make use of the mail program, which some people use.

So this might be more suitable for 4.3 . . .
Warren may feel we have sufficient for DeepThought with the existing list of improvements.
I certainly do.

Zigbert - simple background - works for me.

#28 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 03:07

Lobster wrote:There is one other way to reduce bloat
I would be cautious with this suggestion

It is to remove a 'chunk' of Seamonkey (with total removal in 4.3)
and substitute Firepup

Why do I say chunk? Well I recently tried a puplet that was using Firepup. I needed to use help - the system link was to mozilla instead of default browser (or some such reason)
Basically I would be worried about breaks in programs that are Seamonkey code dependent

Barry has said that we are less dependent or not dependent on Seamonkey since the new structure in the 4 series. We would lose a wsywig html editor - which I find useful on occasion and some people make use of the mail program, which some people use.

So this might be more suitable for 4.3 . . .
Warren may feel we have sufficient for DeepThought with the existing list of improvements.
I certainly do.

Zigbert - simple background - works for me.

Hi Lobster I'll be building a newer version in a few weeks and it will have a mozilla system link, maybe even a seamonkey system link, so all seamonkey web applications will work, also I had a nice browser plugin in the earlier Firepup series thread called "FirePup-0.02" it was a wysiwyg plugin, very small but worked very well, I could add that by default also and maybe fireftp. It could replace composer
here's a link to the homepage
http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/
also the pet for the wysiwyg was 340kb, The pet only worked on v2, I can make a newer one to work on the latest also

I might trim it down if this whole idea takes off and there is support for Firepup over Seamonkey.
Thanks

ttuuxxx

zigbert · #29 Post by **zigbert** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 07:58

WhoDo

1.)
The solid color in the Pwidgets area is set to avoid the known troubles because conky and rox stretch the wallpaper different. A solid color will ALWAYS work as background for the widgets.

2.)
How much orange on the desktop is a matter of taste. I find your desktop nice, but a bit too colorful for my taste

. We are simply different. - Thats a good thing. The whole DeepThought theme is kept rather grayish. Just some spots with orange. I fear that over time, a too colorish theme would have irritated me. (Well, I know it would)

Sigmund

esmourguit · #30 Post by **esmourguit** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 08:20

Bonjour,
About Fotoxx

fotoxx => i would also vote for gpicview, but i think the wallpaper-setter has dependencies to fotoxx...

Just edit and change in /root/.config/wallpaper/preferences
line 5 VIEWER=
Cordialement

HairyWill · #31 Post by **HairyWill** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 11:49

esmourguit wrote: Just edit and change in /root/.config/wallpaper/preferences
line 5 VIEWER=

it probably makes sense to strip that out and the editor reference and fix the wallpaper setter so that it uses
defaultimageeditor and defaultimageviewer

WhoDo · #32 Post by **WhoDo** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 20:17

zigbert wrote:1.)
The solid color in the Pwidgets area is set to avoid the known troubles because conky and rox stretch the wallpaper different. A solid color will ALWAYS work as background for the widgets.

Agree 100%. The background itself is perfect IMHO.

zigbert wrote:2.)
How much orange on the desktop is a matter of taste. I find your desktop nice, but a bit too colorful for my taste . We are simply different. - Thats a good thing.

Of course.

It was just a suggestion. What I was thinking of was the colour of the graph in the CPU monitor, etc. We could also offer a few (small) alternative clock faces to break up the area a little. Just my $AUD0.02c worth. You're doing great stuff here, Sigmund. Suggestions are just that, nothing more.

Cheers, mate.

01micko · #33 Post by **01micko** » Sat 13 Dec 2008, 22:25

@WhoDo

Over in the Pwidget thread (page 3) I posted a link where to get clock skins. You can even use any old image I think, as long as it is 140x140. In the eycandy sub-forum I posted Chrissy desktops with a Mickey clock and a Santa clock. The santaclock was a 48x48 icon that I enlarged. Alls we really need for people to know this and know how to do this is a 'howto'.
Well I guess I better write one then!!!

Update: HOWTO done!

Lobster · #34 Post by **Lobster** » Sun 14 Dec 2008, 00:54

When we created 109CE I was very keen (as were others) to use Geany
instead of Beaver
Geany is now almost double the size it once was 670k
How good is the new Beaver in comparison and how small?

http://www.nongnu.org/beaver/

#35 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Sun 14 Dec 2008, 01:32

Lobster wrote:When we created 109CE I was very keen (as were others) to use Geany
instead of Beaver
Geany is now almost double the size it once was 670k
How good is the new Beaver in comparison and how small?

http://www.nongnu.org/beaver/

I compiled both the latest version, here ya go

ttuuxxx
Ps here's the extracted specs
Geany = 1912kb
Beaver = 328kb

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Puppy 4.2 - Trim the bloat