Puppy 4.2 RC1 Deep Thought - Bugs & Fixes

[ttuuxxx]

@ whodo

don't know if you still accept updates?

if so, epdfview-0.1.7 is on page one of this thread. size is bigger i think 6k. patched to use defaultbrowser as browser.

aragon

Just delete /usr/share/epdfview/pixmaps folder, It saves 11kb compressed, I think those images are part of the bin file anyways, I deleted that folder on my pc and it looked and worked the same.
ttuuxxx

[gerry]

WhoDo: re my problem with live cd not being released after boot- tried again with a brand new pupsave file, and all is well.
EDIT: I have 256MB ram.

The new CUPS is a disaster for me- it does not like the ppd file for my printer, so I can't get a decent print. There is a Gutenprint driver that sort of works- but not well enough for decent prints.

Ah well....

Gerry

[Béèm]

If I recall well, programs like pidgin, which start iconized next to the volume and blinky ones, did start this way before rc1. This freed space to display running programs in the systray. Now in rc1 this isn't the case anymore.

I tried in JWM and there it is as before.

Other programs with this kind of operation are programs like MesNews and Pegasus mail in wine. Thy can be iconized as well in JWM, but not in Icewm.

A change in design?

[smooth]

I have a sound problem , too ( and with 4.1.2). My sound card can't be found at all. Is this problem solved?

[gerry]

One thing that you are doing in making system changes to get CUPS 1.4 to work is that you are losing the backwards compatibility that would allow printers like mine to operate with Puppy. I tried installing an older cups, but I think that the changes that you are making to allow the new one to work are preventing an old version from working.

I'm still working on it, but not hopeful....

Gerry

[ttuuxxx]

One thing that you are doing in making system changes to get CUPS 1.4 to work is that you are losing the backwards compatibility that would allow printers like mine to operate with Puppy. I tried installing an older cups, but I think that the changes that you are making to allow the new one to work are preventing an old version from working.

I'm still working on it, but not hopeful....

Gerry

Hi Gerry

Patriot made a fix, maybe do a fresh boot with
puppy pfix=ram
and then install this patch and try cups and see if it works for you,

[zygo]

aragon,
http://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/howto
"3.4 Server options
...
Hiawatha will drop root privileges after startup by switching to user nobody. You can tell Hiawatha to switch to another user via de ServerId option"

This implies that Hiawatha is running as nobody when no ServerId is specified. What happens when ServerId is removed from the httpd.conf and Hiawatha restarted? It serves - in Unnamed at least. But runs as 65534!

Is nobody made correctly?

In this http://puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00202 Barry mentions that Perl is started insecurely in 4.1alpha4 so the blog would be insecure anyway.

[panzerpuppy]

It's about time to replace the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin with Gnash

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS (NEWS):

Gnash, the Free Software Foundation project to create a completely open-source SWF movie player and browser plug-in that aims to be compatible with a majority of Adobe Flash files, has reached version 0.8.5, which is its fourth beta release. There's quite a bit of new work in Gnash 0.8.5 including MIT-SHM and X-Video support, NetConnection compatibility with more video sites, support for saving all streamed/loaded video files to disk, support for new codecs to maintain compatibility with YouTube videos, support for FLV parsing and decoding of H.264 video and AAC audio, a new GUI for KDE4 / Qt4 with SWF properties and Gnash preferences dialog boxes, support for Speex using libspeex, and improved remoting support.

The mentioned changes were just what we had found interesting from the official Gnash 8.5 change-log. On that web page you can also find more information about this beta release.

Now with Xv support! - that means FAST fullscreen video playback on slow machines.

[aragon]

aragon,
http://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/howto
"3.4 Server options
...
Hiawatha will drop root privileges after startup by switching to user nobody. You can tell Hiawatha to switch to another user via de ServerId option"

This implies that Hiawatha is running as nobody when no ServerId is specified. What happens when ServerId is removed from the httpd.conf and Hiawatha restarted? It serves - in Unnamed at least. But runs as 65534!

Is nobody made correctly?

In this http://puppylinux.com/blog/?viewDetailed=00202 Barry mentions that Perl is started insecurely in 4.1alpha4 so the blog would be insecure anyway.

zygo,

nice find, i will look at this.

thanks
aragon

[aragon]

@ whodo

don't know if you still accept updates?

if so, epdfview-0.1.7 is on page one of this thread. size is bigger i think 6k. patched to use defaultbrowser as browser.

aragon

Just delete /usr/share/epdfview/pixmaps folder, It saves 11kb compressed, I think those images are part of the bin file anyways, I deleted that folder on my pc and it looked and worked the same.
ttuuxxx

will look at it.

EDIT: reuploaded smaller package. left in one pic as it is needed and one icon with symlinks from the others, as those give messages in rxvt.

did you try to print with this version in RC1? i didn't print, so i'm not able to test this properly.

aragon

[ecomoney]

Sorry about wasting peoples time with the scrollbar problem. I deleted my pup_save and started afresh, and its now working.

If you havnt already read it, Ive posted a description of a major new cybercafe project I that I will be working on. using puppy 4.2. when it is complete. Im hoping this will provide valuable feedback, bug reports, and most importantly usability information and suggestions for puppy version 4.2 and beyond.

Theres also been plenty of "lively debate" about the beginners instructional video. It would be good to have everyones input and agreement on the valid points Ttuxxx and others have raised there, before I head down to the "T.V. Studios".

Sometimes I wish my skill was in writing device drivers...


@ PanzerPuppy

An open source flash would be in everyones best interest, and I am sure that the heroic gnash team will eventually succeed in replacing this horrible proprietory piece of bloatware. Too much of the webs information is tied up in it to ignore at the moment though. My suspicion is adobe will wait until the last moment before surrendering and open sourcing flash, when gnash has got so good they can no longer compete. I agree that we could help them along by making gnash available for puppy (i havnt seen a .pet of it as yet)

Youtube is the #1 video website out there, and if gnash is currently capable of playing the videos there full screen on older hardware then there is a powerful case for including it, as well as the current proprietry flash for other websites.

Remember one of puppy's aims in its mission statement is to "just work, no hassles"? Perhaps the way forward would be to include some sort of seamonkey plugin, similar to flashblock, where the user can choose to play flash content for some sites in gnash and some in flash, or to contain some sort of database of sites that will play gnash compliant videos, and some which will play only the proprietry flash.

eg site=youtube then player=gnash
site=facebook then player=flash


Thinking on, If firefox/mozilla were to incorporate this functionality, with its 30% overall market share on all platforms, it would act as a powerful incentive for sites to develop their video content to work with both open and closed source flash. The user would end up having a better experience on open standards flash based sites, while still retaining the ability to play flash movies (as badly as they can now) on other sites. Remember, the internet is made up of mostly linux servers, and Im sure many of the sysadmins of these sites would be happy to make the small changes necessary to have their sites play in both flash and gnash.

There is no reason puppy couldnt "pioneer" this type of system first. We have got more reason than most to want an efficient flashplayer, as its currently the only thing limiting the age of the hardware that puppy can run on for popular web browsing. We were the first linux distro to support ntfs (windows filesystem) read/write after all, and now that major limitation is pretty much cracked.

There may be other changes afoot in the world of online video however...

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/01/26 ... pen-video/

This is a topic of a while new thread however

[gerry]

@ttuuxxx and Patriot- tried the patch, with no improvement. I'm pretty sure now that the fault lies in cups 1.4 not liking my by now somewhat aged ppd file, so NO MORE please! Please don't hold up the project while I sort out this problem.

I need to sort out exactly what the incompatibility is, or remaster the iso with an earlier cups.

Thanks... Gerry

[WhoDo]

- openssh 4.7 is in puppy 4.2 rc1? can't install 5.1 not uninstall 4.7 -

Hi yvonne. I'll look at including 5.1 in the next release so you can test and tell me that it all works as expected. I stayed with openssh 4.7 because that's what Barry had in 4.1.2 by default. I briefly updated during the early alpha's but there were a host of problems, not necessarily related to openssh, so I simply went back to the 4.1.2 package list and updated one package at a time while testing. I may have missed updating openssh or I may have tried it and found problems. I'll try again and let you know.

[WhoDo]

Sorry im a bit behind on this thread

...[snip]...

Back to work...Was there a reason you removed the additional desktops from icewm?

Yes. The mouse scroll wheel feature is enabled by default. Bump the scroll wheel and you change desktops with no indication you have other than your open windows have suddenly "disappeared". It was a compromise of features and I thought mouse scrolling was probably more important. I will listen to arguments to the contrary.

The 10 series of Flash seems more stable in this version of Seamonkey 1..1.4
Is anyone up to confirming/testing that?

I am so confirming and testing that! Flash ten is required by facebook videos (the fifth most used website in the world, and a great way of spreading news about puppy linux!), and sites like veoh its has been reported. The current default version is quite old now (9.0.48.0) and many more sites are likely to change their minimum requirement soon too. If flash ten were added by default it would help future proof this puppy, as well as giving big performance and stability improvements. Flash is a critical application for most internet users, and needs to be the best it can be. The only drawback would be that the latest flash is around 1.8meg bigger, but most users I know would prefer a speedy and responsive flashplayer to having a spreadsheet application!

Robert, the 10 series of Flash will definitely NOT be in Puppy 4.2 by default for size reasons. There is no way I would remove Gnumeric in favour of a browser plug-in! We will be using 9.0.124.0 as per the RC1 release and not the 9.0.48.0 to which you have referred once or twice before.

I know some puppy users (like gerry)have had problems with machines running at 92mb of ram, with pup_420 .sfs having to be loaded from the CD. if this puppy were to increase the size limit to run in RAM to 128mb then it would allow for a lot more modern features. 92mb of ram is not an amount that is usually present in an un-upgraded computer straight from a factory, either 64mb or 128mb being much more common.

The size of RAM Puppy will load and run within is not arbitrarily set at 92Mb (the size of the pup_412.sfs file)! Instead it is determined by the size of the pup_420.sfs file among many other things. The pup_420.sfs is already 6Mb larger than that at 98Mb! I want it to come down to 97Mb at least for usability on older machines. Changing the load parameters won't force Puppy to squeeze in 256Mb of sfs file if you only have 128Mb of RAM space!

AFAIK we have always said Puppy would run (from the LiveCD) in 64Mb of RAM and load entirely in as little as 128Mb of RAM. Several reviewers of Puppy have actually suggested 256Mb as a minimum to their readers, which is reasonable IMHO.

On the whole, there or fors and againsts for either flash version. From my personal experience supporting end users, flash 10 is definetely the way to go considering puppies mission statment, even if we do have to bump up the system requirements to run in totally RAM ever so slightly.

I don't think it would be "ever so slightly", Robert. Any increase in the size of the pup_420.sfs file above the current 98Mb would force the minimum RAM size for normal use well above the 128Mb you propose here anyway. That is because the loading process unpacks drivers and other things into RAM as it loads, and then your window manager and first application load from RAM into RAM and take up even more space. My Puppy 4.1.2 install has a 92Mb pup_412.sfs file and currently requires 172Mb RAM to run with only the Seamonkey browser and Pwidgets open!

It's NOT just about "loading" into RAM; it's also about "running" in RAM with standard applications. Keeping the pup_420.sfs below 98Mb will allow most standard applications to load and run in 128Mb of RAM. That's our objective at the moment. The next step up would be to specify a minimum of 256Mb of RAM and that might preclude a lot of older machines that are still quite usable if we remain "frugal" about our standard inclusions.

[ttuuxxx]

- openssh 4.7 is in puppy 4.2 rc1? can't install 5.1 not uninstall 4.7 -

Hi yvonne. I'll look at including 5.1 in the next release so you can test and tell me that it all works as expected. I stayed with openssh 4.7 because that's what Barry had in 4.1.2 by default. I briefly updated during the early alpha's but there were a host of problems, not necessarily related to openssh, so I simply went back to the 4.1.2 package list and updated one package at a time while testing. I may have missed updating openssh or I may have tried it and found problems. I'll try again and let you know.

I made him a package a few days back on another post he made in a different thread and he hasn't reported back yet if it worked or not for him, kind of slack if you ask me.
ttuuxxx

[WhoDo]

You are absolutely correct! I only gave it a shot as it had RC status so your logic worked, Thanks Mike

I hate subterfuge, but in this case I think the end justifies the means! After leading the 2.15CE development effort I realised that if I was ever to put in that much work again that work would have to result in an exponentially better product or it wouldn't be worth doing! The only way to achieve that is through rigorous testing and retesting. Thank you for your support, Mike!

[WhoDo]

updated gxine to just 1 window.

Got it, ttuuxxx. Thanks, mate.

[WhoDo]

I tried to look again what's wrong with jwm theme switcher..and do these, and it works, so please try:

Great work, trio! I have added your fixes to the next release for testing.

[WhoDo]

if so, epdfview-0.1.7 is on page one of this thread. size is bigger i think 6k. patched to use defaultbrowser as browser.

Yes. I will update versions of already included applications right up to the final release IF I think the risk is justified. In this case I have added the updated epdfview because patching to defaultbrowser enhances usability for those who want to load other browsers after a standard install. Thanks, aragon.

[WhoDo]

WhoDo: re my problem with live cd not being released after boot- tried again with a brand new pupsave file, and all is well.
EDIT: I have 256MB ram.

The new CUPS is a disaster for me- it does not like the ppd file for my printer, so I can't get a decent print. There is a Gutenprint driver that sort of works- but not well enough for decent prints.

These two issues could be related, gerry! If you have tested CUPS printing first, and then attempted to release the LiveCD, you might find that CUPS is so big as to load up your RAM and prevent the LiveCD from being unmounted. IOW, it may not have been the pup_save file at fault.

If it happens again, even with 256Mb RAM, please check your RAM status with HTop or Hardinfo from the System menu.

Hope that helps.