Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[davesurrey]

sage: thanks for your reply.
JMX: a good article on opera even though it's biased towards the EEE.
Cheers
Dave

[magerlab]

i would also suggest again polymer qt engine to make opera look much better
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=33041

@gray : is intird.gz in NOP modified to load more sfs?

[techtype]

[Henry]

gray and all,

Here are my user's Nop 4.1.3 preliminary conclusions:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Looks very good in its bare state. Some nice minor improvements to Xfce.

Unusable as an upgrade to my fully functional and populated Nop 4.1.2 configuration.

1 Opera problems (slow bookmarks, bad scrolling, slow first start after reboot, e.g. 25 sec.)

2 Doesn't print. Response from installed printers:
CUPS-PDF "Unable to open file "/var/spool/cups/d00016-001" - Permission denied"
Laserjet (Default Printer) "Unable to open file "/var/spool/cups/d00013-001" - Permission denied"
HP4480 "Unable to open file "/var/spool/cups/d00011-001" - Permission denied"
(But note that the HP 4480 3-in-1 continues to work as a scanner with hpliplite.)

New Opera and Cups seem promising but I have to revert to v. 4.1.2 until solutions are found.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nop has been excellent! I have faith there will be a way around these problems, as in the past. No one wants to have an orphan distro, or have to start from scratch. Any clues will be appreciated.

Henry

[techtype]

[Henry]

[Sage]

How good is NOP? This afternoon, almost booted in 32Mb with 77Mb swap disk. Added a 16Mb strip and it made it as a usable entity if a tad slow. 128Mb strip and it zings along even on an old Duron1100. Xfce & Opera are a terrific combination. Want a suggestion what to do with those Intel quad cores?
Now for the masterstroke, gray: get it down to 50Mb. When you've finished that, port it for RISC MIPS machines. Am away tomorrow, so take your time - back Thursday....

[magerlab]

the only bug i've noticed is galculator seg faults
but i do not often us it
anyway everything is fast on my desktop ( even with composite enabled)
shure i want to put it on eee pc also( maybe with openbox--replace)

[Henry]

Although my Nop 4.1.2 was working correctly in every known way, it appears that upgrading it to 4.1.3 is not going to work. I tried to try different cups versions, for instance, but of course can't really, the current one being "hardwired" via the live CD. Who knows what other obstacles, incompatibilities lie in wait?

So I have begun the tedious task of rebuilding in 4.1.3. I reckon it will be better in the end. No more complaining

[DaveS]

[Patriot]

Hmmm ...


@gray
NOP desktop is clean and impressive. Great work !
It came as a surprise that you're actually willing to apply cups 1.3.9 into your NOP.
Well, the most important thing is that its working on your hardware right now.

My apology if I seem to be ranting with my further replies below ...


@DaveS
Puppy 4.1.x has cups v1.1.23 (stable released on 03 Jan 2005) which is by current standards can be considered as out-dated. There's valid reasons for using it but there's also valid reasons to use latest cups. It's easy to bitch about CUPS being a mess when one does not understand it (yeah, that includes me back then).

Sure, many other distros are also having cups related problems, BUT, not as severe as puppy. They're able to get cups versions between 1.1.23 and 1.4b2 to produce outputs. Puppy could not. Why is that so ?

As far as I know, there's no CUPS maintainer for puppy. No one here really knows the internals of CUPS (which includes me). There was pakt who did the integrated all-in-one cups+etc v0.3 (sub cups-1.1.23 I think). Anyone wondered why he/she didn't make an update for it ?


“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - A Chinese proverb


Making latest CUPS works on puppy is a big challenge (more so when doing it with very limited time & resources). Puppy 4.2 is actually a lab-mice when it comes to CUPS. Whatever I knew about cups internals, had been channelled (quietly/indirectly/discreetly) towards its implementation in Puppy 4.2. Only once I had to point out something in order to help solving a cups related issue. The actual credit for getting cups to work should go to the beta testers for their positive input/feedback. The official Puppy 4.2 release will still be a lab-subject for cups. One that hopefully will give more feedbacks as to where else cups needs to be whacked ...

It is rather unfortunate that perhaps some users may not be able to get cups to work initially. However, this is the only way since there's no full time development team working on CUPS-for-puppy integration per se. I've mentioned it before and I'm going to mention it again, some one needs to spend some (considerable amount of) time getting acquainted with cups (internals) to get it to work properly ...

My time spent with cups 1.3.9/1.4b2 was very limited (only about a month). My motivation to get latest cups working back then was due to the need for it to work with samba server plus a bunch of other things (which wouldn't work with cups 1.1.23) . My test scope is defined by the hardware I have to worked with. That's my limitation.

I did made an attempt to get latest stable cups works on puppy. Its mighty hard when its me against the world. However, as long as its working for me, I'm already happy. If someone is able to to print with it then its a plus for me. Anyway, I can vouch that cups 1.3.9 stable release can be made to work with puppy as long as it is within my tests scope: CUPS + Gutenprint 5.2.3 ...


@Henry
I believe the reason why an upgrade from NOP412 to NOP413 is giving cups printing problem could be due to the older cups configuration/file/folder structure is still being used. The cups-1.3.9 package was made (back then) to be installed onto an existing Puppy, with tweaks to make it work properly. A NOP413 upgrade does not upgrade cups configuration or some backend folder structure if cups has been previously configured. This is due to how puppy filesystems are handled.

Two possible solutions could be :
1. Install a fresh NOP413 and copy your data from your previous NOP installation. (recommended)
2. Install cups 1.3.9 on top of your upgraded NOP413.


@everyone else
To test your printer with NOP413, I suggest that you create a small (32MB/64MB) savefile somewhere first. Do this if your printer requires additional drivers not provided by cups or gutenprint. Add your printer driver, configure cups + your printer settings using this savefile and finally make a test print. This way you'll know what to expect.

Keep in mind that HPIJS/HPLIP/FooZJS drivers have not been tested with cups-1.3.9 as I do not have access to printers requiring such drivers.

My tests with NOP413 shows that I'm able to print to my existing usb & lpt printer (cups + gutenprint 5.2.3) ...

Please report any issues with cups-1.3.9 on its own thread.


Rgds

[DaveS]

Patriot............ that was not a rant in any way, please continue. It is always tricky for someone like me who has limited knowledge of programming to criticise the efforts, largely given to the community free of charge, of others, and I feel embarrassed at doing so.
One of the biggest problems is that I cant revert to and earlier CUPS, because it is 'hardwired' in to the distro at birth.
Am I right in thinking most of the problems with CUPS spring from the way we dont enter a username and password at boot-up?
Also, surely printing is totally fundamental to a computer system, so it should be pretty much bullet-proof. Sometimes making a printer work on some Linux systems reminds me of the problems of doing same in Msdos, pre windows. And THAT was twenty years ago

ps:
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - A Chinese proverb

Sweet. One to remember when folks tell me Spruce 120s dont have any edge grip on ice

[gray]

Galculator crashing: slight oversight, it is doing so because it cannot find an icon file. Copying galculator_48x48.png from /usr/share/pixmaps/galculator to /usr/share/pixmaps will fix it.

davesurrey: All you need for compiz is to install 3D graphics driver (nvidia), then wows compiz pet and finally the python for ccsm pet. Nothing else should be needed.

Henry: I didnt think an upgrade would even work as this pup uses lzma compression for the sfs files. Bookmarks use a different file structure in Op 10, but it is possible to export bookmarks from 9.6 and then import into 10 (File menu ...). Your scrolling might be improved if you activate 'smooth scrolling' in the Preferences, Advanced tab, browsing option. While there untick the 'show scroll marker' box.

DaveS: Not a clue with your shout down issue. I have tried it on half a dozen different machines from old clunkers to brand new and it has worked fine every time.

CUPS: Patriots 1.3.9 pet worked fine on my Epson CX3900 printer, so I included it in NOP. I think Patriot has done a great job taking the CUPS bull by the horns. If the setup asking for logon all the time annoys you or CUPS is giving permission errors unzip the attached file in /etc/cups.

magerlab: the initrd.gz has a minor change to allow up to 4 sfs files.

[Henry]

[davesurrey]

@gray: