Introducing PULP - 125 MB Puplet for older hardware

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
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Puppyt
Posts: 907
Joined: Fri 09 May 2008, 23:37
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#76 Post by Puppyt »

Typing from Pulp.01 now -
very tight remaster, very crisp and sharp responses to everything I've tried with it - love it! I'll report back too when I've tried it on the older pentium-class hardware you mentioned earlier,

Congrats and Thanks, zenfunk!
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DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#77 Post by DMcCunney »

Puppyt wrote:
DMcCunney wrote:...I can't recommend DOS for something like this. The basic problem is the one you allude to. What, exactly, would you do with DOS programs run from Puppy? The answer, alas, is "not a lot".

DOS brings an assortment of baggage with it: 16 it applications, restriction to old 8+3 file names, a memory model that heavily restricts memory usage, and non-existent support for a number of current things. Most of the stuff you might want to work with would require a fair amount of massage...
Ah-ha- I guessed that you were the real Dennis McC.
I discovered there is another Dennis McCunney out there - apparently a cousin of some sort from a branch of the family I basically don't know at all - but he's not involved in computers or technology. So yeah, I'm the real DMcC... :P
Many thanks indeed for such straightforward clarification on the issue of DOS - I had imagined that something a little "out of the box" might have helped in a lite puplet of any make (not just Pulp - apologies for hogging your thread, Christian). But no: you've made a very convincing argument for the negative, especially wrt the overhanging requirements of the X environment.
The idea is sound - reduce weight by using command line console apps instead of GUI programs. But the DOS apps generally aren't suitable for the technical reasons mentioned, and applicable Linux CLI apps don't really exist.
And while your recollections of the DOS universe brought a tear to my eye as I recalled the first computers to join our family (Osbourne 1 and Kaypro 10) and WordPerfect 4.1 - no mouse, no pull-down menus and just a template cut-out over the function keys for guidance - I see no reason to inflict such experiences on Gen Cloud.
My first "home" computer was a Unix box -- an AT&T 3B1. It was part of AT&T's attempt to compete in the desktop market against the PC, back when AT&T was in the computer business. IT was a single user workstation based on a 10mhz Motorola 68010 CPU, with a bit mapped mono console screen and a GUI I still think is one of the best I've seen. (It did not use X-Windows.) It can boot and run AT&T Unix System V Release 2, a full multi-user, multi tasking OS, in one megabyte of memory, and perform useful work with acceptable performance. (Yes, you read that right. One megabyte of RAM, not one gigabyte...)

I compared it with my later 33mhz 386 struggling to run Windows 3.1, a pseudo-multitaking shell on top of a single-taking MS-DOS OS, in 8MB or RAM, looked in the direction of Redmond, WA, and said "What are you doing?"

My first PC was an old XT clone I upgraded with a 10mhz NEC V20 processor, Hercules graphics card, AST 6-Pak card with a meg of EMS TRAM, and two 20MB Seagate ST-225 hard drives. I had fun doing essentially what I'm doing with my Puppy machine - seeing what performance I can wring out of limited hardware. The icing on that cake was the MKS Toolkit, a suite of DOS programs that implemented all of the Unix utilities that made sense in a single tasking environment, including a very complete implementation of the Korn shell. Booted in full compatibility mode, you had to dig to see it wasn't a Unix box.

But the problems discussed will only become greater. I've been reasonably pleased with Puppy, but my expectations are low. There are limits to what I expect on the hardware I run Puppy on, and I recognize that patience is a virtue. For instance, it takes about 30 seconds to load and run Firefox 3.6, and performance is pokey when I do. Open Office takes longer. I'm stuck with it. I need the capabilities of both.

A poster elsewhere was railing about Google dropping support for Firefox 2.0 in Google Docs and Google sites, and felt Google was discriminating against dial up users. They weren't. They're discriminating against older browsers (including their own Chrome 3.0) that don't support current web standards, because much of what they are trying to do in Docs and Sites uses those standards, and won't work in browsers that don't support them.

I use Open Office rather than the faster and lighter AbiWord and Gnumeric products bundled with Puppy because I need to be able to handle current Microsoft Office files. OO can. Abi and Gnumeric can't.

As the computing environment evolves, there will be more hard decisions for Puppy fanciers. Internet usage is a major current issue, as there's a limit to just how small the internet apps can be and still do what people want. For instance, Dillo is a well regarded lightweight browser. Goof HTML, good CSS, no JavaScript. Oops. JavaScript support is a requirement for a large amount of what you might want to do while surfing. Witness also the issues in getting flash heavy sites to work in Puppy, like Youtube. Personally, I don't even try. My old Puppy box simply doesn't have the horsepower to do an acceptable job of rendering the video. I get a sequence of still pictures instead of smooth motion.

Puppy is a good way to extend the life of older hardware like what I run it on, but you have to be realistic about your expectations, and live with the fact that there will be things you can't do because you can't run the applications that will do it.
Thanks again, DMcC - kuDOS
You're welcome.
______
Dennis

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#78 Post by zenfunk »

The idea is sound - reduce weight by using command line console apps instead of GUI programs. But the DOS apps generally aren't suitable for the technical reasons mentioned, and applicable Linux CLI apps don't really exist.
You know kmandlas blog?
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/
Loads of tips on CLI apps.
So far the only thing not possible on the CLI IMHO is word processing (Yes, I know wordgrinder, I just don't think it'll cut it for me). One workaround would be to run an early MS word inside dosbox.
As the computing environment evolves, there will be more hard decisions for Puppy fanciers. Internet usage is a major current issue, as there's a limit to just how small the internet apps can be and still do what people want. For instance, Dillo is a well regarded lightweight browser. Goof HTML, good CSS, no JavaScript. Oops. JavaScript support is a requirement for a large amount of what you might want to do while surfing. Witness also the issues in getting flash heavy sites to work in Puppy, like Youtube. Personally, I don't even try. My old Puppy box simply doesn't have the horsepower to do an acceptable job of rendering the video. I get a sequence of still pictures instead of smooth motion.
Although firefox takes about 20 seconds to start, once it's up and running the speed is acceptable on my PII 300 MHz. Having 15 tabs open all the time is certainly a no go, but 4 or 5 are no problem. That's also a reason why firefox is kinda the default browser in PULP- it is feature rich and is kinda fast enough for my browsing needs. If I'd have a slower machine, I'd probably go for dillo more often.

You are right, I can't watch youtube inside firefox on my machine (about 2 FPS - LOL), but a plugin for downloading the video separately is included. So, I can watch most youtube videos with mplayer just fine.

Opening doc or odt files:
You can use abiword in pulp, takes more than 5 seconds on my machine. If you just want to have a quick glance, you can double click the file and it is converted to txt by antiword and automatically displayed in the text editor- about 2 seconds.

There are many ways to speed up processes- you just have to hack around the machines constraints a bit.
If you have to do your office stuff for your company all this is probably not enough, but for a hobby computer I don't see why your Pentium I or II should be obsolete. Also think about people that can't afford newer hardware. I think they deserve something like PULP which is IMHO a good compromise between a fully fledged Gnome desktop and a CLI distro.

Cheers, Christian

DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#79 Post by DMcCunney »

zenfunk wrote:
The idea is sound - reduce weight by using command line console apps instead of GUI programs. But the DOS apps generally aren't suitable for the technical reasons mentioned, and applicable Linux CLI apps don't really exist.
You know kmandlas blog?
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/
Loads of tips on CLI apps.
So far the only thing not possible on the CLI IMHO is word processing (Yes, I know wordgrinder, I just don't think it'll cut it for me). One workaround would be to run an early MS word inside dosbox.
I wouldn't. I have early MS Word here, and it works. The problem is one I mentioned previously - I need to deal with current file formats. Early MS Word won't have a clue about current Office doc files, let alone the new XML based docx format. (MS makes changes in their underlying file formats with every new release. I wound up bringing in personal copies of Word and Excel at a former employer, because a remote office had bought and was using a newer version of Office then we had, and was sending us files we couldn't read...)

If I'm going for CLI word processing, I'll likely use SUE, the Simple Unix Editor. SUE is a Unix port in C of the VDE editor originally written in Assembler for CP/M systems by Eric Meyer. VDE was a clone of WordStar, but faster because it did things in one file with no overlays and edited entirely in RAM. It also had things WordStar did not get till later, like macros. Eric switched development to MS-DOS (and the DOS version is still maintained and supported, with a November 2009 1.96a release). He turned his Assembler source over to Carson Wilson, who continued to develop and enhance the CP/M version as ZDE. A chap named Bill Kuykendall hired Carson to do a Unix version. It's not an exact VDE clone, as some things in VDE have no Unix equivalents, but it maintains the basics including the WordStar command set. I have a Linux build that runs fine in a terminal window on Puppy.

I'd be more concerned with handling spreadsheets and Adobe PDFs.
As the computing environment evolves, there will be more hard decisions for Puppy fanciers. Internet usage is a major current issue, as there's a limit to just how small the internet apps can be and still do what people want. For instance, Dillo is a well regarded lightweight browser. Goof HTML, good CSS, no JavaScript. Oops. JavaScript support is a requirement for a large amount of what you might want to do while surfing. Witness also the issues in getting flash heavy sites to work in Puppy, like Youtube. Personally, I don't even try. My old Puppy box simply doesn't have the horsepower to do an acceptable job of rendering the video. I get a sequence of still pictures instead of smooth motion.
Although firefox takes about 20 seconds to start, once it's up and running the speed is acceptable on my PII 300 MHz. Having 15 tabs open all the time is certainly a no go, but 4 or 5 are no problem. That's also a reason why firefox is kinda the default browser in PULP- it is feature rich and is kinda fast enough for my browsing needs. If I'd have a slower machine, I'd probably go for dillo more often.
Which Firefox version? I use FF 3.6, and it takes about 30 seconds to load here, from a UDMA 4 HD using an ext4 filesystem. (It took 45 seconds to load on ext3.) Performance is sluggish but bearable. FF 3 had an assortment of memory leak bugs squashed in FF 3.5. FF 2 is too far behind the curve. Current web development efforts are focusing on things like HTML 5, CSS 3, and newer ECMAScript standards. Older browsers will increasingly be left behind, because they can't handle the newer standards.

Indeed, the development of the Internet is the biggest hurdle. Increasingly, machines are assumed to have a broadband Internet connection and run software that adheres to current standards. If either of those aren't true, the user will have an assortment of problems. If you run Puppy on low end gear, standards support is likely to bite, and lack of broadband may, too.

Dillo is a nice browser: small, light, and good at what it does. It's what it doesn't do, like JavaScript, that make it an emergency only choice for me.
You are right, I can't watch youtube inside firefox on my machine (about 2 FPS - LOL), but a plugin for downloading the video separately is included. So, I can watch most youtube videos with mplayer just fine.
If that works for you, great. My Puppy machine is not my primary system. The desktop is a 2ghz Pentium box with 4GB RAM, triple booting Win2K Pro, WinXP Pro, and Ubuntu 9.10. If I want to watch Youtube, I do it there, or possibly on the SOs XP Pro laptop.

The notebook running Puppy is a relatively small, light, travel machine, capable of doing the basics, like word processing, spreadsheets, ebook viewing, and email. It's not a multi-media media machine because it simply doesn't have the horsepower to do it well. I knew that going in, and don't care. That's not what I use it for.
Opening doc or odt files:
You can use abiword in pulp, takes more than 5 seconds on my machine. If you just want to have a quick glance, you can double click the file and it is converted to txt by antiword and automatically displayed in the text editor- about 2 seconds.
AbiWord does everything in RTF, converting as required. If RTF is suitable, fine. If you need to save your changes back to the original format, you may have issues.
There are many ways to speed up processes- you just have to hack around the machines constraints a bit.
Which I've been doing, as the opportunity allows.
If you have to do your office stuff for your company all this is probably not enough, but for a hobby computer I don't see why your Pentium I or II should be obsolete. Also think about people that can't afford newer hardware. I think they deserve something like PULP which is IMHO a good compromise between a fully fledged Gnome desktop and a CLI distro.
I largely concur. My Puppy box is a hobbyist machine, and is in part an experiment to see what performance I can wring out of older hardware without spending money on hardware upgrades.

And I'm aware of the folks who for whatever reason are stuck with older hardware. Puppy is an apt choice for them, as it can probably boot and run reasonably on obsolete machines. But depending upon what role it is expected to fill, some level of compromise will be required, and there will be things the user simply can't do.
Cheers, Christian
______
Dennis

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#80 Post by zenfunk »

DMcCunney wrote:
zenfunk wrote:
The idea is sound - reduce weight by using command line console apps instead of GUI programs. But the DOS apps generally aren't suitable for the technical reasons mentioned, and applicable Linux CLI apps don't really exist.
You know kmandlas blog?
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/
Loads of tips on CLI apps.
So far the only thing not possible on the CLI IMHO is word processing (Yes, I know wordgrinder, I just don't think it'll cut it for me). One workaround would be to run an early MS word inside dosbox.
I wouldn't. I have early MS Word here, and it works. The problem is one I mentioned previously - I need to deal with current file formats. Early MS Word won't have a clue about current Office doc files, let alone the new XML based docx format. (MS makes changes in their underlying file formats with every new release. I wound up bringing in personal copies of Word and Excel at a former employer, because a remote office had bought and was using a newer version of Office then we had, and was sending us files we couldn't read...)
I'm aware of this problem. MS really wants you to upgrade don't they. I really love my openoffice formats.
If I'm going for CLI word processing, I'll likely use SUE, the Simple Unix Editor. SUE is a Unix port in C of the VDE editor originally written in Assembler for CP/M systems by Eric Meyer. VDE was a clone of WordStar, but faster because it did things in one file with no overlays and edited entirely in RAM. It also had things WordStar did not get till later, like macros. Eric switched development to MS-DOS (and the DOS version is still maintained and supported, with a November 2009 1.96a release). He turned his Assembler source over to Carson Wilson, who continued to develop and enhance the CP/M version as ZDE. A chap named Bill Kuykendall hired Carson to do a Unix version. It's not an exact VDE clone, as some things in VDE have no Unix equivalents, but it maintains the basics including the WordStar command set. I have a Linux build that runs fine in a terminal window on Puppy.
That's interesting, do you have a binary- pet or something? Is it free software by now?
I'd be more concerned with handling spreadsheets and Adobe PDFs.
Spreadsheets is almost a nonissue to me- as a hobbyist, I use spreadsheets not very often. For pdf viewing I can only think about an old xpdf (non CLI for sure) or a pdf2html tool.
As the computing environment evolves, there will be more hard decisions for Puppy fanciers. Internet usage is a major current issue, as there's a limit to just how small the internet apps can be and still do what people want. For instance, Dillo is a well regarded lightweight browser. Goof HTML, good CSS, no JavaScript. Oops. JavaScript support is a requirement for a large amount of what you might want to do while surfing. Witness also the issues in getting flash heavy sites to work in Puppy, like Youtube. Personally, I don't even try. My old Puppy box simply doesn't have the horsepower to do an acceptable job of rendering the video. I get a sequence of still pictures instead of smooth motion.
Although firefox takes about 20 seconds to start, once it's up and running the speed is acceptable on my PII 300 MHz. Having 15 tabs open all the time is certainly a no go, but 4 or 5 are no problem. That's also a reason why firefox is kinda the default browser in PULP- it is feature rich and is kinda fast enough for my browsing needs. If I'd have a slower machine, I'd probably go for dillo more often.
Which Firefox version? I use FF 3.6, and it takes about 30 seconds to load here, from a UDMA 4 HD using an ext4 filesystem. (It took 45 seconds to load on ext3.) Performance is sluggish but bearable. FF 3 had an assortment of memory leak bugs squashed in FF 3.5. FF 2 is too far behind the curve. Current web development efforts are focusing on things like HTML 5, CSS 3, and newer ECMAScript standards. Older browsers will increasingly be left behind, because they can't handle the newer standards.

Indeed, the development of the Internet is the biggest hurdle. Increasingly, machines are assumed to have a broadband Internet connection and run software that adheres to current standards. If either of those aren't true, the user will have an assortment of problems. If you run Puppy on low end gear, standards support is likely to bite, and lack of broadband may, too.

Dillo is a nice browser: small, light, and good at what it does. It's what it doesn't do, like JavaScript, that make it an emergency only choice for me.
True, but nevertheless I can look at most webpages in a firefox 2.20 just fine (to be frank, I can't think of a single one that doesn't render properly). In a couple of years this might be a completely different situation, but to get your info off the web, all the browsers included in PULP, Firefox 2.20, dillo and elinks, do very well- for now.
You are right, I can't watch youtube inside firefox on my machine (about 2 FPS - LOL), but a plugin for downloading the video separately is included. So, I can watch most youtube videos with mplayer just fine.
If that works for you, great. My Puppy machine is not my primary system. The desktop is a 2ghz Pentium box with 4GB RAM, triple booting Win2K Pro, WinXP Pro, and Ubuntu 9.10. If I want to watch Youtube, I do it there, or possibly on the SOs XP Pro laptop.

The notebook running Puppy is a relatively small, light, travel machine, capable of doing the basics, like word processing, spreadsheets, ebook viewing, and email. It's not a multi-media media machine because it simply doesn't have the horsepower to do it well. I knew that going in, and don't care. That's not what I use it for.
Same here, my main machine is a core2duo something running ubuntu which is the machine where I get most of the "serious" stuff done. The vintage PII Thinkpad subnotebook is my plaything where I develop PULP and use for traveling.
There are many ways to speed up processes- you just have to hack around the machines constraints a bit.
Which I've been doing, as the opportunity allows.
If you have to do your office stuff for your company all this is probably not enough, but for a hobby computer I don't see why your Pentium I or II should be obsolete. Also think about people that can't afford newer hardware. I think they deserve something like PULP which is IMHO a good compromise between a fully fledged Gnome desktop and a CLI distro.
I largely concur. My Puppy box is a hobbyist machine, and is in part an experiment to see what performance I can wring out of older hardware without spending money on hardware upgrades.

And I'm aware of the folks who for whatever reason are stuck with older hardware. Puppy is an apt choice for them, as it can probably boot and run reasonably on obsolete machines. But depending upon what role it is expected to fill, some level of compromise will be required, and there will be things the user simply can't do.
If your main goal for your old machine is pushing it to the limit, then you will love kmandlas blog- he is mostly an arch linux guy though. Nevertheless, very inspiring.

I completely agree that an old machine has it's limits somewhere, but when I show people PULP running on my Pentium II, I realize that the limits are not where most people think they are. :D We Puppy Linux users all know that for sure.

Christian

User avatar
lvds
Posts: 340
Joined: Tue 23 Jan 2007, 15:15
Location: Near the window

#81 Post by lvds »

Hi Christian,

I was using Pulp 0.03 and I understood lately that there is now a new
release called 0.1 (I guess it means 0.10). I've seen the screenshot above in
the thread here and really I love the new
look and feel you made ! It reminds me of Milax. If you don't know about it
go there and have a look, it is also based on JWM. It may give you some more nice ideas :-)

Unfortunately I can't download the ISO by now because rapidshare reports
and error: "Unfortunately right now our servers are overloaded and we have
no more download slots left for non-members. Of course you can also try again later."
so I'll have to wait before I can test it :P
May I suggest you to place another iso link at uploading.com ? They will allow
you to earn more from the downloads and they have more bandwidth ;-)
Also please could you tell us the size of ISO and MD5 ?

About the file manager and this sort of things, what would you think of
XFE ? It seems to me "more practicable" than emelFM...

The choice of Firepup is great too. maybe we could gain more (space and
usability) by replacing the whole sound packs with only VLC and mozilla-vlc-plugin ?
... vlc 0.86 is very stable. Though I have no idea how much
weights all the multimedia packages in Pulp (including the firefox addons)
From the tests we made here the videos embedded in webpages crashed
less often when using mozilla-vlc-plugin than other plugin...

About pictures, I would be interested if you could tell me how gthumb
compare to xnview on your computer ?

Thank you very much for your great work, I'm a little impatient to
put hands on the iso :P

Best regards
Laurent

User avatar
CatDude
Posts: 1563
Joined: Wed 03 Jan 2007, 17:49
Location: UK

#82 Post by CatDude »

Hello zenfunk

I took the liberty (with the approval of Caneri, so thank him not me)
and uploaded a copy of your PULP_0.1.iso
Here:
PULP_0.1.iso
PULP_0.1.iso.md5.txt

The usual Username & Password apply
that is: puppy & linux respectively.

CatDude
.
[img]http://www.smokey01.com/CatDude/.temp/sigs/acer-futile.gif[/img]

DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#83 Post by DMcCunney »

zenfunk wrote:
DMcCunney wrote: I wouldn't. I have early MS Word here, and it works. The problem is one I mentioned previously - I need to deal with current file formats. Early MS Word won't have a clue about current Office doc files, let alone the new XML based docx format. (MS makes changes in their underlying file formats with every new release. I wound up bringing in personal copies of Word and Excel at a former employer, because a remote office had bought and was using a newer version of Office then we had, and was sending us files we couldn't read...)
I'm aware of this problem. MS really wants you to upgrade don't they. I really love my openoffice formats.
Yeah, they do. Occasionally, their format changes are intended to add functionality, but more often I suspect it's to encourage upgrades... :(
If I'm going for CLI word processing, I'll likely use SUE, the Simple Unix Editor. SUE is a Unix port in C of the VDE editor originally written in Assembler for CP/M systems by Eric Meyer.
That's interesting, do you have a binary- pet or something? Is it free software by now?
Yes and yes. No PET, but none needed. It's a single executable with no dependencies. Drop it into /usr/bin or elsewhere in the PATH and run it from a command line as "sue [filename]". A man page and a README are included.

A binary archive is here:
https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor ... on/sue.zip

A source tarball is here:
https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor ... sue07i.tgz
I'd be more concerned with handling spreadsheets and Adobe PDFs.
Spreadsheets is almost a nonissue to me- as a hobbyist, I use spreadsheets not very often. For pdf viewing I can only think about an old xpdf (non CLI for sure) or a pdf2html tool.
I use spreadsheets enough to make it a requirement. I wouldn't mind a console mode spreadsheet app, ala the old Lotus 1,2,3, but I haven't seen one.
Dillo is a nice browser: small, light, and good at what it does. It's what it doesn't do, like JavaScript, that make it an emergency only choice for me.
True, but nevertheless I can look at most webpages in a firefox 2.20 just fine (to be frank, I can't think of a single one that doesn't render properly). In a couple of years this might be a completely different situation, but to get your info off the web, all the browsers included in PULP, Firefox 2.20, dillo and elinks, do very well- for now.
It's the "for now" part that's the kicker. Yes, FF 2 handles most sites fine. For that matter, so does SeaMonkey 1.1X. But the evolution of web standards will gradually marginalize them.

I mentioned Google dropping support in their Docs and Sites efforts for things like FF 2 because it can't deal with the newer stuff they are using. I use both, so a browser that works with them is a requirement, and FF 3.6 is installed in Puppy in consequence.
If your main goal for your old machine is pushing it to the limit, then you will love kmandlas blog- he is mostly an arch linux guy though. Nevertheless, very inspiring.
Linux is Linux. Arch vs Puppy doesn't really matter, especially in the case of CLI apps. I bookmarked his blog for future reference.
I completely agree that an old machine has it's limits somewhere, but when I show people PULP running on my Pentium II, I realize that the limits are not where most people think they are. :D We Puppy Linux users all know that for sure.
Oh, yes. :)

But there will be limits, regardless. When I point folks at Puppy or Linux in general, I try to manage expectations. I ask what they want to do with it, and let them know what they can't do as well as what they can. Mostly, I emphasize that it's not Windows, much of what they can do they'll do differently, and a learning curve will be present.
Christian
______
Dennis

User avatar
charlie6
Posts: 1230
Joined: Mon 30 Jun 2008, 04:03
Location: Saint-Gérard / Walloon part of Belgium

#84 Post by charlie6 »

Hi zenfunk,
many thanks for pulp
on pulp03 Galculator num pad keys 2 4 6 8 are inactive in view / paper mode
when booting in each test from live-cd and
using a belgian azerty keyboard with keyboard set on:
test 1: qwerty us [1st choice in setup keyboard choice];
test 2: azerty be-latin [3rd choice in setup keyboard choice];
using 2 4 6 8 from alpha-numeric keyboard works.

I already tested this on turbopup v0.1 also featured with galculator 1.3.1: works OK.
I also got the same behaviour on the french translated Toutou4.1.2 [from Puppy4.1.2] and Toutou4.3.1 [from puppy 4.3.1] also with galculator 1.3.1.

Any idea to fix this?
thanks in advance for any answer
cheers, charlie

nooby
Posts: 10369
Joined: Sun 29 Jun 2008, 19:05
Location: SwedenEurope

#85 Post by nooby »

Mine goes into kernel panic after doing a pupsave file with it and the surprise is that another puppy goes into kernel panic too as a result?

Dpup

while NOP survives them both. So not sure what I did wrong.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#86 Post by zenfunk »

Hi zenfunk,
many thanks for pulp
on pulp03 Galculator num pad keys 2 4 6 8 are inactive in view / paper mode
when booting in each test from live-cd and
No idea at all. I didn' even touch galculator. I left it like it was in Puppy 4.1.2 barebones, of which PULP is derived from.
Mine goes into kernel panic after doing a pupsave file with it and the surprise is that another puppy goes into kernel panic too as a result?
WOW, does this really mean that other puppies don't boot as well with their pupsave files (I dont think using the pupsave file from PULP on dpup is a good idea- but then I don't think anyone would attempt anything like that..;))?
I'm really sorry to hear that. Is it possible to boot with pfix=ram bootoption? then you could delete the PULP-savefile and start over? Otherwise I don't know why PULP should develop such a hostile behavior- it is just a remastered Puppy 4.1.2 barebones...
:cry:

Hope yu will get PULP and Dpup going again- Christian

zenfunk
Posts: 220
Joined: Wed 18 Mar 2009, 07:28

#87 Post by zenfunk »

@ CatDude:
Thanks again for mirroring PULP.

@ DMcCunney:
Concerning spreadsheets- all I can think of for now would be GNU Oleo, but I suspect you have the same problem as elsewhere- modern file format support.
Thanks for the sue binary- I'll check it out.

@Laurent:
Hi Christian,

I was using Pulp 0.03 and I understood lately that there is now a new
release called 0.1 (I guess it means 0.10). I've seen the screenshot above in
the thread here and really I love the new
look and feel you made ! It reminds me of Milax. If you don't know about it
go there and have a look, it is also based on JWM. It may give you some more nice ideas Smile
Hey thanks for the milax link- never heard of it before. I'll give it a spin someday.
Unfortunately I can't download the ISO by now because rapidshare reports
and error: "Unfortunately right now our servers are overloaded and we have
no more download slots left for non-members. Of course you can also try again later."
so I'll have to wait before I can test it Razz
May I suggest you to place another iso link at uploading.com ? They will allow
you to earn more from the downloads and they have more bandwidth Wink
Also please could you tell us the size of ISO and MD5 ?
Since I'm now mirrored on puppylinux.asia (see post right before yours)- all should be good now. If not, please tell me.
Isosize is: 101,2 MB (106145792 Bytes)
About the file manager and this sort of things, what would you think of
XFE ? It seems to me "more practicable" than emelFM...
Hm, the old version of xfe in the repository is just too hiddeous to look at :wink: . I never tried newer versions.
I know that a two pane file manager is very hard to get used to at first sight, but probably my tutorial here:
http://flusslinie.wordpress.com/2009/06 ... ike-a-pro/
helps to smooth out the lerarning curve. After a while it feels much faster than anything else you ever tried before. IMHO it is certainly much better to use than rox (duckandrun....).
The choice of Firepup is great too. maybe we could gain more (space and
usability) by replacing the whole sound packs with only VLC and mozilla-vlc-plugin ?
... vlc 0.86 is very stable. Though I have no idea how much
weights all the multimedia packages in Pulp (including the firefox addons)
From the tests we made here the videos embedded in webpages crashed
less often when using mozilla-vlc-plugin than other plugin...
Hm, first of all Firepup is not in PULP 0.1, nor is it in 0.03. This is simply a typo in the application menu. The browser included is firefox compiled with GTK 1.2 from lamarelle.org.
About pictures, I would be interested if you could tell me how gthumb
compare to xnview on your computer ?

Thank you very much for your great work, I'm a little impatient to
put hands on the iso Razz

Best regards
Laurent
never tried gthumb on my computer, but there is gqview in PULP 0.1 now, which is much more polished, IMHO. Give it a try. Now even fullscreen works- LOL.

DMcCunney
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Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#88 Post by DMcCunney »

zenfunk wrote: @ DMcCunney:
Concerning spreadsheets- all I can think of for now would be GNU Oleo, but I suspect you have the same problem as elsewhere- modern file format support.
It appears to be unmaintained, and looks like focus has shifted to Gnumeric, but it's worth chewcking out. Thanks!
Thanks for the sue binary- I'll check it out.
You're welcome.
Hm, the old version of xfe in the repository is just too hiddeous to look at :wink: . I never tried newer versions.
I know that a two pane file manager is very hard to get used to at first sight,/

I have XFE 1.19.2 installed here, and don't find it "too hideous to look at". It's actually rather nice, and opens large directories and displays contents faster than Rox or Thunar.

The main quirk is that the left panel in two panel mode won't keep "Full file list" as the configured setting. It insists on opening in "Big icons" mode.

I've used dual-pane file managers extensively elsewhere, and was already aware of the advantages.
______
Dennis

nooby
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Location: SwedenEurope

#89 Post by nooby »

Christian, I have to apology. It could most likely have been my sloppy editing of a menu.lst file.

You know that if on edit with windows Notes one time and then edit with linux basic editor next time then they treat hard end of line differently.

I remember from the DOS times that some program wanted cr lf and other lf ce or just one of them or something.

so when everything fall into 256 chars long lines with not space in between some words and I tried to make them look readable to the human eye then I could have missed something that made it boot too many lines at same time or something.

anyway I wish you luck with pulp and look bac using it when I get my skill in menu.lst better.

I don't have time to test more now need to learn more about basics in linux first.

concentrating on what my motivation leads me. :)

so blame it on me don't blame pulp.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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Colonel Panic
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#90 Post by Colonel Panic »

Having read this thread, PULP 0.1 will be my next puppy (sorry ttuuxxx). It looks like a winner even on old computers like mine.

Well done zenfunk!

@Dennis; thanks for the hint about the SUE command line text editor. I'm presently trying to find good Linux command line replacements / analogues for the DOS applications I've been using, and this one looks like a good text editor (I also use Joe, which uses the WordStar command set and which I know well).

I use Vim too, it's a fantastic text editor if you're willing to take the time and trouble to learn it (it has a steep learning curve, to put it mildly). I can't say I'm an expert but I know enough to get by in it.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#91 Post by DMcCunney »

Colonel Panic wrote:@Dennis; thanks for the hint about the SUE command line text editor. I'm presently trying to find good Linux command line replacements / analogues for the DOS applications I've been using, and this one looks like a good text editor (I also use Joe, which uses the WordStar command set and which I know well).
As I mentioned in the post where I uploaded it, it's a text editor, not a word processor, and it doesn't have the bells and whistles of some other products. But it's quick to invoke and power5ful enough for the usual chores people need to do. It's not what I'd run on a more powerful system, but the Puppy box has limited resources, and something that comes up quick and is good enough gets the nod over something that comes up slow, even if "better".
I use Vim too, it's a fantastic text editor if you/re willing to take the time and trouble to learn it (it has a steep learning curve, to put it mildly). I can't say I'm an expert but I know enough to get by in it
Vim reminds me a bit of Photoshop. I ran across a story about a design student getting depressed because he didn't know everything about Photoshiop, and his professor said "Nobody knows everything about Photoshop! You learn the parts that do the things you need to do!"

Vim is li9ke that. I've barely scratched the surface. For the most part, Vim on my machines could be vi, since most of what I do with it uses vanilla vi functions I learned dealing with Unix in the 80's. I've had no reason to dig deeper.
______
Dennis

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Colonel Panic
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#92 Post by Colonel Panic »

A problem has arisen unfortunately; I downloaded the Pulp 0.1 ISO, burnt it to disk and then ran it on one of the community centre's computers, where it works fine.

The trouble came when I tried to log out of the system and return to Windows (someone else wanted to use the computer); the BIOS wouldn't recognise the hard drive when the machine rebooted and it got into an infinite loop, trying to boot from the CD-ROM with no live CD in there.

Has anyone got any idea please about how this might have happened and how to fix it? At the moment (though the community centre tech's being very understanding about it) I hardly dare mention Linux or Puppy in the centre for fear of the guffaws I'd get.

Thanks in advance,

CP .
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#93 Post by DMcCunney »

Colonel Panic wrote:Has anyone got any idea please about how this might have happened and how to fix it? At the moment (though the community centre tech's being very understanding about it) I hardly dare mention Linux or Puppy in the centre for fear of the guffaws I'd get.
This sounds like an incomplete installation of some sort. I can't see how running Puppy from a live CD should do this.

Did this persist after a power cycle?
______
Dennis

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Colonel Panic
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#94 Post by Colonel Panic »

DMcCunney wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:Has anyone got any idea please about how this might have happened and how to fix it? At the moment (though the community centre tech's being very understanding about it) I hardly dare mention Linux or Puppy in the centre for fear of the guffaws I'd get.
This sounds like an incomplete installation of some sort. I can't see how running Puppy from a live CD should do this.

Did this persist after a power cycle?
______
Dennis
Thanks for answering, Dennis;

Yes it did. There was no installation; I took the CD out of the drive and tried to boot from the hard drive as usual, with this result.

I can't see why it might have happened either, but it did. According to our expert, a couple of pointers went missing from the Windows XP boot loader (NTLDR) and one of them linked to the hard drive. It's worrying me somewhat because I've always used Puppy on public computers on the understanding that it's completely "safe" to run it from a CD-ROM and a savefile on the hard drive, as I did in this case.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

DMcCunney
Posts: 889
Joined: Tue 03 Feb 2009, 00:45

#95 Post by DMcCunney »

Colonel Panic wrote:
DMcCunney wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:Has anyone got any idea please about how this might have happened and how to fix it? At the moment (though the community centre tech's being very understanding about it) I hardly dare mention Linux or Puppy in the centre for fear of the guffaws I'd get.
This sounds like an incomplete installation of some sort. I can't see how running Puppy from a live CD should do this.

Did this persist after a power cycle?
Thanks for answering, Dennis;

Yes it did. There was no installation; I took the CD out of the drive and tried to boot from the hard drive as usual, with this result.

I can't see why it might have happened either, but it did. According to our expert, a couple of pointers went missing from the Windows XP boot loader (NTLDR) and one of them linked to the hard drive. It's worrying me somewhat because I've always used Puppy on public computers on the understanding that it's completely "safe" to run it from a CD-ROM and a savefile on the hard drive, as I did in this case.
Weird. If something trashed the Master Boot Record, I can see something like this occurring. That's not hard to fix, but is a bit tedious.

I'd be very startled if a standard Puppy CD did that. I can't say for sure about a custom Puplet. It might have been coincidence, or it might have been an improperly housebroken Puppy, making a mess where it wasn't supposed to. Give a copy of the CD to the tech at the community center, and ask him to look at it. You want a second opinion to rule out Puppy being at fault.
_______
Dennis

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