During slideshow screen went black

[Barq's]

et. al.

I have contacted the author of the slideshow and he is willing to fix the loop back issue I have also left a message for MU to see if he will incorporate the updated slideshow into the screensaver. I am hopping to hear from MU very soon, and will keep you all posted.

With regard to reprogramming the the pizza button into an ESC key....it did not work, but I have not given up yet, after all I'm the one that has to climb the learning curve here and thus the most probable cause for the failure would be me (I hate admitting that).

[npierce]

It is good to hear that you are making progress on getting a real looping feature for slideshow.

Too bad that my Pizza key advice failed you.

Perhaps the keycode I gave you was incorrect for your i-opener. I do not have an i-opener, but found the value 115 on the web, given for the i-opener Pizza key. Maybe yours is different. (On my keyboard, keycode 115 is the key with the Windows logo on it. When I execute the given commands, that key functions as ESC.)

To find out what keycode is correct, you could use xev. Recent Puppy releases don't have xev, but someone posted it here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=12635

Open the file with pupzip, extract xev to /tmp/ and execute this command:

Code: Select all

/tmp/xev

A window named "Event Tester" will appear. Press and release the Pizza Key. You should see something like this in your rxvt window"

Code: Select all

KeyRelease event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x2000001,
    root 0x55, subw 0x0, time 1761708102, (195,237), root:(373,434),
    state 0x0, keycode 115 (keysym 0xff1b, Escape), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 9
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (1b) "
    XFilterEvent returns: False

The third line is the important one. After "state 0x0, keycode" is the keycode for your Pizza key.

[Barq's]

npierce et. al.

Do not be so hasty to assume that your advice was poor, I'm the non-code warrior here and unfortunately the odds are that I'm the one that messed up the code somehow, fortunately I'm kind of the dogged type and still have not given up. However, I will run the latest test you suggest just to make sure. Unfortunately I will not get to run that test until this weekend since that is the only time I have access to the i-opener. All tests that are not i-opener specific I can run on my other machine at home.

Another change for this weekend is that I will be taking a USB ethernet adapter for the i-opener and attempting to route some cat5 cable into the library. If I'm successful I will not have to be off-line the whole weekend.

Another bright note is that MU has agreed to incorporate the tweaked slideshow this weekend (assuming that it gets tweaked by then)

[Barq's]

et. al.

I have not yet heard from Jeremy or Mu regarding any progress with the slidshow or screensaver, but I finally succeeded at getting the cat5 installed to the i-opener this weekend. Unfortunately I'm having ethernet driver problems which I had not expected. I will hammer away at it and let you know of any progress on any front.

[npierce]

Thanks, Barq's, for the progress report. Good luck on getting your network connection working.

(By the way, if you have no luck with the Pizza key, perhaps you have another unused key that could be remapped to ESC. Of course, if you already have a satisfactory work-around to your lack of ESC key, that won't be necessary.)

[Barq's]

Keyboard maping...it worked ... sort of. I do not know which key combination got maped but I got sort of frustrated and just started hitting all the keys and ... bing.... it just sort of poped out of the screen saver mode. Unfortunately I have no clue what key(s) I hit and I have not been able to duplicate it. Arrrrgggghhh.

I have not gotten the ethernet adapter to work. In fact I hose the OS. I now get;

No pinboard inuse...the'default' pinboard has been selected. Use 'rox -p=Default' to turn it on in the future.

At that point the desktop is bare with the exception of a single folder that says home. Anything I attempt just hoses it even more. So I obtained a fresh copy of 4.2 only to get the same result.

Upgrade 4.3.1 - Start all over.

Boot through xorg and I get a black screen with the menu bar. The start menu seems to work (side note: spider solitaire is not part of this release...what a bummer)

Boot through the "test" xorg...ctrl-alt backspace...finish...done and I get the desktop (or al least most of it) and a message that reads;

All required kernal modules were not loaded due to restricted RAM. you need to reboot to create a save-file on the hard drive and/or you need a swap file/partition to obtain more space.

This computer has 128 meg of ram with 121 meg free (that does not make sence...but that is what it says)

Any suggestions?

[disciple]

Any suggestions?

Do what it says. Reboot, and it will ask you if you want to create a save file.

[Barq's]

Corruption, corruption, corruption...nothing seems to work so I started from scratch with a low level format of the hard drive and followed that with a full installation of 4.3.1. I would like to say that everything is running smoothly, but that would be a long way from the truth. However, I've got the screen saver back up and I am now working on the ethernet issue.

The good news is that I have heard from both Jeremy and MU. Jeremy is making progress but it will be a little while yet and MU...I do not see that there is anything he can do until Jeremy gets the new slide show up and running.

In the interim I shall keep trying to figure out why the pegasus ethernet adapter drive will only work under Ubuntu and not Puppy...kind of frustrating really.

[Barq's]

I have the ethernet adapter working. I brought the machine home and put it on my net. That seems to have done the trick since my net does not require a passwod to get out. Now I've got to figure out how to get to the password screen in order to use this on the church net.

success two; I've been able to activate the Grub timeout feature - a minor success but at this point any thing feels good.

Working on; When shutting down the machine gets to the point where it says sendin kill signal to all processes which is then followed by one more line which I do not remember, but that line is followed with the line "system halted" at that point everything freezes. any suggestions?

Up coming fix; How to stop the 1" grey bar across my screen from showing up and wiping out a one inch swath across my screen. That will be my next task while we wait for theslideshow fix.

[disciple]

but that line is followed with the line "system halted" at that point everything freezes. any suggestions?

That means it has finished shutting down and you can turn it off. If you want to make it turn off by itself you'll need to play with boot parameters like acpi=force and apm=on - it either didn't detect that your hardware has acpi/apm, or it isn't working properly with whichever one it is trying to use.

[Barq's]

Disciple

Since all versions of Puppy that I've tried on this machine have always been able to shut down the machine completely without the "system halted" message, I'm pretty confident that the hardware supports the feature. I will search the forums for tips on working with acpi/apm and see if I can figure out what is going wrong. I will let you know how I fare.

Thanks for the explanation.

[disciple]

I should have mentioned that it is often kernel-dependent. e.g. I have a machine that switches off using apm in previous puppies, but only using acpi in 4.3.x

[Barq's]

et. al.

I heard from Jeremy today. He has updated the slideshow to version 1.2 and it now includes a loop feature. YES!

He also added some other stuff that he had wanted to do. I've sent MU a note to let him know that the update is now available on Jeremys' web site ( http://www.xmission.com/~jstanley/slideshow.html). We are getting close

In the mean time I have gotten the pizza key to convert to an escape key (thank you npierce). The function is rather interesting however. It's as if the screensaver only looks for the esc command every 10 to 15 seconds so it is necessary to hold the key down and wait for the screensaver to look for the command. It's kind of weird but it works so I will dig out a little sand paper and borrow some fingernail polish and relabel that key. I'm thinking that ESC might be a little boring, do you think anybody would notice a bright orange key that was labeled $#!^ Probably a bad idea ... never mind.

No success with the full shut down yet but I have not given up.

[npierce]

Hi Barq's,

Good to hear that you are making progress, and especially that Jeremy has added the loop feature to slideshow.


As disciple pointed out, power-down stuff can be kernel-dependent. You've probably already seen this thread, but I'll toss it in here in case you missed it:

Puppy 4.3 APM won't power off [solved]

I've not tried that fix since my PC uses acpi, but it sounds like it could apply to your old i-opener, especially since the i-opener powered-down with older puppies.


That is odd about the 10 to 15 second delay after pressing the Pizza key. Perhaps the developers of the i-opener thought that ordering pizza more than once every fifteen seconds would lead to an unhealthy diet.

[Barq's]

npierce

Thank you for the link to the power-down solution. I can't believe that I missed that one...I mean look at the thread title, it is everything that I was searching for... this is embarrassing. I humbly thank you for the link, it worked.

As for the 10 - 15 second time delay after pressing the pizza key...that only seems to happen with the screen saver. The pizza key has always worked really quick when getting back from the black screen issue, granted that could just be the luck of the draw.

Speaking of the black screen issue, I have not yet tried to shut off the default black screen function in this version of Puppy. I think I shall attempt to resolve that before taking on setting up Wine and E-Sword, while we wait for the fixed screensaver.

I shall let you know how I fare. Thank you again for that link.

[Barq's]

Black screen solution found;

I copied the following line from the front end script running Gxine, that BarryK had pointed out, and put it in the screen saver script in the startup folder, then rebooted.

xset s off -dpms

NOTE: xset s off all by itself did not work, it had to have the -dpms part as well.

The slideshow still runs out of pictures and hangs everything, but I have been able to stretch that out for several hours by adding more pictures and increasing the delay between pictures. I expect that problem to go away when MU finishes incorporating the latest version of the slideshow into the screensaver. Adding a "No Black Screen" toggle to the screensaver setup that either wrote or deleted the above line in the screensaver start up script would be a nice fix, but I don't think I want to push my luck with MU since he has already been so gracious to incorporate the slideshow fix.

While we wait for Mu to finish the incorporation of the slideshow, I shall go find a thread on installing wine.

[MU]

First, sorry, that it took so long.

I work again since middle of last year, and have not much time left for coding in my spare time.

I attach PuppyScreensaver03.

Changes:

- Now located in /usr/local/PuppyBasicScreensaver03
- includes slideshow.bin, the compiled Perigee Slideshow 1.2 from february 2010. http://www.xmission.com/~jstanley/slideshow.html

I compiled it in Newyearspup, and did not test other Puppys. Please let me know it it will not work, then I must try to compile it in Puppy 4.3.1.

The slideshow now shows the pictures randomly, and you can exit it by pressing "esc" or "q".
The "q" key was easy to add to the source (modified slideshow.cpp is included).

The slideshow no longer needs a "recursive symlink", as it now has a "-loop" option.

I did not run it over a longer period, so could not test, if it crashes after a longer time.

Thanks to George for repeatingly reminding me about Jeremias updated slideshow, so that I now finally could add it.

Mark

[npierce]

Hi Mark,

I really had hoped to respond sooner, but I've been busy with other things these days. Sorry for the delay.

I have been running the new version of the slideshow module, and it it is working fine in Puppy 4.3.1. Last night I ran it overnight, and eight hours after I started it, it was still running fine (not that I would have expected otherwise, but it is nice to be sure).

Thanks very much for taking the time to update this. It is great to now have a properly looping slideshow. And the quit with 'q' feature should be a big help to those who were previously unable to ESCape.

Looking around the forum I see that the PuppyBasicScreensaver has quite a long history. And not only do I want to thank you for all your work on this over the years, but thanks to any others who have had a hand in it. Like so many Puppy-related projects, it seems that a number of folks have contributed a little bit, here or there, along the way. And it looks like every year there has been a milestone.

Thanks to you for creating it in 2005, and adding a slideshow module in 2006. Thanks to Jeremy Stanley for creating Perigee Slideshow. Thanks to muggins for making the first .pet of Jeremy's application in 2007. Thanks to puppyluvr for adapting PuppyBasicScreensaver for Puppy 4.1 (by substituting slideshow for gtksee and gtk-1.2, which apparently were not in Puppy 4.1) in 2008. And finally thanks to you again, Mark, for improving how it worked with slideshow in 2009 and, most recently, updating it with Jeremy's improved slideshow in 2010. Also thanks to Barq's for contacting you and Jeremy to start things rolling on these newest improvements. Probably there are others, unknown to me, that deserve thanks too. (If you know who you are, thanks!)

Lastly, I'd like to add a reminder that this screensaver requires PuppyBasic and the slideshow module requires a couple of SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) libraries. These are not included in newer Puppies (like Puppy 4.3.1). Details on what packages are needed and where to find them were provided by vtpup in this post:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 245#365245

There may be other packages needed to get some of the other modules to work, but I've not looked into those since I've been concentrating on the new slideshow module.

--npierce

[Barq's]

et.all

I sincerely apologize for such an extended absence. I wish I could tell you a real creative excuse but I will have to live with "life tossed me a nasty curve ball" and leave it at that. But I am alive and I'm back.

I see that ninety people have already downloaded it and only one post. So I shall give it a go and report back.

Thank you MU for updating this.
Thank you npierce and disciple for staying with me through out this.

[Barq's]

et. al.

I uninstalled the slideshow screensaver 2.0 and installed version 3.0...now it does not work and the screen goes black on schedule again. The screensaver start up script seems to have been deleted from the startup folder when screensaver 2.0 was uninstalled and version 3.0 did not put one back (i.e. I no longer have the xsets off command in the startup folder either).
Under the menu item "Desktop" "Puppy Screensaver Setup" the selected module is slidshow and the the screensaver shows as active. I selected the "test screensaver" option and the slideshow starts just fine (the "q" key for exit works great...thank you). The interval is set for 1 min and I selected the start screensave option and it starts up on schedule. The only problem seems to be the absence of a start up script in the startup menu. I remember how to modify a script, but I do not know how to create one from scratch. how is that done?