Coming Soon: Fluppy for netbooks, widescreens, smallscreens

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
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jemimah
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#31 Post by jemimah »

It would take a good bit of work to get Flwm to play nice with modern pagers and taskbars. It's on my list of things to do, but not near the top. In other words, it's not EWMH compliant.

You need to run flwm as 'startflwm' to get the theme change thing to work. Otherwise changing the theme will kill X. I'm not sure if you ran it manually as plain 'flwm' or if it's screwing up for other reasons.

jakfish
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#32 Post by jakfish »

Hi, jemimah,

Is it just me or have you noticed that the newer kernel/and/or/4.3 in 4.3Final raises the eee temperature by several degrees Celsius? In comparision to Puppy 4.1 kernel?

With wifi toggled off and cpu at 12%, running no app other than wine/MS Word 97, the machine eventually goes up to 55C. Whereas in 4.1, I would be b/w 50-52C.

Jake

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jemimah
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#33 Post by jemimah »

I never ran 4.1 so I'm not sure, although I have been annoyed that it seems to suck more watts than Ubuntu. I need to boot ubuntu with my puppy kernel and see if it's the kernel or the xserver that makes the difference or if it's just in my head. :)

You can get a better idea of this with powertop. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31290

When I post my kernel you should get a better process listing out of powertop and perhaps be able to spot the issue.

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#34 Post by jakfish »

Thanks for the powertop link. And I can't wait to test your eee kernel.

Jake

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jemimah
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#35 Post by jemimah »

I'm pleased to announce that I've discovered a viable laptop-friendly network manager that will run on Puppy! It turns out wpa_supplicant comes with its own gui tool that has a nice systray applet which handles auto-connecting, and roaming with ease and speed, and notifies you of network changes, and just plain works without a lot of headaches. It sounds like wpa_supplicant would only support WPA, but it supports open and WEP networks too. The drawback is that it needs Qt, but in my opinion, the tradeoff is very worth it.
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sunburnt
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#36 Post by sunburnt »

Suggestion: Post a pix of it... !!!

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jemimah
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#37 Post by jemimah »

I did attach a jpg right above you there. :)
Does it not show up?

I'm gonna run it for a week or two to make sure I understand it completely before I make a pet for it.

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sunburnt
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#38 Post by sunburnt »

Sorry... I usually post a reduced pix that shows directly on the web page.

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jemimah
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#39 Post by jemimah »

Does it say somewhere what the maximum size is?

Here are some pix of the applet in action. It doesn't have fancy animations, but it does the job.
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sunburnt
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#40 Post by sunburnt »

Just to the left of the attachments [browse] button is: "Allowed Extensions and Sizes".
However it says: "Maximum Upload Size: 0 Bytes", 6 MB was the last I knew...
Maybe Pizzasgood or one of the other moderators can explain?

magerlab
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#41 Post by magerlab »

i think the module for cpu fan is needed for the new kernel like we have for 25 kernel for eee cpu fan

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#42 Post by jemimah »

I'm planning on adding it but I'm curious why people want to mess with the fan at all.

Does the kernel not handle your fan properly all by itself? The only time I've even had fan problems was after installing fan-control software. Are you trying to save power by not running the fan, or what?


-------

In case someone else has this problem too, I just wanted to mention that the latest bios update from Asus fixed the issue where the cpus would not go into low power mode after waking from suspend. So it was a firmware issue, not a kernel issue. Awesome!

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jemimah
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#43 Post by jemimah »

More good news. I got a graphical bluetooth wizard to work on puppy. This is ported from gnome...getting the applet to work will be much harder (if not impossible) as I will have to rip out a couple gnome dependencies.
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jakfish
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#44 Post by jakfish »

If you're looking to conserve power, the fan's specs in BIOS are not your friend, hence the need for manual control. The BIOS specs essentially don't turn the fan off once it's on--the cut-off temperature is 40C, impossible to reach. [I'm using the eee 900 for reference here]

I'm so discouraged by the temperature spiking in the current 4.3 (can't tell if it's the kernel or the puppy) that I've gone back to 4.12 for everyday use.

I have an sd card reserved for 4.3 and the testing of your kernel, but I'm a power junkie--if I have to use an a/c adapter on a netbook, then the battle's lost. Might as well use a regular laptop.

I save 7 seconds on the cold, frugal sd card boot when using 4.3, but suffer a 4 degree Celsius spike. So my fan is on much more in 4.3, and I'm losing battery b/c of it.

I have many fingers crossed for your kernel, but the temperature changes may be within 4.3, not the kernel, I just don't know.

Jake

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01micko
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#45 Post by 01micko »

Hmmm,

After reading that quote at the top of the page in the Powertop link you would think that the 4.3 kernel would use less power, as it is compiled "tickless". It could be Xorg 7.3. It's been a hassle on some of my old boxes. Maybe I should try ttuuxxx "Puppies 4.3.1.1" on my Eee, it has the same kernel with Xorg 7.0.

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jemimah
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#46 Post by jemimah »

Jakfish, have you turned on cpu frequency scaling?

Can you run powertop on both 4.3 and 4.1 and tell me what the wattage difference is? Or post schreenshots? The fsb underclocking hack solved the inconsistencies I was seeing on my machine.

Battery life is why I waited to buy a netbook until the 1005ha came out, the advertised 10 hour battery life translates into about 6 actual hours. Not too bad.

jakfish
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#47 Post by jakfish »

01micko--

I'd be very interested to hear your results. I also, belatedly, see that BK relented and released a 4.3 with the older kernel.

I just don't know what's making it burn hotter--the kernel or the OS, or maybe my machine itself.

But at any rate, I'd be grateful for any insight from users more learned than me.

Jake

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#48 Post by jakfish »

Hi, jemimah,

I have tried frequency scaling which will not work w/ eee/4.3 (there are other threads/confirmations that show the machine stuck on "performance" despite the elected setting.).

Jake

magerlab
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#49 Post by magerlab »

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47267
needed modules for eee keys and fan-control

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jemimah
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#50 Post by jemimah »

Is there a link to source code for the eee module somewhere?

-----------


No wonder you're so running so hot, Jakfish! I can cook eggs on mine in performance mode. Can you link me to the relevant discussion?

Have you tried setting it manually?
Using Frequency Scaling Governors

You can get a list of available governors with (as root):

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
conservative ondemand powersave userspace performance

Note: If the governors are compiled as modules, load them first:

# modprobe cpufreq_performance cpufreq_ondemand cpufreq_conservative cpufreq_powersave cpufreq_userspace

Now we set our governor: What is our current governor?

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
userspace

Set new governor and watch if it has changed

# echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
conservative
I'm pretty sure my EEE kernel sets it automatically. It should hopefully be up for download by tomorrow.

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