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Coming Soon: Fluppy for netbooks, widescreens, smallscreens

Posted: Tue 29 Sep 2009, 19:28
by jemimah
Fluppy is a remix of Puppy 4.3 using Flwm and Rox-Panel, along with customized window tiling and scripting tools.

Why Flwm?
Flwm is a unique window manager, being both extremely lightweight, and sporting vertical titlebars. Vertical titlebars are optimal for widescreen netbooks: fewer problems with tall windows, and better use of available space.

Flwm has no built-in panel to hog your screen space - the taskbar and pager are on the popup menu, visible when you need them, hidden when you don't.

Flwm has independent buttons for vertical and horizontal maximize; you don't know how much you need this until you've tried it.

Flwm works well with my brand new version of the Tile utility. Tile your windows with a grid, horizontal, or vertical stripes, iconify or cascade; remove the titlebars or put them back - all at the touch of a button. This guarantees you get the most of your screen real estate without the learning curve of a tiling or borderless window manager.

Why Rox-Panel?
It comes free with Rox Filer. It's integrated with the pinboard and supports drag and drop.

Rox Panel can hold as many icons as you need, automatically scrolling them on and off screen if they don't fit in the available space - works perfectly even at 640x480. Vertical panels are supported and well-behaved.

Rox-Panel has a menu, a systray, and several monitoring applets that do not require python.

Rox-Panel stays below your windows until you press the hotkey to bring it to the top.

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If anyone wants to help me test, I'd be interested in releasing an Eee fastboot kernel and maybe a more general netbook kernel to go with it.

Ideas? Suggestions? What would you like to see in a netbook version of puppy?

Edit: I've posted the latest WMpack download here, so it's easier to find, along with the yaf-panel legend screenshot.

atom

Posted: Tue 29 Sep 2009, 23:13
by raffy
A puplet for CPUs with the Atom processor will be nice. Will help testing if this build becomes available.

Thanks for your sharing.

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 13:46
by jakfish
I have an eee 900 and would be happy to test that eee-specific kernel.

Jake

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 14:36
by jemimah
It would be cool if people with Eees currently running Puppy could post their dmesg output so I know exactly which drivers are needed. I have a very very slim kernel currently running on my eee 1005HA, I can just add the drivers for the other Eees and then see if anything breaks.

To get dmesg output type dmesg > filename.txt on the command line.

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 14:48
by panzerpuppy
Fluppy = small Puppy that fits on a 3.5" Floppy :D

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 14:52
by jakfish
Since my dmesg output is huge, I've attached it as a "pet" file. Change file extension to .txt and should work (I hope). [attaching txt or doc files not allowed, apparently]

Jake

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 15:10
by T_Hobbit
I'ld like to help test it!
I not a programmer nor a linux expert, but I'm here with an AAO Linux version dual boot Linpus and Boxpup.

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 17:28
by jemimah
Thanks jakfish. Could you also post the output of lsmod? You can gzip the text file with gzip filename.txt. I'm pretty sure the forum lets you upload gzipped files.

I will post some test kernels soon. Probably next week. I have to figure out what I will do about hosting.

Have you all tried getting suspend to work? I've got a weird kernel/acpi bug on mine and I'm wondering if all the Eees have it. Basically the Cpus won't go into the low power sleep states after resuming from suspend. You can check this with powertop. I'll post instructions if anyone want to check.

Also a quick tip. Puppy's default kernel doesn't load the i915 (and maybe i810) video card module by default (at least on mine). If you have problems resuming from suspend, black consoles, or running Xorg with DRI - that's probably why.

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 19:58
by jakfish
Hi,

Here's the lsmod.txt, and zipped, I hope.

Jake

Posted: Thu 01 Oct 2009, 20:16
by jemimah
perfect, thank you!

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 12:33
by T_Hobbit
From my wife Acer Aspire One 110 (Atom, RAM 512mb, SSD 8Gb, 8.9'' LCD):

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 13:17
by jemimah
Yes I need lsmod too. I originally thought all the drivers would appear in dmesg, but it looks like I was wrong about that.

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 14:32
by magerlab
is it possible to cut Xorg also to leave only intel drivers for eee ?

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 14:40
by jemimah
Yes you can cut xorg down to just intel, but by my calculation it saves only a couple megs.

[Whereas, cutting down the kernel saves like 30 megs; ok I just checked, it's around 20 MB savings]

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 17:08
by luther349
yea the atom kernel is very fast. some beta distros built for netbooks are using it. where talking like instant on and stuff. i think moblin takes 5 seconds to start.

Posted: Fri 02 Oct 2009, 17:27
by jemimah
Moblin actually takes about 45 seconds to start on my computer. The kernel is lightning fast but they weighed it down with a lot of daemons and Gnomey-crap.

My record speed for booting puppy is 13 seconds (to Xvesa, Xorg adds another few seconds).

Posted: Sat 03 Oct 2009, 06:56
by puppyiso
Since Fluppy is for netbooks, please make sure it works with most wireless centered netbooks.

My 3 year old Toshiba works well when booted Puppy but my new netbook doesn't.

Posted: Sat 03 Oct 2009, 12:59
by jakfish
With frugal install to class 6 4gb Kingston sd, 900mhz selected in eee 900 BIOS, I cold boot to 4.3 desktop in 42 seconds (no grub, no unenbootin menu choice of linux flavor).

I realize that usb/sd booting is the slowest way to go, but would love shave off some time nonetheless.

Jake

Posted: Sat 03 Oct 2009, 14:45
by eztuxer
I'd love to test it on my AAO 150 @1.6 GHz with 1;5 GB ram and 8.9" screen.

Posted: Sat 03 Oct 2009, 18:20
by jemimah
puppyiso, what kind of network problems are you experiencing? Driver problems? Or the networking wizard does't work?

I've been attempting to port Moblin's Connman to puppy, but no luck so far.