Puppeee 4.3X

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jemimah · #81 Post by **jemimah** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 00:02

That's really weird Prehistoric! But I am no closer to understanding what the problem is.

Jakfish, Save File To Ram works good! It will definitely be included in the next release early next week. Of course you realize you're trading slow shutdown time for slow boot time...

jemimah · #82 Post by **jemimah** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 00:31

Wow with the drive spun down and everything in RAM I'm running at a very cool 6.4 watts! I may actually get the 10 hour battery life this laptop is supposed to be rated for.

Thank you Jakfish for reminding me I wanted to do this.

jakfish · #83 Post by **jakfish** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 01:51

Encouraging to hear. As for save-less shutdowns, this thread helps:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=321761

Jake

jemimah · #84 Post by **jemimah** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 02:57

I guess your laptop isn't exactly a high-availability database or anything, but I'd be worried about data integrity doing that. It looks like it would be ok at the block level, but you might introduce logical errors this way. You're basically pulling the plug on whatever files you had open. If you also disabled periodic saving, though, then I can't think of any reason it would screw up your save file, but I'd have to look at the script. You'd have to mount it read only be to absolutely sure.

jakfish · #85 Post by **jakfish** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 11:29

You're right; it is pulling the plug. Because upon reboot, you get this error saying xorg closed down unexpectantly, do you want to ignore this or rebuild, you have thirty seconds to make a choice.

So what you have to do is disable this message in xwin, which I've done, so yeah, it's really primitive.

Since users can stop periodic saves, I don't know why such an option can't extend to the shutdown process.

Jake

prehistoric · #86 Post by **prehistoric** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 13:08

@jemimah,

I can't seem to get you a dmesg from one of the failed boots, because when it can't find the sfs files, it drops into an initrd console, which reports it can't find the tty. This could be a clue about where to look for the problem.

When I use the modified Xandros grub menu to boot into your system from the SSD, I get the dmesg and lsmod output attached below. Perhaps this will tell something.

A note about booting from SD cards: I've been assuming everyone boots from the SD card the same way I do, by using the BIOS setup to change the order it tries "hard drives". If you have found some other way to boot from an SD card, without modifying the contents of internal drives, I'd like to know.

jemimah · #87 Post by **jemimah** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 15:03

Prehistoric, that output doesn't help me with the card reader problem. But your networking problem seems to be caused by the fact that both ath5k and ath9k are loading. That shouldn't happen. Does your sound work?

I get that same tty mesg but I can type commands. Do you not get a prompt, or what?

I leave the boot order alone. I just press esc a bunch of times when it's first starting and choose the card reader from the menu. I wonder if that could possibly make a difference...

jemimah · #88 Post by **jemimah** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 15:12

Jakfish, I don't imagine a lot of the options for Puppy were exactly designed with netbooks in mind. That's what we're trying to fix. Read-only save file is an interesting idea that would be fairly trivial to add. The problem is you eventually run out of memory...

Is suspend working for you? Startup and shutdown times become a lot less irritating if you can suspend and resume in two seconds.

prehistoric · #89 Post by **prehistoric** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 18:10

@Jemimah,

With all my experience, I should have known the error message was in error. (This is right up there with the ancient system in which available memory was reported as 0K. Handling a service call from a customer who insisted it said things were OK was worthy of a comedy routine.)

I can get a dmesg, which leads to a new problem, I am not able to mount anything on which to save it. (I'll spare you a blow-by-blow description of other problems. These have confirmed my belief future archeologists will identify the layer marking our civilization by three index artifacts: dead batteries, incompatible chargers and lost remotes.) Once my camera is charged, I'll send a screen shot.

For now, I can confirm that it is treating the SD card as sda and the internal SSD as sdb. These show up clearly because there is only one partition on the card, while there are 4 on the internal ASUS-PHISON SSD drive. It refers to sda as SCSI 2:0:0:0 and sdb as SCSI 1:0:0:0. There is a message from ata2 that the SD card is slow to respond. The text ends at precisely the point where it finally reports sdb as an attached SCSI disk. After this it can't find anything.

Something seems to be backwards.

Added: The mixer in the tray continues to come up muted on boots from the internal SSD. ALSA sound will configure, and I can hear some sound, but the master volume slider remains unusable.

Correction: the very last line in dmesg is:
"<6> Freeing unused kernel memory: 324k freed"

Time to check on the batteries in that camera.

cor · #90 Post by **cor** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 21:18

I'm thrilled about this new puppeee. Amazingly fast. However I can't get the touchpad to work properly. Tapping on the touchpad doesn't work. I followed the leads on the subject in this forum, but to no avail. I have a 701 (Eeepc). Pretty standard I would say. Did I overlook something?

prehistoric · #91 Post by **prehistoric** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 21:46

@Jemimah,

Here are the pictures of that dmesg output photographed off the screen. I apologize for the quality. I'm posting them anyway, as you may be able to glean enough information to locate the problem. These were taken with a handheld camera after a struggle with automatic flash, exposure and autofocus, which were all sure I didn't want a picture like this. The text was viewed in e3vi, so you can see the line numbers on the bar at the bottom, if you wonder where you are. I believe the information you want is near the end.

If necessary, I'll go back and do a better job.

prehistoric · #92 Post by **prehistoric** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 21:52

more screen shots of that dmesg.

smokey01 · #93 Post by **smokey01** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 22:19

prehistoric try this in the console window:

dmesg > dmesg.txt

This should gernerate a text file in /root/dmesg.txt which you can then upload.

Smokey

prehistoric · #94 Post by **prehistoric** » Sat 31 Oct 2009, 23:53

@smokey01,

Afraid you missed the context of my problem. Those screenshots were from dmesg.txt created as you suggest and viewed in an editor. I can't upload the text, or transfer it to another medium, because the boot fails by losing track of disks, etc. I never get to the point where the sfs files load, let alone reach the internet..

@Jemimah,

I see those pictures have been downloaded. I'm (almost) recovered from my last go round. Do you want me to make another attempt?

Added: I don't think I responded to some of your comments.

I'm using the networking wizard for wireless, because it works for me, and I understand it. The wizard finds the ath5k module without a problem. I just exit from wpa_gui.

I've tried booting off the SD card both ways, and it doesn't seem to matter.

The reason for using BIOS setup and changing the order of "hard disks" is that this way I can continue trying things and rebooting as long as a bootable SD card is in the reader when boot starts, without needing to hit escape or F2 in time. (I tend to be a little slow at my age.) When it comes time to hand the netbook over to the person who currently uses the Xandros system, I just pop out the SD card and it automatically reverts to booting Xandros only.

magerlab · #95 Post by **magerlab** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 10:13

there's no happiness in this life:)
ndiswrapper works ok but wpa connection is always with troubles( i need to run wizard several times to connect....)
haven't used new version with madwifi yet

is there a way to disable sleep mode when i close the lid

i noticed that if i ihave streaming radio in gxine and close the lid
eee pc freezes after wake up

jemimah · #96 Post by **jemimah** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 17:30

Cor, On the Desktop menu, choose Flsynclient. Goto the tapping tab and set "One Finger" to "left button" and make sure "Tap Time" is greater than 0.

jemimah · #97 Post by **jemimah** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 17:34

Magerlab, to disable lid suspend, move the file "lid" out of the /etc/acpi/events directory.

jemimah · #98 Post by **jemimah** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 17:56

Prehistoric, it's certainly detecting your card reader, and it's seeing sdb. There's probably a way to mount sdb1 by by hand and copy the dmesg file. You have the mount command in the initrd. Something like 'mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt' should do the job.

Can you try booting without any pmedia or pdev arguments? It should search everywhere then.

jemimah · #99 Post by **jemimah** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 18:11

After a couple late night hacking runs, the ramboot option is ready. I will post beta 4 tomorrow night, but if you want to try it out early, I'm posting the initrd here.

The ramboot option enables you to load all sfs files and your save file into RAM and run completely diskless. Of course you need to keep these files small enough to fit in the amount of RAM you have, leaving some space for the OS to operate. If you have the a regular spinning hard drive you can then use the hdparm utility to shut it down, saving power and reducing noise. Plus you'll get even faster performance. The downside is, none of your changes will be persistent (at least not yet, I may, in the future, provide a shutdown script that copies your save file back to disk). So the procedure is, set up your save file how you want it, then use the ramboot option when you're not planning on doing anything you want to save.

To try out ramboot, replace your initrd.gz with that attached one. Then add 'ramboot=1' to the kernel line in your menu.1st or syslinux.cfg.

EDIT: This seems not to work from a USB drive for some reason... investigating.
EDIT:no, it just freaks out if you try to boot it without a save file. I should add error checking for that.

cor · #100 Post by **cor** » Sun 01 Nov 2009, 18:23

jemimah wrote:Cor, On the Desktop menu, choose Flsynclient. Goto the tapping tab and set "One Finger" to "left button" and make sure "Tap Time" is greater than 0.

Thnx! It worked!

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Puppeee 4.3X

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dmesg from failed boot

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dmesg from failed boot on 900A

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