Turbopup early versions

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

Turbopup early versions

#1 Post by greengeek »

Does anyone have copies of the early versions of Turbopup (alpha 2, alpha 3a and alpha 4 particularly)??

I've got the Turbopup Xtreme 1.0 version but it looks like some of the 'less extreme' versions might be what I am looking for.
Last edited by greengeek on Sun 26 Jan 2014, 18:34, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
ally
Posts: 1957
Joined: Sat 19 May 2012, 19:29
Location: lincoln, uk
Contact:

#2 Post by ally »


User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#3 Post by greengeek »

Thanks for the link ally! These earlier Turbopups are quite good for older machines a bit short on memory or processing power.

One of the isos available at that link is TurboPup Alpha 3a which is a more 'mild' version - not as radical as TurboPup xtreme. It might suit some users who found the 'Xtreme' version a step too far. It allows a choice of JWM or IceWM which are fairly similar. The IceWM has a more traditional looking menu bar.

TurboPup Alpha 3a download here:
https://ia801009.us.archive.org/4/items ... lpha3a.iso
Attachments
V3a_JWM_screenie.jpg
(27.04 KiB) Downloaded 982 times
V3a_IceWM_screenie.jpg
(36.71 KiB) Downloaded 954 times

Dewbie

#4 Post by Dewbie »

greengeek wrote:
not as radical as TurboPup xtreme. It might suit some users who found the 'Xtreme' version a step too far.
Specifically what do you mean?

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#5 Post by greengeek »

Dewbie wrote:Specifically what do you mean?
As synth was developing various versions of Turbopup he was progressively stripping things out of the original 420 pup in order to make it faster. By the time he produced TurboPup Xtreme he had changed so many things that it made the system behave quite differently to what 420 used to be. This made it less familiar to some users, and more difficult to use and maintain.

There were several complaints made by users of Turbopup Xtreme. The ones I can remember were:
1) Black background is too hard to work with.
2) Icon bar / task bar that pops out from left hand margin is too small and difficult to work with
3) Insufficient time to change boot options when booting from CD (have to hold 'p' key down permanently at specific time during boot or else user gets no opportunity to enter boot options)
4) rt kernel (or semi-rt??) causes keypad dropouts (or repeats) on some hardware
5) Sometimes grabs wrong savefile (maybe operator error?)
6) Difficult (and sometimes impossible) to change certain configurations without breaking the whole system

There were some good positive comments from a number of users about the alpha 3a version (none negative as far as I recall) so I thought it might be useful to highlight it as a stable and quick version for those who want a pup for underpowered machines.

By contrast there were more comments from people who found the Xtreme version just too extreme and hard to work with.

Given that there may be a number of potential new puppians trying puppy out on old hardware before they commit to trying it on their newer hardware I thought a softer version of Turbopup might be handy. These versions kind of got lost amongst the development of Turbopup Xtreme (which I would rate as a work of sheer genius...)

Dewbie

#6 Post by Dewbie »

greengeek wrote:
Does anyone have copies of the early versions of Turbopup (alpha 2, alpha 3a and alpha 4 particularly)??

Apparently there wasn't an Alpha 4.
synth's change log shows Beta 1 (the first Turbopup Xtreme) as the next release after Alpha 3a.
Took it for a spin...same problem as 4.21; icons pile up in bottom-left corner of screen.
(Xvesa, 800 x 600; erasing and redrawing them doesn't help, either.)

Also, it doesn't matter which drive is clicked; they all launch Pmount instead of going straight to that partition.
Last edited by Dewbie on Tue 11 Feb 2014, 11:47, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#7 Post by greengeek »

Dewbie wrote:..same problem as 4.21; icons pile up in bottom-left corner of screen.
Thanks Dewbie. It seems that this occurs on some puppies only when using specific video resolutions (When the 'pinboard icon grid step' parameter is not a clean fraction of the desktop resolution). In the case of Alpha3a the quickest fix is as follows:

1) Right click one of the desktop icons (eg 'paint') and select 'RoxFiler' and 'Options'
2) In the left hand pane click on the word 'Pinboard'
3) In the right hand pane look at the bottom for 'Icon grid step', set it to 'Fine' then click OK.
4) Click Menu, Desktop, drive icons manager, then tick all three boxes and do the 'erase and re-draw'
5) Click 'menu' then 'Shutdown', then in the shutdown menu choose 'Advanced' then restart x server.

There is another way which some users may prefer:

Click the Files icon (top left) and open the .config directory
Open the rox.sourceforge.net directory
Open the ROX-Filer directory
Rightclick the 'Options' file and select 'Edit with Geany'
Almost right at the bottom of that file you will see an entry for 'pinboard_grid_step' which can be changed to 1 or 2 (the previous default will have been 16 for medium grid step or 32 for coarse grid step)
Save the file and restart x.


If I find Alpha3a settles down to being useful longterm on some of my older machines I will probably make an updated iso with some bugfixes for these usability issues. I do quite like the 4.2 series.

User avatar
greengeek
Posts: 5789
Joined: Tue 20 Jul 2010, 09:34
Location: Republic of Novo Zelande

#8 Post by greengeek »

Dewbie wrote:Also, it doesn't matter which drive is clicked; they all launch Pmount instead of going straight to that partition.
To set up the 'click to go straight to Rox window' you can do the following:

Click Menu, Desktop, Desktop drive icons manager, then go to the 'Icon Handler' tab then tick the 'Tick box for auto detection of target application' then click ok.

There may be some other way to achieve this just by setting a parameter in a config file - I will post back if I find it...

EDIT :
In order to force a partition to open and show its contents as soon as you click on it do the following:

open the file /etc/eventmanager and look for the line:

Code: Select all

AUTOTARGET=false
and change the 'false' to 'true' then save the file.

The parameters governing how icons are displayed on the desktop are also in this file, so if you wanted to have all of the partition icons always displayed and also have them open as soon as you click them (without stalling at pmount) just look for each of the following lines:

Code: Select all

ICONDESK=false
ICONPARTITIONS=false
AUTOTARGET=false
and set them all to true.

(you may also want to set HOTPLUGON=false and HOTPLUGNOISY=false to true - just be aware that the more 'automatic' functions you set to true, the higher the cpu load. Doesn't make a huge difference but it depends how much resource you have available...)

Post Reply