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Puppy related raves and general interest that doesn't fit anywhere else
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Moat
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#2536 Post by Moat »

Colonel Panic wrote: (I like the desktop clock).
Hi Colonel - that's cairo-clock (w/Radium clock face), installed from the Yum Extender package manager. Actually, all of the apps in the pic were in the default repos - MtPaint, Galculator, Gcolor2 - and TeeJee's Conky Manager was there as well (providing the conky in the lower right). 8)

Bob

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#2537 Post by Puppyt »

Windows 7 Professional >gak<

So I was recently given a Motion Computing CL900 slate /tablet: 2GB RAM, 1.5GHz Z670 Atom CPU, bluetooth keyboard, GPS - all very nice, and I'm really grateful. My usual plan is to debride the M$ OS of all but the essential software (ala Tiny7 etc), clean up and defrag muchly to provide a decent area on the hard drive to enable a dual boot with Puppy, or in this case a Tablet-focused Linux distro of some description. Somehow I couldn't get into the BIOS to check for boot ordering etc, to simplify distro testing on a SD card etc before squeezing it onto the 52GB HDD. Pressing the F2 key or touching the splash screen on startup doesn't do the deal for me. Still working on it - has been innumerous opportunities during restarts at abortive attempts to automatically "update" the "system". Perhaps there's an incantation I should be using...

Everything *was* working really nicely until I relented to the harping pop-ups that I needed updating for like, 2 years of protection for All That Is Good in the M$ Universe / Income Stream. I have been largely sheltered from M$ since jumping to Puppy before Vista became a "thing", but from my recent experience I simply cannot fathom that billions of M$ users (??) tolerate (and will until 2020) this level of service from their hard-earned. So many dead ends to get around the automatic "update" issues (finally found this instructional and working through it https://www.howtogeek.com/255435/how-to ... ce-rollup/). I haven't been using this OS - frankly, I feel that whatever is left of my sanity or intelligence has been used, and abused. I'm not currently writing from the CL900 - it says it has another 45 minutes to complete updates (read: another 3 wasted days). It is sitting over in the corner, glowering at me like a Monster Book of Monsters, teasing me with an infinite loop of "Searching for updates on this computer..." So I'm writing from my Trusty TahrPup 32 desktop, and feeling the stress slowly ebb away from my attempts at mastering the Dark Arts of M$.

Rant over
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Colonel Panic
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#2538 Post by Colonel Panic »

Moat wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote: (I like the desktop clock).
Hi Colonel - that's cairo-clock (w/Radium clock face), installed from the Yum Extender package manager. Actually, all of the apps in the pic were in the default repos - MtPaint, Galculator, Gcolor2 - and TeeJee's Conky Manager was there as well (providing the conky in the lower right). 8)

Bob
Thanks.

I've just installed Neptune 4.5.2 and upgraded it to the latest release (4.5.3), and as usual it's a good Debian-based distro, albeit one with systemd (so not for people who want to avoid the latter).
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

Retro1989
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#2539 Post by Retro1989 »

My main distro is actually Linux mint 18 mate and i have been using mint since version 11, usually prefering to stick on the LTS editions.
I use puppy on my media centre box as its only low end with 1 700mhz P3 CPU and 512mb RAM

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nitehawk
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#2540 Post by nitehawk »

Still using MX-15 (with constant upgrades). Works perfectly. Not a problem in months and months, and MONTHS. Recently installed Refracta Linux (sharing the same hard drive on main computer). Put Refracta on other, older computer. Very good results! MX is totally great for a higher-powered computer,..(really flies)....and Refracta works so well on older (low-powered) computers. Both are just really great (non-System-d) Debian based OS for any computer. Used to love Vector Linux, (Slackware-based)...but they seem to have gone by the wayside lately. So impressed by Refracta, though,....(and MX has no equal, in my book).

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nitehawk
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#2541 Post by nitehawk »

Installed Absolute 14.2 on my second computer (one that I use quite a lot). Couldn't get my network going. Nothing I tried worked. Then I remembered a previous post here by Colonel Panic......
(the one where he says that a LQ thread mentioned using "dhclient eth0" in terminal). By gummie, that works! Thanks Col. P. (nitehawk very happy).

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Colonel Panic
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#2542 Post by Colonel Panic »

Thanks for telling me that too nitie, it's great to know I was able to make a difference! That's the joy of a forum like this one; you never know when something you've written in the past
about a problem you've had, and managed to find a solution to, may be of benefit to someone else having the same or a similar problem.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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nitehawk
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#2543 Post by nitehawk »

...yes,..still very happy with Absolute. Only BIG problem, is no sound! I guess it's a problem with Slackware 14.2 itself. Nothing I try works,...but I've been over to LQ to try and find a solution. Refracta (that I have on another partition)...won't boot anymore when I added SlackO 6.3 to a partition (and added Grub4Dos). That's a "Devuan" thing, since I had that very same thing happen to an install of Devuan.
I just put on MX-16 on that partition ....problem solved. :lol:

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Colonel Panic
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#2544 Post by Colonel Panic »

nitehawk wrote:...yes,..still very happy with Absolute. Only BIG problem, is no sound! I guess it's a problem with Slackware 14.2 itself. Nothing I try works,...but I've been over to LQ to try and find a solution. Refracta (that I have on another partition)...won't boot anymore when I added SlackO 6.3 to a partition (and added Grub4Dos). That's a "Devuan" thing, since I had that very same thing happen to an install of Devuan.
I just put on MX-16 on that partition ....problem solved. :lol:
Hi again Nitie,

Slack 14.2 has moved over to PulseAudio, which I don't like and doesn't work well on my computer. Usually when distros insist on loading Pulse I can just get into alsamixer and select the sound card manually, but if I remember rightly I had to reinstall a couple of packages including PulseAudio itself and alsa-utils before I could get sound working. I agree, it's a nuisance but it might work with your machine.

Grub4DOS ... I feel your pain with that too. It doesn't seem to like booting distros based on Devuan / Ubuntu together with ones based on Slackware, and will just ignore all the non-Slack ones (or at least the kernels).

I'm not an expert on Grub and generally try and let the distros take care of it automatically when I install them, but that hasn't been working out too well recently and I might try and set the config file up manually instead next time (or use a different boot manager such as Plop).
Last edited by Colonel Panic on Tue 18 Apr 2017, 11:33, edited 1 time in total.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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nitehawk
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#2545 Post by nitehawk »

Well,...never could get the sound working in Absolute Linux. Switched over to Salix,...and discovered that I like it a LOT! It's a keeper on my "most-used" computer (Got Windows7--MX--Salix--SlackO 6.3 on a Tb hard drive).

Now,...only problem I see with Salix,..is that it is too big for a CD now. I used a flashdrive (and unetbootin) to install. I want to put the 32 bit version on a really OLD Dell Optiplex,....but I'm all out of DVD disks,..and the Dell won't boot from flashdrives. DRATS! Maybe it's Antix and Puppy for that old computer.

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Colonel Panic
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#2546 Post by Colonel Panic »

nitehawk wrote:Well,...never could get the sound working in Absolute Linux. Switched over to Salix,...and discovered that I like it a LOT! It's a keeper on my "most-used" computer (Got Windows7--MX--Salix--SlackO 6.3 on a Tb hard drive).

Now,...only problem I see with Salix,..is that it is too big for a CD now. I used a flashdrive (and unetbootin) to install. I want to put the 32 bit version on a really OLD Dell Optiplex,....but I'm all out of DVD disks,..and the Dell won't boot from flashdrives. DRATS! Maybe it's Antix and Puppy for that old computer.
I agree nitie, Salix is too big for a CD now. Vector Light still runs (and installs) off a CD though, so that might be worth a look.

There's a new version of Salix Live (14.2.1) out this week, and I might test it out if I get some time this weekend. For now though, since I've had a lot of trouble getting this machine to boot recently I've taken the bold step of refomatting my hard drive and using it exclusively to store Puppy save and .sfs files - sort of a halfway house towards a frugal install, but without installing Grub on the hard drive's MBR. I'm mostly using PuppEX (Exton) Xenial, though I've also been using Tahr64 606 and PuppEX Slacko 6.3.0.

I've tried installing distros (especially MX) on a flash drive, but it's almost glacially slow to load an application from USB and I'm afraid I just don't have the patience to persevere with that.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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#2547 Post by bark_bark_bark »

Colonel Panic wrote:I've tried installing distros (especially MX) on a flash drive, but it's almost glacially slow to load an application from USB and I'm afraid I just don't have the patience to persevere with that.
Don't you have access to USB3? Maybe a USB SSD or USB HDD might help.
....

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Colonel Panic
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#2548 Post by Colonel Panic »

bark_bark_bark wrote:
Colonel Panic wrote:I've tried installing distros (especially MX) on a flash drive, but it's almost glacially slow to load an application from USB and I'm afraid I just don't have the patience to persevere with that.
Don't you have access to USB3? Maybe a USB SSD or USB HDD might help.
Thanks for the advice, but I've got a 2008 computer so I'm reluctant to spend a lot of money to fix anything with it. The easiest way of fixing this by spending more money would be to buy a new internal hard drive; a 500 GB hard drive is about £25 on Amazon and it would still be bigger than the one I have now.

As it is, I've got a solution that works; I've just got to remember where my Puppy disks are so that I don't mislay them for when I get up in the morning (and so far I've managed not to).

[EDIT: actually I don't even need to do that. If I leave the lupu CD in the CD drive when I power the machine down, when I boot it up again it will load itself and then its savefile of its own accord without my needing to select any.]
Last edited by Colonel Panic on Sat 15 Apr 2017, 09:10, edited 6 times in total.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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other OS's

#2549 Post by realwigums »

i run slackware almost exclusively anymore. im really liking slacko too

ive also dev'd on yoper linux and vector linux and am starting another which will be called principia (slackware based) which will include zfs on root and dep handling of official slackware packages

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Moat
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#2550 Post by Moat »

Just tried the new Ubuntu Gnome 17.04, released today. Ugg. :? USB live session, and Wifi detected but wouldn't connect. Fail!

I don't at all "get" Gnome 3 - everything is so "dumbed down" - too-big icons/titlebars (utter waste of screen space), clumsy finding/accessing applications via the dash/menu/launcher/whatever, severe lack of native functionality/options in many applications and widgets, difficult to customize the desktop/layout without jumping through hoops (if even then), aesthetically too simplistic and flat.

The environment makes it feel like there's a "wall" of sorts, between the user and the operating system and it's functions... and either you accept things as they are OOTB, or "...tough luck". :?:

Seems to me that Linux tends to attract "power users" - people who like full and easily-accessed features that allow setting up and customizing the system to their preferences/workflow needs (one of the great, traditional characteristics of Linux) - Gnome 3 is so dumbed down as to completely work against that kind of power and flexibility. Anti-Linux, really. Why?? I have no idea what's behind their intentions/goals (mimic the flawed Windows 10 UI, I suppose...) - but it's an overall blatant failure, IMHO. I've tried (and failed) to like it in the past, and tried again (and failed) today with the latest stable version. Yechhh!! :(

Mate, Xfce and Lxde, FTW (none of which are perfect, but still vastly superior overall) .

Bob

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#2551 Post by rufwoof »

Moat wrote:Just tried the new Ubuntu Gnome 17.04, released today. Ugg. :? USB live session, and Wifi detected but wouldn't connect. Fail!

I don't at all "get" Gnome 3 - everything is so "dumbed down" - too-big icons/titlebars
In Debian Gnome you use either system-settings or tweak-tool to change those sorts of things. First off I didn't like the 'standardisation' myself, but after a while you get a better feel for commonality being a good thing.
clumsy finding/accessing applications via the dash/menu/launcher/whatever
Windows/special key then type the first letter or two of what you want to run, Windows/te for instance will show the Terminal icon.

If you go into tweak-tool you can add additional extensions by downloading .zip files and installing those. I added one to make the top left hot corner with less resistance. I also added a bottom panel as mouse down and continued at the bottom centre of the screen wasn't to my liking.

When you get more used to mouse into top left or press Win key and type t for terminal, L for libre ...etc its quite nice is some ways. I dropped back to using LXDE however as I just have a top of screen panel with my more common apps/program as icons in that ... so even more productive/quicker IMO.

As a common desktop interface gnome is quite good for across a wide range of kit IMO. You can either mostly navigate using just the keyboard, or mostly navigate using the mouse (touch). I think a good way to run it is to open programs you use on different desktops and then mouse into top left corner and pick which one to switch to. In debian they only had a close button on each window and I had to hunt around to find how to add minimise/maximise buttons (in tweak-tool), but only then later 'got-it' about not bothering to minimise windows and instead just switch to another workspace (desktop).

I haven't seen the Ubuntu version so that might be totally different.

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Re: other OS's

#2552 Post by nitehawk »

realwigums wrote:i run slackware almost exclusively anymore. im really liking slacko too

ive also dev'd on yoper linux and vector linux and am starting another which will be called principia (slackware based) which will include zfs on root and dep handling of official slackware packages
...ah,..let us know when you get principia going (sounds interesting). Gotta admit I love the clean, no-nonsense of Slackware. I just got lazy lately,..and prefer Salix. Doesn't Salix tout itself as: "Slackware for lazy slakers"...? :lol:

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#2553 Post by realwigums »

i cant stand how they (salix) build packages and the fact that they rely on sourcforge
for packages. i know a couple of the salix guys from using slackware for so long.
smart people i just hate the way they build and submit packages

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nitehawk
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#2554 Post by nitehawk »

realwigums wrote:i cant stand how they (salix) build packages and the fact that they rely on sourcforge
for packages. i know a couple of the salix guys from using slackware for so long.
smart people i just hate the way they build and submit packages
Well,..I'm not a dev,...(just a happy linux user for over 10 years now). But my very favorite Slax-based used to be Vector. Then they started to deviate from basic Slackware,...and then the releases got farther and farther apart. I started with Vector back at version 5.9 (and was sold on it!). But I've had to go looking else-where for a good Slackware based distro. Salix seems to be OK so far (just started with it). Absolute is kind-of a little "raw" around the edges (or so it seems to me). Couldn't get my sound working in it. Any suggestions you could give about a decent small Slackware distro would be very appreciated!

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Colonel Panic
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#2555 Post by Colonel Panic »

nitehawk wrote:
realwigums wrote:i cant stand how they (salix) build packages and the fact that they rely on sourcforge
for packages. i know a couple of the salix guys from using slackware for so long.
smart people i just hate the way they build and submit packages
Well,..I'm not a dev,...(just a happy linux user for over 10 years now). But my very favorite Slax-based used to be Vector. Then they started to deviate from basic Slackware,...and then the releases got farther and farther apart. I started with Vector back at version 5.9 (and was sold on it!). But I've had to go looking else-where for a good Slackware based distro. Salix seems to be OK so far (just started with it). Absolute is kind-of a little "raw" around the edges (or so it seems to me). Couldn't get my sound working in it. Any suggestions you could give about a decent small Slackware distro would be very appreciated!
I agree with you about Vector; though I still use it sometimes it's been a bit disappointing recently compared to the Vector releases I remember in the past (5.9 SOHO was excellent IMO). They had a great package management system which was unique to the distro, called Quick Picks, and then scrapped it for no apparent reason.

ConnochaetOS is still going, and although I found it a bit rough around the edges it still works; it's a Slack-based distro for older computers and which uses free software only. Zenwalk released a new version in February this year; though it's now 64-bit only it might be worth a look.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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