Pussy: potentially a Puppy with a perfect package manager

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
Message
Author
User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

#1606 Post by sickgut »

Bob_the_plumber wrote:Hmm.. how do i install this stuff the only choice i have is "live cd, live cd copy to ram, live cd failsafe.." frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about this live cd feature, i want it on my hd. is there a way to install it because i'm so noob that i did not find it. :oops:

NERVERMIND I've read the first pages of the post and there is no "easy" installation, I'll try to find a way or read more.


Well after reading how to do a hd image here http://www.thepussycatforest.info/linux/README.txt i think i will give up, i'm to noob for this kind of stuff and i will surely mess up my puppy / winxp dual boot.. :evil: :(
yeah pussy is a live distro and best ran from a CDROM or USB stick. If you want to use a USB stick then download and use the .img.zip, and unzip it then use "dd" to image it to the USB stick (instructions in the README on the website) or there are a number of utilities that run in windows that can use the .iso to put on a USB stick. Either way, you can still run a save file on your HDD or compressed save file on your USB stick. (You can literally fit 20GB on a 8GB USB stick when using compressed save files).

HDD installs while not "officially supported" (ie. every computer system is different and so while we can help you, we cant tell you exactly what to type command for command if you have problems, the only way to be sure is to visit you personally and take a look at your setup) most people do end up installing to HDD once they have had some experience with grub.

However, Pussy was MADE to run from a USB stick and will work so well doing this that in most cases it negates the need to run from a HDD. Also this lets you simply leave your other OSes alone and not have to mess with your HDD.

As far as bugs and or features that need to be added and or fix in Pussy goes, the HDD install method that is newbie friendly is top priority.

It was a trade off when planning to make Pussy, either use normal debian and have an easy HDD install method and loose the ability to run from cd and USB, or use debian live and have very well supported cd and usb installs but loose the HDD install feature. The live usb and cd method was chosen over HDD only.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

#1607 Post by sickgut »

Pussy-Pie update:

Pussy for the Raspberry Pi is making progress. The server version is already available for download from the website: http://www.thepussycatforest.info

The more Puppy-like OS that i am working on now uses the server version as a base and keeps all the servery type things intact while adding a proper usable desktop.

So far all the apps are installed and i am working on the cosmetic type stuff to tie it all in. The desktop will initially look very much like normal Pussy with it booting to JWM and giving the user the option of enabling ROX filer to handle the background icons etc and file managing. This is even more important on Pussy Pie than normal Pussy because the Rasp has so little resources.

Here is a list of the applications that Pussy Pie Desktop will have: (may call this one Pussy Pie Xtra, to keep in line with current naming of the different Pussies.)

mtpaint, leafpad, gpicview, mplayer + mplayer-gui, dillo, milkytracker, rosegarden, XFburn, xaos, cadubi, dosbox, basic256, squashfstools, mhwaveedit, ayttm, epdfview, fbreader, airstrike, hydrogen, audacity, jackd, dead-souls (a MUD text adventure game server ), and of cause the openssh-server, pure-ftpd, telnet server and lighttpd webserver.

There are some familiar apps in there and some that i thought would be interesting to add. Rosegarden/ milkytracker/ hydrogen/ audacity/ jackd (including jack2 and all the other tiny midi packages that it depends on) could be a very good and educational music suite for that revolves around the midi and mod formats. Depending on performance, i may subtract and or add to this lineup of music type apps. I have a midi keyboard and i will use it to test and set it all up well, the OS wont ship with badly configured jack/ rosegarden that is kinda fiddly at the best of times.

This may lean heavily on audio type things but the Rasp Pi is so restricting that its probably best to play to its strengths, because the problem here is trying to find things that it can actually run, and using the Rasp Pi as a useful midi and recording station for home studios is something the Rasp can actually do and do it *silently*. With no fans needed to cool it, the Rasp is silent and this is good for home studios.

I fear that the application selection will undergo many reviews as better drivers and utilities for the Rasp are released. For instance, when OpenGL actually works on debian and is accelerated then I will add some games and maybe release a dedicated games OS as well. When webcams are more available, then a webcam app will be added ... etc... you get the picture.

Many things in the Raspbian repos are not there, either they need to more time to compile the entire Debian repos for the Rasp, or there is some real compatibility issues somewhere. For example, i wanted to add DOSEmu but its not there, but DosBox is. Its not just a matter of performance that dictates what apps we can have working on the Rasp, but the actual availability of applications that have been compiled.

There are a couple of oddities that i am attempting to iron out as far as the disk footprint. Here are a couple of issues as an example:

xcalc: a calculator is always expected to be there, but for some reason this simple program depends on 50MB of other apps, this is strange.

Midori: while this is only a 18mb program, when i try to apt-get it, the dependencies total more than 100MB. In comparison, iceweasel the debian version of firefox only needs 20mb of space including dependencies.

due to the lack of a decent repo of static packages that have been compiled for the Rasp, i kinda have my hands tied with what i can install. If i was to install these and then delete the junky type dependencies from the filesystem manually, this would leave a broken and therefor an incompatible Raspbian OS in its wake, and apt-get will simply be very buggy or may be completely unusable.

There is also no solution for running a compressed filesystem using squashfs for the main OS (this is not a live system like other Pussies).
So 50mb is really actually 50mb. Whereas with other Pussies, 50mb of install programs really only took about 13mb after slimming them and then adding them to the compressed squashfs filesystem. And because all Rasp Pi users will be using SD cards, we need to keep a very small footprint.

well.... back to work :)

[Edit:] I forgot to mention that xarchiver and anyterm will be included. The anyterm server lets you designate a port number to run on and when you surf to that port using a web browser, it will provide you with a web to ssh shell interface. You can use it to provide access to the command line interface or a program that can be run at the console. The www.thepussycatforest.info website uses anyterm to provide access to a text adventure game. This becomes a bit of a memory nazi with multiple sessions of this running at once, but its not meant for high traffic. Combining the dead-souls MUD server with anyterm results in a game that is embedded into a webpage that can be used as a chat room.
Last edited by sickgut on Wed 15 Aug 2012, 09:05, edited 1 time in total.

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

#1608 Post by greengeek »

sickgut wrote:There are some familiar apps in there and some that i thought would be interesting to add. Rosegarden/ milkytracker/ hydrogen/ audacity/ jackd (including jack2 and all the other tiny midi packages that it depends on) could be a very good and educational music suite for that revolves around the midi and mod formats.
Sounds awesome. Hydrogen is a lot of fun. Hope everything plays ball and comes together ok.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

Media Streaming

#1609 Post by sickgut »

Hello people....

I have stumbled across an idea and i need advice from all you guys.
Apparently there is a few media "streaming" applications available.

The difference between just serving out video files via the webserver or ftp or samba etc.... and the video files being served out using streaming software is this:

#1) Traditional webserver/ samba/ ftp serving of video files.... when the user surfs to or logs in or clicks on a shared folder and then clicks on a video file, it doesnt play... it downloads and then the user needs to find where it was saved then play the file

#2) With streaming software (as i understand it), you can use your web browser to surf to the servers IP or hostname and all this is the same as number #1 except when you click on the video file, it plays over the network, just like youtube.

Now i am asking you guys for advice, can you guys point me in the right directiion in selecting what media streaming software is easy to use and stable etc... any recommendations are welcome,

I think the Rasp Pi would be able to run streaming software and this would be an awesome addition to Pussy-Pie.

my ears are open and my eyes are even more open... i want to learn

aarf

#1610 Post by aarf »

If i was to stream something i would stick it in a webpage with the appropriate html. I'd have to look the html code up because i havent done it for a long time.

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

Re: Media Streaming

#1611 Post by greengeek »

sickgut wrote:#2) With streaming software (as i understand it), you can use your web browser to surf to the servers IP or hostname and all this is the same as number #1 except when you click on the video file, it plays over the network, just like youtube.
I'm no expert on streaming, but it seems to me that the main issue is owning the rights to the streamed content.

The software and hardware requirements for streaming quality media files from the internet do not seem difficult - but if the owner of the streaming website or media access rights changes the format (for the sake of controlling or monitoring access) it creates a moving target - and that seems to be why there have been so many changes to Flash etc, over the last couple of years.

It is also why Apple does not support Flash- because they want to lock up and control the streamed content in their own way. Apple also says they have controlling rights to Theora aswell, so I don't know how it would be possible to focus on streaming from the internet without falling prey to the controlling natures of the media companies.

If there was an "opensource" version of youtube I think it would be worth streaming, but otherwise I think it is a waste of time trying to keep changing the software in an effort to keep up with the changes they make. (The media controllers don't want Linux hackers accessing the media...They want to use streamed media as a paid, subscription service ala iTunes if they can swing it...).

However, if RasPussy had opensource software for streaming from an HDD to it's own local network then that would be a nice feature.

gcmartin

Re: Media Streaming

#1612 Post by gcmartin »

Streaming is a technology. It has nothing to do with rights. From the developers view in application development, the application can stream or the application can accept a stream. Rights has no place in streaming.

But, I do recognize and respect authorship and artist needs and desires to their work. And I am not purporting anyone to circumvent the digital rights of any product.

Questions
  • Lastly and most important (at least to me) is that VLC is suppose to be able to stream. What would/could be used as its streaming receiver?
  • Can Xine be a streamer and is that documented somewhere?
Thanks in advance for any help on these 2 questions

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

Re: Media Streaming

#1613 Post by greengeek »

gcmartin wrote:Streaming is a technology. It has nothing to do with rights.
But there is no point going to the effort of setting up streaming capability if you have no right to access the codec that is used to format the data. Or if that codec is proprietary and only available to those who pay a subscription, or allow google-style monitoring.

The reason so many people have had so many problems trying to stream from news websites or youtube is that the media companies are keen to prevent free public access to any form of entertainment or media that they can use to make advertising revenue on.

It would be valuable to have streaming capability if there was a universally accepted standard agreed upon by webhosts and media organisations, allowing stable and free access. However that is not currently the case as far as I can tell. Even if you look at the .pdf standard (one of the most universally accepted formats for static information) they still keep changing it year on year.

It's still early days in the moving pictures war, but even now there is very little standardisation in terms of codec etc across the globe. Of course we in Puppyland could make our own choice and have our own PupTube.

User avatar
saintless
Posts: 3862
Joined: Sat 11 Jun 2011, 13:43
Location: Bulgaria

Re: Media Streaming

#1614 Post by saintless »

gcmartin wrote:Questions
Lastly and most important (at least to me) is that VLC is suppose to be able to stream. What would/could be used as its streaming receiver?
Take a look here. Maybe this information will help:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/29/how- ... using-vlc/

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

Re: Media Streaming

#1615 Post by sickgut »

saintless wrote:
gcmartin wrote:Questions
Lastly and most important (at least to me) is that VLC is suppose to be able to stream. What would/could be used as its streaming receiver?
Take a look here. Maybe this information will help:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/29/how- ... using-vlc/

Thanks for that link Saintless. If i can work with VLC then i will set it up so that it can be enabled or disabled etc either as part of the raspi-config that has been left over and unmodified from the original raspbian OS or part of a "catroll panel" ... lol... remember that?

If it gets added to Pussy-Pie-Xtra then ill backport it to Pussy-Pie-Server-Edition as well.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

Samba VS HTTP and FTP

#1616 Post by sickgut »

Hi people,

I am just posting a brief explanation as to what file sharing method i am going to setup in all versions of Pussy-Pie.

While i have left the Samba packages untouched from the original Raspbian OS, i am not going to configure them to do anything special in Pussy-Pie.

This is because as far as i can tell, even to use a perfectly configured samba on a windows machine requires us to educate newbies to use it. Newbies as far as i understand them do not know much about networking at all, even setting up shares and things between windows machines. Samba is there to provide seamless networking interconnectivity between Linux and Windows (and also to other OSes like Mac OS and Android etc).

To leave a perfectly installed and working Samba on a Linux server may seem like blasphemy but using Samba as the primary method of interconnection will result in endless man hours spent on supporting Windows users and Mac and Android users how to use networking on their specific systems to begin with, and then comes the endless cycle of Samba reconfiguring.

My official policy about this is (you can quote me on the record):

"Samba is there if you would like to configure and use it."

And so that is Samba out of the way. Now for HTTP and FTP. This is how all Pussy-Pies will handle file sharing:

lighttpd will provide webserving from /var/www (i may make a link it to /www or /webserver to make it easier to remember). Webserving will be on the usual port 80. This will remain unchanged.

Why mention this about lighttpd? we already know that all Pussies (not just Pussy-Pies) have the webserver running as standard and i can just surf to http://meow/ or http://raspberrypi/ or whatever your hostname is or the IP the machine like http://192.168.1.101 and view your personal website or a blank page if you have not created one. But we know this, why mention it here?

Well, this is because lighttpd will have a second instance running, of the same program but on a different port. The port number will be something like 1234 or 6789 or 1111 or some easy to remember number that doesnt clash with any known popular server app or web application.

You will be able to use your web browser from another computer or device on your network to surf to http://your-pussy-server-name:1234 or the IP addy of the of the machine like http://192.168.1.101:1234
and you will see the list of files you want to share from your Rasp Pi.
You simply right click the one you want and then select "save as" to save it where you like, or if you have configured your browser properly then you can single click and save it. If it is a browser viewable file like a .txt or .html or .swf then the browser will simply view the file or play it, this is good for browsing your stuff but to save these you will need to right click then select "save as". This is the easiest way to share out files and every device that has a web browser on your network will be able to use this feature with no fuss, or configuration on the users part.

To aid with file serving, a dir will be created as /media/local/ or /media/files/ . And the entire /media dir will be the default dir that lighttpd will share out as its second session. This means that as soon as a USB stick or USB HDD is attached to your Rasp Pi, it will appear in the /media dir and automatically will be shared out. This is ideal as it lets the user add a new disk and BOOM! its instantly working as a share. No need to plug in a monitor and configure the mounts and webserver config or login via ssh or telnet to do the same.

What is /media/local about then?
This will be the default place to store any files you want shared out that reside on the OSes SD card. If you are browsing the internet and want to download something and share it out, you save it in this dir and it is instantly available. I may setup the default behavior for the dillo and or secondary browser and other apps like MTpaint and any other program you download or make stuff and then save it to default to /media/local/
as its standard saving folder. This way anything plugged into the Rasp Pi or stuff you make on the Rasp Pi is shared out.

Can i disable the file sharing and or webserver? Yes, there will be an easy "disable" script or button in the Catroll-Panel or you can edit the lighttpd.conf yourself if you are brave.

OK OK .... but how do i PUT files on the Pussy-Pie as browsers only let me download?

Its called FTP and FTPS.

There is a program that is called WinSCP. It is only a few kilobytes in size and it runs on Windows, all the Windows's except for Win 3.11 and lower, ie: Win 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Win 7, Win 8 beta.

This WinSCP program is free and is only one file. The standard default lightppd webpage placeholder will be edited to link to this file as this file will be included with Pussy. This means that any Windows machine surfing to your Pussy-Pie server will be able to download and run this easy to use FTP/ FTPS client.

WinSCP is easy to use, you just add a new connection and you will be prompted to enter the IP or hostname of the server and then its username and password then you can save the config. Now every time you click the WinSCP icon, you are met with an open Window that lets you drag and drop any file into that open window. In this way its almost like using Samba. You can also add a mapped network drive using WinSCP if you want to. This may seem strange to those used to Samba but it really isnt any harder to use than Samba. Instead of configuring the server with a complicated conf file you can within a few clicks have write access to the server. WinSCP also lets you view and or run files with a click. You can drag to and from the WinSCP window just like it was a mapped network drive. WinSCP will default to use FTPS, which is the SSL version of FTP. If you force WinSCP to use normal FTP it will simply be un encrytped.

But what about the other OSes?
WinSCP is available for Mac OS and i may include WinSCP Mac version with Pussy-Pie. I dont know about android but there must be a WinSCP-like program for it, and when i get around to it i will find one and also include it with Pussy-Pie and so every OS will be covered once they use their browser to download it by simply entering http://servername or http://192.168.1.101 for example and then clicking on the version of WinSCP for your OS and saving it to your system and then running it.

What about Linux? Use gFTP its just like WinSCP.

While i invite everyone to comment, this is pretty much the way i go. The only potential change that may happen is that i may use a "super duper ultra fancy configuration" for Samba and there will be Samba and HTTP and FTP/ FTPS working all at the same time. HTTP and FTP have always been there and this isnt a real change, its just a matter of teaching people how to use it. The entire internet is built with Linux/ Solaris/ other *nix computers all running HTTP and FTP... its proven system.

Oh, one more potential change, i may just run one session of lighttpd that shares out /media/local as the default placeholder holder page and it will run on the standard port 80 so you dont have to enter a port number in your browser while surfing to your Rasp. This of cause kind of makes the user choose between sharing files and sharing a home web page. I think file sharing takes priority. If you really want to do both then you can set it up like that. This is only a remote potential chance tho.

Ok ill report with more developments as they happen.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

FoxyRoxy Linux

#1617 Post by sickgut »

Hello People

I am taking the time to shamelessly plug a new Linux distro made by none other than some of our most active developers from Pussy Linux: jbv and saintless.

The name of the distro is FoxyRoxy Linux. It is based on debian live, the same as Pussy, but it has a more visually appealing desktop interface and is heading in the direction of becoming focused on providing an easy to configure NAS server but it still has everything you would expect a Linux distro to have and networking works out of the box first boot. Insert a live CD and as soon as you boot into the desktop, click Firefox and you are away surfing the internet. There is a media player and package management is handled via apt-get or Synaptic. It is definitely worth a look.

The website for FoxyRoxy is:http://www.foxyroxylinux.com

jbv
Posts: 179
Joined: Sat 01 Jan 2011, 00:22

#1618 Post by jbv »

I guess the cat is out of the bag now ... or should that be Pussy? :lol:

Thanks for the shameless plug sickgut, it is genuinely appreciated.

For those who are interested, my project with saintless is now at what we consider a "Developer Release". This means that we've got it sorted and are happy with it, but it needs just a little more spit and polish before it goes live, so to speak. It also means that we really are not able to handle end-user, support type questions.

In some ways it has more than Pussy, yet it also has less. Wireless networking is not installed yet and it may be some time till this is added. We have a vision that will take some work. If you're desperate and need Wireless, you could always apt-get it, but you will also need to be able to set it up / configure it yourself.

The core already has a veritable plethora of network protocol support (via wired connections), with SMB and NFS servers running out of the box, in addition to SSH access and the "to be expected" ... Web server. It also has a DLNA server, which has been tested against a wide variety of TV's and media players, although you do need to manually start this one. It all works.

It has a little more filesystem support, although it won't boot from NTFS and write back to the NTFS partition. It is unlikely to ever be able to do that. However, you can just pop in a USB stick and it is auto-magically mounted and it doesn't use HAL to do it.

It has basic Apps, but no Office Suite. Easily installed using apt-get and we'll have some scripts for cleaning these up within the next week or two.

Going against the Linux grain, we are trying to document stuff, which is always a big task and something that will never be right. But we'll try to do what we can to make life easier for developers in this regard. The docs are a little sparse at the moment and the Forum is definitely showing signs of having just been built, as there are still test messages where we've been beating up on stuff over the last month during the setup process. Some of these threads/messages will change and/or vanish over the next few days, as we begin to finalize the setup process.

The project can be found at FoxyRoxyLinux.com
We've got install guides and what we hope are enough details for developers (general tech people) to have a look, and see if this might be something they would like to be part of or can use.

Our goal is to keep the memory requirement to be under 128Mb and at the moment we're doing really well in this regard. Overall system resource usage is very low on both the memory, and CPU overhead side of things. Our Primary install is a bootable USB stick, or .squashfs files on a local hard drive.

The ISO is 546Mb at the moment, although that also includes the 90Mb build environment, 20Mb of additional sound drivers/patches which may or may-not be required, and 3 kernels (486, 686, 686-Bigmem).

Feel free to have a look, anyone can browse the forum and download the ISO.
If you'd care to drop a note afterwards, that would be great.

www.FoxyRoxyLinux.com

Cheers

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

#1619 Post by sickgut »

Hi people... just checking in to say im still working on Pussy-Pie.... i have been delayed for a few days due to problems compiling anyterm ( www.anyterm.org ) this is the http to shell interface, i see this as important to include in all Pussies as it allows you to control your Pussy system remotely using any device that has a web browser, no need to mess with Putty or telnet or some ssh client.

after anyterm is sorted out, i need to spend some time on the visual interface and that will take a few more days but after that, Pussy-Pie-Xtra will be uploaded and ready for everyone to use

[Edit:] finally have Anyterm compiled.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

#1620 Post by sickgut »

Hello people

still clunking along with Pussy-Pie for the time being.

However i have a renewed vigor for the normal Pussy. I was planning to make the Pussy Xtra the most complete kick ass live CDROM or USB distro possible. There is still a fair bit of space left in the ISO before it hits the 700mb mark.

I figure that Pussy is still new enough to use as a base for a more ambitious project. In previous posts I promised to maintain the current Pussy and keep it uptodate while i start work on the new generation of Pussies for 32 and 64 bit using the new Linux 3.something kernel, however i am going to stick with the current Pussy for a while and while i will start work on the next generation of Pussies at some point i am delaying that in favor or pimping the existing Pussy.

Instead of making Pussy Xtra the best and most complete live CDROM distro possible, i have decided to push it further. Pussy Xtra will be made into the best most kick ass and complete live DVD distro.

Filling up 4.something GB of a DVD disk may be difficult considering the current slimming techniques and squashfs compression, but there are alot of useful apps out there that im sure will add to Pussies usefulness.

Games, software synths, audacity/ rosegarden/ lmms/ hydrogen etc with a properly configured jack and midi system, CUPS, samba, programing utilities, video editing and other apps that i have not even heard of will be added. Looks like ill have to do some research and maybe get some feed back on what apps people actually use. Pussy Xtra is fairly packed while coming in under the 700mb live cdrom mark. A live DVD system could be epic, thats 6 times the space. The mind gets boggley at even the thought of this. I promise however, that i wont fill the DVD iso with crap.

The normal Pussy Xtra that is the flagship of the Pussy distros at the moment will still be available for download when the DVD version is released. Now what the hell do i call the DVD version? Pussy Super Really Big Xtraer? hmmmm maybe "Pussy Over Meow" or something would suit it.

I cant wait till i finish this Pussy-Pie for the Rasp, i have no love for it at all. I wont use it for anything other than a fileserver but it does that very well.

aarf

#1621 Post by aarf »

@sickgut just in case you miss this posted by broomdodger at bkblog http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/0 ... spberry-pi

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

#1622 Post by sickgut »

Pussy-pie: Analogue TV out (PAL/ NTSC) vs HDMI

Having to take a moment (turned into a couple of days) to consider what way to go with this. I could have different desktop environments and resolutions for TV out and HDMI or i could make sure everything is viewable with the lowest denominator ie: TV out....

If i go with a TV friendly desktop, this means dealing with a resolution of 600 and something x 400 so. There are a few apps that dont scale down to this low resolution. Airstrike is one of them. There are very few games that are ready to go on the Rasp and it would be a shame to miss out on Airstrike. This app wants 800x 600 atleast and there is no way to scale it down. Maybe beside its JWM menu entry i should have a note in brackets stating that its not suitable to use on a TV screen such as:

JWM -> Programs -> Games -> Airstrike (HDMI only)

As far as offering support for an OS goes, its best to exclude something than have to spend 6 hours a day explaining something because its not working.

I could have a separate TV entry in the JWM menu, this would pretty much duplicate everything except for the apps that wont work correctly with the low resolution.

Also the browser choice will be Dillo and Seamonkey or Firefox rather than Dillo and Midori. I figure if you need to do something that Dillo cant do then you wont mind waiting an extra few seconds for a proper browser to load. Midori cant run Java and there are other things it cant do.

Another thing i have decided on is that Pussy-Pie automatically overclocks the Rasp to 800Mhz, this is the default factory "safe" overclock and it is a noticeable improvement. I cant help thinking that if 1Ghz clocking was stable, then 80% of the performance issues would be solved. Maybe someone will release a tiny heatsink and fan for the CPU.
I will have a menu option or catroll-panel option to use standard 733GHz clocking.

I must admit, the lack of fully supported video acceleration in the Raspian OS has annoyed me. With all this bragging about the GPU..... the only catch being... you cant actually use the GPU. The 256MB RAM in the "B" version is more than enough and compared to a 733MHz ARM CPU in a cheap Android tablet, compiling things is much much much faster. I personally will be happy to get this Pussy-Pie OS finnished and done, im sick of dealing with this thing. Its a cheap PC that is being marketed as actually being useful but its not. However its a fine server and ill use mine for that.... it sucks at everything else. Actual video drivers would make it more useful, but not useful to the demographic that its marketed at, people learning BASIC and C++ and Python dont care about OpenGL.
*rant over*

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

one thing it seems to be good at

#1623 Post by dancytron »

One thing it seems to be good at is being a thin client.

I can run rdesktop with my windows XP machine and it is totally pleasant to use speedwise except video. Even if I log on to the Pi with VLC from the Windows XP computer and open rdesktop inside the VNC session it is still usable.

If I can get it to be a print server too, then I'll have freed my laptop from the desk and I'll keep it.

User avatar
sickgut
Posts: 1156
Joined: Tue 23 Mar 2010, 19:11
Location: Tasmania, Australia in the mountains.
Contact:

Re: one thing it seems to be good at

#1624 Post by sickgut »

dancytron wrote:One thing it seems to be good at is being a thin client.

I can run rdesktop with my windows XP machine and it is totally pleasant to use speedwise except video. Even if I log on to the Pi with VLC from the Windows XP computer and open rdesktop inside the VNC session it is still usable.

If I can get it to be a print server too, then I'll have freed my laptop from the desk and I'll keep it.
Hmmmmm

Yes, thin client stuff should be fine, but would be alot better once we get accelerated video drivers for the so called "bad ass" GPU.....

Maybe once the vid drivers are sorted, video stuff should be better.

The only ready to go Pussy that i have ready for the Rasp is the server edition but it doesnt have VNC or any obvious print server software. I know nothing about CUPS and VNC... however, any self respecting server OS should have both of these.

looks like ill have to hit the books.

im more than annoyed with the GPU driver situation, this alone is stopping the Rasp Pi from being a Playstation 2 quality games console.

dancytron
Posts: 1519
Joined: Wed 18 Jul 2012, 19:20

#1625 Post by dancytron »

I don't think video ever works right over Windows Remote Desktop/rdesktop. I used to use it a lot in an old job and what I saw on the Pi was it working well in all respects.

If you are going to test it, some versions of Windows are crippled. Here's the patch I used. http://deepxw.blogspot.com/2009/04/univ ... patch.html

edit: I've tested some thin client stuff on the R. Pi. There are several vnc clients. All of them were either too slow or very primitive. The primitive one was xvncviewer . To scroll, you have to use right and left click. One directvnc didn't work. I found the bug report, which has been fixed but not updated in Debian and told the guy on the R. Pi website who followed up with whoever.

One thing that did work fast enough was xrdp, which is a linux server for Windows remote desktop clients.

So far then, you can windows remote desktop in and out of the pi and you can vnc in, but can't vnc out because the clients are lousy.

edit again: Also this page has all kind of information on setting up xrdp and an compiling/installation script I am running now to see if it works.

Post Reply