Issues setting up a Puppy for Mom

[starhawk]

Hey all!

Mom is currently a WinXP nut, although her XP looks a lot like Win98... and she uses *hack*cough*hack* Netscape 4.72 (copyright 1999) for her email!!

I suspect that I may be able to help her get along with something faster and more modern if I can convince her to use Puppy. Settled on Fluppy 013 because she's a laptop lady -- and I can make it look like WinXP "Classic Theme" real easylike.

I've set up a Fluppy 013 CD (first successful multisession disk for me!) to look like her usual desktop. However, I'm having some issues.

I downloaded an SFS of Firefox from the first post of the Fluppy thread, but it won't stick. On reboot, it says that it can't mount it... and proceeds to not mount it! I can't seem to convince the bloody thing to save to /mnt/home either... heck, that particular sfs is from FF 3.6.x -- anything newer would be welcomed.

Also, I would like a *.pet of Thunderbird that works in Fluppy. I can't find one that's recent enough to be useful. My reasoning is that there's at least a *chance* that Thunderbird will be compatible with Mom's old email files -- Netscape is the distant ancestor of what is now Firefox and Thunderbird, so it stands to reason that there *may* be backwards-compatiblity there.

In the meantime, it's past 3AM here in NC. I'm going to bed.

[Bligh]

Seamonkey is the evolution of Netscape. Some people just like Netscape/Seamonkey, sounds like your mom is one if them. I still have 4.8 running with 7.2 0n a win 98 box (mostly for email). BTW her old email can be copied to Seamonkey.
Cheers

[davids45]

G'day starhawk,

I have a wife like your mother. I've just convinced her to use Seamonkey 2.3 on her new lap-top, shifting up from mozilla-1.x. We both started with the Netscape 4.x suite. She still uses Windows unfortunately - from XP to 7 is possibly a step forward (time will tell).

Anyway, why not use a Seamonkey sfs as Seamonkey is a direct descendant of Netscape? Or try a Puppy that uses Seamonkey as its default email and browser? Gettting the wallpaper and theme to resemble XP should be possible for most Pups?

If you need to import her ~12 years of emails and bookmarks, maybe 2.0x would be better than 2.3 which I find can be a nuisance for bookmarks - keeping the years of emails accessible has been fine for me.

David S.

[Bligh]

I think Seamonkey 2.11 is the latest which seems to be similar to Netscape. Also if she has become accustomed to ms works, Abiword is very similar, don't know about file compatibility.
Cheers

[starhawk]

I have two problems with SeaMonkey: (1) I don't know it like I do Firefox, and (2) as an artist, I can comfortably say that I find its UI to be most lacking. That first one squashes it, though, because if Mom ever has to hear that I don't know and it'll be hours waiting for a forum to respond... she'll just go right back to XP. If she ever leaves it.

I really do want what I said I want: Firefox and Thunderbird. Any help with that would be appreciated.

EDIT: and even if I did want SeaMonkey, I'd need to fix the SFS load problem. I'd also want to know where to download themes to make it look different. While Mom uses Netscape for her email, she uses IE8 for her browser...

[starhawk]

OK, one and a half problems fixed... decided to use a flash drive instead of a CD... after I ran out of room on the CD! I also remembered that there's a way to open SeaMonkey in "email client" mode. So...

...if someone can tell me the proper command for SeaMonkey Mail to open, that would be helpful. I think the entry in defaultemail should be

exec mozmail "$@"

but I don't remember. Could someone confirm this?

[starhawk]

The command in my previous post doesn't work. Any help would be more than appreciated.

Also, I'm sorry if I came across as rude earlier. I just felt like I was being told that I didn't know what I was doing, and rather bluntly so. That's my head, not ya'll's posts

[starhawk]

OK, let me try something a little different here. If you were going to try to install SeaMonkey in Fluppy 013, as a mail client only, how would you do that?

[starhawk]

Wow, ya'll are in a distinctly helpful mood today.

This is the last time I'm posting in this thread... I've managed to solve my problem on my own. Good thing I'm not a completely helpless total n00b, because if I was, I would have given up and gone back to Windoze several hours ago.

That said, solved is solved, so I'll edit the title to reflect that.

[cthisbear]

" I've managed to solve my problem on my own. "

Come on mate. You know the rules.

Post your fix 4 the next bloke.

Chris.

[Lookinglass360]

Hey starhawk
Looks like I am to late.
I had FF 5 lucid pet saved on my hd it loaded and seem to run
fine in a live fluppy. So the FF 6 pet I saw the other day should work
as well. About half way down the page.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 5&start=60

The Thunderbird lucid pet from this page also seems to work thou I did not try to set it up.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ges-lucid/

Good Luck

[starhawk]

Wow, post a rant, and I get an actual response with useful help! Now I know how to get support around here...

My "fix" was to track down a workable *.pet of SeaMonkey (it came from the Quirky repo on ibiblio)... and then track down two libs and an updated SQLite. The SQLite also came from Ibiblio>Quirky. I don't remember exactly where I found libhunspell and libjpeg-7 (tried -8 and it bombed) but they're on this forum. Use that Puppysearch thing that's in Beem's sig if you want to find 'em, I don't care to track down exactly which of the sixty or so links went to the right libs.

I can also comfortably say that it probably will cause problems if anyone tries to use more than one browser SFS from jemimah's Fluppy 013 thread.

lookinglass360, I'll gladly try the FF 6 pet you linked to -- much better than FF 3.6 which is what jemimah posted!

[cthisbear]

" Wow, post a rant :

You know I don't discriminate....I hates everybody.

""""""""

And the other problem is searching your for own posts on this forum.
You know you have answer...but where the hell is it?

I just posted 4 a Toshiba.
Goodbye half an hour searching and posting.

But someone posting a fix and nothing else.
Well what can I say?

Why should I help the next poster????

"""""""

And recently I had to help move a family member
to another address.
Would I rather help here or lift furniture and do packing?

But sometimes our real world lives collide with Puppy postings.

All the best though...Chris.

I will have to call you the Lone Ranter....hee! haa!
And I will be Taunto...ha! ha!
Do I now become your sidekick....ouch!

Hey. Please post that link for the >> pet of SeaMonkey.

[starhawk]

Link is here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_pa ... .13-q1.pet

I'm not going to respond to the rest of that, lol.

[starhawk]

@lookinglass360 -- FF 5/6 don't work for me, but it's not your fault (or anyone elses' on this board).

There are no IE8-look themes for Firefox after about FF3.7!! Ridiculous but true. So back to the SFS in the Fluppy thread.

At this point, I think I'm done tinkerin' -- I have what I want. Consider this [SOLVED]. If someone really wants it enough to pester me, post here and I'll show a screen shot of what it looks like and all that.

[sfeeley]

fyi starhawk-- you may not have gotten as many quick replies yesterday because the earthquake shut down the internet on parts of the US east coast for much of the afternoon.