Lessons to learn from Slitaz

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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106498
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Lessons to learn from Slitaz

#1 Post by 106498 »

Hi everyone. Warning, criticism of puppy follows:

I love puppy. This doesn't really have anything to do with the OS, but more with the great people on this forum. The last 2 months I've been using Slitaz though, because it's less focussed on livecd, and it turns off my computer, plus it's a little more polished. There are some things I've noticed that Slitaz does really well, where puppy fails.

Package management!
Slitaz has a text-based package manager, as well as graphical. This is awesome!!! This wouldn't be hard to make, would it? It's just easy for giving instructions on forums, don't have to wait for it to load either and you can see the progress as a package installs. Plus if something goes wrong with X you can still use it.

Slitaz also does a much better job of automatically installing dependancies.

I also like having the ability to remove programs included on the ISO, as I usually do a full hd install. I know that it's possible on puppy with some workarounds, but I feel it should come standard.

Also, some programs on puppy are almost impossible to remove, I think they are included in other packages. This shouldn't be done. Each library and program should have it's own (clearly named) package.

It would also be nice if the package manager had info on each package, or at least a link to a URL. Especially as often packages have been modified to make them smaller.

And a maybe a mirror for community made packages.

Filesystem
Compared to Slitaz, the puppy filesystem is a mess. Stuff installs all over the place. It's a mission trying to find anything.

I guess the puppy experience, in the end, comes over as a sort of hacked together OS, rather than something built from scratch with a goal of simplicity. Some smoothness would just be nice. Elegant simplicity, rather than complex minimalism.

Just my thoughts...
-TdeM
[color=green]An expert is just a beginner with experience.[/color]
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bugman

#2 Post by bugman »

i'd agree about the package system, ha, i feel funny even typing "package system" while talking about puppy, oh well . . .

files going everywhere though, i thought all distros did that badly, i have never been able to find anything in any of them until i got used to the thing

i have never tried gobo though, it is supposed to be very easy, although it too is probably hiding a mess behind its well-ordered symlinks

EDIT TO ADD that none of the above is an endorsement of slitaz, i tried it once and was--well, i can't remember how i felt, it must not have made much of an impression . . .
Last edited by bugman on Wed 10 Feb 2010, 19:26, edited 1 time in total.

gerry
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#3 Post by gerry »

Having read the first post above, I tried Slitaz 2.0 (the latest stable version). On my desktop, live cd, I could not get rid of the "Out of Range" sticker in the middle of the screen, although I entered the correct resolution at boot. So, find Control Box in the menu, click on it. Must enter root password, so I do (it's "root"), but does it start? No. Give up.

Try it live usb in my Acer Aspire One. Boots ok, but wireless doesn't work.

Google around a bit, find a Slitaz specially tailored for AA1. Read about it, find that I would have to use the command line to load the needed module for WiFi, even though it is specially tailored.... There is also a list of bugs, which the originator does not intend to fix.....

I don't think Puppy has anything to learn from Slitaz.

gerry

DMcCunney
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Re: Lessons to learn from Slitaz

#4 Post by DMcCunney »

106498 wrote:Package management!
Slitaz has a text-based package manager, as well as graphical. This is awesome!!! This wouldn't be hard to make, would it? It's just easy for giving instructions on forums, don't have to wait for it to load either and you can see the progress as a package installs. Plus if something goes wrong with X you can still use it.
Ubuntu is similar. You can use apt-get from the command line, or Synaptic in the GUI.
Slitaz also does a much better job of automatically installing dependancies
I concur completely, but I don't see Puppy reaching that state any time soon.

Consider what it necessary for it to happen:

1) There must be a complete and well maintained repository of available packages. This is not true for Puppy. While there are official repositories, they are often out of date, and half of what you might want to use must be found by ransacking the forums and following pointers. Puppy badly needs people devoted to repository maintenance, and a standard manner in which packages are submitted for, approved, and added to the repositories.

2) The repository must be based on a database that tracks dependencies for each package, and can provide a list of everything needed by a package. This does not happen at all for Puppy.

3) The package manager must be able to query the repository for the list, examine your system to see what you have, and automatically download and install the package and any missing pieces, so the program Just Works. Puppy is only beginning to get any sort of dependency management. There are functions in Puppy to check what dependencies a package has, but you still on your face trying to find the missing parts.
Also, some programs on puppy are almost impossible to remove, I think they are included in other packages. This shouldn't be done. Each library and program should have it's own (clearly named) package.
Depending on the package, that may not be possible. Many libraries are used by more than one package.
It would also be nice if the package manager had info on each package, or at least a link to a URL. Especially as often packages have been modified to make them smaller.

And a maybe a mirror for community made packages.
A URL to what? The package's home page?
Filesystem
Compared to Slitaz, the puppy filesystem is a mess. Stuff installs all over the place. It's a mission trying to find anything.
It's not that bad. I can generally find things. The issue I see is where Puppy puts things somewhere other than where other distros do.
I guess the puppy experience, in the end, comes over as a sort of hacked together OS, rather than something built from scratch with a goal of simplicity. Some smoothness would just be nice. Elegant simplicity, rather than complex minimalism.
Puppy was intended for older, lower end hardware, and has a goal of being small and low resource. It's largely succeeded in that, but in the process has made an assortment of compromises.

I'd like to see Puppy become a more modular distribution, with a package hierarchy that would let you build a Puppy customized to your needs. There are all manner of Puplets that are customized distros, but how do you find the one that happens to contain the features you need?

I'd keep the standard Puppy ISO. But I'd add other options. The first might be Skinny Puppy (No, better not. There's a band by that name.) Call it TinyPuppy.

Tiny Puppy would have only Linux, X-Windows, a package manager, and a default window manager like JWM. It would have no applications, and would be a base on which to build. Then you could add application packs. One might contain AbiWord and Gnumeric for lower resource machines. Another might substitute Open Office for folks who needed the more powerful option. Or you might select SeaMonkey for browser/mail/news or Firefox/Tunderbird instead.

And Puppy achieved small size by leaving things out. It should be possible to add them back in.

For instance, many of the CLI utilities in Puppy are links to Busybox. Busybox is intended to provide a an embeddable subset of standard Gnu/Linux commands for low resource environments, and using Busybox instead of the actual utilities saves space, But the Busybox utilities are cut down versions of the full counterparts, and sometimes leave out desirable features. I'd love to see a PET that installed all of the full versions of the utilities, and removed the symlinks to Busybox. I have the space, and want the real things. (There's a PET like that, but it just installs the new commands with suffixes like "-NEW" It's one the user to do the fixes to use them.)

(I've been copying some things over from the Ubuntu partition on my Puppy box to get things that are part of a standard distro but are not included in Puppy, like tune2fs.)

To achieve this goal will take massive adjustments in Puppy land. I don't see them happening any time soon.
______
Dennis

gerry
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#5 Post by gerry »

I'm using dpup at the moment. So far, it seems to install packages from the Debian repositories ok, and look after the dependencies, just like Debian. But not everything works- I tried Ratpoison, but the menus wouldn't work. Things are looking up though!

And I did ask Guy about a stripped down version like the Debian Netinstall iso, and he said "yes, one day". The Debian Netinstall doesn't have a window manager, all you get is a terminal, so first you have to type "Apt-get install Xorg fluxbox abiword cups ......"

gerry

nooby
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#6 Post by nooby »

I am not sure if Puppy can learn from Slitaz. Puppy works better than slitaz on my two computers.

But I think we need many kinds of Puppy. I would also like a TinyPuppy but also a SuperPuppy like the SuperOS Ubuntu that I have tested and that one works best of all linux distros I have tested. But it is really big so it is for those with much memory and modern computers.

But me being a newb knows to little to be of any good advice on such.

I tested some 40 distros and extremely few lived up to my needs. a handful.

Stardust was very good, Pup-431-NOP is good too. Pup-431JP but there I hit the wall of not getting how to tell it to not load the Japanese Google instead of the swedish google. Otherwise a very good Puppy. MacPup was good too.

I wish Puppy could have several versions. By using Woof one could take from many different repositories and build the best linux for beginners. Then a small Puppy for older equipment and for those that want to tailor made what they want.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

davesurrey
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#7 Post by davesurrey »

This is a particularly interesting post, for me at least, as whilst I am typing this on one PC I am trying to get SliTaz Cooking's GUI Package Management system to work on another PC. And it does seems to be broken.

Puppy was not the first distro I used when I first came to Linux. I say used rather than meerly installing and playing around with. As a lot of folk do I started with the better known and larger distros. Being a Linux new-comer I soon found that some distros had helpful communities but some didn't. That's why I uninstalled Mandriva and PCLinux, for example, as although I saw them as good distros the arrogance in their forums put me off.

So I looked around. I found DSL and was amazed at what it could achieve in such a small footprint but it looked a bit tacky IMO and I didn't feel it was for me as my main distro.

Luckily I found Puppy. It seemed a good overall compromise and the helpfullness of the forum certainly endeared it to me. But I was on a roll. I then found and used Austrumi, TinyCore and SliTaz amongst many others. I was a distro junky.

Austrumi looked beautiful and really professional. The two things seem hard to dis-entangle. But my (lack of ) knowledge of Latvian meant support was almost impossible to find so I had to leave it.

TinyCore (sometimes unkindly called son of DSL) is a really interesting distro to me. It's very dynamic, the support forum is pretty damn good and it offers a great degree of flexibility and choice. I certainly feel it has a lot going for it. The package management system is very very good IMO and in some ways I see it as the Arch of small distros. I believe it has a good future. There are things to learn from it.

SliTaz is also a small distro and it's initial footprint, like Tinycore, seems to give Puppy a run for its money until you see how stripped down it is. Add all the extra apps that a standard Puppy comes with and you'll find a distro of very similar size.

There's no doubt that Slitaz has a very structured Package Management system also. It's a pity that it's broken in Cooking and I'll have to wait for a fix before the gui version works again. With no feedback from the devs who knows when that will be. It is a good looking distro IMO and the Stable version is pretty stable. However it should be considering Stable came out April 2009, and the next Stable is due March 2010. In the meantime if you want to keep up to date but can accept running what is basically seen as a beta then you have to use Cooking (last release Nov 2009.) But we can learn for it.

I believe Tiny Core and SliTaz both have a better Package Manager than Puppy does, even thought I think BK has made a lot of good improvements to the PPM in Puppy 431. Some of which include features that the other two don't have.

But remember it's a lot easier for TinyCore and SLiTaz to do this. There is just one distro at any one time. With puppy however there are many many pups and variations being worked upon. So no wonder there seems less structure. It's my thesis that only with this seemingly less structured (read free-er) approach can there be such a wide choice of Puppys. So yes the other distros can learn from Puppy.

I am sure BK and others can reign in all development and say Puppy must be like this or that. But the inevitable outcome will be less choice, less innovation and with less innovation comes less improvement.

As ever I am glad we Linux users have a choice. When it all looks the same we will have lost a great benefit of free software. Nevertheless no-one I am sure will believe we have nothing to learn from others' endeavours. But let's just put this in perspective.

And let's never forget the importance of a helpful and useful support infrastructure. SliTaz lost almost all of their forum and wiki a few months ago and as a result is still limping along. We had a near miss and I still don't feel many here realise how disasterous that could have been.

Cheers
Dave
Last edited by davesurrey on Wed 17 Feb 2010, 15:37, edited 1 time in total.

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ttuuxxx
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#8 Post by ttuuxxx »

As Package Management goes I like the way I split the puppy package manager in half on 2.14X, you click to install a app from the repo and you click to uninstall an app, 2 different apps. kind of like windows.
as for a package manager that works with a repo for puppy, I'll say it once guys, That is totally impossible on puppy. Puppy isn't your run of a mill distro that has one repo updated by a team of individuals that you have to submit packages to. How lame and boring.
Think about it, I would have to compile apps, send them to be looked at and submitted and wait for a link, then post the link in the forum like a day or 2 later. That would drive me nutssssssss.

Puppy is about freedom, learning, experimenting. I would say probably puppy teaches more newbees real Linux internals than Ubuntu does. Ubuntu/Mint is a very tidy distro, well organized and you learn nothing from using it. everything is done already for you, just about every package is made up, they made it a pain to use root/compile. Its just what I like to call "a no-brainer point and click distro".

Puppy is all about education, learning, and most of all doing your own thing. I think it was lobster who one said "puppy is a free for all distro"

a typical puppy user will know the distro inside and out in a matter of a year or so. Unlike a ubuntu user who will still only really know the main menu,lol

Lets look at the package manager,one of our main package manager parts is the forum. Because we are so diverse. The package manager can install its own packages pet,pup, plus deb, tar.gz, etc. Actually it can install more formats than most other distro's these days :) It can uninstall apps.

Really a perfect puppy Package Manager would be
-repo with puppy.ca included
-install packages
-uninstall
-find packages on the forum

personally the way I like I would like is
you click the PM and a package it installs
you click the PM to uninstall apps,
you click the PM and you have a webpage open with apps listed by series that could searched via name, starting letter, category, contents
Also a search box window on the PM itself would be cool,

Really I think the way it is now its perfect, when I want to search the forum, I use my search engine plugin for firefox, it gives me way better/quicker results.
ttuuxxx
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#9 Post by DMcCunney »

ttuuxxx wrote: as for a package manager that works with a repo for puppy, I'll say it once guys, That is totally impossible on puppy. Puppy isn't your run of a mill distro that has one repo updated by a team of individuals that you have to submit packages to. How lame and boring.
So instead, users are lost in a maze of twisty litlle dependencies, all different, and must look all over the place to find missing pieces when they try to install an app and it fails to run.

How utterly slipshod and maddening.
Think about it, I would have to compile apps, send them to be looked at and submitted and wait for a link, then post the link in the forum like a day or 2 later. That would drive me nutssssssss.
So instead, the users must go nuts, because there is no guarantee a package of yours they download will run because you may or may not provide the missing dependencies, assuming that because they are on your system, the user will have them too.

I don't see any reason why you should change your habits. By all means, build things and offer them. But at some point, if they get generally accepted and widely used, they should be in an official repository. There doesn't seem to be a standard procedure to make that happen.

And even stuff in the standard distro may not be in the repository! For example, Puppy 4.31 includes the current 1.18 version of Geany. Is it in a repo? Is there a PET anywhere so users who haven't upgraded to 4.31 can install it on their system? I can't find one.
Puppy is about freedom, learning, experimenting. I would say probably puppy teaches more newbees real Linux internals than Ubuntu does. Ubuntu/Mint is a very tidy distro, well organized and you learn nothing from using it. everything is done already for you, just about every package is made up, they made it a pain to use root/compile. Its just what I like to call "a no-brainer point and click distro".
ttuuxx, I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, but the vast majority of potential Linux users out there you might like to recruit to the Puppy fold don't want to learn about Linux internals, and shouldn't have to. They should be able to install Linux and packages and have things Just Work.

This is what makes distros like Ubuntu popular. By and large, things do just work.
Puppy is all about education, learning, and most of all doing your own thing. I think it was lobster who one said "puppy is a free for all distro"
So it is, but "free for all" can have negative connotations as well as positive ones, and the negative ones are just as applicable to Puppy.
a typical puppy user will know the distro inside and out in a matter of a year or so. Unlike a ubuntu user who will still only really know the main menu,lol
See above about what users want to know/learn.
Lets look at the package manager,one of our main package manager parts is the forum. Because we are so diverse. The package manager can install its own packages pet,pup, plus deb, tar.gz, etc. Actually it can install more formats than most other distro's these days :) It can uninstall apps.
The fact that is can handle a wider range of package formats is good. But it dropped support for the older PUP format in 4.31, and there's still a lot out there in the older PUP format on the repositories. It would be nice if some of it got converted PET at some point.
Really a perfect puppy Package Manager would be
-repo with puppy.ca included
-install packages
-uninstall
-find packages on the forum

personally the way I like I would like is
you click the PM and a package it installs
you click the PM to uninstall apps,
you click the PM and you have a webpage open with apps listed by series that could searched via name, starting letter, category, contents
Also a search box window on the PM itself would be cool,
The above description would be nice indeed, if it ever actually happened. (See me not holding my breath waiting...)
Really I think the way it is now its perfect, when I want to search the forum, I use my search engine plugin for firefox, it gives me way better/quicker results.
Perfect for you, maybe, but don't assume you're representative.

Puppy is intended and optimized for older, lower-end hardware. It does a good job at running on the sort of kit it is intended to support, once the user has got it installed, configured, and with the parts they need to do what they want. Getting to that point can be a major chore.

If you really want Puppy usage to grow, it needs to be less of one, and better package handling and dependency management are the first places to start.

I liken it to having a car. You can own and drive a car without having to be a mechanic or possess a working knowledge of the principles of operation of the 4 stroke internal combustion engine. You just have to know how to drive.

Puppy is like the hot rod you build an customize yourself. The results can be splendid, but you have to be a mechanic to do it. Not everyone wants to be a mechanic.
______
Dennis

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jemimah
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#10 Post by jemimah »

I'm with Ttuxxx in this debate. The chaos is one of the main reasons I wanted to be a Puppy developer in the first place.

To contribute to a distro like Ubuntu, you maybe get to work on one small part, or be the maintainer of one package, and even then, you'd have to know who to talk to. People like me, who maybe don't fit the developer stereotype, or who aren't very assertive, can quickly be alienated by the whole process. But there's no barrier to entry with Puppy.

I'd never contributed significantly to open source before, and now in just a few short months, I have my own puplet, and I even have users. I love how open, collaborative, and bureaucracy-free the Puppy community is. Puppy is friendly to innovators in a way that no other distro is.

There is a huge opportunity here for someone to catalog, organize, and test the software on the forums. Anyone who wants to step up, absolutely nothing will stand in your way. You wouldn't even need to be a programmer to do it.

Where Puppy needs to grow, is in recruiting new developers. The more devs we have, the better things will get for users, and the faster things will progress.

As a user, it's somewhat pointless to complain about Puppy deficiencies, because there's not really anyone to complain to. The existing developers generally have long todo lists already, and we can only really work on projects that inspire us.

It's better to promote Puppy to potential new contributers, or pitch your ideas to developers that might be looking for a project. There's nothing like finding a niche where your talents can go to good use - and there's plenty of empty niches here.

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complexity, and distributed control of software development

#11 Post by prehistoric »

I'm very much aware of the deficiencies people find in Puppy. I hear about them over and over.

I'm also aware that mainstream software has gone off into a world of its own. Without experts to support their use, people using computers are spending more and more time being their own system support, and less and less time on the things they wanted to accomplish.

People like me, who examine equipment others throw away, have often reached the same conclusions I have: most machines are thrown away for reasons that have nothing to do with broken hardware. It has become routine for me to find the machine infested with malware which made it slow. The machine has been more under the control of malicious people than the people who paid for it.

In other cases, I've found things badly misconfigured. Someone sticks two IDE devices on the same cable, without realizing they will both run at the speed of the slower device. (Zip drives were notorious in this regard.) Sometimes, I find slave devices with no master device. I have literally found hard drives in machines people have forgotten were there. Perhaps, they never knew.

For one system I worked on recently, the solution was to buy the right kind of memory for $20, instead of paying $400 for a new machine. This was supposed to be a stop-gap measure, until we could replace the machine. The person using this machine now resists suggestions of cheap replacements I find, she is perfectly happy with what she has, and doesn't want to change anything.

Why does this astonishingly low level of operating efficiency persist? Because the people who sold you that machine only get paid for selling machines. The average user couldn't afford the cost of real system support. You can be sure they don't get it.

When it comes to software, the situation is even worse. The people who sell you software get paid for consuming resources you paid for. In fact, most of software revenue comes from companies that sell their software with new machines, i.e., the purpose of that software is to sell new machines. If it has other admirable qualities, these are good advertising, but the fundamental purpose which produces revenue is tied to planned obsolescence.

For reasons of market dominance, the ideal monopolistic solution is to make things so complex no company without billions of dollars in current income can possibly compete. This is exactly what has taken place.

I predicted this long ago, but then I had the advantage of watching IBM do this in an earlier cycle. One feature of OS 360 was characterized by the quip "it's its own best customer". The purpose of the OS ceased to be getting productive work out, and everything went into keeping the whole unstable stack of hardware and software from collapsing. It was routine to walk into a computer center and see a large bullpen with hundreds of people busy at tasks which had somehow escaped control of the company which owned the computer.

(A friend of mine used to wear a pager that might go off at 3:00 a.m. to alert him to a crisis demanding his immediate attention. After some time like this, he needed the services of a psychiatrist.)

I have much more to say on the subject of software libraries, and bloat, but I will save that for another post. This one is long enough.

Watching the same creeping complexity overtake home computers has been a slow-motion horror flick for me.

What's to be done? If you build a competing hierarchical organization, you end up basically cheering your team on because they wear a different uniform, not because of fundamental differences in approach. (Those would be economic suicide in the current environment.) The answer has to be one that does not require centralized authoritarian organization.

Such distributed activities can accomplish major tasks. Here's an example of a task requiring a great deal of human labor, which is now done by people all over the world. Most don't even know they are doing something productive. They are simply solving a trivial problem to access something they want.

In Puppy software development, we have one aspect of freedom from large, rigid organizations -- heroic individuals blazing their own paths. These are typically very good at getting proof of concept programs working. They are less interested in bearing the weight of support on their shoulders for very long. (It can be crushing, believe me.) The Puppy community needs to fill in the gap between inspired, but imperfect, creations and essentially finished products. This should be feasible, because most tedious tasks in software development do not require genius.

We have large numbers of people interested in solving their own particular problems with using Puppy for their own purposes. What we lack is a way to consolidate that effort into a functioning distributed organization that moves steadily toward higher reliability, efficiency and improved ease of use. Consider the example of reCAPTCHAs, presented above, and come back with your own ideas for doing software improvement in a distributed fashion, once a proof of concept is demonstrated. Don't assume the supply of geniuses, heroes, or even altruists, is unlimited.

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#12 Post by ttuuxxx »

DMcCunney When I package an application I provide the deps for the version it was compiled on.
Take 2.14X my year long upgrade :) I must of made over 300 packages for it by now, and when it goes final user sullysat will have them hosted @ http://www.wisdom-seekers.com/puppy.html#office

When I compile, I compile live, that way I don't have extra deps installed that get missed when I package the app.
Its the best way to do it :)

as pup packages go, Barry wanted to phase them out, but he also has a package that will allow you to install them
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... .0.4-2.pet

also I think that 4 series has a script built in to convert them
pup2pet

ttuuxxx
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#13 Post by 106498 »

(I thought I replied yesterday, but apparently forgot to hit the reply button).

Well then... I agree that the way puppy is run makes it very accessible for non-elite peoples to contribute. This is probably why so many people do! What would be nice is if there were some official guidelines with respect to where programs install etc.
prehistoric wrote:In Puppy software development, we have one aspect of freedom from large, rigid organizations -- heroic individuals blazing their own paths. These are typically very good at getting proof of concept programs working. They are less interested in bearing the weight of support on their shoulders for very long. (It can be crushing, believe me.) The Puppy community needs to fill in the gap between inspired, but imperfect, creations and essentially finished products. This should be feasible, because most tedious tasks in software development do not require genius.

We have large numbers of people interested in solving their own particular problems with using Puppy for their own purposes. What we lack is a way to consolidate that effort into a functioning distributed organization that moves steadily toward higher reliability, efficiency and improved ease of use.
Exactly!

I still think that a text-based package manager would be good to have.
nooby wrote:I wish Puppy could have several versions. By using Woof one could take from many different repositories and build the best linux for beginners. Then a small Puppy for older equipment and for those that want to tailor made what they want.
If the default puppys (including one with older kernel) were able to uninstall programs it would be so much easier to make your own custom puppy.
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106498
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#14 Post by 106498 »

Ok then, thought about it some more. What about a community contributed package system like that of freebsd (http://pbidir.com/).

If this is made in a wiki format, then everyone that makes a package (or someone else) can add it to the wiki. The files would be stored wherever, just like they are now, to spread the load. But everything could then be found in the same place.

Here's a little demo:
http://www.tdem.co.nz/wiki/doku.php?id=start
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jemimah
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#15 Post by jemimah »

The reason it's hard to uninstall things is that the sfs file is read-only. To actually delete stuff, you have to unpack it, delete the files, then repack it - which you cannot do on a running system. You're better off starting with a barebones system, and adding stuff from there. There was a PetBeGone program and a remastering program called Remax for 4.2 and possibly earlier versions, that would allow you to remaster smaller, but no has updated it yet to work with 4.3. However, there is this tool that will get the job done manually:http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47469


With a full install, deleting stuff is no problem; It's knowing what to delete that presents an issue. I think the only way to know for sure is to download the package in question, see what files are in it, then delete by hand. With a full install, I think you could just install it, then uninstall it, and it will be gone.

The best option is to build your own Puppy with Woof (or older versions have Puppy Unleashed). Then you can specify exactly what you want in it from the beginning. I found the Woof gui to be rather confusing still, but it will improve as Barry works on it.

If I have to install from the command line (usually because I messed up X somehow), I generally unpack the pet and install by hand. It would be trivial to modify the petget command to install/uninstall pets without X. If someone mentions it to Technosaurus, he'd probably do that for 4.4.

--
I have not found that Puppy has a particularly haphazard filesystem - at least not more than Unix in general. Perhaps you could provide an example, and a suggested guideline.

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jemimah
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#16 Post by jemimah »

Puppy has a wiki. I think you just have to PM Raffy for an account.

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage

If someone were to create such a page, and add all the existing packages, probably it wouldn't be that hard to get people to keep it updated in the future. I think many packages are already in there.

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prehistoric
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wiki good, what would be better?

#17 Post by prehistoric »

Writing for the wiki is an excellent practice, which I have been remiss in doing. My excuse has been that things here on the forum move too fast for me. I am constantly discovering I'm simply repeating information already posted.

One thing I'm looking for is a sneaky way to index this forum, by taking advantage of searches people run and questions they post, so that writers of wiki articles won't have to repeat searches or experiments. Luis von Ahn, the main originator of the reCAPTCHA idea, is now working on ways to use humans to classify pictures (without necessarily turning it into work, and paying them.) Using the many people learning about Puppy to generate classifications of posts in a more limited domain, without making it into a job, seems like an easier problem.

At present, I'm having enough trouble keeping up with work by Jemimah or Zigbert in current threads. When you consider the many forks in the path to the latest and greatest Puppy, and realize these are not necessarily dead ends, the problem of providing appropriate advice for people who want to pursue alternatives gets considerably larger.

One current example is a question about a machine with very limited RAM and disk. John Murga's meanpup 2.02 still sets a hard standard to beat. But, what if you don't want to boot off a CD, or can't? If I had not faced exactly the same problem recently, I would not have known where to direct someone to the posted answer.

One recurrent theme in the current topic has to do with libraries. We keep hearing, over and over, pleas to offer a repository like Ubuntu, etc.

What needs to be emphasized is that we are not cut off from these. The Puppy 3 series could use packages from Slackware, if you handled dependencies properly. There was also gslapt, which could install packages from Debian, thanks to MU. Not only was this possible in the past, there are still forks of Puppy proceeding along those lines. Big Bass has been running Slaxer for some time. Now, with woof, we have whole new series built from Slackware, Debian, or Ubuntu packages: spup, Dpup, upup.

In addition, I want to mention ttuuxx turning out upgrades for the 2.x series, and technosaurus' or jrb's work with tinycore. (Is this tpup? Anyone I've overlooked, please forgive me. I haven't been able to read the entire forum.)

We have all manner of programs available, we just don't put them in the official release. Much of the work of sorting out changes from other distributions is thoroughly routine. It shouldn't require the attention of a special "developer" who designs and writes programs for a living. Most people who come to Puppy are willing to do a modest amount of work to get something they want. How can we build on this to make this work available to others who come later -- without creating a rigid organization?

106498
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#18 Post by 106498 »

I guess there's no reason not to put it on the main wiki (other than that no other linux does this AFAIK, but then again, this is puppy:-)

I'll go request an account right now. And learn how to compile stuff.
jemimah wrote:The reason it's hard to uninstall things is that the sfs file is read-only. To actually delete stuff, you have to unpack it, delete the files, then repack it - which you cannot do on a running system. You're better off starting with a barebones system, and adding stuff from there.
I guess thats true. In that case it would be nice to have an official barebones, although that's probably not feasable. I found that most barebones distro's still had some random unnecessary programs (games etc, I really can't remember exactly).

Looks like I'll have to learn to use woof.
[color=green]An expert is just a beginner with experience.[/color]
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ttuuxxx
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#19 Post by ttuuxxx »

106498 wrote:I guess there's no reason not to put it on the main wiki (other than that no other linux does this AFAIK, but then again, this is puppy:-)

I'll go request an account right now. And learn how to compile stuff.
jemimah wrote:The reason it's hard to uninstall things is that the sfs file is read-only. To actually delete stuff, you have to unpack it, delete the files, then repack it - which you cannot do on a running system. You're better off starting with a barebones system, and adding stuff from there.
I guess thats true. In that case it would be nice to have an official barebones, although that's probably not feasable. I found that most barebones distro's still had some random unnecessary programs (games etc, I really can't remember exactly).

Looks like I'll have to learn to use woof.
Yes woof sounds like a perfect project for a eager person like yourself :)
good luck, its a lot of fun once you get into it :)
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

amigo
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#20 Post by amigo »

"puppy teaches more newbees real Linux internals" -Sorry, that's the wildest staement I ever heard -you can't pass on what you don't have... Puppy still has no concept whatever of Linux internals

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