Puppy2 Alpha 7 released May 7

[Lobster]

Here is the link
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy2

I created the new image on top of this page (in XaraXL) which is a very exciting closed source (Boo! Rubbish!) to open source (good plan. hooray!) project. Even more exciting is Barry has somehow squeezed Inkscape into the latest Alpha (Inkscape will be using Xara code in the future . . .)

I am downloading it now - the last Alpha was very high quality
Go test - let us know

Well done to Barry and the whole team as always Amazing - come on you artists - Puppy2 Logos?

What is gxhost?
and eh . . . the time has come for me to (once again) use multi session. Anyone recommend a link, wiki page, info on doing this from Puppy2?

[MU]

temporary mirror:
http://dotpups.de/isos/puppy2alpha-7may06.iso
http://dotpups.de/isos/puppy2alpha-7may06.iso.md5.txt
Mark

[Lobster]

Read Barrys Developer page and make sure you delete the 1 or 2 files he lists there.
I changed the background with MU's background changer (band on the top) - so easy!
OK on First boot up only (?) there is a temp USB hack - so it is slow - but being sorted.
The boot seems simplified slightly (maybe I imagined that?)
Inkscape seems to have the help files. It is worth downloading just for Inkscape.
I usually end up installing Inkscape and audacity - whatever I do - good to see one in Puppy. I hope it stays.
Gparted makes Puppy VERY useful - but read Barrys note further down - Not yet ready for use - this is an ALPHA (pre Beta). Gamma is the release version.
MUT 0.8 is there, the calendar on the taskbar
I was able to open my USB keydrive - so I can use this version for a bit

Seamonkey Browser contains composer, email, and address book
I always change the font to a sans (rather than the default serif - It is clearer) What do others use?

Be interested in others opinions.

Be Happy. Be Puppy.

[Melmo]

New version works great,

only bug encountered so far is that firewall seems partially broken.

It still loads but now gives error messages about some symbol's not recognised, prob has something to do with IPTABLES upgrade in 2.6 kernel?

Also does not power off on shutdown but since this is the first 2.0 series installed might not be specific to this particular Alpha

otherwise seems to boot faster then previous versions, all in all good update

Melmo

[HueyNym]

Audacity's ok, but I *really* love SNACK audio! - It's the BEST. The Snack library was designed *specifically* for speech recording, and with the ogg library add-on, it's just purely brilliant. Nothing better for pupcasting, IMHO

I fear it's much maligned and misunderstood and woefully underused and appreciated.

I LOVE SNACK!

-Huey

[MU]

Here is a small bugfix, that should solve problems with some graficscards:
http://dotpups.de/tests/findhostbridge-bugfix.pup

Mark

[billstclair]

I mirrored the ISO, devx_003.sfs, and all-modules... at:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/puppy/puppy2.html

There are links on that page to direct downloads, torrents, and md5 sums for the three files. Amazon is usually very fast.

[BarryK]

Lobster,
I see in your snapshot, GParted, there is an exclamation-mark-icon against a ext3 partition -- that's because the utility program 'dumpe2fs' is missing.
It's part of e2fsprogs.
You could probably grab it from some other distro, but it will be in the next release.

[peppyy]

System #1
msi 2ghz mut machine with tons of oddball stuff.

Downloaded and burned in under 5 minutes to reboot.

Everything is looking good. I heard my first ever boot barks, that was exciting.

MUT seems to have some trouble reading my burner for about a minute, spins-stops-spins etc. but works ok after that.

Can play with my ATI card later but video runs full screen ok in xorg.

Love having GParted. Makes it real nice for my multi drive readers when I need a quick format or partition.

Will try it on a couple more machines tonight, hope it will boot on the laptops, would love to have IR support for my printers.

[peppyy]

Machine#2 Gateway 700mhz pIII 128 ram
Memory warning, flashing 2M. eithernet and programs work but gxine which Locks up in either xvesa or xorg.

Machine #3 ibm thinkpad 600e.
autodetected machine, trackpad and sound. Configured xorg manually. everything works but dhcp. wag reports not using pcmcia. installed wifi-beta and still no go. Switched to my orinoco and it loaded the module ok and finds eth0, reports the router correctly but can't obtain an address. Card lights show alive and active during toggle but then shut off.

Of course I could be missing something since I am on some prety heavy duty meds at the moment for my back.

Machine #4 Asus Terminator TII 2.4ghz 512 ram
So far it is flawless. First distro to actually work without extra setup. Have not tried the burner yet but I am willing to bet that I can get the wife to loose win98 now I have refused to install XP because of the agrivation factors. . I will have to do a reall good backup first though. She will need full java and a couple other things for her pogo games and I hope I can find her a yahoo toolbar that will do everything she wants. I know there are some for firefox but I haven't tried them yet.

Machine #5 HP Pavillion 500mhz amdk62 256 mb

Barked twice, video crisp, drives detected correctly. Network worked but slow, (512mb/sec) everything else looked very good. I have access to a couple more like this one, my 770z and anothrer hp clone but overall it looks really good for the newer machines. Nice work.

Edit, And although I am no artist I tried a quick logo in the Gimp.

[raffy]

Hey, thats a good idea: "twice the fun"

Am testing in this bleeding-edge Pentium 4 that Puppy2 has shutdown nicely last time. The partitions vfat, ext2, ext3 were all mounted by MUT.

Only had some noticeable delay with the "sleep (t=138)" at boot time.

[marksouth2000]

Downloaded and burned the CD-RW last night, so it's time for my usual set of (probably non-constructive) comments. These applay to using the CD-RW in multisession mode.

• At the first shutdown, the burn initially fails with a buffer underrun. The burner drawer ejects and closes, there is a looooong pause, then the burn proceeds successfully. I have no idea what causes this.
  
  The CD is correctly detected as such, even though it is booted up in a DVD burner.
  
  This is the first time I've tested Puppy on a machine with a 1280x1024 display. The background had horizontal stripes above and below that were of the most vivid shade of cerise that I've seen for a long time. (WHY CERISE????? Is it Raffyy punishing me for suggesting that not all distros have to use blue as their theme colour???) Selecting "stretch" in the background control panel fixes this, so I'd suggest it should be the default.
  
  May I suggest that if an ethernet card is found at boot, that the user is directly asked if they want to configure it with DHCP? The ethernet wizard is painless enough, but one has to know to use it. Perhaps just a "Configure Ethernet Automatically? YES/NO" kind of dialogue box.
  
  Gxine uses 30% of the (1GHz) CPU for visualisation, maybe consider turning visualisation off by default?
  
  Graveman seemed unable to erase a CD-RW. The same burner happily erased some CD-RWs using K3B under Mandrake a few minutes later.
  
  Selecting the shutdown option from the menu works correctly to turn the machine off - it didn't in the last 2 alphas.

I apologise in advance for the offence that my comments will almost certinly cause to someone, but hope that one or two will, nevertheless, be useful for the future development of Puppy2.

All the best,

[raffy]

You'll be lucky to find truly offended puppies here.

Indeed, testing the multisession CD is one thing to try with Puppy 2. Hope others will do that (including me ).

[peppyy]

Machine #6 My everyday trusty 770z
Nice hardware detection and setup. Found the sound card and alsa works pretty well. Video looks great in xorg. With 320mb of ram installed running live it reports only 86mb free.

My first impression is that on this 366mhz machine it runs about 40%slower than 1.0.8 I notice that there are 40 processes running at boot versus 21 for 1.0.8 so that in itself is alright I suppose but my processor never goes idle and hovers around 50% with just seamonky open on the post a reply page. Top reports mozilla at 20% + or - 2 and X at 5 to 10% cpu all the time. I have to do some tweaking on that.

Definately beginning to look like it is not for these older machines with the slower processors. Playing an mp3 with gxine is about all it can handle. I am going to kill as much as I can and try another run but it looks like kernel2.6 might not like this machine.

[BarryK]

Machine#2 Gateway 700mhz pIII 128 ram
Memory warning, flashing 2M. eithernet and programs work but gxine which Locks up in either xvesa or xorg.

The 2M is the available space for your files. Gxine may need to create buffer files, which may be using up the space. Solution is to save the session to a pup_save.3fs file, then on next boot you will have over 400M available.
.. maybe should have a popup waring message about this.

Note, on my 128M PC, I have more free space, about 5M -- on some BIOSes you can adjust how much of that ram gets grabbed for video -- mine is set to 8M I think, which is plenty.

[raffy]

Here in my old trused Celeron 400 Mhz 128 MB RAM, modem was available after bootup (hey, that's really a charm!).

Yes, I noted what Peppyy was saying - the CPU appears busier than usual, almost fully busy with only 5 browser tabs open (I used to do 20 tabs without problems here). Free space reported is 97 MB (as I have swap partition).

I played a VCD (my video is an old 8 MB AGP) and while the CPU usage had shot up, I could still continue with this message, jump to the other tabs, and do screen capture (see below).

[Lobster]

Lobster,
I see in your snapshot, GParted, there is an exclamation-mark-icon against a ext3 partition -- that's because the utility program 'dumpe2fs' is missing.
It's part of e2fsprogs.
You could probably grab it from some other distro, but it will be in the next release.

I can wait (just about)

I tried using Gparted today on an AMD K-6 333 mz (underclocked 350) using Puppy2a7
Gparted is very nice compared to the two existing (fdisk and . . . ?) console partitioners. I am not sure what I did - but I had fun. Will be giving that HD some further spinning later today . . .

I need to bring your attention to the Howto section of the forum and the webcam wizard that is being developed. Can that be in the first beta?

I would suggest this approach of probe and download drivers could cut Puppys size in other areas . . . (Could it be used in MU's 3D graphic-card options for example? . . . certainly seems to be going a similar way)

[EdwardMGoldberg]

I have started the May 9 Puppy on my HP Media center and all is well.

Yes, I did have to streach the background screen (1280x1024 24 bit).

The only area I have still not made work is the Multi-Session. My
Boot code from the BIOS will not look at any multi-session CD as
a possible boot disk (bummer). I have heard that this is not a puppy
problem. I wil use a floppy to boot and get around this later.

For now I use a 512 Meg. CF Flash as my local storage. It takes a
while to set up the puppy save file the first time, but after that it
is fast on the re-boot. Comment- a message that this is a one time
slow task would be nice. I had a fear that I have taken a bad path.

The speed is great! I use SuSE 10.0 for most of my work. This
release makes my system FLY!

The system has 1.5G of fast DDR so puppy takes off like a rocket.

I use on-line storage from Amazon S3 for all of my long term files.
I would like to start a project to add this function to Puppy next round.
It works well to up-load to Amazon the private storage at $0.05Gbyte!

I will keep testing, great work!
Edward M. GOldberg

[BarryK]

only bug encountered so far is that firewall seems partially broken.

It still loads but now gives error messages about some symbol's not recognised, prob has something to do with IPTABLES upgrade in 2.6 kernel?

Also does not power off on shutdown but since this is the first 2.0 series installed might not be specific to this particular Alpha

Melmo,
I tested the firewall wizard with just the "default" choice, which blocks everything. I just tried it again, running firewall_install.sh from a terminal window, and no error messages, and it passes its own sanity test, all modules
load okay.
What options did you choose in the wizard that have caused the problem?

This time, the default is 'acpi=on' for BIOSes later than Jan 2002.
Maybe that's your problem. Try the boot option 'puppy acpi=off".

[PeterSieg]

Hi, just downloaded the actual jre from sun as self installer...

at building rt.jar, the whole systems hangs.. nothing possible except pull
the power cord..???!!

I suspect unionfs...?

PS