Carolina - 1.3

[rg66]

Thanks, Geoff. Between that and PAE (not too useful on a netbook with only 2gb RAM max ), I guess I'll be staying away from Carolina for now

Just out of curiosity -- does XFCE allow one to drag&drop / reorder the buttons on the bottom tray (what Windblows users call the "taskbar")...? That's what I'm actually looking for; the Chrome thing was a sort of important digression if you know what I mean.

Geoffrey was playing around with Chrome and the glibc hack, not sure how far he got though. There might be a possibility to run the latest Chrome but don't quote me on that.

Carolina-non-pae and Carolite both use 3.2.13 non-pae kernel

Xfce allows to re-order icons on the panel, just right click one and choose "move" and move your mouse cursor to a new place and left click.

[starhawk]

Thanks, rg66!

I'll watch this thread for updates re: the glibc upgrade.

Just curious, has the nonPAE Carolina 1.1 come out yet?

[rg66]

Just curious, has the nonPAE Carolina 1.1 come out yet?

Yes, it was released Nov. 23, a week after the pae version. It can be found here: http://smokey01.com/carolina/isos/non-pae/

[starhawk]

[Pete22]

I am preparing a laptop for my friend. She has one program that needs to
be run with Crosswire. I added the pet python-2.6.4+wx. This allowed
crosswire to start. However, it will not install because it is running as root.
What can I do to fix this?


Pete

[Geoffrey]

I am preparing a laptop for my friend. She has one program that needs to
be run with Crosswire. I added the pet python-2.6.4+wx. This allowed
crosswire to start. However, it will not install because it is running as root.
What can I do to fix this?


Pete

What is Crosswire, do you have a link to it or the source code, it would be better to have it built to use python 2.7.

[Pete22]

Geoffery

Crosswire is a frontend for wine to run finicky windows programs on linux

Here is a link: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cro ... /download/

I don't know what versions of python it runs with. The error message said
python-gtk2 was not installed.

So I tried adding python pets until I found one that worked.
Pretty lame, I know, but I got close to making it work.

If there is a better pet or sfs that would make it work, please let me know.

Thanks for taking a look at this.

Pete


Edit I found a pet for pythong 2.7.2 and python tk 2.7.2 and now crosswire works. Thanks for the idea.


Edit it does not let the windows program run. so I still have a problem.

[can8v]

When I first got Samba working in Carolina I didn't notice how slow it was, as I tested some transfers with some very smal files. Even at 100/Kbs it doesn't take long to transfer a 100 KB file.
At any rate I am getting transfer speeds between 70 and 200/Kbs over Samba and 8-24/Mbs over FTP and HTTP. Even over the internet I get 12/Mbs down and 3/Mbs up.
I am using a Cisco E1000 WiFi router. Only the U-Verse Modem is connected by Ethernet. All other nodes are connected by WiFi. I say nodes rather than computers, because I am including tables, game consoles, TVs, Blu-Ray players, and phones, as well as computers.
The Game Consoles, Blu-Ray player and TV are all DLNA only, and they seem to be streaming a little slow (ie. sometimes choppy video or sound that does not occur when watching the video at the source), but I don't know how to test the speed of a DLNA connection.
The various operating systems involved are Carolina1.1, Saluki .023, Android 2.2, 4.1, and 4.4, Mac osX, Windoze 7, and Windoze XP. The Windoze computers are exceeding 10/Mbs when transferring files between themselves, but if the Mac, Linux or Android is on either end of the transfer I only get 70-200/Kbs. Again this is only using SMB, I get respectable speeds over FTP or HTTP.
On the Carolina machine I am using the standard Simple File Sharing setup that comes standard in 1.1.
I am looking for any ideas on how to narrow this down a bit.
***Edit***: I did some ping test and the average from the Carolina machine to any of the others and back is 3-6ms, but in the reverse direction it is between 58 and 147ms .
***Edit***: At the Carolina1.1 laptop that I am using for a server. I turned down wlan0 and connected the ethernet port to the router, then turned up eth0 and ran the network connection and now smb protocol will transfer consistently between 1.1 and 2.6 MB/s FTP and HTTP speeds are unaffected. This is even more confusing to me as this did not only correct the problem concerning smb transfer speeds between the Carolina smb server and other devices, but also corrected the smb transfer speeds between my Android devices and the Windows machines and the Android devices and the Saluki Laptop or Mac laptop. The thought crossed my mind that the WiFi adapter on the Carolina laptop was causing some RF interferrance, but wouldn't that effect all protocols (ie FTP and HTTP)? I cannot explain this, but I am happy to have a solution to the problem. This was not some stroke of genius on my part I had been planning all along to set this computer up on eth0 after I got everything set up and no longer needed it to be mobile. It was just dumb luck I guess.

[starhawk]

n00b question. Is SFS-Load the only way to load SFS's in Carolina? I can't seem to find the option to load an SFS at boot like on most Pups

EDIT: using CaroLite 1.1, not "regular" Carolina...

[Geoffrey]

n00b question. Is SFS-Load the only way to load SFS's in Carolina? I can't seem to find the option to load an SFS at boot like on most Pups

EDIT: using CaroLite 1.1, not "regular" Carolina...

Pretty much, or you can double click the sfs in any location and load it that way, it will give the option to copy it to /mnt/home, it then will be loaded from then on until its unloaded.

[starhawk]

Got it going... seems to work fine. Surprises the heck out of me, but if it works, it works, I guess.

Would be nice to have a newer Chrome... my history disappeared because this Chrome is too old to import it. Pain in the tail to remember the URLs of my usual haunts, amusingly enough...

...but then again I tried upping glibc to 2.15 (used an Ubuntu *.deb) and it BFE'd.

[can8v]

Hello all,
I have found the best way to connect my Nexus 7 is to use a Samba server on the Carolina machine and a Samba Client on the Nexus 7. This is not the easiest to set up, but after setup it works well and I don't have to keep track of any cables. I have however already seen another post from somebody trying puppy out that was perplexed as to why they couldn't connect their Nexus 7 via USB. "It worked in Ubuntu". After some research I discovered that KDE comes with MTP support. In Puppy however, the Nexus 7 incorrectly reports that it is connected as a "Media Device". only after you dig into the settings do you discover that it thinks it is connected using MTP. All fairly recent puppies I am aware of support PTP connections for the Camera in the Nexus 7 and that works fine, but for general file transfer MTP is required.
I did some research (the wiki at Arch Linux was very helpful) and found that Thunar supports gvfs and gvfs has support for MTP.
Carolina is apparently built with some of the gvfs backend modules, but not the one for MTP. This is a shame as it seems to be the only component missing to have support for connecting all MP3 players, tablets, phones, etc. that use MTP over their USB connection. When other OS such as Windoze and Ubuntu support this is makes Puppy appear broken. This seems like a fairly simple thing to add, but I am not sure how to make it work. I saw a pet in the package manager for gvfs, but I was unsure if it included the mtp backend module or just the modules that are already included in Carolina 1.1. Can I just install that PET and then mount the device in Thunar? I was considering that, but it will overwrite all of the gvfs modules already in Carolina. I am not sure if that is a good thing or not, as I don't know which version is already in Carolina. A little guidance here would be appreciated.
***Edit***
I booted into Carolina pfix=ram then installed the gvfs pet from the PPM, which I suspect includes only the modules that are already included in Carolina 1.1. MTP still doesn't work nor does FTP from Thunar. That or I am doing something wrong here. I figured it wouldn't hurt and if it did I wouldn't be creating a save file anyway.
The best I can tell, there are a few backend modules for gvfs that would be really nice to have. MTP for mounting usb connected devices that require MTP, FTP and SFTP, so I can use Thunar for FTP rather than FireFTP (no longer need Firefox, could switch to Slimboat), and DAV as Web Dav sometimes comes in handy (assuming that is what the DAV backend module is for). I found instructions for compiling gvfs, but nothing for compiliing the backend modules, which are apparently distributed separately. Perhaps somebody here can point me in the right direction or provide a pet. Anyone know who set up the smb backend for gvfs in Carolina, that works great and probably similar steps to get the other backend modules working.

[Geoffrey]

@ can8v

The gvfs with thunar started with Saluki http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 621#658621 it was a bit of a hack but works, so we used that in Carolina, it maybe possible to do as you require, you are the first to mention it, will have to read up on what was done in the first place , if memory serves me correctly I think we only added the missing files and didn't overwrite any existing one's.

[starhawk]

This little netbook sure does have some quirks.

CaroLite 1.1 will not shut down properly.

It writes to the savefile but never gets farther than that. In fact, the text on the screen, 20+ minutes later, still is just the "Carolina is now shutting down" and "writing session to savefile" text. It finishes, but doesn't know it.

Probably something weird to do with ACPI, but I thought I'd let folks know about it.

This is (as always) an ASUS 1000HEB netbook with 2gb RAM and a 64gb SSD. CaroLite 1.1 was installed frugally (IIRC there's not much choice ) to the SSD.

[can8v]

@ can8v

The gvfs with thunar started with Saluki http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 621#658621 it was a bit of a hack but works, so we used that in Carolina, it maybe possible to do as you require, you are the first to mention it, will have to read up on what was done in the first place , if memory serves me correctly I think we only added the missing files and didn't overwrite any existing one's.

Ok I have looked into this further and it appears that While Thunar does have the code necessary to mount MTP devices, it does so using libmtp, gvfs, and the gvfs-mtp backend. It is designed to use something called gio (I haven't looked into this yet), but it can apparently optionally use FUSE when gio is not available. From what I can gather gio or FUSE is needed from each of the backend modules (ie. gvfs-ftp, gvfs-smb, etc.), so since gvfs-smb is already working in Carolina, I can only assume that one or the other or both are installed somewhere in Carolina. I found several version of the libmtp library and gvfs-mtp backend module for gvfs packaged as source and as .deb packages. So far none of the combinations I have tried have produced working MTP in Thunar. I am admittedly a little confused by the version numbering system (ie. unrelated version numbers for libmtp and gvfs-mtp backend module). I don't know which versions are compatible with each other.
While this seemed be a somewhat simple fix at first, it now seems a bit more complex. I will look into it again tomorrow.

[can8v]

Ok I couldn't put this MTP issue to bed just yet. I am determined to make this work. Anyway I Installed the gnomad2.pet packaged which includes the libmtp and support for data transfer to mtp devices, however; it did not work in Carolina. I plugged in the Nexus 7 and gnomad2 said that it was scanning /root for quite some time then displayed relevant content from /root and said it was scanning the media library for over 30 minutes during which time my Nexus 7 said that MTP had stopped unexpectedly. After 30 minutes or so I killed the gnomad2 process as the app was locked up and wouldn't close. Then I installed the entire gvfs-backend deb package hoping it would work with the libmtp ver. 1.6.1 that was included with the gnomad2.pet pa ckage. It did not work because, it was compiled with support for gphoto2 and something else (which I already forgot). At any rate Thunar took almost 15 seconds to load after that, so I decided to see what was going on by launching it from the terminal you can see the result in the attached screenshot. Can somebody either tell me how to compile gvfs backend without support for these items or point me in the direction of a tutorial for such.

[ac2011]

When connecting an external monitor via D-sub VGA cable, the desktop is wiped, no background shows and it's not possible to right-click on it.

I tried this connecting to my TV via D-sub VGA, yes I get this also, I did try connecting the cable after the laptop had loaded Carolina and I had a desktop, I then used xrandr to select the TV, this gave me a screen but as you have described it then maxed out the CPU activity, this as me baffled, I wouldn't even know where to start.

A little more information now. The problem with the external monitor seems to be with xfdesktop: its CPU utilisation goes nuts. Installing the full Xorg PET doesn't help (in fact it stops Xorg working). I can use Xvesa and get two displays, but only at 1024x768.

I tried to killall xfdesktop but it restarts itself. After a bit of searching I found this, which might be related. It has a link to a patch.

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8119

Does that shed any light? I'd love to get Carolina running on this machine.

[can8v]

When connecting an external monitor via D-sub VGA cable, the desktop is wiped, no background shows and it's not possible to right-click on it.

I tried this connecting to my TV via D-sub VGA, yes I get this also, I did try connecting the cable after the laptop had loaded Carolina and I had a desktop, I then used xrandr to select the TV, this gave me a screen but as you have described it then maxed out the CPU activity, this as me baffled, I wouldn't even know where to start.

A little more information now. The problem with the external monitor seems to be with xfdesktop: its CPU utilisation goes nuts. Installing the full Xorg PET doesn't help (in fact it stops Xorg working). I can use Xvesa and get two displays, but only at 1024x768.

I tried to killall xfdesktop but it restarts itself. After a bit of searching I found this, which might be related. It has a link to a patch.

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8119

Does that shed any light? I'd love to get Carolina running on this machine.

I will be looking into this soon, as I also have an interest in getting this fixed. No guarantees, as I am not sure where to start with this either.

[ac2011]

I tried this connecting to my TV via D-sub VGA, yes I get this also, I did try connecting the cable after the laptop had loaded Carolina and I had a desktop, I then used xrandr to select the TV, this gave me a screen but as you have described it then maxed out the CPU activity, this as me baffled, I wouldn't even know where to start.

A little more information now. The problem with the external monitor seems to be with xfdesktop: its CPU utilisation goes nuts. Installing the full Xorg PET doesn't help (in fact it stops Xorg working). I can use Xvesa and get two displays, but only at 1024x768.

I tried to killall xfdesktop but it restarts itself. After a bit of searching I found this, which might be related. It has a link to a patch.

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8119

Does that shed any light? I'd love to get Carolina running on this machine.

I will be looking into this soon, as I also have an interest in getting this fixed. No guarantees, as I am not sure where to start with this either.

Getting somewhere:

install rox from repository
mv /usr/bin/xfdesktop /usr/bin/xfdesktop_old
killall xfdesktop
rox -p default

I now have a basic desktop (rox) and can run on an external monitor without mad CPU usage. It's ugly, though, because I'm sure xfce4-session (or something) is trying like mad to re-start xfdesktop. Trouble is I can't work out where to tell it to stop trying.

xfdesktop is version 4.10.0. I think an upgrade would fix this.

Edit: some more thoughts. Doing the above but also creating a small shell script at /usr/bin/xfdesktop containing:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
while [ 1==1 ]
   do
   sleep 99999
done

allows xfce4-session to satisfy its desire to reload xfdesktop if it's not in memory.

Rox pinboard is fine for me, though there are no drive icons. Thunar can handle volume mounting, or I seem to remember there's a PET somewhere on the forum for doing so.

This is all just a workaround, but it means I can actually use Carolina with an external display from my laptop now.

Edit again: this works even better as the contents for /usr/bin/xfdesktop

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
while [ 1==1 ]
   do
   rox -p /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/PuppyPin
   sleep 999999
done

Image attached, with the desktop_drive_icons package from elsewhere on this forum. This works fine for me.

[Geoffrey]

@ac2011,

I'm still trying to find the problem, but it's a ever so slow task, I did recompile xfdesktop but it has a bug that I can't find a fix for, jemimah did fix this but left no clue as to what she did, the problem is that dragging menu entries to the desktop removes them from the menu where it needs to just copy them to the desktop, the current version of xfdesktop in /usr/bin is from saluki which worked fine until you found it's downfall.

Did Saluki have the monitor problem? if not then may need to look elsewhere.

I'm calling on anyone that may have a lead to what the problem may be, rg66 and myself have very limited capabilities, as we are constantly learning as we go.

I compiled the desktop drives icons you mention in Carolina.