pUPnGO 2012 Plus Extras

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starhawk
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#16 Post by starhawk »

...extras?

TBH, if shipping to the UK weren't so expensive (us$15 or so) I'd offer to ship you ones you're missing, if any. Unfortunately, it's beyond my means -- America has a LOT of issues, how we treat our poor being one of them, in a big way. (Small example: Mom and I live on her disability check; it's ~us$1k/mo. We do not receive Food Stamps any more, and therefore making ends meet is difficult at best.)

In a previous lifetime (ie before bad stuff happened and we became poor) Mom was an attorney and we traveled to Europe every other summer. I say this a lot: if I could pick one city to live in, it would be London.

Maybe someday. Right now I couldn't afford the trip to the airport.

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greengeek
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#17 Post by greengeek »

Updated my second post to add iso of Textmaker2002 as a lighter (but less capable) alternative to Freeoffice. Just might breathe some usability back into less powwerful machines.

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#18 Post by greengeek »

Updated my fourth post on the first page to include a couple of isos to assist browsing:

1) Contains pupngo2012basic + sns pet + qtweb browser.

2) Contains pupngo2012basic + sns pet + qtweb browser + Xorg.
.

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#19 Post by greengeek »

Updated my second post to add an iso that has Textmaker2012 only (does not include the Planmaker or Presentations). It includes sns and xorg, and just has Dillo as the browser to keep things lightweight.
TM2012 is stripped from the Freeoffice2012 package and is able to read docx and also create pdfs if needed. Pretty neat little word processor.

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#20 Post by starhawk »

Want to report some issues and some successes.

I installed pUPnGO2012 with Xorg/SNS/FreeOffice to the Infernal Dell.

System specs --
Dell Latitude CPi D300XT
300MHz Pentium II CPU
128MB "EDO" RAM (2x64MB)
NeoMagic graphics card
4GB CompactFlash "HDD" in CF->IDE adapter
CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive in modular bay

(The bay modules are more modular than Dell wants you to know -- I've a Combo drive from a Thinkpad in this one!)

Shutdown from CD absolutely positively 100% would refuse to in any way generate a save file. So I couldn't install it using the install script...

So I did my first manual install! ("did you know" there's no thread for that in HOWTO??? What the...!) I copied the zdrv and main sfs files over, along with initrd.gz and vmlinuz. Then I rebooted with a Puplite5 CD and installed grub4dos. Then I rebooted with no CD in the drive.

As a note... this particular lovely little pile of dump has a graphics card that doesn't mesh well with Xvesa, and the screen likes to think it's an 800x600 screen when it's a 1024x768 screen. Whoopeedoo, there's a few extra steps here for graphical config --
(1) when the horribly colored desktop first shows up, hit CTRL+ALT+BKSP to get to the prompt.
(2) run xorgwizard. pick the 1024x768x16 resolution.
(3) afterwards, type xwin [ENTER] to get back to graphics. it will come up 800x600 'cause it thinks it's smarter than you (it's not!)
(4) navigate to (and open) the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf -- this is confusing because there's an xorg.conf. with a hard-to-see dot at the end. The one that's higher up in the list is the correct file.
(5) within xorg.conf, there are two sections that need attention. One is called "monitor" and the other "screen". Both will have a mention of the (wrong and ugly) 800x600 resolution. Change it in BOTH to 1024x768.
(6) save file, exit Beaver.
(7) CTRL+ALT+BKSP again.
(8) nifty trick: [UP_ARROW] then [ENTER]. Or, if you like to type, type xwin [ENTER] ;)

"Phew!" That's it.

BTW, even on this pokey little pile of [...] FreeOffice is pretty snappy. This was unexpected -- I figured it would bog things down unmercifully, but it seems to work pretty dang well.

Haven't tested SNS WiFi config -- have to dig up my Cardbus WiFi card and hope that the driver will work (IIRC it's one of those ones that needs ath5k or something... I've forgotten now exactly what it is). Also... sound still doesn't work on this laptop. xmixer crashes without any errors -- I type xmixer in terminal, and it hesitates for a second and then does a new line with the hashtag prompt on it. Oops! Meanwhile my only sound is a PCBEEP if I get an error message. (The sound problem is a known issue -- I've mentioned it before.)

Overall qualitative score: I'm a happy dude with this -- although there are some issues that still need fixing ;)

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#21 Post by greengeek »

Thanks Starhawk! I have now added a link to your findings in my xorg related posts.

I agree with you about Freeoffice being nippy - seems like a real honey to me.

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#22 Post by starhawk »

To be clear, greengeek -- the strange issues with this Dell's graphics are basically because it's a really old Dell. This is a 1999 machine.

This laptop predates the ATi/nVIDIA market takeover or whatever it was -- it has a 3rd party graphics card by a company called NeoMagic, because back then, there WERE 3rd-party graphics, and Dell wanted something "odd" so that they could charge their customers mega $$$ to fix it when it broke.

I'm not going to out-and-out say that these problems will ONLY happen with this particular line of Dell laptops (the Latitude CP/CPi/CPx series) but I will say that *any* laptop of that vintage is going to have a lot of quirks.

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#23 Post by greengeek »

Actually I had the same problem with my Tosh TE2100 lappy - I had to manually adjust xorg.conf and followed your howto comments from earlier in goingnuts thread - I had forgotten to write it up. It might be a common issue on other PCs aswell so I'm glad you've clarified the procedure.

I do have a Dell cpt which I've dug out (not used it for about 3 years) so I'm very interested in seeing what it takes to get yours going (then I'm going to copy your setup :-) )

Sounds like you've got yours going without adding in a NeoMagic driver - is that correct? I didn't realise this version of xorg had all it needed.

I was thinking about starting a separate thread for these Dell lappy sound issues- what do you think? Be nice to get a functional lightweight puppy going on these.

EDIT: nope: turns out its a cpi D300XT just like yours. Not sure of the ram size yet. Must have a tinker soon.

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#24 Post by starhawk »

The NeoMagic driver is built into this version of Xorg. It selects it automatically.

The trick with any other Puppy on these laptops -- do not do not DO NOT select "NeoMagic" at startup, or Xorg will crash flat on its face. Go for the generic Xorg driver, and let the firstrun wizard do its thing afterwards ;) I rather strongly suspect that this is not a "standard" version of the NeoMagic card (if there is such), but one that Dell tweaked... ;)

By the way, the RAM on these is EDO. Regular PC100/133 won't work -- and although you can get EDO SODIMMs on eBay, they charge insane prices for them. I'd love to put 2x128mb in this thing, and max it out (max RAM is 256mb) but I simply can't afford it :( Right now it has 2x64mb (128mb total) because that's as good as I can do.

The sound issue is a driver conflict -- IIRC the wrong driver is loaded, but I never was able to transplant the correct one from p412. Someone needs to compile the driver needed specifically for pUPnGO. Of course I've forgotten what the name of the driver is... also, pUPnGO doesn't really have a devx -- IIRC goingnuts started making one but never finished.

@goingnuts: what happens if I try to use a p412 devx? (I assume it won't work at all...)

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#25 Post by goingnuts »

what happens if I try to use a p412 devx? (I assume it won't work at all...)
as close as it comes - most stuff made with that.

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#26 Post by starhawk »

OK. I'll download it, and see if there's an SFS installer in pUPnGO2012...

...and then I'll see if I can find the right driver.

I'm no coder, but I can make and make install...

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#27 Post by greengeek »

I've had some display problems booting pupngo2012 on certain machines (unrelated to a need for xorg) and have had some success with rearranging the display functions. I'm calling this derivative "TLCpngo12" as the critical display functions are referenced to the "Top Left Corner" instead of having the menu and drive icons sitting in an artificially calculated bottom_of_screen position.
Thread here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 684#683684

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#28 Post by greengeek »

Have now added a combo sns/xorg/qtbrowser/freeoffice version of pupngo2012. See page 1 post 4.
(includes mp text editor to overcome the strange problem of beaver not being able to cop/paste between some programs)

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#29 Post by goingnuts »

Nice work! I do have a beaver now with the problem fixed - just too big to post here. Also kind of slow reacting when copy/paste between applications - but it works...

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#30 Post by starhawk »

@greengeek -- bravo on the new pUPnGO2012+ version (as I'm calling them now, lol) -- looking forward to trying it out on The Infernal Dell. Downloading now... should go well unless Mom notices a slowdown and reboots the router... hopefully that won't happen ;)

Probably what I'll do is install the Opera pet that goingnuts gave me, along with the other stuff in the more recent posts in the pUPnGO2012 thread.

goingnuts, if you could post that fixed beaver pet somewhere, that'd be great, I'll put that in as well -- or really anything that's not CLI-based. Geany or Bluefish would be REALLY snazzy (but probably too big for this). Maybe there's a text editor that does something similar in a tiny space? Really what I miss is the programmer friendly stuff, oddly enough -- I can edit JWM "xml" a little better when it's in color ;)

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#31 Post by starhawk »

OK so beaver's still in there, AND has the coloring I need (which I hadn't noticed until now, somehow). Good thing, as minimumprofit makes my eyes hurt and my screen do Bad Things.

So, two questions --
(1) how do I remove MP?
(2) how are application defaults set within pUPnGO2012? eg, what and where is the file that tells what the default text editor is? IIRC in most Puppies and Puplets, it's defaulttexteditor, a text file, in I want to say /usr/local/apps... can't find 'em in pUPnGO2012...

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Keef
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#32 Post by Keef »

You might get more joy in /usr/local/bin....

Code: Select all

#which defaulttexteditor
will tell you for sure.

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#33 Post by greengeek »

starhawk wrote:(1) how do I remove MP?
To remove mp:

1) Delete /usr/bin/mp
2) "Open as text" the file /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/PuppyPin and delete the line which contains a reference to "mptext"
3) "Open as text" the file /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/globicons and delete the lines which contain the following stanza:

<rule match="/usr/bin/mp">
<icon>/usr/share/pixmaps/details.png</icon>
</rule>

(This does not remove the details.png icon from the pixmaps pool, it just removes any association with mp)

4) "Open as text" the file /usr/local/bin/defaulttexteditor and remove the line that refers to mp.

(To be honest I have no idea how that association got to be inside that file - I didn't put it there so maybe that is an automatic function at boot time. Thanks for the tip Keef)

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sullysat
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#34 Post by sullysat »

This is very cool folks! When I first started looking at PupNGo1012 (and following the main thread while wishing that I was able to play more!) I thought that a better little browser and a decent text editor/word processor is JUST what this pup needs, so thanks to all.

Personally, on machines that need to have something this small loaded on them, all I really want them to do is find the internet, basic browsing, and word processing. PupnGo is perfect for that.

Loving these threads!
Sully
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