Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[gcmartin]

Barry announce a kind of combining efforts for Precise.

The upcoming Precise release is a first of its kind, in Puppyland. It will bring great innovations forward in this combined announcement. Although its not official in how this is to be released, just looking at today's forum shows us several distro offerings from the combined efforts of both BarryK and Pemasu. It is these 2 developer's efforts over 2012 that has moved Puppy into a site of innovation. I say this because these 2 people have directly made it possible to run a Puppy on a 32bit platform and have it use ALL of your RAM for the workload you put your machine through. And, these 2 have also not forgotten those who have PCs as they also continue to provide a distro which runs on PCs that are purposeful built and do not contain the memory addressing firmware built into most PCs since 1995. Although this is a very small number of PCs, the conscious attention paid by BarryK and Pemasu is a testament to the kind of people that work within the Puppyland sphere. As such, this necessitates the need for them to build separate versions for each distro they create for community use.

As we approach the upcoming release date, I would like to call to attention a problem that affect support of the different distros about to be released under the same monocle. I'll summarize the simple problem and offer an idea that could/would assist in minimize the problem's impact while making clear the issues they share.

Problem
There will be no less than 2 and possibly more of Precise(s). Thus, there will be forum efforts to address finding and issues in its use. Assuming only 2, when someone reports a problem there is no formal way to ID the distro that the problem is reported under. Thus, any user could inadvertently report a problem as, incorrectly, the "other" distro. (We have already seen this when there are 2)

Idea
This indirectly addresses a simple way for users to "see" which distro that they are using and should be reporting, should they exercise some measure of accuracy. HARDINFO that Kirk introduced 2-3 years ago, where it identifies on its 1st 2 pages the specific distro that is running in the system. This makes it simple and easy for development to ask the user which disto he has and almost make it fool-proof for him to report the distro which is running. I'm not sure what effort was involved to provide this level of detail, then or now, but, suffice it to say, it useful for ID purposes.

One case of its need in PUPs (minor idea)
I have just started to use Puppy (FATDOG) as a VM Host. If the speed remains as fast as it is (i'm currently running 5 different Puppy distros in this implementation), should I notice a problem and want to report, I do NOT have a simple step to report the distro that is running in the Virtual machine. I also have had this problem running the 5 PCs that I do when I testing several distro in the same time frame. If I stop for dinner, or family time, and come back I sometimes mistake one machine for another; necessitating the need to open the CD/DVD drawer to physically see which one I'm running. There are also other fields in HARDINFO that also are useful. HARDINFO screens from FATDOG are contained below for your review.

The idea is one to make it even easier for users to accurately identify feedback appropriate to the distro they are reporting on. Yet at the same time, making it clearer to development which distro is being reported based upon system's information.

Here to help

[8-bit]

One other thing that bugs me is a Puppy distro in progress that only uses one topic to cover them all with an updated release for testing being in the same thread maybe 100+ messages into the thread.
And I think it would be better to create a new bug report thread for each phase of a version.

Of course in reporting a bug, for example, slacko 5.4.0, the version should be specified so the creator knows which version the bug relates to.

[Q5sys]

[Flash]

For what it's worth, people post bug reports all over the forum, sometimes with no indication of which version of Puppy they're talking about, and I have no way to move them to the appropriate thread, even if I know what that is.

[jamesbond]

[Monsie]

[drblock2]

Try this:

[gcmartin]

Puppy member @Rodin.S published an upgrade to Hardinfo for 32bit PUPs, last week 2013-02-23

That Hardinfo versions shows which PUP is running in the "top 2 pages" of the on-screen report.

Here to help.

[Monsie]

gcmartin,

Update:

I am currently running and testing Wary 5.5 and I note that HardInfo now correctly identifies the Operating System "OOTB". I am assuming that this works for Racy 5.5 also.

Monsie

[gcmartin]

Slacko V5.5 ihas also using a much current version, as well. Official versions are showing up with HARDINFO improvements. Thanks goes to @Rodin.S for recognizing community benefit and helping. As well as to the developers who make this happen within distros.