X-Slacko-4.4 with Xfce

[rg66]

Addendum: It occurs to me that you may not be entering the setup panel if you are in Canada? Try setting Perth/Oz and tick the Firewall and zone boxes. That Firewall box is k/b-only. Does that mean it's a CLI panel? Is there some unintended delay switching from an Xorg window into a terminal window all within the main X window? Not something I've seen before but maybe something that Xfce doesn't like? As SW is outside my ambit, just wild questions for the cognoscenti.

I'm in Uganda and always setup location on first run unless testing. I've tried all that on my Athlon box with no joy so to speak. The screen saver is controlled by xautolock so the problem might be with that. I haven't been able to do any testing on a slower machine yet, no power for half the day (yay Africa!) but hopefully today.

[starhawk]

Another annoyance with this laptop (Dell E4310). When I got the laptop (and set up X-Slacko 2.2) it did not have a battery at all. The battery arrived this morning and I put it in before booting up.

The laptop knows it's there -- I can see the charge state in the UEFI "BIOS" config (yes, Legacy BIOS is enabled!) -- but the little battery icon in the bottom tray refuses to recognize the battery as present. It gives all of the specs when I left-click, but it also says the battery isn't present somehow (which is incorrect). I don't seem to get any response to a right-click, either...

Thoughts? Advice? Anything? Beuller?

EDIT: battery is defective. Ignore me please! I will be getting a replacement from the eBay seller soon, I hope...

[rg66]

@ Sage

I did some tests with an Athlon 2500, 512mb RAM, and P4 2.66 512mb RAM booted from CD. I can finally confirm that you're not hallucinating

It happens when choosing a new timezone in quicksetup. Line 1591: hwclock --hctosys --${NEW_HWCLOCKTIME} must screw up xautolock's timing.

I think the easiest fix is to default the screen saver to disabled in the next release. In the meantime, I'll upload delta's for X-slacko-2.2 to disable it and you can make a new ISO.

Edit: Another easy solution that allows screen saver to be enabled is to add a few lines to the startup script

Code: Select all

while [ "`pidof quicksetup`" != "" ]; do
sleep 5
done

this will start the xautolock timer after quickset has been closed.

[Sage]

I can finally confirm that you're not hallucinating

Can I stop taking the pills, doc?!

[rg66]

@ starhawk

I finally got around to testing the battery on my lappy (the wife uses it everyday), I'm down to one now as the kids destroyed my HP DV7 beyond repair. The one I have left is an old (coming on 10 years) Acer travelmate with serious ACPI issues in linux. I get a battery icon but no left or right click.

Anyway, glad you figured it out.

[Marv]

@ starhawk

I finally got around to testing the battery on my lappy (the wife uses it everyday), I'm down to one now as the kids destroyed my HP DV7 beyond repair. The one I have left is an old (coming on 10 years) Acer travelmate with serious ACPI issues in linux. I get a battery icon but no left or right click.

Anyway, glad you figured it out.

Three disjoint thoughts.

The Xfce4 battery plugin works correctly in 2.2 on my fleet of Fujitsus, mostly 2004 to 2007 era. One s6210, one s6120, one s6230, one s6520. Also ok on a Dell D6xx Latitude. They are all pretty straight intel processors and glue.

I know you've pulled the 2.2.1 deltas but I continue to use 2.2.1 with no issues. On second thought the 'n' is not so good as it makes that init non standard. The Bay Trail boxes have usb card readers installed that take forever (20s) to set a flag on boot and allow the init script to continue so I've implemented ignore=usb in the inits. Without the 'n', all the X-slackos and LxPupTahr inits are same.

For the Bay Trail mobos with Intel 4000 HD video, there is a significent boost in performance between the intel libs, Mesa, and Xorg in X-slacko 2.2 and in LxPupTahr (both running 3.14.20 kernels). On the slacko 5.70 based 2.2, modesetting is the best it can do while the intel driver can be used on the Tahr based OS with a 5x increase in glxgears FPS. On the other hand, X-slacko is more user friendly (at least according to my users) and rock solid once set up.

That's what mischief I'm up to.

Thanks,

[rg66]

Always good to get feedback from you Marv, thanks.

Not too worried about the battery plugin as I rarely use the lappy, I prefer my desktop but I'll add the battery plugin to the next release.

I'm still contemplating the "n", it's nice to differentiate between the two but might cause issues down the road. The edit to init is harmless if not used but I'll most likely drop it.

I'm working on what will probably be the last of the 2.x.x series. Basically the same as 2.2.1 but save interval has been sorted and I've added a zdrv for easier kernel swaps plus a few fixes for minor things.

[rg66]

X-slacko-2.3 PAE and Non-PAE ISO's and delta's are available for download.

Major changes include zdrv and support for save to folder. See change log for more details.

Download
ISO md5sum
delta md5sum
change log

[rg66]

@ Sage

Screen saver delays for 2 minutes in RAM mode (pupmode 5), should be enough time for setup.

[Marv]

X-slacko-2.3 PAE and Non-PAE ISO's and delta's are available for download.

2.2n-2.3n delta downloaded and applied. md5 of iso checked. Frugal install to Pentium M, ipw2200, intel 855GM video laptop. First pristine no savefile, then created a token savefile to test 'neverland', then 3.14.20 kernel swapped in, then savefile from 2.2.1n updated. All steps exactly as expected. Sound, video resolution, wireless connection (both with Frisbee and with PWF 3.2), save at shutdown behavior, battery monitor all work correctly.

On kernel swapping. Thanks for the zdrive. Note: I do use the initrd from LxPupTahr when swapping the 3.14.20 kernel in. A bit smaller, works consistently and mine now has my mod to allow the kernel param ignore= to pass usb for my boxes with slooow card readers built in. Of course, appropriate DISTRO_SPECS put in and correct ID numbers appended to the vmlinuz and zdrive.

So modified, I'll now feed it to the Bay Trail boxes. Don't expect any surprises there either.

Edit: Indeed, no surprises there. Asrock Q1900M motherboard, Celeron j1900 2GHz quad core Bay Trail-D processor, intel 4000 HD video (10 watt TDW, fanless box, no CPU governor needed) 2 Gbyte DDR3 memory, wired ethernet. These pretty much need at least a 3.11/3.12 kernel so the 3.14.20 swap runs well. Updated the 2.2.1n savefile smoothly. As previously, the Xorg/Intel drm/Mesa versons in Xslacko limit the 4000 HD video to modesetting (non-accelerated) mode so FPS is modest but video either streamed or from DVDs is quite acceptable. Remains a solid choice for my rescue boxes with an excellent menu structure.

Thanks,

[Billtoo]

Virtualbox in PCLinuxOS:

video-info-glx 1.5.1 Mon 1 Dec 2014 on X-slacko 2.3 Linux 3.10.32 i686
2.0 VGA compatible controller: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Graphics Adapter
oem: VirtualBox VESA BIOS

X Server: Xorg Driver: vesa
X.Org version: 1.12.4
dimensions: 1152x864 pixels (423x318 millimeters)
depth of root window: 24 planes

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.4

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Core 0: @3389 1: @3389 MHz

# glxgears
3049 frames in 5.0 seconds = 609.738 FPS
3194 frames in 5.0 seconds = 638.644 FPS
3167 frames in 5.0 seconds = 633.307 FPS
#
Working well.

[rg66]

@ Marv

I think the zdrv will be better for kernel swaps but editing main sfs to change DISTRO_SPECS is a pain. Zdrv might be a better place for it since it take no time to unsquash/squash it.

If you are using Tahr initrd.gz and want to use save to folder, you'll need to use gyros Tahr initrd.gz or add his patch.

[Marv]

@ Marv

I think the zdrv will be better for kernel swaps but editing main sfs to change DISTRO_SPECS is a pain. Zdrv might be a better place for it since it take no time to unsquash/squash it.

If you are using Tahr initrd.gz and want to use save to folder, you'll need to use gyros Tahr initrd.gz or add his patch.

Yes, it would be great to get DISTRO_SPECS where it's easily edited. As to folders, I used the patch enough to see that it worked but for now, I have had such exceptional good luck with squashed savefiles from a reliability/ease of backup/non-tamperability by users standpoint I don't plan to change anytime soon. With multiple pups on a machine and ample horsepower even in the Pentium Ms to mount and manipulate or clean them if need be maintaining them is a breeze. For me that's the soul of puppy linux.

[rufwoof]

Yes, it would be great to get DISTRO_SPECS where it's easily edited

In Slacko 5.3.3 I have http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72842 installed under menu UTILITIES that provides a means to edit initrd.gz (that includes DISTRO SPEC).

[Marv]

Yes, it would be great to get DISTRO_SPECS where it's easily edited

In Slacko 5.3.3 I have http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72842 installed under menu UTILITIES that provides a means to edit initrd.gz (that includes DISTRO SPEC).

edit-initramfs does a fine job on the initrd now, it's the main sfs that's a bit cumbersome on slower machines.

Thanks for the pointer,

[Sage]

Screen saver delays for 2 minutes in RAM mode (pupmode 5), should be enough time for setup.

2.3PAE: Sadly, Pacman lives! No change.
but it's not reproducible,
and
2.3 N: Bingo - no Pacman.
...but, after about 10mins of video streaming, Firefox(with FP) produced a total systems crash needing a hard reset.

[rg66]

Yes, it would be great to get DISTRO_SPECS where it's easily edited

In Slacko 5.3.3 I have http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72842 installed under menu UTILITIES that provides a means to edit initrd.gz (that includes DISTRO SPEC).

edit-initramfs does a fine job on the initrd now, it's the main sfs that's a bit cumbersome on slower machines.

Thanks for the pointer,

X-slacko has a right click custom action to edit initrd.gz using edit-initramfs , just right click it and > "Edit initrd.gz". It's the puppy_xxx_xxx.sfs that's the pain in the @$$.

[rg66]

Screen saver delays for 2 minutes in RAM mode (pupmode 5), should be enough time for setup.

2.3PAE: Sadly, Pacman lives! No change.
but it's not reproducible,
and
2.3 N: Bingo - no Pacman.
...but, after about 10mins of video streaming, Firefox(with FP) produced a total systems crash needing a hard reset.

Ok Sage, your killing me now.

The only difference between PAE and Non-PAE is the kernel, same main sfs with a different kernel. Doesn't make sense, the screen saver shouldn't run in either for 2 min.

I did update firefox but not flash player so that might be the issue with the streaming video.

[Sage]

Pacperson: way out of my depth but logic might suggest that the fault doesn't lie with the screensaver, itself, but that something is calling (or allowing it to be called) it inappropriately. Firewall setting panel? This is the only version of Puppy I've ever seen exhibit the phenomenon. Afraid all I can do is test, observe and report.

[rg66]

Pacperson: way out of my depth but logic might suggest that the fault doesn't lie with the screensaver, itself, but that something is calling (or allowing it to be called) it inappropriately. Firewall setting panel?

The screen saver is started by a .desktop file in /root/.config/autostart which calls /usr/bin/xscreener. Xscreener in both PAE and Non-PAE is set to sleep for 2 min if PUPMODE = 5. I can't see how it's being started in PAE unless your running in something other than PMODE 5. Can you give me your exact setup? CPU, RAM, running cd, etc....... and check /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE > PUPMODE=? and PUPSFS=?

This is the only version of Puppy I've ever seen exhibit the phenomenon. Afraid all I can do is test, observe and report.

As far as I know it's the only puppy other than Carolina, which also uses screener, that has an actual screen saver app. The default is to use xset which is actually screen blanking.