Light-Debian-Core-Live-CD-Wheezy + Porteus-Wheezy

[mcewanw]

Hi Guys,

One annoyance I'm finding is that underscore characters are not appearing in xterm display when I list things or use commands like modinfo. Is it just me?

[mcewanw]

Sorry, double posted in error.

[mcewanw]

Have you installed the mesa-dri driver yet. I have to install that on mine to get the acceleration to work.

That didn't seem to work at first but on further testing I seem to have reasonable CPU mplayer load now after:

Code: Select all

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

Actually, I think xserver-xorg-video-ati was already installed but I did need both libgl1-mesa-dri and firmware-linux-nonfree I think. I'll have to try all this again just to be sure. It still uses a bit more CPU than in Puppy GuyDog, but that's not surprising I suppose since this is Wheezy compared to GuyDog using squeeze packages. I am using the gz compressed sfs at the moment, as Toni suggested, but I don't think that has any effect. I'll put everything back to normal and double check tomorrow.

EDIT: Hardinfo report on DebianDog tells me mesa is working and I have direct rendering now:

-OpenGL-
Vendor : X.Org R300 Project
Renderer : Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV350
Version : 2.1 Mesa 8.0.5
Direct Rendering : Yes

So that is good... but... from hardinfo report on GuyDog, I don't have this! So it remains a mystery why mplayer is running so efficiently in GuyDog on my machine! (I wonder if I can even improve on that if mesa is not currently running in GuyDog...)

Current situation is therefore that mplayer is working reasonably efficiently now in my DebianDog install on this machine, but I'm still not satisfied I have really found the answer!!

EDIT2: Nope. Something not right. I've rebooted again and mesa is showing in hardinfo report and I have all the above bits and pieces installed but mplayer consuming twice as much cpu as it seemed to be. I don't know what is going on tonight! I'll have to look into this more tomorrow...

[saintless]

,One annoyance I'm finding is that underscore characters are not appearing in xterm display when I list things or use commands like modinfo. Is it just me?

Can you give an example output from such command, William? And the same command from puppy to search for the right settings in xterm. I see nothing wrong yet.
This also might be of help:
http://bsdpants.blogspot.com/2008/07/xt ... cters.html

It is strange gzip compression does not give you less CPU usage. It does that on my old hrdware and the system is really much faster.

Toni

[mcewanw]

,One annoyance I'm finding is that underscore characters are not appearing in xterm display when I list things or use commands like modinfo. Is it just me?

Can you give an example output from such command, William?

No actual command needed on my machine Toni. If I have an xterm open and type an underscore the character is simply invisible. It is being typed (I can cut and paste into editor and it is there ok) but just not showing ever in my xterms.

I was mainly looking at mplayer cpu load toni. I have a lot on the system just now so i'm not sure I can reliably see if the overall system cpu is much different. But I didn't get the impression there was much change overall. Perhaps my system, though old, is fast enough to mask the difference or do you note a major change on your faster machine? EDIT: Ah, sorry, I just realised I'm still using Porteus boot method, forgot to change the menu.lst to use a persistence file instead - but will that really make any difference?

[mcewanw]

One major difference I've noted comparing my DebianDog and GuyDog distributions is that GuyDog loads the module agpgart and DebianDog does not. GuyDog also loads modules intel_agp and intel_gpp (whatever they may be...?)

[saintless]

Hi, William.

Porteus-boot will not affect much your mplayer test.
If using gzip does does not make visual difference changing boot method will not do it with sure.
gzip compressed main module runs much faster on PIII-600Mhz and 128Mb RAM. It also uses 7Mb less RAM in Htop.

firmware-linux-nonfree package could also make difference for Squeeze at least. I have network card that works only after installing firmware-linux-nonfree.

Toni

[mcewanw]

Hi, William.

Porteus-boot will not affect much your mplayer test.
If using gzip does does not make visual difference changing boot method will not do it with sure.
gzip compressed main module runs much faster on PIII-600Mhz and 128Mb RAM. It also uses 7Mb less RAM in Htop.

firmware-linux-nonfree package could also make difference for Squeeze at least. I have network card that works only after installing firmware-linux-nonfree.

Toni

Yes, I thought it wouldn't make much difference in this machine, which is Pentium M 1.6GHz with 1 GB RAM. The only difference with the gz compression method that I notice is the size increase of the sfs file to over 120MB as you said.

As far as agpgart is concerned, I think that must be built into debian kernel since I see references to that in dmesg from boot up and it doesn't seem to be a module in the system. Yes, firmware-linux-nonfree might be what I'm needing in the debian core squeeze version for better performance.

[mcewanw]

I thought I'd try playing with xorg.conf, but when I drop out of X and enter:

Code: Select all

Xorg -configure

I'm getting error message:

(II) [KMS] No DRICreatePCIBusID symbol, no kernel modsetting.
Number of screens does not match the number of detected devices.
Configuration failed

It's just my Pentium M laptop and no extra monitor attached to it. I'm still trying to chase down my mplayer cpu load situation, which was why I was planning to experiment with xorg.conf

[Ether]

...
If I have an xterm open and type an underscore the character is simply invisible. It is being typed (I can cut and paste into editor and it is there ok)...

Not to interrupt the flow of this ongoing dialog, but could you please explain how to copy the text from an Xterm window? I've been trying everything I could think of and no joy. Thank you.

.

[saintless]

Hi, Ether.

Copy - paste: mark the text in Xterm and just press the scroll wheel mouse button to paste it where you need. And the opposite.
To select all or part of the content in Xterm mark small part and start scroll the mouse button. When you click right mouse button the text is selected to the point where the cursor is.
Press Ctrl and right mouse button and see what menu will appear.

Also you can install rxvt like in puppy or lxterminal.

Toni

[saintless]

I thought I'd try playing with xorg.conf, but when I drop out of X and enter:

Code: Select all

Xorg -configure

I'm getting error message:

(II) [KMS] No DRICreatePCIBusID symbol, no kernel modsetting.
Number of screens does not match the number of detected devices.
Configuration failed

It's just my Pentium M laptop and no extra monitor attached to it. I'm still trying to chase down my mplayer cpu load situation, which was why I was planning to experiment with xorg.conf

Hi, William.
It should be related with you graphic card model. Try to boot with nomodeset and see if this works.
Just few links from google with the same message:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=16403
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132
http://www.linuxine.com/story/debian-li ... o-settings

Till you find the problem use only live-boot-2 or live-boot-3
nomodeset maybe will not work with porteus boot.
Fred wrote nonetworking for example does not work with DebianDog porteus-boot but it works with debian boot:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 472#774472

Toni

[Ether]

Hi, Ether.

Copy - paste: mark the text in Xterm and just press the scroll wheel mouse button to paste it where you need. And the opposite.
To select all or part of the content in Xterm mark small part and start scroll the mouse button. When you click right mouse button the text is selected to the point where the cursor is.
Press Ctrl and right mouse button and see what menu will appear.

That worked, thank you.

Is there a FAQ or something where I could get this info for myself? I hate to take up bandwidth here asking such basic questions, but I don't know where else to get answers.

On a separate topic:

I'm trying to learn my way around Debian Dog. I have it frugal-installed in sda1 with GRUB4DOS on an old Dell Dimension E310 and it's working great so far.

I'm trying to config it so that I don't have to run apt-get update every time I power-up. Here's what I tried:

- boot v2 persistent
- apt-get update
- RemasterDog and save as 01-filesystem.squashfs in sda3 ext partition
- replace the existing 01-filesystem.squashfs in the /live folder with the new one
- re-boot

It didn't work (as evidenced by the fact that when I did apt-get update, it downloaded all the files again).

What am I doing wrong?

[saintless]

Hi, Ether.

Feel free to ask anything DebianDog related. The answers will be usefull for others reading this thread. Xterm howto:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xterm

- boot v2 persistent
- apt-get update
- RemasterDog and save as 01-filesystem.squashfs in sda3 ext partition
- replace the existing 01-filesystem.squashfs in the /live folder with the new one
- re-boot

It didn't work (as evidenced by the fact that when I did apt-get update, it downloaded all the files again).

What am I doing wrong?

Nothing wrong but if you try to save apt-get downloaded database and downloaded deb packages it will not happen this way.
Remasterdog (as also RemasterCow) make some extra cleaning in order to keep your system small as possible.
It will not save the files for apt-get update information in:
/var/cache/apt - 39Mb
/var/cache/apt/archives - all downloaded packages with apt-get (this folder easy can become 200-300 Mb and more. After installing the packages you do not need this deb packages anymore).
/var/lib/apt/lists - 48 mb.
All this files will be created again after running apt-get update.
If you like to keep them use live-rw save file. For example use this 1Gb for testing:
http://smokey01.com/saintless/1gb-example-save-file.zip
Extract it on top of any ext or vfat partition and use live-boot-2 persistent
The boot code should have persistent in kernel line and initrd line to use initrd1.img. Example for DebianDog frugal on sda1:

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title DebianDog (sda1) 
root=(hd0,0) 
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 boot=live config persistent swapon quickreboot noprompt autologin
initrd /live/initrd1.img

Now all your changes will be saved inside the extracted live-rw save file without any extra cleaning.
If you prefer to edit /opt/bin/remsterdog script not to do apt-get information extra cleaning comment lines 80, 82, 84. But you will include inside the main module the size of the files I pointed above.

Toni

[Ether]

Hi, Ether.

Feel free to ask anything DebianDog related. The answers will be usefull for others reading this thread.

I appreciate your patience and helpfulness.

Nothing wrong but if you try to save apt-get downloaded database and downloaded deb packages it will not happen this way.
Remasterdog (as also RemasterCow) make some extra cleaning in order to keep your system small as possible.
It will not save the files for apt-get update information in:
/var/cache/apt - 39Mb
/var/cache/apt/archives - all downloaded packages with apt-get (this folder easy can become 200-300 Mb and more. After installing the packages you do not need this deb packages anymore).
/var/lib/apt/lists - 48 mb.
All this files will be created again after running apt-get update.
If you like to keep them use live-rw save file. For example use this 1Gb for testing:
http://smokey01.com/saintless/1gb-example-save-file.zip
Extract it on top of any ext or vfat partition and use live-boot-2 persistent
The boot code should have persistent in kernel line and initrd line to use initrd1.img. Example for DebianDog frugal on sda1:

Code: Select all

title DebianDog (sda1) 
root=(hd0,0) 
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 boot=live config persistent swapon quickreboot noprompt autologin
initrd /live/initrd1.img

Now all your changes will be saved inside the extracted live-rw save file without any extra cleaning.
If you prefer to edit /opt/bin/remsterdog script not to do apt-get information extra cleaning comment lines 80, 82, 84. But you will include inside the main module the size of the files I pointed above.

I am going to study the above very carefully and do some experimenting. I think part of the challenge facing me is that I don't yet have a framework of understanding about what the squashfs files do and how they are used. I'm just making guesses at this point based on hunches. Is there a beginner-level FAQ that you might recommend to get me started down the right path toward understanding? I have a feeling that once I get a foundation to build on the learning will happen a lot faster. I'll bet this is a hurdle that many new users stumble on and give up. I'm determined not to give up... I think the rewards will be worth the effort.

EDIT1: re-reading your post, I just realized something: "apt-get update" does not actually update the installed OS with patches and updates, right? It just downloads an updated copy of the repo database?


.

[saintless]

...I don't yet have a framework of understanding about what the squashfs files do and how they are used. I'm just making guesses at this point based on hunches. Is there a beginner-level FAQ that you might recommend to get me started down the right path toward understanding?...

Hi, Ether.
Same with me at first. This is what happen when you use puppy linux only for too long Squashfs is nothing else but SFS files you use with puppy. Just Barry named them different i guess. Some info links:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SquashFS-HOWT ... using.html
http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/SquashFS-HOWTO/
Keep on mind you are using Debian Live CD now and it is really very similar to Puppy but words like SFS and frugal install are not known in Debian. This why it seems strange at first.

Toni

[saintless]

EDIT1: re-reading your post, I just realized something: "apt-get update" does not actually update the installed OS with patches and updates, right? It just downloads an updated copy of the repo database?

Yes, this is correct.

[fredx181]

Double work if we start with jessie now - we do not know when it will become stable. There are still bugs in already added packages from sid to jessie repositiry. We are not sure what kernel to use as default yet and few more upgrades will be needed at least till it gets stable version.
.......

Thanks for the info, I'm beginning to understand now.

Fred

[mcewanw]

Toni, Fred:

I'm still struggling away trying to get efficient mplayer performance on my old Pentium M laptop. Today I tried DpupWheezy to see what the result would be and to my surprise mplayer ran efficiently (three times less CPU than DebianDog on my system) - almost as good as GuyDog. And this apparently without mesa. So then I checked with lsmod what modules were being loaded, and lo and behold, like GuyDog, it had agpgart and intel_agp and intel_gtt all available as modules under /lib/modules/kernel/drivers/char/agp (I think that's where it was anyway - no longer running to check location). And all three of these were being auto-loaded on my machine at boot-time. On DebianDog, on the otherhand, there is no such directory of modulesm, instead they are listed as module.builtins for the kernel - that seems to be the key difference (and yes I do see agpgart when checking dmesg, but still mplayer runs rubbish on this machine unless they are loaded as modules, which I can't do with DebianDog).

Then, I backtracked, since I had a recollection the first Porteus-Wheezy, using Porteus kernel worked better on this machine. And sure enough, great mplayer performance on this machine again, and also agpgart.ko, intel_agp.ko and intel_gtt.ko all available and loaded automatically as modules. So that is what I need... But how do I get these modules for DebianDog or can I use that old Portues kernel/modules/firmware somehow on latest DebianDog - I think that would solve it for me?! :-) Might well also solve similar issue for anyone else with a problem when that /lib/modules/kernel/drivers/char/agp directory doesn't exist on their system but instead all built into the official Debian kernel.

[saintless]

...But how do I get these modules for DebianDog or can I use that old Portues kernel/modules/firmware somehow on latest DebianDog - I think that would solve it for me?! Might well also solve similar issue for anyone else with a problem when that /lib/modules/kernel/drivers/char/agp directory doesn't exist on their system but instead all built into the official Debian kernel.

Hi, William.
You can have this very easy:
Download 3.9.11 porteus archive and extract it inside /live
http://smokey01.com/saintless/DebianDog ... orteus.zip
If you like to have also the porteus firmware download this module and place it inside /live
http://smokey01.com/saintless/DebianDog ... s.squashfs
Change in your boot code initrd1.xz with initrd3.xz and vmlinuz1 with vmlinuz3 and reboot.
Now you are running DebianDog with porteus kernel:

Code: Select all

root@debian:~# uname -r
3.9.11-porteus
root@debian:~# uname -a
Linux debian 3.9.11-porteus #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jul 22 23:09:06 UTC 2013 i686 GNU/Linux

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root@debian:~# lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
i915                  375014  0 
video                   8730  1 i915
i2c_algo_bit            3426  1 i915
drm_kms_helper         25483  1 i915
drm                   153298  2 i915,drm_kms_helper
mperf                    727  0 
speedstep_lib           2104  0 
cpufreq_userspace       1108  0 
cpufreq_stats           2248  0 
cpufreq_powersave        492  0 
cpufreq_conservative     2060  0 
ipv6                  160644  20 
snd_intel8x0           18536  1 
snd_ac97_codec         68805  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_pcm                40415  2 snd_ac97_codec,snd_intel8x0
snd_page_alloc          4786  2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
snd_seq                31616  0 
snd_seq_device          3185  1 snd_seq
snd_timer              10826  2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
e100                   19420  0 
snd                    28377  8 snd_ac97_codec,snd_intel8x0,snd_timer,snd_pcm,snd_seq,snd_seq_device
8250                   17747  0 
mii                     2704  1 e100
i2c_i801                6984  0 
soundcore                520  1 snd
parport_pc             12161  0 
processor              21719  0 
i2c_core               11947  5 drm,i915,i2c_i801,drm_kms_helper,i2c_algo_bit
mousedev                6572  0 
evdev                   5856  4 
ac97_bus                 560  1 snd_ac97_codec
floppy                 39017  0 
intel_agp               6564  1 i915
parport                12085  1 parport_pc
serial_core            12472  1 8250
shpchp                 17379  0 
thermal_sys            10673  2 video,processor
intel_gtt               7529  3 i915,intel_agp
agpgart                17239  4 drm,intel_agp,intel_gtt
button                  3102  1 i915
hwmon                    866  1 thermal_sys
pci_hotplug            16054  1 shpchp
rng_core                2080  0 
root@debian:~# 

If you like to go further just remove the official debian kernel:

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root@debian:~# apt-get purge linux-image-3.2.0-4-486
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux-image-3.2.0-4-486*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 80.5 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

And use RemasterDog to remaster the system. The size will be at least 10Mb smaller because of the size of kernel 3.9.11 module.
You can reverse the official debian kernel very easy the same way by downloading this module:
http://smokey01.com/saintless/DebianDog ... el-486.zip

Toni