Raspberry Pie Puppy

[vtpup]

I've recently received a Rasperry Pi B+ board for Christmas, and have done quite a lot of exploring using Raspbian. As a long time Puppy user, I was curious to do a comparison.

Tonight downloaded Puppy squeeze Alpha4 and trying to work with it, learn what the problems are, and why it was abandoned -- with hopes of resurrecting it.

I installed it via Berryboot, a multiboot wizard front end.

First impressions:

The screen is black! One user complained about this on the RPi forum, and tried to adjust xvidtune to no effect.

Solution I found:

Not really a video problem -- there simply is no wallpaper selected by default. The windows are all fine and programs start and display. You just need to go to the wallpaper setter to set one of the usual choices. However, I can see how this is confusing to a newcomer to Puppy.

Next problem:

None of the usual program icons are on the desktop -- again, not a real problem, but may cause newbies to find it less friendly to try to guess from program names in the menu, what each actually does. The desktop icons were always named by function, not program names, and offered an easy introduction to using Puppu. Also, this lack of icons is inconsistent across the other standard Puppies.

Next problem:

Wireless has to be set up for Puppy after Berryboot goes through the whole process earlier. Puppy inherits no settings from Berryboot, therefore, again confusing to newbies that they have to set up networking right after setting it up earlier. Even I was fooled, though I've set up Puppy networking hundreds of times. I thought I was still connected and went to the Puppy package manager to update the repositories, and none of the URLs would resolve in wget (naturally -- no network!).

Next and more serious problem:

Refreshing repositories failed after downloading the package lists. When Puppy went to reformat them for the package manager, continuous lines scrolled up for every package saying:

packageFoo /usr/local/petget/find-cat: line 1 : syntax error: unexpected "("

The huge number of Debian packages meant this went on for more than an hour of scrolling error messages. Finally I terminated the process.

Well I can see why there has been little adoption of Puppy Linux on the Raspberry Pi so far.

It seems to me that if we can work out some of the problems, however, our distro will run really well on this $35 computer. I'd like to help by testing and also writing how to guides for the Raspberry Pi community, to see if we can create the interest that will sustain it.

I believe there are more than 3 million RPi boards out there, and I think that Puppy has huge advantages in terms of size speed, and handling of SD memory, among other things. The Pi isn't a particularly fast computer, but with Puppy aboard, I think it can really come alive.

[ally]

watching with interest......

[vtpup]

Thanks ally.

So question:

How do we solve:

packageFoo /usr/local/petget/find-cat: line 1 : syntax error: unexpected "("

Anybody?

[MochiMoppel]

Anybody?

Obviously the person who compiled find-cat. So who was it (noryb009?) and where is the source code? I found some hints in /usr/local/petget/0setup ("#130126 find_cat rewritten. works as before, also can post-process an entire db-entry or db-entries-file. arch code rewritten by noryb009")

[rokytnji]

Line 1 in packageFoo /usr/local/petget/find-cat has a ( in it that is being called a syntax error.

When I get that in AntiX. I make a backup 1st of /usr/local/petget/find-cat.bk

Then modify the original by removing the ( in line 1 and see what error pops up next. Sometimes I have had to edit like 10 lines in a script before it would quit erroring out.

Anyways. That is anyones take on that error.

[vtpup]

Thanks Mochi, -- Sorry for the shorthand -- I didn't mean to ask who is responsible for it, but to ask if anybody has an idea how we can solve the problem.

While it's true it might be a problem that requires recompiling that executable, I was wondering if the message means the executable found a "(" in data, and line 1 in the program couldn't execute because of the data problem.

In which case maybe something changed in the style of the data - maybe for instance the repositories for Debian have added a parenthesis since the program was first created. If so, we could just add a script to strip out or alter what was needed without re-working find-cat.

The basic problem is that, as an executable, we can't see inside of find-cat to check what line 1 is doing. Is the line the problem or is what it is working on the problem?

And Rocky, what you suggest is what I would normally do with a script, but this is a binary component.

But lets keep going -- someone will be able to solve this.... I hope!


ps. I've PMed Noryb2009 to see if he could help....

[rokytnji]

Code: Select all

And Rocky, what you suggest is what I would normally do with a script, but this is a binary component. 

Ouch! Sorry Bro. Out of my league there now.

Stupid question. Can a different file be subbed in while backing up original?
I've gone that route also.

[noryb009]

History of findcat: IIRC, find_cat was first implemented in bash, which was extremely slow. Berry then implemented it in Geany, which was much faster. I then sent a C++ version, which was about double the speed of Geany, but was never added to woof. I then implemented a C version, which was 4x the Geany version, which can be seen here. The big problem, though, was calling the program for each package. So I modified the C version to optionally take in a file to process, which took <1s for 20 000 entries. But it used a modified categories.dat, so Berry rewrote it in Bacon which was quite fast, as it was only invoked once. This is what is currently in Puppy.

Try running `/usr/local/petget/find-cat geany A text editor' - if that has an error, the problem is likely either with find-cat or categories.dat. If that runs fine, it is either how petget runs find-cat, a problem with reading files, or a problem with parsing the output from the debian->puppy format script.

Assuming it runs fine, I'm guessing the error is from petget running an illegal command, which just happens to be the find_cat command. See if there is anything wrong with the command being run.

[dancytron]

To be cool to the general public, Raspberry Pi puppy would have to integrate with omxplayer (pi version of mplayer), the pi specific web browser and other Pi specific things to take advantage of the GPU therefore have full HD video (and other cool things) which is a big part of what makes the R Pi cool.

[vtpup]

Unfortunately, I found that the stock Puppy for Raspberry Pi included the Chrome browser, rather than a Seamonkey equivalent (IceApe) which is a complete spoiler for me. Well, even re-mastering wouldn't solve that problem, because apparently support for IceApe has been cancelled by Debian.So not a viable browser/email suite from a security standpoint

I'm not sure if IceWeasel (Firefox clone) is still supported, if so, that's the only ARM browser I'm aware of that provides anything like Seamonkey's security, privacy, anti-scripting options, and addon/plugin availability that would make it something I'd personally want to use nowadays.

The Raspberry browser epiphany, while slightly better than Chrome (anything is) still lacks most user control of these issue areas

Chrome under Puppy in a test on the Pi, completely blocked me from using Ixquick! That browser is a bad joke, and really doesn't belong on a stock Puppy.