T2: Wary: Xorg 7.3-original

In the forum we have been discussing Xorg in Wary 0.7. Wary has Xorg 7.3+, approx. same versions of packages as used in Debian Lenny, whereas Puppy 4.3.1 (and earlier) uses the first release packages of Xorg 7.3. There are differences in performance, mostly due to the use of xorg-server 1.3.0.0 in Puppy 4.3.1 and 1.4.2 in Wary 0.7 (and Lenny).

I have decided to give it a go with Wary rolled back further, using xorg-server 1.3.0.0 but still with some later Xorg 7.3+ packages. So not quite rolled all the way back to Puppy 4.3.1.

Note that this rollback also includes these packages:

pixman 0.12.0
mesa 6.5.2
cairo 1.8.6

...mesa in particular I think needs to be rolled back to match the version of Xorg.

Wary/Quirky has GTK 2.16.6, and because I couldn't resist it I have rolled forward, to gtk 2.20.1, glib 2.24.2, pango 1.28.1 and atk 1.30.0 -- I did this because there was an app that I wanted to compile recently but it needed at least gtk 2.18.

So, last night and most of this morning I was setting up T2 to recompile Wary with all of the above, using the same code base (gcc, glibc, etc.). I also looked around for latest of many apps (Firefox, SeaMonkey, etc.).

With all of this rolling back and rolling forward, I don't yet know if everything will compile. It's running now.... we shall see!

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Comments

glib
Username: Jemimah
I've been having problems with Vattery and Traytemp no longer working if I update glib past 2.22. Not sure what the problem might be - svg stuff still works everywhere else except the systray. I'd be curious if you have the same issue or any thoughts on what the issue might be.

Lenny
Username: gjuhasz
"I give my 2-cents to fixing the bugs first then going ahead with Lenny's compilation parameters. I assume that Lenny's team worked a lot with optimization, so applying their settings would lead to the best Wary, too. Anyway, the decision is yours - the resulted Wary may be the only Puppy for many oldish hardware. Including my ones, why not?

busybox patches
Username: technosaurus
"I have recently ported some apps to busybox: minimp3 - plays mp3 file(s) waitmax - alias to timeout (slight difference in syntax) guess_fstype - guesses filesystem type working on fusermount, but am open to requests waitmax and guess_fstype are used in init so it may speed up booting current patches are in this thread http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=59496 some other apps in init may work with newer busybox as well: rev (NEW!) lspci could replace elspci (slightly different output) lots of modutils (must configure even if allyesconfig)

Re Busybox applets
Username: BarryK
"technosaurus, Excellent initiative. Maybe some of those, like 'guess_fstype', the official busybox developers might be interested.

off topic but
Username: bigpup
"The next time your feeling down, think about this. Found this on the forum. If it means anything to you, your work has just helped a lot of people. I am an American Missionary in Namibia, Africa and I run a school here. We have a bunch of old computers that we are using to teach computers to our students. Our students are mostly very poor and have no opportunity to learn computers. Puppy has helped me get several more computers up and running that we had put on the shelf because they just couldn't handle the load of Ubuntu but they run fine with puppy. Now our students can print their work on those machines. Thank you again.

Mesa would not compile
Username: BarryK
"Mesa would not compile in T2. It seemed to be a mismatch with dri packages in Xorg. I tried other versions of Mesa, also failed. This has come about because I was mixing original Xorg 7.3 packages with some later ones as used in Lenny. I have rolled the entire package/xorg directory in T2 back to exactly as used in Puppy 4.3.1. Now mesa compiles (v6.5.2). Of course, this meant starting again. If you have used T2, you will know how long it takes. I am making it worse as I am using an external USB hard drive, which is considerably slower than an internal drive.

Gtk+ would not compile
Username: BarryK
"Gtk gave an error message about pango not having cairo backend. I have run into this problem before, and solved it, but for some reason when I searched my blog I couldn't find the solution. So, have researched with google and think have solved it again. You know that you do have the cairo backend in Pango if /usr/lib/pkgconfig/pangocairo.pc exists. The problem is elsewhere, pango requires a more recent version of the fontconfig package, otherwise fails to build the cairo backend. I had rolled package/xorg/fontconfig back to the original Xorg 7.3 version. Now I have rolled it forward again, to what I used in Wary 0.7: version 2.7.3. As I don't want to start T2 compiling from the beginning, I have recompiled fontconfig by doing this: [i]# ./scripts/Build-Pkg -5 -chroot -cfg puppy5b -update fontconfig[/i] ...unfortunately, that does not update the fontconfig .tar.bz2 binary tarball, so after I have gone through the whole compile exercise, I am going to run T2 complete compile again (takes 2 days). Now to recompile pango: [i]# ./scripts/Build-Pkg -5 -chroot -cfg puppy5b -update pango[/i] ...this time I do get usr/lib/pkgconfig/pangocairo.pc

new pango uses libstdc++
Username: technosaurus
"I would recommend using Pango-1.24.5 unless it is a hard requirement you want to pull in libstdc++ because of pango's changes in the internal harfbuzz code (for freetype) to use c++ instead of c as of 1.25 Also is there a reason not to compile gtk and its deps against xml2 - My reasoning is that none of the apps that I have come across require expat and can't use xml2 instead... Rox requires it xml2 and it is always loaded so it seems that would offset the size difference between the two... but then again all gtk apps would need to be recompiled to work without expat installed anyways because autotools uses pkg-config --libs instead of just trusting the linker and doing -lgtk-x11-2.0 (to prevent this I just modified the .pc file accordingly and while I was at it I added -DG_DISABLE_CAST_CHECKS to the cflags to reduce compile size ... need to see if it fixes the insert key bug as well)

Re Pango
Username: BarryK
"technosaurus, I'm using pango 1.28.1, glib 2.24.2, gtk 2.20.1 and atk 1.30.0. I am just letting T2 decide on the config settings. Note, I had to bump cairo to 1.8.8 to meet minimum requirements for firefox 3.6.9.

Tags: wary