'Red Dog' due Easter 2011
This dog was loved in mining communities in Western Australia in the '70s. His life has been made into a movie, shooting has just finished, but it won't be released until next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dog_(Karratha)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/18/2930560.htm
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2010/06/10/2003475107
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Family crisis
Just to let everyone know, I am somewhat pre-occupied right now, since Saturday. Still doing a bit of Puppy development but offline.A close relative had a stroke, speech became jumbled, etc. We called an ambulance and have taken turns keeping him company, first in an emergency ward then in an intensive care ward. He needs an operation on the brain, but first has to wait until blood-thinning medications get out of his system.
I'm at his place tonight, using his computer. I booted Puppy off a CD, as I never like using anyone's Windows system -- don't want to risk typing my passwords into unknown Windows-based systems.
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2.6.32.16 kernel
I have compiled this kernel in Wary, intend to use it for the next release of Wary.Patched source tarball and SFS can be found here:
http://bkhome.org/sources/kernel-2.6.32.16/
pu#p#py li#nu#x
I tried to compile all the analog modem drivers, had the same success/fail as with the 2.6.34.x kernel.
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Another Wary coming
Just a short post to let everyone know what is happening. I have been getting tired of Spup, decided to give it a rest. I'm going back onto Wary.This is Puppy built from T2 packages and Xorg 7.3+, plus one of the long-term-support kernels. The last release of Wary had the 2.6.27.47 kernel.
I am just about to compile the 2.6.32.16 kernel, which is the most recent with long-term-support.
I am also toying with the idea of converting all the T2 packages into PETs, so it will build entirely from PET packages, in the same way Puppy 4.x builds in Woof.
In my current mood, see previous post about KMS, this is going to be a relief.
Stay tuned!
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Weird Intel video problem
Yesterday I was helping someone who had an infected Windows XP. It was running soooo slow, yet she persisted in using it. Then a document that she was editing in Word just disappeared. That's when she phoned me.I booted Spup 0.4 from CD, and the desktop came up ok -- but so weird, all text displayed with some characters missing. Not just the desktop, in the applications too. For example, the text "file" under the file-manager icon top-left of screen displayed as "f le" (from memory I think the "i" was missing) -- the missing characters were just transparent gaps.
However, text did display ok in the rxvt terminal.
This is the KMS-enabled intel video driver. I have actually run Puppy on her PC before, no problem, so the issue is with this recent driver.
I rebooted and choose the 'vesa' driver and all was well.
Regarding her missing file, yeah, it really was missing. I used 'find' in Puppy to search the entire drive, it was gone. Maybe it can still be recovered off the drive although deleted, but I am not familiar with tools to do that. Her XP is installed on a fat filesystem.
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Pmusic 1.0.2
I have upgraded to zigbert's latest audio player.Forum thread:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31206
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Woof uploaded, July 20, 2010
This is the version of Woof used to build my unreleased Slackpup 0.4.2.For introduction and instructions to download Woof, go here:
http://bkhome.org/woof/
So, if you have previously downloaded Woof, all you have to do this time is run this in the Woof project directory to update to the latest Woof files:
# bones download
It is recommended that you follow instructions in the above link to download Woof with full history, however if all you want is the latest tarball, here it is:
http://bkhome.org/bones/woof/woof-LATEST.tar.gz
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'nosmp' removed
The Puppy Universal Installer appends the kernel boot parameter 'nosmp'. This was done as a precaution as it might have helped booting on some uniprocessor systems.However, it does cause confusion as users wonder why their multi-core CPU is only running on one core.
So, I have removed the 'nosmp' boot parameter. The affected script is /usr/sbin/puppyinstaller.
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Playing DVD videos
The on-going saga of playing DVD videos in Puppy...When a DVD is inserted, a disc icon appears just above the tray. The default behaviour is if you click on the icon, if it is an iso9660 filesystem then it mounts, if it is a DVD video then the mediaplayer starts playing it.
The script for this is /usr/local/bin/drive_all.
I have fixed one thing. If a DVD video is detected, it was launching with "exec defaultmediaplayer dvd://" but in the case of mplayer and gnome-mplayer that only runs the first "chapter" of the DVD and then it exits -- which on some DVDs is just a splash screen.
I have changed it to "exec defaultmediaplayer dvdnav://"
A DVD video is detected by this:
dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/sr0 | grep 'Mounted Media: .* DVD-ROM'
which usually works. However, I do have one DVD video which actually has a iso9660 f.s. and the line I test gives this:
Mounted Media: 11h, DVD-R Sequential
...so the script thinks it is not a DVD video.
However, running the Gnome-mplayer, if I choose 'File->Disc->Open DVD with menus' then it opens as a normal DVD video, with menus.
The problem is, I don't know how to detect that it is a DVD video. I shouldn't have to mount it to do so, Gnome-mplayer doesn't. Interesting what 'disktype' returns:
--- /dev/sr0
Block device, size 3.566 GiB (3828711424 bytes)
CD-ROM, 1 track, CDDB disk ID 023BFD01
Track 1: Data track, 2.197 GiB (2358986752 bytes)
UDF file system
Sector size 2048 bytes
Volume name "DHUN_SCN"
UDF version 1.02
ISO9660 file system
Volume name "DHUN_SCN"
Data size 3.565 GiB (3828187136 bytes, 1869232 blocks of 2 KiB)
...anything in there that identifies it as a DVD video?
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Frugal: saving session to entire partition
When Puppy is installed to hard drive in what we call "frugal" mode, we have the choice of saving the session to either a file or to the entire partition. The same thing holds for Puppy installed on a USB stick.However, to save to the entire partition, it must be a Linux filesystem. It can't be done on a fat or ntfs partition.
Of course, saving session to a file has it's advantages, such as you can have lots of them and they are easy to backup. But, they do have a size limitation, I think of about 4GB although I have never tested that.
Saving to the entire partition is a kind of quasi-full-Linux-installation. You are using the entire partition to save your session, so you have available all the free space of that partition.
I have been testing this. Previously there was a problem with mounting SFS files when the session is saved to the entire partition, but recent puppies have a special patched Aufs that allows this. My test installation has various SFS files, including OpenOffice and it is working nicely.
See my earlier blog post on this patched Aufs:
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01535
However, I have had to fix a couple of scripts. You cannot save the session to entire partition if Puppy is installed in a subdirectory. So, I have modified the Puppy Universal Installer to warn of this -- if it sees that you are installing to a Linux partition it warns not to install into a subdirectory if you intend or think you might want to save the session to the entire partition.
Also, when Puppy is booted for the first time and then shutdown, the rc.shutdown script checks to see if Puppy is installed in a subdirectory. If so, will not offer to save session to the entire partition (but does put up an explanation why not), only to a file.
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