Fatdog64 720-final released

Fatdog is a fork of Puppy Linux, and I have always found it exciting to watch its progression. Reason, there are often very clever innovations. The developers are 'kirk' and 'jamesbond', and more recently 'fatdog', 'sfr', 'step' and others.

Fatdog forked from Puppy Linux many years go, using the Unleashed build system, before Puppy went over to the Woof build system. Here is a Puppy family-tree:

http://puppylinux.com/family-tree.html

...it doesn't actually show dates, but Fatdog forked from Puppy 4.0, I forget how many years ago that was. The developers took Unleashed off in a new direction, and more recently they are able to build the packages of Fatdog from source, see forum post:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=109961

Correction:
They did use Woof, before branching entirely to their own build system, with complete compile-from-source, see timeline:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/history.html

Development is still happening very intensely, and version 720 of Fatdog64 has just been released, see announcement on the Puppy Forum:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=112372

Here is the Fatdog homepage:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/

I will also download it, to examine some of the things listed in the release notes -- with our puplets, we cross-pollinate, and I will likely find some new ideas for Easy and Quirky.

Tags: linux

Puppy Linux Xenialpup 7.5 released

At last, another official Puppy Linux release! My goodness, if you look at Distrowatch, the last official release announcement was 01micko's Slacko 6.3 in November 2015:

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy

It gave the impression that nothing was happening on the Puppy-front, however, a visit to the Puppy Forum shows, as always, feverish activity. Lots of people developing and testing, and many custom releases. However, no one put their hand up for their release to be the next official pup. Until now.

Philip Broughton, '666philb' on the forum, has coordinated this pup, and we were getting feedback that this should be the next official pup. So, Philip decided to go for it.

Here is the announcement:

http://blog.puppylinux.com/?viewDetailed=00047

Release notes:

32-bit: http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-xenial/32/release-xenialpup-7.5.htm

64-bit: http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-xenial/64/release-xenialpup64-7.5.htm

Join discussion in the Puppy Forum here:

32-bit: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=106479

64-bit: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=107331

Great news. This pup is of course, built with woof-CE.

Tags: linux

Kernel 4.13.9 compiled in Pyro64

In Quirky Pyro64 to be more precise.

The build scripts and patches are uploaded here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/kernel/4.13.9/

I hit a very strange bug. When the build script ran "make menuconfig", the terminal crashed. No error messages, it just aborted. I recompiled ncurses, the terminal still crashed.

Very odd. The urxvt terminal emulator is working fine, using it everyday in Pyro64. I googled of course, found the same crash reported a few times, but no definite fix.

So, changed the script to run "make gconfig", the GTK config, and that worked fine.

Tags: linux

First tutorial on booting Linux on a PC

I am planning two or three tutorials, and this is the first:

http://bkhome.org/linux/prepare-your-computer-for-booting-linux.html

Although Easy Linux is mentioned a few times in the tutorial, it can be applied to other Linuxes.

This tutorial is an expansion on an earlier one I wrote on UEFI-booting.

My intention is that the next tutorial will be based on the existing page on frugal installation, but enhanced with explanation about boot managers/loaders.

Tags: linux

New blog for Easy OS

I have posted recently about archiving this blog, as I am moving to a new host.

As it is a fresh start, I evaluated about a dozen CMSs (Content Management Systems) and blogs. Some of them are very nice, but I was always unsatisfied with the speed (lack of) and server overhead.

The problem is, I am comparing with this blog, which is a small perl script, derived from PPLOG. It rates 95/100 on the google site speed test. Many CMS/blog systems rated quite high, up to 87, some were woeful, down around 50-60.

Then I thought some more about what I really want. Most of my sites are static web pages. The only dynamic part is the blog.

Hence, I moved on to evaluating static site generators. Apparently, there are over 450 of them. I waded through a couple of dozen of those, before finding Bashblog.

Very simple, and creates a somewhat rudimentary, yet capable blog. The Bashblog website:
https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog

The author seems to have designed it to run 'bb.sh' on the remote site. I did that, but there are limitations, so I set it up to run locally, and I wrote a one-line rsync command to sync with the remote site.

This is the result:
http://easyos.info/news/

The text is a bit small, I need to play around with the css file.

It is also supposed to have Disqus commenting, I don't know why that isn't working.

There is absolutely no server overhead in this. Posts are created in markdown and posted as html. They are just static html pages, already archived. Brilliant!

I plan to post a howto sometime, on how I have setup Bashblog, and mods.

Since these blogs have no server overhead, I will probably have at least one more, a personal blog.

Bashblog uses 'Markdown.pl' from here:
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Tags: linux

Descendents of PPLOG

This blog that you are looking at now, is a special version of 'pe_pplog', that was created when my blog was under attack. That was back in 2013/2014.

Puppy forum member 'efiabruni' is the developer of pe_pplog, and here is where she has kept my special version:
https://github.com/efiabruni/pe_pplog/tree/comment_registration

Efia has her blog running here:
http://tine.pagekite.me/pe_pplog.pl

A couple of days ago, I downloaded her latest version from github, but found that posts failed. The hint as to why is a bugfix reported in her last post, which appears to have repcussions -- I suspect the latest change has not been actually tested.

Yesterday, I sent an email to Efia, no reply yet. I did have a go at fixing it myself, but having zero knowledge of perl doesn't help.

So, are there any other descendents of PPLOG. There was sc0ttman's JSPPLOG, but I found his website is gone.

However, 01micko has created 'sjpplog_ng':
https://github.com/01micko/sjpplog_ng

You can see this blog in action here:
http://blog.puppylinux.com/

Here is a forum thread on pe_pplog, back in 2013:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=86326

Tags: linux

jwm version 2.3.7

Yippee, I have finally upgraded JWM!

Quirky has been using version 976 from git, for years. This is the "2.2.x" series. Now I have compiled version 2.3.7, released 20170721. This page explains differences between the 2.2 and 2.3 series:
https://joewing.net/projects/jwm/release-2.3.shtml

All of my collection of JWM theme PETs will need to be upgraded. So far, have just done the 'brightdeepblue' PET, as used in the latest Quirky and Easy.

The 'jwmconfig2' PET is for the old version. Rather than fix it, I am now using radky's PupControl, which has JWMDesk in it.

Tags: linux

Hiawatha web server

I have compiled the latest Hiawatha, version 10.6, as the PET used in Quirky and Easy is ancient. Project site:
https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/

This is how I compiled it:

# mkdir build

# cd build

# cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_INSTALL_SYSCONFDIR=/etc -DCMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR=/usr/lib -DCMAKE_INSTALL_BINDIR=/usr/bin -DCMAKE_INSTALL_SBINDIR=/usr/sbin -DCMAKE_INSTALL_MANDIR=/usr/share/man -DWEBROOT_DIR=/root/Web-Server -DLOG_DIR=/var/log/hiawatha -DPID_DIR=/var/run -DWORK_DIR=/var/lib/hiawatha -DCONFIG_DIR=/etc/hiawatha

# make

# new2dir make install

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Tags: linux