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
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
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
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
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
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