|
Puppy developer news:  Older news |  Later news |
5-Jan-06
I'm working on "Puppy2".... it's revolutionary, but I'll maintain
the mystery until something is released. Probably quite soon...
31-Dec-05
Puppy 1.0.7 live-CD iso file is mirrored at the following locations.
You may want to try one of these, as the Ibiblio download can be slow:
Courtesy of Mark Ulrich:
http://dotpups.de/puppy-releases/1.0.7/ISO/
Courtesy of Ted Dog, Puptrix mirror:
www.puptrix.org/std/puppy-1.0.7-mozilla.iso (61M)
www.puptrix.org/std/puppy-1.0.7-mozilla.iso.txt (md5sum)
www.puptrix.org/std/puppy-multisession-1.0.7-mozilla.iso (63404032)
www.puptrix.org/std/puppy-multisession-1.0.7-mozilla.iso.txt (md5sum)
http://68.112.75.253:6969/
30-Dec-05
Puppy version 1.0.7 is released. The live-CD iso file is 60.46M. Release notes:
- The big news is the move from the Xvesa Kdrive X server to the sophisticated Xorg X server (v6.8.1). However, Xvesa is retained as a fallback.
- The Xorg Video Wizard has been written from scratch to give a very pleasant experience setting up and modifying Xorg.
- Gaim is upgraded from version 1.0.2 to 1.5.0. Puppy has the full set of plugins supplied with the source package.
- There is now a very nice little program to graphically view the sizes of directories and files, called Gdmap.
- Xarchive archiver replaces guiTar, and there is a desktop icon called PupZip that is a drag-and-drop frontend to Xarchive.
- Puppy now has a desktop icon so that one-click will lock the screen and bring up a pleasant animation. This uses Xlock.
- Morizot firewall is replaced by Linux Firewall, which has a very easy installation Wizard.
- Roaring Penguin PPPOE has been updated from version 3.5 to 3.7, patched slightly to work in Puppy.
- The DVD burner application TkDVD is upgraded from v3.8.3 to 3.9.0.
- Problems with XF-Prot, the virus scanner, have been fixed.
- There is a new little utility set-xftdpi, to globally set font size.
- The font viewer tkFont has been improved and is now in Puppy.
- mtPaint has been upgraded from version 2.03 to 2.10.
- Puppy now has tkGamma version 1.0, a GUI frontend to xgamma
- BusyBox has been upgraded from v0.60.5 to v1.01.
- Syslinux is upgraded from version 3.08 to 3.11.
- cdrtools has been upgraded to version 2.01.01a03.
- Puppy now has crond and crontab, and a GUI Gcrontab.
- ColorExplorer is a neat little Tcl/Tk GUI app for exploring colors.
- Fragger is a small utility application that let's you see graphically how fragmented a file is.
- Developers, please note, there is a new usr_devx.sfs file.
- There are a great many more little improvements and updates since the release of 1.0.6 -- read the notes below.
puppy-unleashed-core-1.0.7.tar.gz and usr_devx.sfs will be uploaded shortly.
If upgrading from Puppy 1.0.6 or earlier and an Xorg DotPup package is installed, please uninstall it prior to booting the new version.
If you tested Puppy 1.0.7beta, I recommend executing the xorgwizard script again after booting the new version.
There is still room for improving Xorg Video Wizard, so please provide feedback on the Forum. I reported further down that xvidtune does not work, however I tested it on two other PCs and it does work, so it is a video-chip issue. So, I plan to incorporate xvidtune into the Wizard for fine-tuning the display. Xvidtune is in 1.0.7 and you can run it separately.
Here is the complete list of packages in Puppy Unleashed 1.0.7. Those shown in bold are either new or updated since 1.0.6:
The following packages were in Puppy Unleashed 1.0.6 and have now been removed:
0rootfs_skeleton-1.0.6 busybox-0.60.5 cdrtools-2.01 gtkcat-0.1 mtpaint-2.03 rox_filer-1.2.2 rp_pppoe-3.5 syslinux-3.08 tkdvd-3.8.3patched tkfont-1.1 xfprot-0.24b
29-Dec-05
The burniso2cd script has been improved slightly. I added the
ability to burn multiple CDs/DVDs from one iso file. There are a couple
of other things that have been postponed, such as ability to erase a
rewritable CD or DVD.
The AbiWord help page in Puppy has been updated. This page is a
must-read for anyone who uses AbiWord. It is available via the "Help"
menu, or even by typing "man abiword" on the commandline.
28-Dec-05
I'm mighty pleased, as I finally got Linux Firewall
to work properly. This has a great installation wizard, but previously
it did not install properly. I traced this down to the script launching
"sh" internally, meaning that it ran Busybox Ash. Replacing "sh" with
"bash" fixed it. Yippee!
This wizard is powerful yet very easy to understand. With a few clicks
I created a firewall that that puts all the ports in "stealth" mode.
This means that my PC is totally hidden. I checked this using
ShieldsUp! at www.grc.com (follow
the links past all the advertising to arrive at the ShieldsUp! page).
ShieldsUp! does report that my PC responds to pings, however this is
not a security hazard -- in fact as explained on the Linux Firewall
home site (www.projectfiles.com/firewall/),
it is contrary to recommended standards to disable ping acknowledgement
-- my ISP pings me, I think to check that I'm still there. But, the
Linux Firewall docs state that if you are really paranoid, you can set
"RFC_1122_COMPLIANT=no" in /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall to disable ping.
Linux Firewall is so good, it's going to be in Puppy 1.0.7, displacing Morizot firewall.
The Linux Firewall Wizard edits /etc/rc.d/rc.local and adds an entry to
execute /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall. If you have any pre-existing code in
rc.local to execute a firewall, it would probably be best to delete it
prior to running the Wizard (don't just comment it out, as the Wizard
detects the existence of "rc.firewall" string in the file and will not
add its own entry).
Note, the Wizard does not, as yet, disable the firewall -- to remove it, delete /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall.
The official Puppy 1.0.7 is expected to be available by New Years Day.
28-Dec-05
Gdmap
has replaced Xdiskusage. They essentially do the same thing, give a
visual display of disk usage, however Gdmap is only 56K whereas
Xdiskusage is 290K and requires the OpenGL library.
OpenGL and MESA libraries have been extracted from Xorg and are now
a PupGet package, xorg_opengl-6.8.1. The SDL library is also a PupGet
package, sdl-1.2.8. These will be available when Puppy 1.0.7 is
released.
28-Dec-05
I have not been able to fix a bug in xlock, the screen locker for X.
Xlock saves a password in ~/.xlockrc, and that much works, however
Xlock accepts any password to unlock the screen.
I have updated the "HOWTO write programs for Puppy" help file in Puppy. It was way out of date.
27-Dec-05
I'm experimenting with the SDL library (version 1.2.8, out of Vector
5.0STD) in Puppy. Note, if this library makes it into a Puppy release, usr_devx.sfs will also have to be updated.
I have removed the MESA library from Puppy, as it duplicates
functionality of OpenGL. OpenGL is incredibly slow though. Puppy does
not have the DRI modules -- does this slow down OpenGL or MESA? My
experience in this area is minimal. My previous experience with
OpenGL-based apps on other distros has also been slowness to the point
of being unusable ...I'm inclined to remove all OpenGL libraries
...anyone want to discuss that on the Forum?
What about SDL-based apps that don't need OpenGL or MESA -- are there many of them?
26-Dec-05
Bugfixes for Xorg Video Wizard. A few other things tidied up.
24-Dec-05
There was a delay in uploading usr_devx.sfs. It's there now.
Mark Ulrich has mirrored 1.0.7beta on his fast server: http://dotpups.de/puppy-releases/1.0.7-beta/
Ted Dog has also mirrored:
http://www.puptrix.org/beta/puppy-1.0.7beta-mozilla.iso (61.5M)
http://www.puptrix.org/beta/puppy-1.0.7beta-mozilla.iso.txt md5sum
Please be sure to check the md5sum after download.
24-Dec-05
Okay, I've uploaded it. Puppy version 1.0.7beta is not an official
release. It is for Puppy testers to evaluate and debug. The size of the iso file is 61.5M. Get it from
here:
http://www.pupweb.org/test/
- This iso uses pup001, so will update your current Puppy. Be aware that this causes a file "cleanup", and unregistered files in /usr will get moved to /root/tmp.
- If you have a customised desktop, be aware that your desktop icon layout will be replaced, but backed up as /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/globicons.bak and PuppyPin.bak. Note that desktop icons are now sticky on the extreme right side of the screen. There is also a new "preferred layout" for system and drag-and-drop icons.
- The PupGets directory on Ibiblio and mirrors has yet to be updated for 1.0.7. Some PupGets have changed and there are some new ones.
- For developers, there is a new usr_devx.sfs, also at the above link.
- Important things to test are the new Xorg Video Wizard, both
xorgwizard from the commandline and from the Setup menu. Rarsa has
updated the Ethernet/network Wizard. There is a new Roaring Penguin
PPPOE. A new version of TkDVD. A new frontend to the DotPup installer.
A global font-size-setter. Then there's Xdiskusage and tkFont. These
can all be found in the menu.
24-Dec-05
Xdiskusage
is now in the live-CD. This is a very handy application that displays
disk usage of directories and files graphically. It uses FLTK (Fast
Light Tool Kit) and OpenGL. Previously Puppy did not have the OpenGL
library, so the Xdiskusage PupGet package was about 1M (uncompressed)
with OpenGL in it. However, Pup 1.0.7 has OpenGL, so Xdiskusage, with
FLTK statically compiled, is about 250K -- I decided this utility is so
useful, I can accept that size!
Bluefish and XF-Prot have been relegated to PupGet packages.
23-Dec-05
I have been playing with Opera 8.51. One of the first things I did
was try "Print preview" and text was a mess, overlapping like anything.
A bit later I chose "View source" from the menu -- nothing happened.
Hmm, both of those work perfectly in Mozilla.
23-Dec-05
GuestToo reports that he has had a DotPup updater for F-Prot out for sometime, that works:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4816
I have placed his check-updates.sh script into the XF-Prot PupGet package.
Rarsa has been doing excellent work upgrading the Network/Ethernet
Wizard. His version 0.3 has upgraded my /usr/sbin/net-setup.sh script.
I have just been testing it, and there is still a bug, that was in my
version also -- clicking the "test_eth0" button returns that the
network cable is unplugged, when in fact it is plugged-in and on a
"live" network. The problem is the program ifplugstatus -- Puppy has
two different versions of this program, as sometimes one version works
and the other doesn't. The boot script /etc/rc.d/rc.network uses both
to determine whether the network cable is plugged in and alive, however
net-setup.sh was only using one of them. So, I modified net-setup.sh to
also use both ifplugstatus programs.
(I am posting this fix separately to rarsa).
Rarsa is working on v0.4, which will upgrade WAG, the wireless
config tool, however I have a deadline for 1.0.7beta, so have put v0.3
into 1.0.7beta.
MU has created a superb Xmodmap switcher, but I'm uncertain how to integrate it into Puppy. Currently it's a DotPup.
We have a keyboard layout chooser when Puppy is booted for the very
first time, and it can also be invoked via the Keyboard/mouse Wizard.
We also have a ChooseLocale utility. Should the Xorg Wizard have a
keyboard setup section that firstly invokes ChooseLocale, then invokes
Mark's Xmodmap chooser? -- I presume that the locale should be set
first?
To put it another way, we have three separate programs, that seem to
complement each other, but I am uncertain how to mesh them together in
Puppy.
23-Dec-05
A hearty thanks to Luc Martineau, who has offered server space for
anything Puppy-related. I will probably use it for alpha Puppies and
other experimental files.
The utility program xev, part of the Xorg package, is now added to Puppy.
We have a problem with XF-Prot,
the virus scanner. XF-Prot is a GUI frontend for F-Prot, a commercial
anti-virus commandline scanner. We used to be able to download the
latest virus definition files, and we had a script to do so, however I
can no longer find a direct URL. Instead, we have to go to their
website, at http://files.f-prot.com, and fill in a form before
downloading.
Anyway, I have fixed up XF-Prot with the latest F-Prot virus definition
files, and the automatic update script is replaced with an explanation
to go to the F-Prot website and manually download the latest files,
whenever an update is desired.
The F-Prot virus definition files are now included in the XF-Prot PupGet package, which will be uploaded to Ibiblio soon.
22-Dec-05
Unionfs is upgraded from
version 1.0.11 to 1.0.14. Note that 1.1.x versions only support the 2.6
kernel. Tricky to compile! Not yet tested ...hmm, I hope that I
compiled it right... the kernel module unionfs.o is now only 78K,
before it was 186K.
J_Rey had a good idea, that I have now implemented. When configuring
X, there is the possibility that the computer may hang or become
unresponsive such that you are forced to reboot. Puppy will now detect
that the previous X session did not terminate properly, and instead of
just plunging you back into the same situation, will drop you down to
the commandline, from where you can manually run xorgwizard (this
mechanism is generic, should work for Xvesa also).
Of course, a wayward application could also hang the system, and a
forced reboot will also result in a drop down to the commandline.
The code that implements this is in /usr/X11R6/bin/xwin.
Peter Sieg reported on the Forum that Gxine crashes on Xorg, but
works on Xvesa, running Pup 1.0.7alpha. I have just tested Gxine on the
latest 1.0.7, and it works fines, in fact much better than Xvesa -- I
can now adjust contrast and brightness.
However, I think Peter was testing running Puppy in Qemu.
Peter also reported that if he exits Xorg then runs xorgwizard and
chooses Xvesa, Xvesa runs but after a few mouse clicks, hangs. But then
works after a reboot. This must be a Qemu problem again, as I don't get
that bug.
21-Dec-05
Roaring Penguin PPPOE has
been upgraded from version 3.5 to 3.7. Also, I edited the source a
little, to hopefully make it more Puppy-compatible, but not yet tested.
I'm thinking that Pup 1.0.7beta will be out by Christmas eve. So,
for those who do the opening presents thing on xmas morning, while the
kids open their pressies, Puppy enthusiasts can download a new Pup to
play with.
20-Dec-05
There was a report on the Forum that 1.0.7alpha install-to-usb does
not work. I just tested it, and it works fine -- running
Puppy-booted-from-usb right now.
Upgraded fitimage2root script, written by MU. There was a
rounding-off bug, MU has fixed it. This script is used for the "exact
fit" option of the background image.
20-Dec-05
Marv on the Forum reported that a line on xorg.conf like this:
Screen 1 "Screen1" Right Of "Screen0"
prevented X from working. He has a motherboard video chip that is
disabled, instead he is using a plug-in video card. I have modified the
Xorg Video Wizard to detect this line and comment it out, however I
will need to think about this some more in the future, for the
situation where people will have two monitors and be making use of
Xinerama.
I am imposing a very slight standardization in the layout of icons
on the desktop. Application icons can be anywhere on the screen, but I
am placing:
- "system" icons on the upper-right side of the screen, in a vertical column on the extreme right. This includes "lock" (to lock the screen) and "Save" (saves a session for multisession DVD).
- Drag-and-drop icons on the lower-right of the screen, in a vertical column on the extreme right. This includes "pupzip" (drag-and-drop archiver) and "trash" (drag-and-drop trashcan).
- All other applications will be to the left, preferably along the left and top sides of the screen.
The problem that we have had, is that icons may be on the right side for say a screen of 800x600 pixels, but if you change to 1024x768 then they are no longer so. This is now taken care of automatically.
This means that any icon you place on the right side will automatically "stick" there.
19-Dec-05
The Xorg Video Wizard script creates xorg.conf with mouse protocol
set to "auto". This should work for serial, ps/2 and usb mice, and does
so for me, however a couple of people reported on the Forum that their
usb mouse only worked when the protocol was set to "IMPS/2".
It was awkward to fix this, but I have done so for the Xorg Video
Wizard, xwin and the Mouse/Keyboard Wizard. (The way I coded this is
clumsy -- need papaschroumpf's brilliant knowledge of sed to improve
the code!)
I found a serious bug in the Mouse Wizard, that may have caused it
to choose other than what you selected. For example, you select a USB
mouse, but the Wizard sets it as a PS/2 mouse. Bug now fixed.
It was reported by a couple of people on the Forum, that shutdown
had a large delay, and this was tracked down to the pcmcia shutdown
code in rc.reboot (the shutdown script). The bug was causing a delay of
20 seconds during shutdown. I have fiddled with the code and think it
is fixed.
19-Dec-05
TkDVD is upgraded to version 3.9.0. It now has the ability to copy DVDs.
/sbin/check_space is a background program (daemon) that continually
monitors the ramdisk and will pop up a warning message if space is
running low. This has always been in Puppy. I have modified
/root/.xinitrc so that check_space will only be launched if free space
in "/" is less than 20M. Thus, check_space will only run in very tight
situations, such as running in a 128M-RAM PC with no swap partition. It
will not run in a hard-drive-installed Puppy, as "/" is the entire hard
drive partition which is bound to have more than 20M free (besides
which, the full h.d. install doesn't use a ramdisk).
Recently there has been some contention on the Forum about the best
way to locate and install DotPup packages. Puppy has a menuitem "Setup
-> DotPup package installer", which launches Mark Ulrich's DotPup
Downloader. However, I have modified this so that the menuitem now
launches a little frontend that I have written. This frontend has a
brief introduction and offers download via the web browser or the
DotPup Downloader.
This frontend is also launched from the pupget script (PupGet package manager).
My frontend script is /usr/sbin/dotpup.
18-Dec-05
A problem with Xorg Video Wizard has been fixed (I think). The
Wizard uses xvidtune in commandline mode to return the current
resolution and horizontal and vertical frequencies, however it was
reported on the forum that at least one type of video chip, the i810
family, does not work with xvidtune. The Wizard now detects this and
falls back to using xrandr and gtf to figure out the current video
resolution and frequencies.
The Xorg Video Wizard can now change screen resolutions "on the
fly". This is achieved using xrandr. This means that with X running,
the Wizard can be chosen from the Setup menu, and a choice of
resolutions is offered -- one may be chosen and X will immediately
switch to it, without restarting X or killing any applications. The new
resolution can be made permanent if desired.
Note, though, only lower resolutions than the original can be selected.
For example, if you originally chose 1024x768 when you ran XorgWizard,
this dynamic resolution changer will only offer resolutions below that,
such as 960x600 and 800x600.
14-Dec-05
The Xorg utility programs xrandr and xsetpointer have been added.
13-Dec-05
As someone mentioned on the Forum, it would be nice to simplify the
requirement to "restart X" -- rather than "exit to prompt then type
xwin". So, there is now a menu entry in the "Shutdown" group.
GuestToo pointed out a problem with adding the /root/.fonts
directory to X's fontpath -- see notes for 11th Dec.
/etc/rc.d/rc.local0 will now execute mkfontscale and mkfontdir if
/root/.fonts has font files in it and fonts.dir does not exist and if
/root/.fonts is either a regular directory or a symlink to a partition
that is not ntfs. /root/.xinitrc will add the fontpath if
/root/.fonts/fonts.dir exists.
Hacao, developer of our Vietnamese Puppy, has found that
/usr/bin/install does not work. It is a BusyBox applet. So, I have
disabled it. The full install program is in usr_devx.sfs.
Many improvements to the Xorg Video Wizard. I have to test on some
more hardware, then will upload the latest script for testing.
12-Dec-05
Fixed some bugs in Xorg Video Wizard. One of the bugs is in Xorg
itself -- autoprobing the monitor created an invalid HorizSync line.
Wrote a little script, set-xftdpi,
located in /usr/sbin, to edit the DPI setting in /root/.Xresources.
This value affects the rendering of antialised fonts, so will not have
any affect in applications that do not use Xft, the antialising library
for X.
As an exercise, it is a Ash script, but with an embedded Tcl/Tk GUI --
I did this as I couldn't get what I wanted using gtkdialog.
For most applications, such as Mozilla, Gaim, Abiword, etc., if the
text appears to small or to big, set-xftdpi is a means of globally
adjusting the rendering size to something that suits you.
11-Dec-05
The pupget package tkfont-1.1, which has tkFont, a font viewer, is broken. Some files were missing. It also needs xfd,
a viewer of the character set of a font, which is part of the Xorg
package, except that I got it from Xfree 4.3.0 as that uses the older
libXaw.so.7 which is more compatible with libXaw95 used in Puppy.
tkFont now works, and it will be in Puppy 1.0.7, as it is much nicer
than xfontsel.
I have hacked the source of tkFont -- hey, this was last updated in
1997! You can copy a fontname to the clipboard now, whereas previously
it was copied to a cut-buffer, requiring the middle mouse button to
paste, something that Windows people are unfamiliar with.
tkFont is a little bit messy, as it creates many windows. At startup,
it creates two windows, one showing the list of font names, the other
some sample text for the chosen font. Despite my limited knowledge of
Tcl/Tk, I managed to combine them into one window.
Another font problem is fonts placed into /root/.fonts/. GTK and Qt
applications find these automatically, but they are not in the X font
search path. This means that some applications, notably Xlib and
Tcl/Tk apps, do not find them, tkFont included.
So, I placed this line into /root/.xinitrc:
[ -e /root/.fonts ] && xset fp+ /root/.fonts/ #v1.0.7
If anyone sees anything wrong with doing this, please let me know.
10-Dec-05
One of the Xorg bugs was X not always exiting properly. I'm
experimenting, any scripts that execute "killall X" are followed by
"sleep 1" then "killall -9 X". Of course, while I'm experimenting, "killall X" on its own is working fine.
I have placed "Xft.dpi: 75" into /root/.Xdefaults, to get fonts when
running Xorg to look the same as when running Xvesa. Maybe should add a
little box into the Xorg Video Wizard to tweak this.
Incidentally, for 1.0.7alpha testers, "xorgwizard" that runs at first
bootup, and from the commandline, is for creating a xorg.conf from
scratch. But, look in the Setup menu, and the "Xorg Video Wizard" has a
lot of options -- that's where I was thinking a font-size tweaker would
be nice.
That was last night. Now it is 3am morning of the 11th here in
Western Australia. I woke up and started working on Puppy ... yes, I
know, I'm obsessed. The really weird thing is that Xorg is ignoring the
entry in .Xdefaults, fonts are back to as they were before,
small. Suddenly, the "Xft.dpi: 75" entry in
/root/.Xdefaults is being ignored. Whatever I set it too, exit to
prompt and restart X, cold reboot, no difference, it is being ignored.
...hmm, I'm not dreaming that I have woken up, am I?
So, I move "Xft.dpi: 75" to /root/.Xresources, which is read by
/root/.xinitrc and merged by "xrdb -merge -nocpp /root/.Xresources" --
this works. But, it leaves me with a mystery.
Have changed the FontZoom factor in the Amaya v8.8.1 config file to
120, so that fonts in open documents display at a reasonable size.
Previously it was 100.
10-Dec-05
Great news! Puppy enthusiast Hacao (Forum name) has developed a Vietnamese Puppy. Forum announcement here: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4519
9-Dec-05
Ted Dog has mirrored Pup 1.0.7alpha here:
Download from puptrix:
http://www.puptrix.org/alpha/puppy-1.0.7alpha-mozilla.iso
http://www.puptrix.org/alpha/puppy-1.0.7alpha-mozilla.iso.txt (md5sum)
8-Dec-05
Okay, I've uploaded it. Puppy version 1.0.7alpha is not an official
release. It is for Puppy testers to evaluate and debug. Get it from
here:
http://www.pupweb.org/test/
Read through the notes since the release of 1.0.6, to find out what
is new. Note, libfreetype has been taken back to version 6.3.7, as
supplied in the Xorg package. There are various things to evaluate,
such as pupzip, xlock and Gaim, but the main thing is Xorg. Putting
together all the issues that I currently have with Xorg:
- Fonts are a bit small in some GTK apps, compared with running on Xvesa. I would like fonts to look the same when switch between Xvesa and Xorg. I have already fixed the default font in Xlib apps.
- There was some discussion about this on the Forum, and I put MU's code into /usr/X11R6/bin/fvwmpoweroff, but this bug is happening after the "fix". The bug is that Xorg does not always exit, at least not properly. It doesn't happen consistently, just sometimes, I choose to shutdown, and the screen stays in some kind of graphics mode, but it still shuts down.
- There is a bug, Xvidtune doesn't do anything -- that is, clicking the "Apply" or "Test" buttons is supposed to change to the new video settings, however the screen just flickers momentarily but there is no change. A problem with my SiS video chip, or Xorg?
- It was reported recently in the Forum, that some of the settings in Gxset, namely DPMS and auto-repeat, do not work. These are deliberately disabled as they do not work with Xvesa. Gxset is invoked via a script gxsetshell, that does this. However, when Xorg is running these features should be available, so I have modified gxsetshell to detect if Xorg is running and not disable anything. -- haven't yet tested this under Xorg.
- CTRL-ALT-+/- does not work.
- I'm using an old 15-inch monitor, that should work for 800x600@72
and 1024x768@60. In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if I specify more than one
resolution, say this:
Modes "800x600" "1024x768"
X runs at 800x600 but with a "virtual screen" effect, that is at 1024x768 with a 800x600 viewport. Removing "ViewPort 0 0" makes no difference.
If the "Modes" line has only "800x600" on it, then okay. - The xkb stuff is removed. When Xorg starts, it outputs a message that it is falling back to the "pre-xkb layout". Linux has two separate keyboard layout systems, and I am trying to avoid duplication in Puppy. But, can we get the non-US keyboards to work properly? We managed with Xvesa, so should be able to with Xorg.
So guys, you are invited to give this new Puppy a bash! Note that the iso is set to use pup004, to avoid a clash with your existing Puppy. Please be sure to delete any existing pup004 so that Puppy will start with a clean slate.
8-Dec-05
Puppy now has libmad version 0.15.1b and cdrdao version 1.2.0. Well, libmad will be in the live-CD, but I am leaving cdrdao as a PupGet package.
Puppy enthusiast bombayrockers (Forum name) posted this message: http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=4425
Which reminded me, and I tested font antialiasing on the new
Xorg-Puppy. Amazing, bitmap fonts are now antialiased. Also, many of
the GTK1 applications are now able to display with antialiased fonts --
this modernises them, makes them look like GTK2 apps!
Oh, I am mighty pleased -- Amaya version 8.8.1 is a GTK1
application, and now with the working antialiasing of bitmap fonts,
Amaya looks beautiful.
Amaya is, in many respects, greatly superior to Mozilla Composer for
HTML page editing, and I am now very tempted to go for a Firefox/Amaya
combination, rather than the current Mozilla Navigator/Composer. Or,
keep Navigator/Composer and just add Amaya to the live-CD -- I for one
do a lot of HTML editing and would like to have both editors to choose
from.
Consider this: The gzipped tarball of the current release of Firefox
(1.0.7) is 7.8M. Puppy's Mozilla Navigator/Composer combo is 8.8M. So,
for a live-CD just 1M bigger we get a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Hmm, I did promise to release 1.0.7alpha. Maybe tomorrow!
Fonts are a bit small in some GTK apps, compared with running on
Xvesa. I would like fonts to look the same when switch between Xvesa
and Xorg. I have already fixed the default font in Xlib apps. Well, I
will release 1.0.7alpha and you guys can experiment and find out the
best way to get fonts looking consistent between the two X servers.
There is a bug with Xorg. There was some discussion about this on
the Forum, and I put MU's code into /usr/X11R6/bin/fvwmpoweroff, but
this bug is happening after the "fix". The bug is that Xorg does not
always exit, at least not properly. It doesn't happen consistently,
just sometimes, I choose to shutdown, and the screen stays in some kind
of graphics mode, but it still shuts down.
Mark Ulrich's DotPup Downloader has been upgraded from 05B to 05C.
7-Dec-05
mtPaint has been upgraded from version 2.03 to 2.10.
There is a bug, Xvidtune doesn't do anything -- that is, clicking
the "Apply" or "Test" buttons is supposed to change to the new video
settings, however the screen just flickers momentarily but there is no
change. A problem with my SiS video chip, or Xorg?
Anyway, I have incorporated Xvidtune into Xorg Video Wizard.
Xvidtune can be used purely as a commandline application to return the
current modeline (the "-show" option). I use this in the Wizard to find
out the current horizontal and vertical refresh rates.
Puppy now has tkGamma
version 1.0, a GUI frontend to xgamma (which comes with Xorg). I never
forgot, sometime ago a couple of people requested a brightness control,
as Xvesa is too bright on some LCD panels -- so, now we have the
solution. tkGamma is now incorporated into the Xorg Video Wizard.
6-Dec-05
Busybox 1.01 has been recompiled, with the following applets disabled, as they are now replaced by full versions:
cat, cp, cpio, date, dd, egrep, fgrep, grep, gunzip, ipcalc, mkdir, mv,
netstat, rm, fdisk, [, bunzip2, du, find, sort, test, wget.
A new applet has been added: od.
Finally, Xcalc is fixed. Nobody ever complained about it, but Xcalc
requires an Adobe Symbol bitmap font, without which the lettering on
some of the keys is wrong. So, Puppy now has the Adobe 75 dpi
8,10,12,14,18,24 point bitmap Symbol fonts.
It was reported recently in the Forum, that some of the settings in
Gxset, namely DPMS and auto-repeat, do not work. These are deliberately
disabled as they do not work with Xvesa. Gxset is invoked via a script
gxsetshell, that does this. However, when Xorg is running these
features should be available, so I have modified gxsetshell to detect
if Xorg is running and not disable anything.
Partview, the little Tcl/Tk script that graphically displays used
and free space of mounted partitions, crashes when Puppy is installed
to hard drive. This is due to there being no pupxxx file. Fixed.
Puppy has aqcuired read-edid, version 1.4.1. This is a small utility that probes a plug-and-play monitor. I am using this in Xorg Video Wizard.
Also, Xorg Video Wizard continues to improve. The Mouse/Keyboard Wizard and
xwin script are now harmonious with Xorg Video Wizard and support Xvesa and
Xorg. Added a checkbox to the latter for emulation of a middle button
on a 2-button mouse.
4-Dec-05
Some rationalising happening. Have taken out xorgcfg and
libXaw.so.8, plus a couple of directories that have support files for
xorgcfg. Reason is, it's over 1M of stuff and I reckon my own Xorg
Video Wizard is better. The old text-mode xorgconfig is still there, retained as a fallback.
Mark Ulrich has written a great little script, written in puppyBasic. I have taken the liberty of naming it fitimage2root.
Puppy uses xli to write an image to the root window, meaning to the
desktop background, but sometimes xli cannot fit the image exactly to
the screen resolution, resulting in empty horizontal bars on top and
bottom of screen. Fitimage2root uses extra functionality of xli to
resize an image to exactly fit the screen, and also applies smoothing,
meaning that a small image when scaled up for the desktop can actually
still look good.
Fitimage2root is now integrated into Puppy, and is an option in the
"Desktop background image" utility (in the "Control Panel" menu).
Syslinux is upgraded from version 3.08 to 3.11. This may fix booting problems on some hardware.
3-Dec-05
Okay, the Xorg Video Wizard
is written. It highly automates the process of creating the xorg.conf
configuration file. Works well, at least on one of my computers.
1-Dec-05
Another text editor! This one is oriented toward programmer's, and is called Geany. The developer is Enrico Troeger and his project homepage is: http://geany.uvena.de. Geany will be available as a PupGet package with Pup 1.0.7.
1-Dec-05
I have created an Unleashed package of Xorg
version 6.8.1. This is taken from Slackware 10.1 (on which Vector
5.0/1STD is based). I have been following the work done by MU and others,
and have continued on from that. I have cut the size of Xorg down
considerably.
The live-CD that I am using right now has everything from 1.0.6 (almost),
including Xvesa, but now with Xorg as well, and the size of the iso
file is 61.9M. I have retained Xvesa, as that works flawlessly on most
video hardware, and from a running X there are GUI tools for
configuring Xorg -- I have placed xorgcfg and xvidtune into Puppy. There is also a commandline configuration tool called xorgconfig.
Xorg bugs:
- CTRL-ALT-+/- does not work.
- I'm using an old 15-inch monitor, that should work for 800x600@72
and 1024x768@60. In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if I specify more than one
resolution, say this:
Modes "800x600" "1024x768"
X runs at 800x600 but with a "virtual screen" effect, that is at 1024x768 with a 800x600 viewport. Removing "ViewPort 0 0" makes no difference.
If the "Modes" line has only "800x600" on it, then okay. - It
was mentioned on the Forum that "killall X" doesn't work with Xorg. It
does work for me. I put this as a bug, as it needs to be sorted out why
this is a problem on another Xorg but not mine. I would have thought it
would be the same on all Xorgs.
I compiled the Kdrive X servers with inbuilt fonts, that is, cursor, 5x7, 5x8, 6x13, and xmessage uses one of those. However, for other X servers, we have the problem of xmessage using a different font.
I googled around, trying to find a fix, eventually took a punt and put this into /root/.Xresources:
*font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-*-*
Yeah, it works.
Note that I have stripped out all of the "xkbd" stuff in Xorg. I presume that Xorg will fall back to whatever keyboard layout, etc., is in effect prior to X starting. It seems to be working alright, but I have a US-layout keyboard, which is the X default anyway. So, need to see what happens for other layouts.
All the libraries left in though, even OpenGL, plus all the server modules, plus all the input drivers (apart from xkbd). But, removed DRI drivers. There were multiple libXaw libraries, of various versions. I kept only libXaw.so.8, as xorgcfg uses it and does not display correctly with libXaw95.
MU has been investigating alternative Kdrive servers (see Forum link below, 29-Nov), and if they are able to set screen refresh frequency then they will be a viable more compact alternative to Xorg. That is to be considered as a parallel project. MU reported about Mozilla crashing on Flash sites -- it seems to be okay with this Xorg, this site http://www.utexas.edu/learn/flash/examples.html plays okay.
Over the next couple of days, I intend to write a Xorg Video Wizard, plus update the X server chooser Wizard, then fix a few more things. Then perhaps will upload a test iso file about the 8th Dec, which will be version 1.0.7alpha -- this is the plan anyway. This change to Xorg will make many people happy, but it will probably require some testing and tweaking -- there are sure to be more bugs than those listed above.
29-Nov-05
Here is MU's announcement about the new alternative Kdrive X servers: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=25761
29-Nov-05
I have been looking into the X servers used by Puppy, and have written a X server chooser Wizard.
Note that MU has a chooser program for his Kdrive X server DotPups and
there should not be any conflict -- see the Forum, "new DotPups"
section for MU's announcement.
There is a PupGet package named Xfbdev-4.3.0v2-xkbd, but I found there is a bug when it installs. It also needs to have the modules_fb-2.4.29
PupGet package installed. These two reasons combined may explain why no
one has used this. I am now considering putting it as a standard
feature of the live-CD. It does need more work, as the kernel
framebuffer driver modules, at least some of them, are very poorly
documented. The SiS module is an exception -- it has excellent features
and is well documented, and fortunately my main PC has a SiS video
chip. I'm using it right now. Main advantage: higher screen refresh
frequency! It already has a Framebuffer Video Wizard, that I have enhanced a little bit.
The xf86_svga-3.3.6 PupGet package is from XFree86 version 3.3.6, suitable for pre-2000 video chips. I have made this easier to use with a Xf86_vga Video Wizard.
24-Nov-05
The upgraded libgsf (see news 21-Nov-05) breaks Abiword. I don't
want to recompile Abiword just now, so I have reverted libgsf to the
Puppy 1.0.6 version. Also decided to play safe and reverted
libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui also.
Darn, the host for goosee.com is giving trouble again. This time ftp isn't working, hasn't been for several hours.
23-Nov-05
I haven't explicitly announced it on this page yet, so here it is
now. GuestToo has provided SP106, a service pack for Puppy 1.0.6., that
is a whopping 8.5K:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=3555
cdrtools has been upgraded to version 2.01.01a03.
22-Nov-05
PupZip has evolved into a universal archiver wrapper (a non-gui frontend). The script is /usr/local/bin/pupzip.
It recognises XArchive, TkZip and guiTAR archiver programs, choosing
one of them if present (left to right is decreasing order of
preference). It also recognises dpkg-deb2 and rpm2cpio2 if present --
these are enhanced alternatives to the Busybox programs, provided as
DotPups by GuestToo.
ROX-Filer mime types and file associations have been updated to work
with PupZip, including recognition of .rpm, .deb and .rar files. Now,
click on any of these files, and it will open in XArchiver (or one of
the lesser choices).
Also /etc/mailcap and /etc/mime.types have been updated, which affects Sylpheed and Mozilla.
I'm having second thoughts about a drag-and-drop desktop icon for
PupZip, considering how easy it is to just click on a file in Rox. It
is kind of nice, though, to drag a directory to the "pupzip" icon, and
a archive is created. Note, it can also be done by right-click and
"Open With...".
The desktop now has two drag-and-drop icons, "pupzip" and "trash",
and I'm thinking that these should be separated from the others. I
suggest that the bottom-right of the screen be for drag-and-drop icons.
Top-right for system operations, like "lock" (which runs xlock) and
"save" (multisession DVD save). The other side of the screen for normal
desktop applications.
...suggestions welcome!
21-Nov-05
I have brought back the full dd and cpio programs, as it turns out
the Busybox versions aren't good enough. The XArchive program uses
rpm2cpio, rpm and cpio to handle .rpm files, however Busybox's rpm
isn't adequate either. Rather than install the rather large full rpm
package, I added extra code into pupzip, the frontend script to
XArchive, to use rpm2cpio, cpio and tar to convert the .rpm file to a
.tar file then open it in XArchive.
By the way, the current usr_devx.sfs needs to be disabled, as it has
the rpm2cpio program, but it is missing a library. The Busybox rpm2cpio
is adequate for the pupzip script.
21-Nov-05
I've been attempting to compile Gnumeric 1.6.0.
Toward that end, I upgraded these libraries:
libgsf 1.13.3, libgnomeprint 2.12.0, libgnomeprintui 2.12.0
and these will be in Puppy 1.0.7.
I also upgraded these:
glib 2.6.6, pango 1.8.2
and installed this:
goffice 0.1.1
But, although Gnumeric then had all the dependencies, still got a undefined reference when compiling.
Cannot be bothered chasing this anymore. The upgraded glib, pango, goffice and gnumeric will not be in Puppy 1.0.7.
Upgrade of Gnumeric will happen, but later.
20-Nov-05
Thanks Mark, for discovering XArchive! MU (Mark Ulrich) has created a DotPup for XArchive in the Puppy Forum: http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=3838
I compiled XArchive
and made it into an Unleashed package, as this looks very much like a
worthy replacement for guiTAR. However, I got carried away and also
created a drag-and-drop desktop icon -- ain't Rox wonderful!
It's very intelligent, and knows if you have dragged an individual file
or a archive file. So, you can create archives, or extract archives,
just by drag and drop. It may have some wrinkles, which we can work on.
The desktop icon has the title "pupzip", a take on the name "winzip".
I also added the "pupzip" intelligent frontend to the right-click "Send to..." menu in Rox.
By the way, does anyone know how to change the menu entry "Send to..."
to "Open with..." -- that would be more meaningful for Windows refugees.
I plan to upload a early test version of Pup 1.0.7 about middle of the week, around the 23rd.
19-Nov-05
Gaim is now upgraded from version 1.0.2 to 1.5.0, the latest. Puppy has the full set of plugins supplied with the source package. This will be in Puppy 1.0.7.18-Nov-05
As Puppy now has crond and crontab, a GUI is needed to use it. So, Puppy now has Gcrontab,
which is a frontend for creating crontab files. I haven't actually used
this thing, it will be up to anyone interested after the 1.0.7rc is
released.
GuestToo fixed a bug in Pmount, the Puppy drive mounter/unmounter (or as was discussed recently in the forum, partition
mounter/unmounter, if we want to be more pedantic). It's in his Service
Pack for Puppy 1.0.6. I have placed the fixed pmount script into the
upcoming Pup 1.0.7.
GuestToo's Service Pack 1.0.6 also has a bugfix for Partview, that
displays used and free space of mounted partitions graphically. I
applied a further bugfix so that it works properly with the df program
in Busybox 1.01.
ColorExplorer
is a neat little Tcl/Tk GUI app for exploring colors, particularly
useful to see what the standard X names look like (for example, "dark
slate grey" or "navajo white"). ColorExplorer is developed by Bill
Poser, www.billposer.org. It's now in Puppy.
Fragger
is a small utility application that let's you see graphically how
fragmented a file is. I wanted to see the fragmentation of the "pup001"
file, and this shows me. Such a tiny app, may be of use to others, so
this has gone into Puppy also. Fragger is developed by Doug McLain. Project page: http://fragger.sourceforge.net/
17-Nov-05
I have recompiled Busybox 1.01 with crond and crontab enabled. This increases the executable from 420K to 428K. The symlinks are /usr/bin/crontab and /usr/sbin/crond.
John Murga found this introduction to cron: http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html
16-Nov-05
Finally have upgraded Busybox, from version 0.60.5 to 1.01.Here are the Busybox files in /bin:
ash busybox cat-BUSYBOX chgrp chmod chown clear cp-BUSYBOX cpio
cut date-BUSYBOX dd df dmesg dumpkmap echo egrep-BUSYBOX expr false fdflush
fgrep-BUSYBOX free getopt grep-BUSYBOX gunzip-BUSYBOX head hostname id ip
ipaddr ipcalc-BUSYBOX iplink iproute iptunnel kill ln ls mkdir-BUSYBOX mknod
mktemp more mount mv-BUSYBOX netstat-BUSYBOX pidof ping ping6 pipe_progress ps
pwd rm-BUSYBOX rmdir rpm sh sleep stty sync tail touch tr true
umount uname uncompress usleep vi zcat
Files in /sbin:
chroot fdisk-BUSYBOX freeramdisk fsck.minix halt hwclock ifconfig ifdown ifup
init_DISABLED klogd loadkmap losetup makedevs mkfs.minix mkswap nameif
pivot_root poweroff reboot route swapoff swapon syslogd
Files in /usr/bin:
[-BUSYBOX basename bunzip2-BUSYBOX bzcat cal chvt
cmp dc deallocvt dirname dos2unix dpkg dpkg-deb du-BUSYBOX env fdformat find-BUSYBOX ftpget ftpput hexdump hostid install killall
loadfont logger logname md5sum mesg mkfifo nc nslookup openvt printf
readlink realpath renice reset rpm2cpio setkeycodes sort-BUSYBOX
strings tee telnet test-BUSYBOX tftp time top traceroute tty uniq
unix2dos uptime uudecode uuencode wc wget-BUSYBOX which whoami
xargs yes
Files in /usr/sbin:
fbset hwclock rdate
Legend:
Bold: New programs. These are not in Puppy 1.0.6 or earlier.
Blue bold: In Puppy 1.0.6 and earlier these were "full" versions, now reverted to Busybox.
All of the above files are symbolic links to /bin/busybox. The
symlinks postfixed with "-BUSYBOX" are supported in the busybox
executable but disabled as they are replaced with "full" versions. it
may be that the Busybox versions have improved enough so that they can
be restored, but I don't know that yet, so leaving the option there.
Also, there are a lot more utility programs than in the 0.60.5 version, so it will be interesting to investigate them.
However, there are some programs now in Busybox that I think I can safely move back from the full versions.
Have configured with support for file sizes greater than 2G, so the
reason I replaced the Busybox dd program with the "full" version from
Vector no longer applies, so have restored the Busybox version.
The programs mkfs.minix, mkswap, fsck.minix, hwclock and fdformat are in Puppy 1.0.6, from the util_linux package (taken from
Vector). I have restored the Busybox versions.
Note
that I have placed symlinks for hwclock in both /usr/sbin and
/sbin, as some scripts in Puppy are hard-coded for the former, though Busybox has
defaulted to placing it at the latter. Some symlinks, such as chroot, cut, expr
and free default to /usr/bin or /usr/sbin and I have moved them to /bin
and /sbin, as Puppy needs them early in bootup, before /usr is
available -- this is the same situation as Puppy 1.0.6 and earlier.
The programs losetup and umount are left working in Busybox, and the
full versions, from the util_linux package, are also kept in Puppy,
named losetup-FULL and umount-FULL -- this is as before, to maintain
the status quo. Previously, the Busybox versions of losetup and umount
did not work properly, and we have yet to determine that they work
properly in the latest Busybox.
Note that /sbin/init_DISABLED does not mean that Busybox init is not
used. It is replaced at bootup of the live-CD with a script, then
Busybox init is restored.
Note, you may wonder, if some Busybox programs are not being used,
that is, those with "-BUSYBOX" postfix, why not configure the Busybox
source to compile without them? Apart from the reason that in some case
we might consider reinstating the Busybox version, in many cases it
makes little or no difference removing the program. For example,
configuring Busybox without bunzip2 and gunzip makes no difference at
all to the size of the executable -- for the reason that the
uncompression functionality is required anyway by other Busybox
applications.
One program in 0.60.5 but not in 1.01 is /sbin/update. I don't think anything needs it.
Mini-drama: getting Busybox to work...
Updating Busybox is one thing, getting it to work another. After
upgrading, one difference from what is shown above is that I had
reverted fdisk from the full version (from utli_linux package) to the Busybox version, as the
"--help" option showed the Busybox version has all the commandline
options that I need. I created the new image.gz and usr_cram.fs and
copied them to a usb pen drive, then booted it. But, got this message,
repeated endlessly:
kmod: failed to execute /sbin/modprobe -s -k binfmt-0000, errorno=8
This error message has been reported a few times on the Puppy Forum. I
googled far and wide, but, as is typical of the kernel, documentation
of this message is inadequate, also responses on mail lists and
newsgroups are inadequate.
In a nutshell, it seems this message occurs if the kernel is unable to execute an executable, for example it is corrupted.
Although, as I was getting the above error repeating endlessly, it indicates that modprobe itself is corrupted.
In my case, I found the cause. The Busybox fdisk program does not
accept the "-s" option, which is required in /sbin/init startup script.
This is despite the the "--help" showing that the "-s" option is
supported. Aaargh! ...pathetic. Busybox v1.01 is supposed to be highly
bug-fixed. The invalid return from fdisk caused choas later in the script, resulting somehow in the above error message.
Anyway, back to the full fdisk program.
Are we there yet? No, booting gets further, but another Busybox-related crash...
The Busybox mini-drama continues...
/sbin/init, the very first script that executes at bootup, has this line:
cat /etc/fstab | sed -e 's/\/dev\/ram0/tmpfs/g' > /new_root/etc/fstab
which no longer works -- the destination file is zero bytes. The
program sed is the full version, compressed with UPX. No error
messages, sed seems to run, but empty output. Yet, after bootup, sed
works. Then I found ldd doesn't work -- ldd is a script, not an
executable. Then I found poweroff and shutdown don't work.
The syslogd program is executed in rc.sysinit, and the "-L" parameter is no longer supported -- at least I can fix that one.
So, tried sed that has not been compressed, and it works. Note
though, the compressed sed does work after bootup. Within /sbin/init, a
compressed executable simply doesn't work, no error message.
We are not there yet. The above line of code still does not work. It has to be modified:
cat /etc/fstab | sed -e "s/\\/dev\\/ram0/tmpfs/g" > /new_root/etc/fstab
Does this mean all my scripts are going to be broken? No, the single
"\" does work after bootup. It's weird, seems like a bug in the new Ash
interpreter.
And what about ldd? This is a shell script, got from Vector. Well,
Mandrake 9.2 also has a ldd script, I tried that, it works. Hmmm.
Then there's the problem that reboot and poweroff don't work. Well,
I recall something similar way back, with v0.60.5. The problem is the
use of pivot_root at bootup. For 0.60.5, have to disable
BB_FEATURE_LINUXRC, but 1.01 doesn't have that option but I took a punt
and disabled CONFIG_FEATURE_INITRD, and that fixed it.
Are we there yet? I noticed another error message during booting... will tackle that next.
If you would like to play with the new Busybox, maybe try out the new "applets", it is available here:
http://www.pupweb.org/test/
13-Nov-05
Freetype has been upgraded
to version 2.1.10, which includes the library libfreetype.so.6.3.8
(upgraded from 6.3.3). If I got the configure options right, it should
have the bytecode interpreter for TrueType hinting enabled --
this was discussed awhile back on the Forum... yes, here it is: http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=1873
Nathan F also has some packages that need this more recent libfreetype.
12-Nov-05
Puppy now has xlock.
The X server used in Puppy can blank the screen after a period of
non-use, and a keypress or mouse activity will restore the X desktop --
this facility has always been there. However, the question has
sometimes been asked on the forum, what about security if the user
wants to leave PC for awhile and doesn't want anybody to snoop on what
they are doing. The solution is to have a password, however, we don't
want a password for the normal screen blanking.
One solution is to use xlock. I hacked the source and compiled it to a
fraction of its normal size. I also wrote a GUI frontend for it, and
set it up as a Rox-app, and created an icon on the desktop, alongside
the trash-can. Just click on it, and the first time it will ask for a
password, then locks the screen. Any keyboard press will bring up the
password screen. A right-click on the desktop-icon allows choice of a
configuration GUI and you can choose an animation to display while the
screen is locked.
It is possible to use xlock to create animations for the desktop,
and the script does support this, meaning I could put an entry into the
menu for this, however, after about 5 seconds of wonder seeing The
Matrix scrolling down the desktop, you would probably not want it there
as a regular feature, as apart from being distracting, it also uses a
lot of CPU time. Some of the animations are quite nice though, and some
means of taking a snapshot and using the still image as a background
image would be nice.
Note, I'm not thinking of xlock as a high-security system, just for
the situation where you want to leave your desk for awhile. Just click
the icon. If someone snoops, and presses a key, they get a
enter-password screen.
10-Nov-05
Gtkcat, the CD file cataloger, was not mounting CDs correctly. I modified the source code.
8-Nov-05
Puppy 1.0.6 has been named "Puppy Sizzler" by Lobster (Forum name),
due to the enhanced save-to-DVD capability (that we have referred to so
far as our "multisession" Puppy). The Wiki page for "Sizzler" has
information on alternative ways to download, including by torrent: http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy106.
Prolific Puppy developer MU (Forum name) has a Windows program to
install Puppy 1.0.6 from within Windows XP. You will need to read the
discussion about this on the forum: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=3534
7-Nov-05
Puppy Linux version 1.0.6 released. The live-CD iso file is 55.7M. The two big items in this release are Abiword 2.4.1 and the multisession DVD. Release notes:
- With the 2.4 series, Abiword has come of age. This is now professional wordprocessing, and Puppy enhances the pleasant experience with a large number of plugins included in the live-CD, including grammar checker and equation editor. There is an American-English dictionary, others can easily be installed.
- The "multisession Puppy" has been greatly enhanced, especially for DVD. If you have a DVD burner, this is the way to go (if not, consider buying one!). The Puppy multisession DVD-R is a very smooth experience. For the uninitiated, this boots up from DVD and saves everything back to DVD, no hard drive required at all -- see introduction to the concept here.
- Alienx (Forum name) has done a superb job with his simple remaster-CD scripts. I have placed his scripts into the menu "Setup -> Alienx simple remaster-CD". These are an alternative to the "official" remaster-CD/DVD script.
- Thanks to Klhrevolutionist and MU (Forum names), for dict and GUI frontend PBdict, for accessing an online dictionary. This can be found in the "Word processing" menu.
- The multisession DVD has a desktop icon for saving changed files
to DVD without actually shutting down. This is great if you have a
unreliable power supply and don't want to risk losing some critical
work.
- Burniso2cd script is upgraded to handle DVDs as well as CDs.
- TightVnc replaces TkVNC VNC client. See information about Rarsa's (Forum name) TightVnc server in notes of 31-Oct-05 below.
- Puppy now has Partview, a tiny Tcl/Tk script that was originally called disk.tcl. I hacked it to work on Puppy. Partview gives a graphical display of the free space on mounted partitions. It is launched from the "Control Panel" menu.
- Pmount,
the Puppy drive mount/unmount script (a more basic alternative to MUT),
has been rewritten. You will find it in the "File managers" menu.
- An alternative to the Gaby addressbook, named Dlume, has been added as a PupGet package.
- Puppian's Ticker is upgraded to version 006, TkDVD to 3.8.3, keenerd's WAG to 0.3.2, Jesses' MUT to 0.0.7b, Graveman to 0.3.8, Fig2dev to version 3.2.5 alpha 7.
- I have upgraded the dd utility program from Busybox to the full version.
- growisofs has been updated from version 5.11 to 5.21 (taken from Vector). Have also got dvd+rw-format, dvd+rw-mediainfo, dvd+rw-booktype and dvd-ram-control. All of these are from the dvd+rw-tools package.
- The metamail program is now in Puppy. It is needed by Sylpheed. See notes for 4-Oct-05.
- The Links Grammar and gtkmathview packages are included in the live-CD, to support the Abiword grammar and equation editor plugins. This was done to get the complete experience of Abiword "out of the box", though future versions of Puppy, and custom versions, may relegate these to PupGet packages.
- The controversial "peach" theme of 1.0.5 is now taking back-stage. The default will now be the original JWM colour scheme, arctic-seagull desktop image, and the original GTK theme. The live-CD inbuilt JWM/GTK coordinated themes will be original, peach, XP and blueX.
- As usual, heaps of "under the hood" bugfixes and infrastructure improvements.
It is vitally important that the multisession iso file is burnt to CD or DVD correctly. Please note that currently we know of no adequate Windows DVD burner program to burn the multisession iso file to DVD. See the notes below for 2-Nov-05 on how to burn it. That is, you need a running Linux system.
Developers, please note that usr_devx.sfs has been upgraded. You will find this on the Ibiblio download site.
Puppy kennels are popping up all over the web. An overview page is here: http://www.pupweb.org/.
Apart from the "official" 1.0.6 release announced above, Puppy enthusiasts are bringing out their own custom versions (as Puppy live-CD/DVD is so easy to remaster with packages of your choice).
A community-based support structure named Puppy Foundation has been setup at: http://www.puppylinux.org/ and I have relocated the Wiki there: http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/.
4-Nov-05
I upgraded Fig2dev to version 3.2.5 alpha 7. This is a commandline
utility to convert "fig" vector graphics files to various other
formats. It now supports export to Latex ...I had the idea that
Figurine could be used to design maths equations, then export to Latex
(Figurine uses Fig2dev), but the generated Latex file is not liked by
Abiword ...well, Figurine is not an equation creator as-such, so
generates generic Latex graphic code unsuitable to import into Abiword.
Anyway, the upgraded Fig2dev will be in 1.0.6, so Figurine is capable of exporting to many more formats than before.
Puppian's excellent Ticker program was working for dialup users, but
not for those with a faster Internet connection. Thanks to GuestToo who
has fixed this. Ticker is upgraded to version 006.
I fixed a bug with multisession CD/DVD, for handling of usr_devx.sfs and usr_more.sfs.
Just download them to /root and reboot, they will be automatically
loaded onto /usr. However, in the case of DVD, download them, burn
immediately to DVD using growisofs, then delete the file. Next time
Puppy boots, it will get loaded into ramdisk (currently no size
checking) and mounted on /usr -- but also when the DVD gets full,
usr_devx.sfs (and usr_cram.sfs) will automatically get burnt onto the
new DVD.
I'm thinking a desktop icon could handle this -- download and burn these to DVD -- for 1.0.7 maybe.
3-Nov-05
Klhrevolutionist has reported a new version of TkDVD just released,
v3.8.3, that fixes a bug. I have upgraded Puppy to this version.
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=1885
2-Nov-05
Okay, we think BUG2 is fixed. See forum thread.
Possible BUG4:
I thought that I had put code into /usr/sbin/install-hd2, the
install-to-hard-drive-option2 script, for the situation where /usr is a
symlink to /.usr_cram. You get this situation if the live-CD boots and
can't or doesn't (you chose boot-option-3) use a pup001 file. I do
really need to fix that, but in the meantime, install-hd2 is supposed
to detect that situation -- and I thought that the fix was in 1.0.5.
That is, there is code inside install-hd2 that detects if /usr is a symlink, by using "readlink" program. Yes, here it is:
#1.0.5 bug fix...
if [ -h /usr ];then #1.0.5 it may be a symlink to /.usr_cram
REALUSR="`readlink /usr`"
cp -a $REALUSR /mnt/data/usr
else
cp -a /usr /mnt/data/usr
fi
...could some kind soul try the bootup with option3, then a new install, then see if you get a proper /usr. UPDATE 3NOV: Peter Sieg has tested this, installed Grub also, reports success!
2-Nov-05
Puppy version 1.0.6rc (release candidate) is available. This is not
an official release. It is for people to test and find bugs. Barring
anything serious, the final 1.0.6 should be out early next week. There
are two files, puppy-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso (the normal live-CD) and
puppy-multisession-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso (specifically multisession, no
boot menu). They are 55M. I have already discovered three bugs, see below.
Download puppy-multisession-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso from: http://puppy.wise-guy.us/ (courtesy Babbs)
Download puppy-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso from: http://www.nstsoftware.com/puppy/ (courtesy Normen Stengel)
WHAT'S NEW:
The focus in 1.0.6 is the new Abiword and the new multisession CD/DVD.
There are two separate ISO files. testing should focus on these two,
but other changes have occurred -- please read the notes below, down to
the release of 1.0.5, to find out all the changes.
TESTERS:
If you have an interest or responsibility in a particular area, please
test it and if any trouble report to me by email at
bkaulerATpupwebDOTorg. Please note that this email address has "active
filtering", and an email reply is generated automatically asking you to
confirm your post -- please click on the url link given in this email
to confirm the post.
MULTISESSION CD/DVD:
You need to download puppy-multisession-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso. This can
be burned to either CD-R (or CD-RW) or to DVD-R (do not burn to a new
blank DVD-RW or DVD+RW, unless it is already used, as it needs to be
formatted). The Burniso2cd script in 1.0.5 cannot burn to a DVD, only a
CD. The Burniso2cd in 1.0.6 is upgraded and can handle both. You can
burn to DVD-R from Puppy 1.0.5 by running this command:
# growisofs -speed=4 -Z /dev/hdc=puppy-multisession-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso
where /dev/hdc is the DVD burner drive. This should work in any Linux system.
There is currently no known Windows burner program that is adequate for
burning the iso to DVD! -- you will get one to do it, but at best will
get startup and shutdown error messages.
You can also burn the ISO file to a CD-R from the commandline:
# cdrecord -multi -data -eject -v speed=4 dev=ATAPI:/dev/hdc puppy-multisession-1.0.6rc-mozilla.iso
and this should work on any Linux system, as long as SCSI-emulation is turned off.
Note that the multisession DVD is inherently superior to the CD and
much preferred if you have a DVD burner drive. Please use a DVD-R
single-layer. Do not use a DVD+R. Double-layer is wasted space as Puppy
can only store on the first 4G (approx). Bulk-packs of DVD-Rs cost
about 30 - 35 cents each, almost as cheap as CD-Rs.
For anyone new to the concept of the multisession Puppy, please go here.
RESTRICTION:
The PupGet packages at ibiblio.org have not yet been upgraded for
1.0.6. Some packages have changed and there are new ones. Therefore, do
not use the PupGet package manager, except to maybe download a simple
package like a game, to test that the package manager basically works.
BUG 1:
Burniso2cd script has a missing comma, causing two buttons to be
joined. Selecting that button will choose the "MULTI-CD" option. fixed for 1.0.6
BUG 2:
As described below, preservation of DotPup entries is still not
working. The entries get extracted by the
/usr/sbin/backup_dotpup_menues.wxbs to /tmp/menu_dotpup_fvwm95.txt and
/tmp/menu_dotpup_jwm.txt, but when rc.update calls
/usr/sbin/restore_dotpup_menues.sh they aren't getting reinserted.
However, run from the commandline:
# restore_dotpup_menues.sh
and they do get restored. So, something is wrong in the call from /etc/rc.d/rc.update.
Therefore for this 1.0.6rc, if upgrading your pup001 file from 1.0.5,
after the bootup run the above program to fix the menus. Then restart
the window manager. not yet fixed
BUG 3:
There is a bug in PBdict, the GUI frontend for dict. The scripts are in
/usr/local/PBdict/. From an initial look at script main.pb, I thought
it was using gtkdialog2, so I inserted the
<wtitle></wtitle> tag into gui.tpl. However, I now find
that the script runs the old gtkdialog program, which does not
recognise <wtitle> and terminates.
The fix for this is to edit /usr/local/PBdict/gui.tpl and remove my <wtitle> line.
You can launch PBdict from the "Word processing" menu. fixed for 1.0.6
1-Nov-05
Prior to release of 1.0.5, Mark Ulrich helped me by writing some
code to preserve the DotPup entries in the window manager menu
configuration files when a new version of Puppy is booted. The problem
is that the latest config files replace those in the "pup001" file, and
custom changes get lost.
There was a problem with the code however, so it wasn't implemented at
that stage. Now that 1.0.6 is just about to come on the scene, it is
important that this be fixed. Mark's DotPup Downloader creates menu
entries, and we don't want these to disappear.
I have examined the code and think it is now fixed. For anyone
interested in the technical side of this, the update script
/etc/rc.d/rc.update calls /usr/sbin/backup_dotpup_menues.wxbs to
extract the DotPup entries from the menu config files, then the new
config files are installed, then /usr/sbin/restore_dotpup_menues.sh is
called to reinsert the DotPup entries.
I am testing Abiword in 1.0.6rc ...ah, it sure is nice! The equation
editor can import in two ways, either by typing a Latex formula into an
edit-box, or by opening a mathML file. I'm wondering about that latter
option -- a mathML WYSIWYG editor would be nice -- I think Amaya does
that. Is there any other small GUI program that can be used to design
equations and save in mathML format (or Latex)?
Thanks to Klhrevolutionist and MU (Forum names), for dict and GUI frontend PBdict,
for accessing an online dictionary. I have converted the DotPups into
an Unleashed package, dict-1.4.9 (with PBdict in it) and it will be in
1.0.6rc. It is launched from the "Word processing" menu.
31-Oct-05
I have decided to make Abiword complete "out of the box".
We now have a professional quality product that power users can use for
any wordprocessing needs, even for sophisticated documents that would
normally require a desktop publishing program, or for complex technical
documents such as research theses. Therefore, I decided that having all
the plugins ready-to-go, without having to download extra packages,
creates a very nice first impression and will make Puppy suitable "as
is" for this class of user.
The Links Grammar and gtkmathview packages are included, meaning that
the grammar checker and equation editing are immediately available. An
American-spelling dictionary is included also (other languages will
have to be downloaded -- see the Abiword help page in Puppy). These are
all quite weighty, so the live-CD has grown a bit.
Keenerd (Forum name) has developed WAG
(Wireless Access Gadget), that was introduced in Puppy 1.0.5. I have
upgraded it to version 0.3.2 and converted the DotPup to an Unleashed
package, named wag-0.3.2. I also relocated wag-conf and profile-conf to
/etc/WAG/, as there is a problem having writable files inside /usr --
when a version upgrade occurs, a cleanout of /usr occurs, and these
config files will get restored to the original files.
So, be aware when upgrading from 1.0.5 to 1.0.6 that this cleanout will
occur -- you might like to copy these files somewhere for safekeeping
if you want to retain the settings.
31-Oct-05
Rarsa (Forum name) has made the TightVnc
server and client applications available as DotPups.
Puppy has TkVNC client however this has proved to be very limited. Pup
1.0.6 replaces TkVNC with TightVnc client. I compiled TightVnc client
program to use libXaw95 which is already in Puppy as the DotPup version
requires an extra Xaw.so.8 library.
So, for Pup 1.0.6 you will not need the TightVnc client DotPup, but if
you want a VNC server then you will want to install rarsa's TightVnc
server DotPup.
Speaking of DotPups, Jesse Liley has upgraded his DotPup downloader/installer to version mu05B and this will be in Puppy 1.0.6 also.
30-Oct-05
Great news! As already announced, Pup 1.0.6 will have Abiword 2.4.1, which is working very nicely.
A new feature of Abiword is AbiMathView, which is a plugin for equation editing. This uses another package called gtkmathview.
I was able to compile the latter but not the former, however today
Martin Sevior, the developer of AbiMathView, helped me and I was able
to compile it. I would also like to acknowledge the Abiword developer
guys who helped Martin, and Luca Padovani who developed gtkmathview.
Abiword sure has arrived... good enough to write your PhD thesis!
GuestToo supplied a menu file for iceWM configured for Puppy 1.0.5.
This file is /root/.icewm/menu. I have updated it to suit Pup 1.0.6 and
it is now a permanent feature of the live-CD. That is, even if iceWM is
not installed, the menu file always is, meaning that the file can
always be kept up-to-date with the current applications.
Actually, the iceWM menu file is very easy to maintain, as mostly I
just have to make sure it has all the required menu entries, with
layout matching that of the other window managers. Unlike the menu
configuration files for JWM and Fvwm95, an entry in "menu" does not
have to be commented-out if a program is absent, as iceWM itself
determines that -- there are some exceptions however, such as apps that
launch via rxvt.
The PupGet package manager is aware of the existing "menu" file and if
a iceWM PupGet package was installed, the already-existing menu file
will not get overwritten. Maintainers of any DotPup iceWM package
should also consider this in the installation script -- check for
existing /root/.icewm/menu and not overwrite it (unless there is a
really good reason to do so).
Similarly, PupGet will not erase a w.m. menu config file if the w.m.
package is uninstalled. A DotPup package that registers with the PupGet
package manager at installation will be okay, as PupGet will handle
uninstallation. PupGet is specifically aware of JWM, Fvwm95 and iceWM
window managers, not any other w.m.
29-Oct-05
The DVD burner program TkDVD
in Puppy 1.0.5 has a bug. The "Open" button to select an iso file to
burn to DVD does not work. I reported this to the author and it is
fixed. Puppy 1.0.6 will have TkDVD version 3.8.2.
Note that Puppy also has Graveman, that handles DVDs as well. Both
programs use growisofs and it's support utilities. TkDVD is thus an
alternative, and there is no problem to give you this choice as TkDVD
is very small. It is written in Tcl/Tk.
The author of TkDVD is Régis Damongeot and the homepage for TkDVD is http://regis.damongeot.free.fr/tkdvd/.
28-Oct-05
Puppy is moving to a new kennel... kennels to be more correct!
Go here http://www.pupweb.org/ to see the "big picture".
Note that goosee.com will remain functional. It's just that we are spreading out a bit more.
27-Oct-05
Heh, heh, I've bowed to the pressure... the controversial "peach"
theme is now taking back-stage. The default will now be the original
JWM colour scheme, arctic-seagull desktop image, and the original GTK
theme. The live-CD inbuilt JWM/GTK coordinated themes will be original,
peach, XP and blueX.
24-Oct-05
The experimental 20th October multisession iso has some bugs:
A DVD-R works fine, but not DVD+RW or DVD-RW. When Puppy shuts down,
in the case of the latter two, Puppy thinks the DVD is full when it
isn't. If the RW disc is being burnt in "overwrite mode" then there is
only one track, which is what causes the problem.
Anyway, I think it is working alright now.
The /root/archive folder disappears. This was a bug before and I thought that I had fixed it. This time it is fixed.
23-Oct-05
I'm pleased to report that Abiword version 2.4.1 prints nicely. The
previous problem of text displaced upward on the page is absent. Yippee!
I have modified the script /usr/bin/lprshell to work properly with
nenscript. The background here is that lprshell, a frontend to "lpr",
converts a text file to Postscript, and previously it called Abiword in
commandline-mode to perform the actual conversion. However, due to a
problem with using Abiword in this mode, lprshell is now using
nenscript.
Abiword is able to convert a variety of file formats to Postscript,
whereas nenscript only does plain text to Postscript. Later I will
probably reintroduce Abiword into lprshell, but for now just using
nenscript.
I did a test print from Beaver, which prints to lprshell, which in turn calls nenscript, then lpr... yes, prints fine.
Okay, what we really need now is a little GUI for lprshell, that
pops up a dialog box allowing the options of nenscript to be set... the
frontend could even call GSView for print preview. I'll post the latest
lprshell file on request, if anyone feels inspired to tackle this.
22-Oct-05
I have upgraded the dd
utility program from Busybox to the full version. The reason is that
the Busybox version only supports file sizes up to 2G -- although I
think that was a compile-time option -- anyway, we are gradually moving
away from Busybox, so I just grabbed it from Vector.
I have made nenscript, a
little utility program that converts text files to Postscript, a
default choice in the official live-CD. Note, nenscript is called from
lprshell, which in turn is used by some applications, for example
Beaver and Leafpad, to print.
The problem is that lprshell can alternatively use Abiword in
commandline-mode to convert a text file to Postscript, however the
latest version of Abiword (2.4.1) has a bug doing this.
Now there's an interesting thought... a little GUI for nenscript. Or
rather, for lprshell. Simple applications like Beaver and Leafpad have
no printer intelligence of their own, they just call "lprshell
filename.txt" and off it goes to the printer. But, if we add a little
GUI in lprshell, it could popup with some options to feed to nenscript.
Like, for example font and font-size. Hmm, there's probably already
something like that somewhere.
The multisession live-CD/DVD development is progressing. I have
created a "Save" desktop icon, that will only appear on the desktop in
the case of a multisession-DVD. There is a risk if working on an
important document that it will be lost if there is a power-outage, as
everything is in RAM -- or the system could hang, although that is
unlikely. Anyway, this "Save" button is a partial solution. It takes a
snapshot of changed and new files and saves them to DVD -- it's just
like a session-save at shutdown, except in this case there is no
shutdown.
I have not done this for a CD, as each track saved to a CD is at least
...going from memory here.. about 12M, even if you only have one small
file to save.
21-Oct-05
Puppy now has Partview,
a tiny Tcl/Tk script that was originally called disk.tcl. I hacked it
to work on Puppy. Partview gives a graphical display of the free space
on mounted partitions, including the ramdisk and the pup001 file. It is
launched from the "Control Panel" menu.
An alternative to the Gaby addressbook, named Dlume, has been added as a PupGet package (available when 1.0.6 released).
Jesse Liley's MUT partition mounting utility program has been upgraded from version 0.0.6 to 0.0.7b.
18-Oct-05
I have tidied up the GTK and JWM themes.
The JWM peach theme is still the default, but you will be pleased to
know that the original JWM theme, and the arctic seagull background
image, are back, selectable in thoughjourney's (Forum name) JWM
configuration program jwmConfig.
alienX (Forum name) has created some great theme DotPups, and I have
selected his blueX and the improved XP themes to be built-in to the
Puppy live-CD.
There are matching original, blueX and XP themes for GTK applications also.
17-Oct05
I was looking at Pmount,
the Puppy drive mount/unmount script, and lamenting how crappy the code
is -- this is because it grew from the early days of Puppy, with new
features just bolted on in a topsy-turvy fashion. Pmount is the
predecessor to MUT -- the latter launches from the "drives" shortcut on
the desktop. Pmount is still in the menu however, but I decided that it
either needs to be improved or removed. So, I rewrote Pmount from
scratch. It now works better I think, the code is cleaner. Pmount does
not have the same technical excellence, that is, the same degree of
hardware probing as MUT, and the GUI is less sophisticated, but it is
there as a simple alternative.
If size is not a problem, I like to provide choices in Puppy -- that's
why you find more than one file manager, text editor, etc.
15-Oct-05
I have overhauled the scripts pmount, bkup2cd.sh, burniso2cd and createpuppyonline.
The last one is PCCC, the Puppy Create Custom CD program -- mostly it
has been updated to handle burning to DVD and also has simplified "fast
track" creation of a multisession CD or DVD.
The CD burner program Gcombust is an Unleashed package. It works
well except is designed for use with SCSI-emulated IDE/ATAPI CD drives.
As Puppy no longer requires SCSI-emulation, I wrote a help-window that
pops up when Gcombust is started, that explains how to make Gcombust
work without SCSI-emulation. This is /usr/local/bin/gcombustshell. This
is old news, but gcombustshell was broken, so I fixed it.
Note, Gcombust should not be used for burning DVDs.
There have been some reports on the Forum that guiTAR does not work.
I have just checked it... if you open a file, for example
myfile.tar.gz, you need to choose "Select all" from the menu before
clicking the "Extract" button -- otherwise nothing happens.
So, that is not a bug, however, compressed single files, for example
myfile.gz, cannot be extracted, so that is a bug, or at least is a
limitation.
So, I can only find one problem, the first is a procedural issue.
Anyway, I have asked Terry Loveall, the maintainer of guiTAR, if he can
fix both of these. For example, if you hit the "Extract" button without
having selected any files to extract, a popup window can ask if you
want to extract all the files.
14-Oct-05
I have compiled Abiword
2.4.1. It is very nice, except there is one bug. Ha ha, I've been
hanging out, wanting to upgrade to 2.4.x due to a printing bug in
version 2.2.7, but 2.4.1 has a new bug. I don't have access to a
printer right now, so cannot confirm that the printing bug is fixed
either.
The new bug is the "--import-extension=" commandline option, used to
override the automatic datatype detection. We need this as Abiword is
used as a "glue" commandline application to convert various file
formats. For example, a HTML file opened in Beaver must print as a text
file, and Abiword will be used to open the HTML file as text and
convert the text file to Postscript prior to printing. But,
&%$#%*@, it doesn't work. I've sent an urgent bug report to the
Abiword developers.
I've included a bunch of nice plugins: Babelfish, BZ2 compression,
embedded editing with mtPaint, Google, Grammar checker, MS Write
import, StarOffice SDW import, Internet dictionary, Abiword Online
Wiki, import WMF graphics, import and export XHTML, import XSLFO.
The grammar checker uses Links Grammar, that will be a Unleashed package.
Note, the multisession DVD is progressing very nicely.
7-Oct-05
Ted Dog (Forum name) has modified the multi-session Puppy to work
better with a DVD. He has pioneered the use of growisofs, which is
superior to cdrecord that we have used up to now.
GuestToo has also been working on fixing some bugs.
Building on Ted Dog's work, I have updated the boot script
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit-cd and the shutdown script /etc/rc.d/rc.reboot-cd
to use growisofs if a DVD is detected. It works very well. It looks
like multi-session has come of age, but you have to use a DVD-R, which
means of course you need a DVD burner drive.
I have also modified /sbin/init, the first boot script, to use a
swap file if a Linux partition is not found. However, only doing this
for multi-session boot.
Multi-session boot now looks for usr_devx.sfs and usr_more.sfs, but
with a difference -- they are looked for on the CD/DVD and if found
copied into the ramdisk and mounted on /usr.
growisofs has been updated from version 5.11 to 5.21 (taken from
Vector). Have also got dvd+rw-format, dvd+rw-mediainfo, dvd+rw-booktype
and dvd-ram-control. All of these are from the dvd+rw-tools package.
We hope that DVD multi-session will be working nicely for the release of Puppy 1.0.6!
4-Oct-05
Many of you guys who have used Sylpheed for awhile will agree it's
great. With Puppy 1.0.4 I used the Mozilla mail & news module, to
get a feel for what it is like to use on a regular basis. Then I
installed Sylpheed 2.0.1 and when I started using it, I felt
relieved... it is so much nicer.
Version 2.0.1 has nice partial rendering of HTML mail, so you get the
links but not all the HTML, which was a major factor in my feeling of
relief. Also the very snappy performance. Also the user interface.
However, Sylpheed is slightly crippled.
So, why doesn't the "Open" button work? This is where the oh-so-common sloppiness of open source developers shows its face. The documentation is old and incomplete. I have had Sylpheed in Puppy for about two years, and I only just now found out how to get the "Open" button to work. In a mail-list somewhere, someone reported that they had to study the source code and found out that the "Open" button will only work if the metamail program is installed. Okay.... well, Vector doesn't have it, so I got it out of Mandrake. Hey presto, "Open" now works!
My master plan for mime-type handling enters the next phase. Puppy 1.0.5 has default handlers, for example /usr/local/bin/defaultwordprocessor, which are scripts that will execute the correct application. I am getting everything to work via these default handlers, so that they are the only place modifications will need to be made. I have now modified /etc/mailcap to use these -- both Sylpheed and Mozilla reference /etc/mailcap. The desktop icons were already setup in 1.0.5 to use them.
So, if any application installs, say for example a new wizz-bang web browser, and it is wanted for it to become the new default web browser, then edit /usr/local/bin/defaultbrowser. The file has the format:
#!/bin/shSo you would replace mozstart with your new executable.
exec mozstart "$@"
3-Oct-5
Puppy has featured as "distro of the week" on distrowatch.com Weekly
News. That's great, lots of people will be coming here to read about
Puppy. Welcome!
As you will see below, you can choose the official "standard" version
1.0.5 live-CD, or our "Chubby" version. Also custom Puppies are on the
way.
After booting Puppy and getting onto the Internet, be sure to install
GuestToo's "Service Pack" -- it has some tweaks and minor bug fixes.
get it from here:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2568
For developers, GuestToo has created a DotPup downloader for Puppy Unleashed 1.0.5:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2658&highlight=
Hmmm, in that case, I might as well go for a Sata-enabled kernel as well. Staying with 2.4.29 though.
Anyway, welcome again. This page is my personal developer's news blog, so is specialised. For general news, be sure to visit the General News page on the wiki: Wiki news page.
2-Oct-05
Okay, now we are working toward 1.0.6. There will not be any alpha,
beta, gamma or preview release of 1.0.6, just the final. The reason for
this is that there will not be any major changes, just incremental
improvements, refinements, minor bugfixes.
Graveman has been upgraded
from version 0.3.0 to 0.3.8. We are not using the latest version of
Graveman, for the reason described further down this page (it has a
serious bug). Also, the latest Graveman requires Cdrdao, that Puppy
does
not have. I tested version 0.3.8 as it is the last version before
Cdrdao is required, and it works. 0.3.8 also supports DVD burning.
I have applied the patches from GuestToo's "Service Pack" v0.0.1.
Differences are that I have placed gaim32.png into
/usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps/, and in /usr/local/lib/X11/mini-icons/
gxmessage.xpm is a symlink to mini-happy.xpm (not gxmessage.png as that
kind of grated on the nerves).
1-Oct-05
Wow, Puppy has really hit the "big time" ... we now have a Service
Pack for Puppy 1.0.5! GuestToo has created an "SP", with minor tweaks
and bugfixes. Unlike the Service Packs for a certain other OS, this one
is very small, just 8.52K. Get it from here:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2568&highlight=
This is a DotPup package and very easy to install. Just download it, then click on it.
Nathan Fisher (Nathan F on Forum) has created grafpup 1.0.5, a custom Puppy for graphic artists. See here: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=15860#15860
29Sept05
Chubby Puppy version 1.0.5 is released.
This is a fatter Puppy, with OpenOffice and Mozilla, and the live-CD
iso file puppy-chubby-1.0.5-openoffice-mozilla.iso is only 91.4M.
Chubby has OpenOffice 1.1.4 but is missing Abiword and Gnumeric,
otherwise is the same as the standard Puppy 1.0.5 release -- see
release notes on 27Sept05 below.
Chubby requires a PC with 256M RAM.
Chubby is available from these two sites, courtesy of Normen Stengel and Babbs:
http://puppy.nstsoftware.com/puppy-chubby-1.0.5-mozilla-openoffice.iso
http://www.puppy.wise-guy.us/puppy-chubby-1.0.5-mozilla-openoffice.iso
Please also do an md5sum check:
http://puppy.nstsoftware.com/puppy-chubby-1.0.5-mozilla-openoffice.iso.txt
http://www.puppy.wise-guy.us/puppy-chubby-1.0.5-mozilla-openoffice.iso.txt
Note, if you have already tested the standard 1.0.5 live-CD and you
now want to try Chubby, change /etc/puppyversion back to "104" before
booting Chubby, so that Puppy can perform some upgrade checking (like
adjust the desktop icons and menu).
The bugfixed standard Puppy 1.0.5 has been uploaded to ibiblio.org
-- see bug note on 28Sept05 below. If you are downloading 1.0.5 about
now, apologies if I changed files right in the middle of your download
-- please download the md5sum file and check it.
28Sept05
There's a torrent for downloading Puppy 1.0.5:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2498&highlight=
We have found a bug in 1.0.5. This is not going to affect most
users. I'll fix it and upload a new iso tomorrow. It will
affect you if you want to install Puppy to hard drive and if you booted
the live-CD using boot-option-3-run-Puppy-totally-in-ram. So, it's a
very particular condition, most people won't encounter.
When you boot the live-CD, Puppy creates a file for your personal data,
called "pup001", on a partition on the hard drive. Now, that's a
problem if you then want to install Puppy to that same partition, as it
is in-use. Solution is to choose option-3 at bootup then choose to run
Puppy totally in a ramdisk. Then can install to that partition.
However, that's where the bug comes in.
I fixed the install script (install-hd2.sh) and posted it here:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2515&highlight=
A way to avoid the bug is to use boot-option-3 and choose some other
partition, if there is one, in which Puppy can create the pup001 file.
Note, even a usb stick can be specified (usually partition sda1) in
which to create the pup001 file.
Be warned that I will be uploading the fixed iso file with the same
filename, puppy-1.0.5-mozilla.iso, as many sites have linked to that.
I'll post another message here just before updating the file. As I say
though, you're only likely to encounter the bug if installing to hard
drive, and I have posted a fixed script anyway, so if you want to
download the Puppy live-CD iso file, don't wait just do it!
27Sept05
Puppy version 1.0.5 is released.
The live-CD file puppy-1.0.5-mozilla.iso is only 53.4M. This release is
awesome! Although the version number has only changed from 1.0.4 to
1.0.5, the number and quality of new features is ...awesome! Many Puppy developers have
created applications that are making their début, and those guys
are justly proud of what has been created. Release notes, in no
particular order:
- Mark Ulrich (MU on the Forum) has developed DotPup Downloader, a brilliant GUI application for downloading and installing DotPup packages (for the uninitiated, Puppy has two package systems, DotPup and PupGet).
- Keenerd (Forum name) has developed WAG
(Wireless Access Gadget), a superb GUI for configuring a wireless
network. We are getting into supporting wireless for the first time, so
it is a work-in-progress, but keenerd's WAG and bladehunter's wifi-beta.pup are both incredible.
- Puppy still has the Mozilla suite, however it is cut-down and only has the Navigator and Composer modules. The default email/news program is Sylpheed, addressbook program is Gaby, and the calendar program is Ical. If you want the mail/news/addressbook modules from Mozilla, download Thunderbird, or for a calendar download Sunbird -- instructions are posted on the Forum. Mozilla still has the Flash and Gxine plugins, and now supports image-blocking.
- Mozilla Composer supports spellchecking, but Puppy lacks the dictionaries. This is very easy to rectify and there are dictionaries available for every language. See notes below that explain how to download and install.
- Puppy has a new CD/DVD burner program called Graveman. Gcombust has been retired (now a PupGet package). I was going to use Xcdroast, however Graveman is easier to use. Xcdroast is also a PupGet package.
- I have written a completely new CD remaster program, codenamed PCCC. From the menu: "Start -> Setup -> Create custom Puppy live-CD". This works with the PupGet package manager, and a custom CD can be created that has more or less packages than the current CD. Also registered DotPup packages can be moved onto the CD. PCCC takes you through in very easy steps, right to burning the new CD.
- The default desktop has a new look, new colors, new icons, new background image. I would like to congratulate Dan Van Wormer for the superb implementation of a trashcan, with help from GuestToo (Forum name).
- Timezone setting is now correct. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Puppy, your timezone will be wrong. If you are running Puppy for the first time, it is set to GMT+08:00 (8 hours ahead of GMT) which is okay if you live in a longitude through Perth, Singapore, HongKong. Setting the timezone is easy: just go to the menu "Start -> Control Panel -> Set timezone". After setting the timezone, you may have to set the date/time: "Start -> Control Panel ->Set date and time". Note that Puppy assumes the hardware clock is set to local time.
- You can now choose a locale. Previously, Puppy's locale switching was broken and stuck on the C locale, which is for 7-bit ASCII characters. The default now is en_US (United States English), but it is easy to change: "Start -> Control Panel -> Chooselocale country localisation". Note that this is a work-in-progress and Puppy may not have the fonts for every locale.
- The live-CD now only has one window manager, JWM (version 0.24), however Fvwm95 is available as a PupGet package so is only a click away. Also iceWM is available as a DotPup (we are working toward integrating iceWM more into Puppy).
- Previously, JWM had to be configured by editing a text file, but
thanks to Amanda Singh (thoughtjourney on the Forum) Puppy now has a GUI
configuration tool, jwmConfig.
This is brilliant, transforms JWM into a super-easy to use window
manager. Launch from the menu: "Start -> Control Panel -> JWM
configuration".
- Thoughtjourney's JWM configurator has two themes but more will be made available. "Start -> Control Panel -> GTK theme" has choices for the GTK1 and GTK2 applications and we are working toward integrating these with the JWM themes and improving the color choices. For now, you might find some theme colors to be strange.
- Puppy now has his very own basic interpreter, called PuppyBasic,
developed as an offshoot from wxBasic, by Mark Ulrich (MU on the
Forum). PuppyBasic is very small, only 143K (uncompressed) and is
designed to work with Xdialog and Gtkdialog for easy creation of GUI
applications.
- Mark Tyler's wonderful mtPaint program is upgraded to version 2.03.
- We have font anti-aliasing for GTK1 applications, but currently not activated due to some problems. There is a library /usr/lib/libgdkxft.so that does this. See notes further down this page, also in the News pages for 2003/4 for the ongoing saga.
- John Murga has created a very small Java development environment, using GNU Classpath, jamVM, plus some other stuff that I can't recall (not being a Java person). This is available as a package that you can download using the PupGet package manager. Note, it does not include a Mozilla plugin.
- Jcoder24 has done some superb work getting HSF/HCF analog modems to work in Puppy. These are available as DotPup packages. I recommend that you read the threads on this in the Forum.
- Ticker is a news ticker, developed by Puppy enthusiast and active contributor Puppian (Forum name). Menu: "Start -> Internet -> Ticker news ticker".
- Puppy now has puppyPDF, a little script written by Amanda Singh (Forum name thoughtjourney). This will convert any file to PDF format.
- Jesse Liley (Jesse on the Forum) has updated his superb MUT (Media Utility Tool) from version 0.0.5 to 0.0.6.
- Sylpheed mail and news client has been upgraded to version 2.0.1.
- Thanks to menno (Forum name) who fixed a print-preview problem with Ical, the calendar program.
- Gtkdialog has been upgraded to version 0.59.8, but the older 0.58.8 has been retained due to compatibility problems. The newer executable is called gtkdialog2.
- I have written a script to burn an iso file to CD or DVD. It is called burniso2cd and has a simple GUI. I wrote it because Xcdroast is a pain to use, but Puppy has switched to Graveman, which makes burning a CD from an iso file easy.
- Terry Loveall's uXplor 2-pane file manager is upgraded to version 0.26.
- Puppy now has spacereplace, a Bash script that can recursively replace the space character with an underscore in directory and file names.
- A new utility program called rename, and the full du and sort to replace the Busybox versions.
- The media player Gxine has been upgraded from version 0.3.3 to 0.4.6, the latest.
- Samba has been upgraded from version 2.2.7 to 3.0.14a. Note that Puppy only has the client applications: nmblookup, smbclient, smbmnt, smbmount and smbumount.
- Pakt (Forum name) has made considerable improvements to the floppy boot disk, and called it WAKEPUP. See notes below.
- The big news for developers is that we now have a single file, usr_devx.sfs,
that provides everything to turn Puppy into a compile environment. To
install, look at the introduction further down this page. Basically
though, it is very simple: just download usr_devx.sfs to /mnt/home (or
do that from Windows if it is an NTFS partition), reboot Puppy, and
you're ready to go!
Warning: If upgrading from an earlier version of Puppy, the new desktop icons will replace whatever you had before. This does not normally happen with a version upgrade, but is necessary in this case due to underlying structural changes. The new icons are generic and you can customise to suit. Note that the previous desktop settings are saved in files /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/globicons.bak and /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/PuppyPin.bak.
If you are on Internet dialup by analog modem, the correct procedure is to first run the Modem Wizard, then one of the connection programs Gkdial, Xeznet or Wvdial. Gkdial is the usual choice, but we have found that the modem initialisation string that it creates does not suite many modems -- we plan to fix that, but for now, if your modem fails to dialout, edit the file that Gkdial has created in /etc/ppp/chatscripts/ and replace the string "AT&FW2" with "ATZ" -- or some other string that works (see Internet Connection help Page in Puppy for more info).
Note that PuppyBasic is also called wxbasicscript in some of our documentation and on the Forum. The main wxBasic project (http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net/) is developed by David Cuny and the naming of our offshoot as "PuppyBasic" is approved by David. Already some applications are written in PuppyBasic, including Mark's brilliant DotPup downloader program.
Abiword version 2.2.7 used in Puppy still has the printing bug that causes some pages to print with text displaced upward on the page. This is due to a malformed Postscript in the header of the page, or so it seems. <gripe>the Abiword developers have known about this bug for 2 years</gripe> But there may be light at the end of the tunnel and I hope to have Abiword 2.4 in the next Puppy, with that bug fixed. Note, this bug also affects printing from other apps such as Sylpheed and Leafpad, that use Abiword as a commandline text-to-Postscript converter.
This page is a kind of personal news blog, and you might find it helpful to read down to discover the unfolding story of Puppy development. For general Puppy news, especially what is happening beyond my narrow development interests, I recommend that you also keep a watch on the Wiki news page.
26Sept05
In the notes of 25Sept05, regarding Gkdial, I have kept the previous
executable. Reason is, after recompiling Gkdial, the new executable
does not work properly. It's a weird, weird, weird bug! What happens
is, I click on the "Connect" button, and a small empty window appears
above and to the side of the main Gkdial window
...it is supposed to be a little information window that a connection
could not be established with an OK button, but the window is empty --
it gets worse -- the new window keeps rapidly redrawing itself, in
different places on the screen, taking up all CPU time as it does so. I
suspected JWM, but no, it happens in Fvwm95 also. What is the
difference between this latest gkdial executable and the previous? --
nothing, except that the previous one was compiled under Mandrake,
which has glibc version 3.3.2 (and the older compiler), whereas the latest executable is
compiled with Vector's glibc 3.3.4. I did get another app exhibit this
bug also, can't recall which one.
Now it gets weirder. If I hit ctrl-alt-backspace quickly (waiting awhile the
whole system locks up), restart X, then run the old gkdial executable,
it has the same bug! (sigh)
I found this comment in a recent post on a Debian forum:
> The problem is that gkdial is very old and broken code. Even
> according to the author and ex-maintainer, it's garbage.
I fixed a bug in PCCC, the CD remaster script (which is actually
/usr/sbin/createpuppyonline). When packages are removed from the
live-CD (that is, they are in the current CD but you don't want them in
the new CD) they now get removed from the new menu also.
25Sept05
Gaby addressbook. For Pup 1.0.5 I have promoted Gaby to the default
addressbook for Puppy. However, there are some issues. Gaby has a great
big "Save" button that doesn't actually save, instead have to go to the
menu "Base -> Write..." to save -- this needs to be fixed most
urgently. In fact, it's weird, I think if you edit a record, you have
to click the Save button, then go to the menu to save to hard drive --
this is going to confuse people -- better if hit Save button also saves to hard drive.
A more difficult problem is printing. Gaby uses Latex to convert a .tex
file to .ps, but Puppy does not have Latex -- so, what can we do about
this? Gaby can export to HTML, so maybe a quick hack would be to use
that somehow -- for example we can convert html to Postscript (see
Amanda's /usr/sbin/puppypdf program for ideas, also abiword can do it
from the commandline, see /usr/bin/lprshell). Gaby is written in C and
is version 1.0.6 (do not choose a later version) -- I've got the source if
you can't find it.
At this stage, improvements to Gaby will have to go into Puppy 1.0.6.
I have recompiled Gkdial to generate a chatscript with modem initialisation string "ATZ". It was reported recently on the Forum that ATZ works with SmartLink modems, it also works with a Lucent linmodem that I tested awhile back, and with an old external modem that I'm currently using (X-Link XL-288E). I do have a true-hardware internal PCI modem (Lucent chip) that does not work with ATZ, but you can't win em all. ATZ is probably the most widely acceptable string.
24Sept05
Mark found a bug in mtPaint 2.02, so have upgraded to 2.03.
A bit of a mystery with font antialiasing in Puppy. Bitmap fonts do
not antialiase, only the scalable Type1 and TrueType fonts. Note,
Puppy's bitmap fonts are to be found in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc.
The outcome of this is that if a bitmap font is used by an application,
it will not display antialiased. For example, for reasons known only to
itself, Mozilla renders some web pages with a bitmap font. Bitmap
fonts are fixed sizes, and look okay if rendered at those sizes, but if
scaled they are jagged. I became acutely aware of this problem when I
got font antialising working for GTK1 applications a few days ago. The
menu and dialog text is a bitmap font, so not antialiased.
A year or so ago, in a much earlier version of Puppy, I had font antialising working for both GTK1 and GTK2 applications and
it worked with all the fonts including bitmapped. So, the great mystery
now is why are bitmapped fonts being excluded? This is something to do
with the way Xft and Fontconfig works.
I am posing this mystery for anyone interested in font rendering and who would like the challenge.
John Murga has put together a very compact Java package (6.0M), see
the Forum. I have made it into an Unleashed package and it will be
available via the PupGet package manager after Puppy 1.0.5 is released.
Jcoder24 has done some superb work getting HSF/HCF analog modems to
work in Puppy. I would have liked these to be available via PupGet as
well, but have run out of time -- I want to obtain a compatible modem
first -- so targetting it for 1.0.6. However his package is available
right now as a DotPup package, and Mark Ulrich's brilliant new DotPup
downloader, version MU05, will be in Puppy 1.0.5 to make downloading of
DotPups a piece of cake.
Keenerd's WAG version 0.3.1 will be in 1.0.5.
Cutoff guys. No more submissions!
23Sept05
Mark Ulrich has suggested that it would be convenient for developers
if Puppy has both versions of Gtkdialog in Puppy 1.0.5, as we need to
ease the transition. We have agreed that the version 0.59.8 Gtkdialog
be called /usr/sbin/gtkdialog2, and the older one be
/usr/sbin/gtkdialog. From the release of Pup 1.0.5, everyone is
encouraged to use gtkdialog2, as the old one will be phased out.
Okay, here is the source of all the trouble. This is what has confused me ever since I started the Puppy project. The following is a quote from http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml:
In order to keep time properly, /etc/localtime must point to the
correct time zone data file. Look around in /usr/share/zoneinfo/
and pick your timezone or a near-by big city. Please avoid the
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT* timezones as their names do not
indicate the expected zones. For instance, GMT-8 is in fact GMT+8.
These GMT+/-offset timezone files are what Puppy uses.
23Sept05
Mozilla Composer in the upcoming Puppy 1.0.5 will have a
spellchecker, but without any dictionaries. This is very easy to
remedy. The website that has dictionaries for all languages is http://dictionaries.mozdev.org/installation.html,
and you can either use a browser to go straight there, or open the
spellechecker in Composer, by "Edit -> Check spelling..." then click
on "Download more". The instructions on the website state
to left-click to download and install a dictionary, however for me that
gave a download error. Instead, right-click and choose to download and
save the file, for example "spell-en-AU.xpi". Then running Mozilla,
choose "File -> Open..." and open the ".xpi" file and it will
automatically install.
You can find installed dictionaries in /usr/lib/mozilla/components/myspell/.
An interesting note about the spellchecker used in Mozilla: it is MySpell, the same as used in OpenOffice.
Finally I seem to have got the timezone sorted out (sigh of relief
from GuestToo). GuestToo has been telling me for ages that the
timezone-setting program run from "Start -> Control panel -> Set
timezone" sets the offset from GMT/UTC with the wrong sign.
It's mighty confusing. All the online documentations tells me that here
in Perth I am at "GMT+8", meaning 8 hours ahead of GMT (Greenwich Mean
Time, now known as UTC) (for example: http://www.bdtradeinfo.com/form_misc/world_time.asp). However, /etc/localtime has to be set as a
link to file /usr/share/timezone/GMT-8, not to file GMT+8, in other words, it seems to be "looking the other way". A
complication is that the "date" program uses file /etc/TZ, and does not seem to reference
/etc/localtime, and /etc/TZ is a text file with its own syntax
requirement. Again, there is the same situation with the sign. If I place the text "PUP-8" into /etc/TZ, it means 8 hours
ahead of UTC (the prefix "PUP" doesn't mean anything).
What convinced me, after working on it from 8pm to 3am, was being able to check against a link provided by GuestToo: http://andrewu.co.uk/clj/timezone/. I was able to figure out correct settings for /etc/TZ from this site: http://leaf.sourceforge.net/doc/guide/buci-tz.html.
Although timezone now seems correct, I don't know if the saga is over,
as there is still some uncertainty in my mind about the way the two
different timezone mechanisms interact -- for example, the "hwclock"
program behaves differently when executed from within rc.local0 (during
bootup) and after bootup. Anyway, leave it for now -- test it and let
me know -- in particular, do the file times/dates in other partitions
seem right, are received email times/dates right?
Jesse Liley (Jesse on the Forum) has updated his superb MUT (Media Utility Tool) from version 0.0.5 to 0.0.6.
Amanda Singh (thoughtjourney on the Forum) has brought out the first official release of jwmConfig,
a configuration GUI for the JWM window manager. Puppy 1.0.5rc had a
prelease version. This makes configuration of JWM so easy -- no, that's
an understatement -- closer to describe jwmConfig as awesome!
22Sept05
My experience with Xcdroast so far has not been very good. Despite
the seemingly impressive GUI, I have found it confusing to use. Also, moving
around the various windows, it keeps trying to redetect the drives,
causing enormous delays in trying to use it.
Yesterday I had a very simple requirement, to burn an iso file to CD,
and after stuffing around with Xcdroast for awhile, I re-installed
Gcombust and used that.
There is another graphical CD/DVD burner called Graveman,
and I gave it a test run. Unfortunately the latest version, 0.3.12-4,
does not work. After scouting around forums and mail-lists, I found many complaints,
that the last few versions have the same problem -- when a CD or DVD is
inserted into a drive, the program insists there is nothing there.
Someone commented that he had used a version several-versions back that
did work, so I did the same. I downloaded version 0.3.0 and yep, it
works fine (it would be a useful exercise to find out the latest version that still works!).
In fact, it works very well, simple logical user interface, CD and DVD
drives auto-detected. I burnt a ISO file to CD with no trouble
whatsoever. Good, Xcdroast has been tossed out, and Graveman is in for
Puppy 1.0.5.
Note, I had to install libmad and upgrade libid3tag to meet Graveman's requirements.
GuestToo's little DotPup installer script has been updated to
version 002. This works by a mime type to ROX-Filer so that files with
".pup" extension are recognised and his script
/usr/sbin/dotpuprox002.sh is executed to install the .pup file.
mtPaint, the brilliant paint program developed by Mark Tyler, is upgraded to version 2.02.
21Sept05
Mark Ulrich's DotPup Downloader creates entries in the window
manager menus, which is a problem when we come to Puppy's infamous
version update script, /etc/rc.d/rc.update. This overwrites the
existing /root/.jwmrc, /root/.fvwm95rc (and /root/.icewm/menu) files
with pristine files from the live-CD (image.gz file), with entries
setup only for the installed Unleashed packages. Script rc.update runs
the fixmenus script which corrects the menu entries for any installed
PupGet packages (using the keyword file for each installed package)
...with me so far?
It means that user-customised menu files are lost, including any
modifications made by an arbitrary package installer. However, Mark has
written a couple of scripts, /usr/sbin/backup_dotpup_menues.wxbs and
/usr/sbin/restore_dotpup_menues.sh (which calls
restore_jwm_menue.wxbs). These are called before and after, so that
(hopefully) the DotPup entries created by the DotPup Downloader get
preserved.
It's a bit theoretical so far as we haven't tested it on an actual upgrade!
The Amaya version 8.5 package has been upgraded to 8.8.1. This uses
GTK1. Amaya is a very good WYSIWYG HTML editor. Ha ha ha ha, I also
have antialiased fonts working with GTK1 applications ...again ...the
old-timers such as GuestToo will know that this has been an on-again
off-again thing, then it appeared to be permanently broken.
20Sept05
Thanks to GuestToo for some code to test if online. The scripts
pupget and createpuppyonline (PCCC) use the ping program to test
Internet connectivity, but some people find that ping fails yet they do
have an Internet connection. GuestToo used wget to make the test. I
have left the ping test in those scripts, with wget as a fallback test.
The guys on the Forum informed me that there is a wonderful little
program developed for Puppy, that must be in the next live-CD. Its name
is Ticker and it is a news ticker, developed by Puppy enthusiast and active contributor Puppian. Okay, done.
Mark Ulrich is putting an incredible effort into assisting the Puppy
project. He has developed a DotPup package installer with a superb GUI.
It is named DotPup-Downloader, and I have made it into an Unleashed package and it will be in the 1.0.5 release.
19Sept05
I found a bug that caused the multi-session CD to not load saved
sessions. That is, at shutdown it would save the session to CD, but on
the next boot it did not load the saved session to RAM.
I was looking through the two scripts /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit-cd and
/etc/rc.d/rc.reboot-cd that are run at multi-session boot and shutdown
respectively, intending to implement Ted_Dog's (Forum name)
improvements for handling DVDs, but found other issues. I also
converted the code so now it is all ATAPI burning (no scsi-emulation).
As we are rapidly approaching the self-imposed deadline of Friday for
all changes, prior to releasing the official 1.0.5 around middle of
next week (hopefully), I will hold Ted_Dog's improvements over until
1.0.6.
18Sept05
Puppy now has wxBasicScript. This is a Basic interpreter. It is
wxBasic without support for wxWidgets, and is modified by Mark Ulrich
to work well with Xdialog and Gtkdialog. Thus, we have a very small
interpreter (143K uncompressed) that can do nice GUIs.
This will be in the released 1.0.5, with some documentation. This is an
alternative for people who are not comfortable with Tcl/Tk or Bash/Ash
scripting. It may encourage many people to have a go at programming in
Puppy ...don't expect anything like MS VisualBasic though, this is
simple, simple, simple!
Sylpheed mail & news client is upgraded from version 1.0.3 to 2.0.1. There is a change from GTK1 to GTK2.
16Sept05
Puppy now has puppyPDF,
a little script written by thoughtjourney (Forum name, real name is
Amanda Singh, another Aussie!). This will convert any file to PDF
format.
Amanda has also developed a configuration program for JWM, jwmConfigMgr.
This is really nice. I have put her pre-release version of this into
1.0.5rc and she will have a final version ready for the official
release of 1.0.5.
Puppy 1.0.5rc (release candidate) is now available. This is not an
official release. It is for the Puppy developers and enthusiasts to
test and debug. It creates a "pup003" file, so as not to mess around
with any of the other pupxxx files. Please see the Announcements
section of the Puppy
Forum. The 1.0.5 official release is not far off!
15Sept05
Thanks to menno (Forum name) who fixed a problem with Ical, the
calendar program. Print-preview was broken, as it relied on sending
stdin to Gsview, the Ghostscript viewer. However, unlike Ghostview,
Gsview's predecessor, Gsview does not accept standard input.
I have applied menno's patch and preview now works. However, if you
have already used Ical, you will also have to edit /root/.calendar and
change the text string "[ghostview -]" to "[gsview]" (the essential thing is to get rid of that "-").
GuestToo (forum name) has added support for Icewm in
/usr/sbin/fixmenus. Now, any menu entry can be enabled or disabled,
based on supplying a keyword. It does however mean that
/root/.icewm/menu will have to be setup with keywords, like
/root/.jwmrc and /root/.fvwm95rc. The Icewm menu file can be built-in
to the live-CD when it is created, even if Icewm is not installed --
the advantage of this that the menu will be correct always. When PupGet
package manager is used to install or remove packages, if
/root/icewm/menu file is present it will get updated. JWM, Fvwm95 (and
soon Icewm) are PupGet packages so can be installed and removed. The
PupGet package manager script (/usr/sbin/pupget) takes special care of
these three packages, and the menu file already installed does not get
overwritten by the one in the package.
For example, say that I use Unleashed to create a live-CD with only JWM. But, it will have all
window manager menu config files /root/.jwm, /root/fvwm95rc (and soon
/root/.icewm/menu), with menu entries correctly configured by the
fixmenus script. When using the live-CD, PupGet can install and remove
packages, and all the w.m. menu files will keep track. If PupGet is
used to install another w.m., its menu config file is already setup for
the current status of Puppy.
Gtkdialog has been temporarily taken back to version 0.58.8 due to a
problem with the latest version. Discussion is taking place with the
author to resolve it.
14Sept05
Thanks to advice from GuestToo, when chooselocale restarts X, the locale is properly changed.
A Wireless Wizard is created. It's not much, really just a front-end, as most of the work is already done by bladehunter (Forum name), with his wifi-beta.pup and keenerd (Forum name) with his superb WAG
(Wireless Access Gadget). There are rough edges everywhere, also have
not sorted out how to save the setup for automatic connection at
bootup. WAG needs more work, for example I tried the ping test, it
failed, yet my web browser worked. Mere details. I will release Puppy
1.0.5rc (release candidate) soon and the scripts can be hacked into
submission.
12Sept05
mtPaint, the brilliant paint program developed by Mark Tyler, is upgraded to version 2.01.
Puppy now has chooselocale,
a script to ...well, to choose the locale. I decided that the live-CD
will only have en_US and en_AU built-in, but this script enables you to
choose the one you want and it is then downloaded from the Internet.
The script applies the new locale by changing the LANG environment
variable. Chooselocale will be launched via the Control Panel menu.
I don't fully understand locales yet. I looked at the locale-switching
script in Austrumi -- he switches between English and Latvian -- and he
just changes LANG environment variable in /etc/profile then restarts X.
However, my tests show that to be insufficient and a reboot is
required. Anyway, chooselocale is a step in the right direction, and if
anyone discovers anything more and wants to hack the script, go for it.
I have taken the default shell back to Busybox Ash. /etc/profile was
exporting SHELL=/bin/bash, so that Bash would run if a rxvt terminal
was opened. However, I found a problem with running curses text-mode
applications in an rxvt terminal -- "line" characters do not display
properly. In the extended 8-bit ASCII character set, there are
characters for drawing lines, corners and various other shapes. People
who have used some old MSDOS programs like the old Edit, will know that
these characters can give a pseudo-GUI appearance, with pull-down menus
and popup dialog boxes and so forth.
Testing the mp text editor, launched from a Bash shell, a
vertical-line-character displays as a "3", so it appears its 8th bit is
getting chopped off. However, running mp from Busybox Ash shell, no
problem.
If anyone knows a solution to this problem, let me know!
11Sept05
I have written a simple script to burn an iso file to CD or DVD. It is called burniso2cd and has a simple GUI. It will be launched from the Multimedia menu.
We have a need for this. If we have a new Puppy live-CD iso file, we
just want to burn it to CD, without any hassles, such as the possibly
confusing options and setup requirements of Gcombust or Xcdroast.
Burniso2cd asks a few easy questions, such as whether you want to burn
the CD as multi-session, then uses cdrecord to perform the actual burn.
This script can be used for any iso file, not just Puppy live-CD iso
files.
10Sept05
Have added some more functionality to PCCC, the new CD remaster
script. One new feature is I have made it easy to add extra kernel
modules to the live-CD.
I added some thumbnail images to the GTK theme selector, so that
users will be able to see in advance roughly what each theme will look
like.
9Sept05
The GTK theme selector in Puppy, invoked via the "Control Panel"
menu, has more themes added. They are dark blue, dark grey, red-n-blue,
light green, and a black theme. The black theme is probably a bit too
radical -- I can't see some of the icons properly in Composer, the app.
I'm using right now -- may have to fiddle with the colors a bit, change
the icon bar to a grey background rather than jet black. These themes
will all be found in /etc/gtk/.
Note that the GTK themes used in Puppy are very simple and do not require theme "engines".
My "wifi-week" is about to start. Right now I'm at my rural home, no
wireless, but I can at least get the driver working for the wifi card.
I have a Netgear WG311v2 pci wireless card, which has a Texas
Instruments ACX111 chipset. Note, the WG311v1 card has a Atheros
chipset. A quick search on the Internet showed that although there is a
acx111 driver for Linux, ndiswrapper is recommended.
I wasn't able to look at what Bladehunter has done in this area, as got
a "404" when tried to download his wifi-1.0.4-beta-2.pup. So went ahead
regardless... hey guys, this is too easy!
(so far) First time I ever setup a wifi card. Here are my steps:
- You need to be running Pup 1.0.5alpha2 or later, and the file /mnt/home/usr_devx.sfs -- which has Perl.
- Mounted the CD supplied with the card, copied off all of the XP drivers folder.
- Opened a terminal in the XP drivers folder.
-
# ndiswrapper -i wg311.inf ...this creates /etc/ndiswrapper/ -
# ndiswrapper -l ...this tests status of installed driver.
-
# modprobe ndiswrapper ...this loads the module
-
# iwconfig ...tests if interface available
...yep, wlan0 up and running!
7Sept05
Some very good news: setting locale is now working. The way this
came about is almost by accident. I tried the locale program, like this
"# locale en_US", and it worked. Previously it did not work. So what
was different? The programmer's development file usr_devx.sfs was
loaded, that's what, and I found the files it was supplying that are
needed to properly set the locale.
With usr_devx.sfs loaded, if you look into /usr/lib/locale you will see
subdirectories for all the locales. This is what is missing from the
Puppy live-CD. So, I copied the en_US, en_CA, en_AU and en_GB
subdirectories across to the glibc-2.3.4 Unleashed package, so that
they will be built into the live-CD. of course, this choice is not
going to please everybody, but you can get the subdirectory that you
want out of usr_devx.sfs (which was copied from Vector 5.0STD).
I changed the entry in /etc/profile, from "export LANG=C" to "export
LANG=en_US". Obviously this is not going to please everybody either
.... we probably need a little locale-setting utility, and /etc/profile
can read what the locale is supposed to be and set LANG appropriately.
Also, is it enough to just set LANG environment variable at bootup? In
the case of Beaver, it seems so...
The really great news, that has caused me much rejoicing, is that
the Beaver text editor is now fully functional. Beaver has had a bug,
that has been there ever since Puppy started to use Beaver, like about
two years ago. If we open any text file with characters that have the
8th bit set, that is if the file is not composed entirely of 7-bit
ASCII characters, then it opens with an empty window, no text displays.
A little while ago, I realised that this is due to LANG=C, as the "C"
locale is for 7-bit ASCII. However, Puppy was unable to change to
another locale as the mechanism was broken.
Now, with the locale subdirectories in /usr/lib/locale, I tried it two ways:
# export LANG=en_US or locale en_US
# beaver non-ascii-file.txt
In the first case, beaver reads the LANG environment variable and
switches locale to en_US. Running the locale utility before running
Beaver also works, even with LANG still set to C. I don't know which is
the best choice, just setting LANG or executing locale, whenever we
boot Puppy. I need advice from people who have been into this.
A complaint on the Forum has resulted in a very nice solution.
Fvwm95 has a gui tool to set date and time, but in Puppy 1.0.5alpha2
there is only JWM, so nothing to set date/time except for commandline
utilities. Mark Ulrich (MU on the Forum) to the rescue -- he has
created a very nice little gui tool using Xdialog. This tool is
independent of any window manager, so can be in the menu of all of
them. I have placed it as /usr/sbin/set-time-for-puppy, launched from
the "Control Panel" menu, and it will be in the released 1.0.5. Thanks
Mark!
I do need to think about a release date for 1.0.5... let's see,
"wifi-week" is next week, so maybe the week after that, toward the end
of the week.
6Sept05
I have taken Mozilla back to the Classic theme, the original
default. Note, if anyone wants another theme, they are easy to install.
The Classic theme adds about 0.2M onto the live-CD compared with the
Littlemozilla theme, but I am forced to go back to Classic as it
appears that gtkmoz, the internal HTML viewer used in Puppy, is hard-coded to use Classic.
I was planning a "wifi-week" this week, to get stuck into wireless
for Puppy, get up to speed with what Bladehunter, keenerd and others
have been doing. Unfortunately, I'm at my friend's place now, who has
adsl and a wireless router modem, but I left my wireless card at home
-- which is four hours drive away. So, it's postponed to next week.
Plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime.
Lobster is organising a chat-fest for this coming weekend: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/FoundationPuppy, to discuss all things Puppy.
5Sept05
Terry Loveall, of www.modest-proposals.com, is the current maintainer of uXplor,
the delightful 2-pane file manager used in Puppy. Terry has made many
improvements and released version 0.26. One of those improvements is
something that I wanted -- key-binding compatibility with Windows
Explorer (more or less). In the days when I used Windows Explorer, I
had
the habit of holding down the CTRL key when dragging a file to make a
copy, otherwise it is moved (or to be more accurate, W.E. made a
shortcut if dragging within the same partition, or a copy if dragging
to another partition -- an "inconsistency" that could trap the unwary).
UXplor now does that, but without the inconsistency. Terry has also
improved the "Send to..." popup window (that you could also call "Open
with...") so works with the arrow keys and mouse.
UXplor v0.26 is now an Unleashed package and will be in the next
release of Puppy -- probably best if you don't compile and install it
yourself as it is heavily customised by me to integrate well into Puppy.
4Sept05
John Doe (Forum name) posted a patch for LinNeighborhood v0.6.5,
that prevents a malfunction. I have recompiled LinNeighborhood with the
patch. Thanks John.
3Sept05
Puppy now has spacereplace,
a Bash script that can replace the space character with an underscore
in directory and file names. It also works recursively, meaning that it
can do subdirectories. Thanks to Bruce B (Forum name) who discovered
this, and also thanks to Richard van Kampen who wrote it.
Spacereplace uses a small utility program, rename,
that I have got out of Vector. This works like mv, but is specifically
for renaming a file rather than also relocating it (with mv you can
move a file to the same place as the original, meaning that all you do
is rename it). I also got the du
utility out of Vector, replacing the Busybox du, as I needed the
"--apparent-size" commandline option for more accurate size estimation
of the image.gz filesystem in my new PCCC script.
...hmm, the way things are going, there isn't going to be much of Busybox left in Puppy!
I have upgraded the trashcan to the latest version posted by dvw86
(Forum name), which has an improvement by puppian (Forum name). Thanks
guys, I love that trashcan -- when I demo Puppy to anyone, I always create a
file in Rox then drag it to the trash ...and I also do it myself
sometimes, just like to see it working!
I think it was GuestToo who reported that GTKSee (image manager)
crashed in Puppy 1.0.5alpha2. I think this is due to the change of
glibc from 2.3.2 in Puppy 1.0.4 to 2.3.4. I have upgraded GTKSee to the
latest, 0.6.0b-1, which works fine.
2Sept05
Imaginatively titled Puppy Custom CD Creator
(PCCC), /usr/sbin/createpuppyonline is a new script to create a custom
live-CD, or custom image.gz and usr_cram.fs files. The old script,
/usr/sbin/remaster-cd, is still there, however the new script offers
far more sophistication. It ties in with the PupGet package manager,
allowing PupGet packages or DotPups that have registered with PupGet,
to be moved onto the live-CD. Or, any packages can be removed, even
those already on the current live-CD, thus allowing creation of a more
"bare-bones" live-CD.
PCCC also ties in with Puppy Unleashed if it is installed, and will
draw on the packages as needed. Alternatively, packages will be
downloaded as needed.
Although PCCC is a Bash/Ash script, it uses GUI windows throughout.
PCCC is quite large, 1231 lines of code, and took me about ten days to
write (approx. three-four hours per day dedicated to that particular
project).
27Aug05
Menu management was becoming increasingly fragmented. Menu entries,
for the window managers and the master help file, are now handled in
one file, /usr/sbin/fixmenus.
Scripts that previously manipulated the menus themselves, now call this
fixmenus script. Those scripts are the pinstall.sh files in the Fvwm95,
JWM and rootfs_skeleton Unleashed packages, /etc/rc.d/rc.update (script
to handle version upgrades), /usr/sbin/pupget (PupGet package manager),
plus a new script not yet announced, /usr/sbin/createpuppyonline.
There has been discussion on the Forum about better ways to manage
the window manager menus. Well now at least it is centralised, and any
changes can be made in fixmenus without affecting other scripts. I
would like to thank papaschtroumpf (Forum name) for help in making some
of the menu manipulation code more efficient -- his suggestions have
been incorporated into fixmenus.
24Aug05
A new page: Puppy from scratch.
23Aug05
Wonderful news! I have been experimenting with the compile options
for the "1.8b1.5" Mozilla source used in Puppy 1.0.5alpha2 just
released.
Two complaints about the Mozilla in 1.0.4 and in 1.0.5alpha2 are that
it cannot block images and there is no spellchecking in Composer. Well,
I'm pleased to report that both are now working. The default dictionary
is US English, but the Moz site must have alternatives to download.
This Moz is now highly functional, although only a beta version. You
have to wait for the release of Pup 1.0.5 though!
Someone mentioned awhile back on the Forum that ATAPI CD
(non-SCSI-emulated IDE CD drives) burning now works with the 2.4
kernels as well as the 2.6 kernels.
Yes, it seems to work okay. The burner program Xcdroast issues a
warning window that SCSI-emulation is more reliable, but I am not
having any problems with ATAPI burning. Gcombust is basically designed
for SCSI-emulation, and the developer has shown no signs of updating
the program, so I decided that the official live-CD will now have
Xcdroast rather than Gcombust.
As we no longer have to use SCSI-emulation, I have redesigned the
CD/DVD Wizard accordingly. SCSI-emulation is still an option, but
deprecated.
A positive spinoff of this is that there are some applications, for
example some audio CD players, that don't work with a SCSI-emulated drive.
So, one problem area is eliminated.
The DVD burner program TkDVD has been upgraded from version 2.6 to 3.8.
Above is the News for the "second part" of 2005. It got too big for one page
Click here for "first part" of 2005 News: News 2005a page