Woof 0.0.2 available

I have taken a snapshot of my Woof development system. I built a live-CD iso file, 'woof-002.iso', and it is 99.78MB.

The tarball 'woof-unleashed-002.tar.gz' is the Woof build environment. Expand it anywhere in a Linux partition. As lots of packages will be downloaded later, use a partition with 8 - 10GB free space. It will expand to directory 'woof-unleashed-002'.

The 'woof-unleashed-002.tag.gz' tarball is 23MB, but this will become considerably smaller in the future, perhaps about 10MB. The reason for this is that it contains a directory 'packages-templates' which is mostly full of auto-generated package template information, one-half to three-quarters of which is not needed.

I have written part of the '1download' script, the skeleton of it, that determines each package name to be downloaded and the path where each is located on the repos. If anyone wants to finish it, it should now be fairly straightforward, just find out what Ubuntu repos to access and how to use wget or gcurl to probe if a pkg exists on a repo and if so to download it.

This is a snapshot, it is not intended to show any degree of completion or polished presentation. The desktop theme is definitely a work-in-progress. It has all the same applications as Puppy4, but in many cases replaced by Ubuntu equivalents -- Gnumeric for example -- although I noticed that when I opened /usr/share/examples/spreadsheets/Sample.xls, the graph was missing.

Anyway, apart from the rough edges, this build has almost all Ubuntu packages underneath. It really is a "99MB Ubuntu". And of course, just as fast as you expect of Puppy -- after all, "a rose by any other name is still a rose".

To get it, go here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/woof-002/

And I must repeat again, please please do not report any bugs! I don't want to know. If you fix something, that's different!

This is a very early snapshot only, not intended for regular use. It is probably only going to be of interest to a few people.

The Ibiblio site also has the 'devx' file. This is also auto-generated by the Woof build scripts, and works fine. There are some mysterious things though -- for example 'new2dir' does not work, and perhaps the 'installwatch' utility that new2dir uses may have to be updated and recompiled -- don't know, just guessing.

One more little problem -- as the menu is incomplete, it doesn't have an entry for shutting down. You have to do CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE then type 'reboot' or 'poweroff'.

Note that 'hal' and 'dbus' are different from the Ubuntu packages. I recompiled the source, also substituted some startup scripts from Slackware. Actually, I could probably go back to the Ubuntu dbus and dbus-glib binary packages, but for hal I wasn't happy with the pre-compile config options and its dependencies.

Personally, I think that the most exciting thing about this Woof build system is that it should be fairly easy to do a rebuild when the next release of Ubuntu comes out. Or for Debian. Perhaps in a matter of days Woof-pup can be upgraded to be compatible with the latest Ubuntu/Debian release.

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Comments

Woofy works.
Username: cthisbear
Booted up in your new Woofy now. Barkin hell..not. Happy holidays BK. Chris.

Looks promising
Username: Leon
"As usual, I manually copied ISO file contents to /w200 directory and created menu.lst entries: # Boot Woof Linux title Woof-002 rootnoverify (hd0,4) kernel /w002/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=w002 initrd /w002/initrd.gz boot Then rebooted but boot failed. After created and booted Woof from ISO CD and saved woofsave.2fs file at shutdown, Woof successfuly started using the same grub settings. Since one of Dingos alpha releases when Xorg was modified Dingo failed to work at 1024x768 with my Radeon 9200 SE and Sony SDM-M51 LCD monitor but Woof works fine.

Woof, Woof
Username: Lane Lester
"My attempt to boot the "live CD" failed, although i've been able to do this with Ubuntu. But a burned CD worked fine. I was surprised how much it looks like Puppy, but then, that's what it is. The main advantage I see to using the Ubuntu repos is the ability to do "single-click" updates of everything with Synaptic or whatever.

Ubuntu packages
Username: BarryK
"Well, I was thinking of extending PETget to offer packages from the Ubuntu repos for installation. Regarding Synaptic, I would need to find out how Synaptic knows what's already installed, and set that up. Sage, precisely, that is the point. It works just like Puppy, hence my quote "a rose by any other name is still a rose" -- but who said that? Not Shakespeare, he wrote ""A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" in Romeo and Juliet --but that's appropriate too!

Woofie
Username: Sage
"A woof in sheep's clothing, then?! I would counsel against tangling with anything *buntu. I don't believe the DW & other stats. I read more dissension from than stable than plaudits. If you want to do something clever, go straight to the horses' mouth and get into bed with the master, Debian. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I dont see the point
Username: linuxcbon
"I dont see the point using debian or ubuntu or whatever. Build puppy from latest sources and have updated pets, that's more than enough.

Ubuntu > Debian > Pet
Username: Lane Lester
"The large market share of Ubuntu means that third-party programs are offered in Ubuntu packages earlier than most others, including Debian. "Updated pets" means a lot of work for someone. With debs (Ubuntu), someone else... a lot of someone elses are already doing the work.

No
Username: linuxcbon
"No, our self-made pets are more than enough. We dont need quantity, we need quality. That's what puppy is famous for.

hello
Username: ttuuxxx
"Ok guys, Ubuntu is great in its own dvd,lol But seriously Ubuntu has issues with libs, most of Ubuntu packages are based with either KDE or Gnome installed, not that much for gtk 1 or 2. Lets look at it this way, its a dvd, not mini-cd install, So when you install the average package that could work on puppy, 5 out 10 times you'll need extra libs, if its kde or gnome just forget about it, unless you have a new pc with lots of resources. In the past ubuntu gutsy packages have worked on series 4.0 which is nice, it saves me compiling some things, like sdl games etc. But Barry's efforts here are excellent and have been something I've always wanted to see. :) I'm looking forward to future versions of WOOF, and applaud Barry for job well done. If we could work out the package manager for Ubuntu and say have the whole release around 115MB That would be really nice. excellent first release Barry ttuuxxx

pet and deb
Username: Leon
"I was searching for Wine 1.1.11 pet, the latest Wine release, to install it on Puppy 4.1.2. After some googling and using some bookmarks with known wine pets locations I found these latest pets: - http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/bugs/wine-1.1.7.pet - http://sharenload.com/download.php?file=672wine-1.1.7.pet - http://salis.sutteryuba.com/dingo/wine/wine-1.1.7.pet Then I tried wine-1.1.11-i386.deb binary package from wine home page. I opened and save it with pupzip, made and loaded as SFS file. It works just fine. I prefer to install packages as SFS files. It would be very useful to have an option just to download a package and not installed it.

love the jq8 icons
Username: 01micko
"Nice work. Issue with wireless drivers but I still made it online! Those jeba icons are so cool. simplicity itself. HNY Barry, Micko

mount-FULL working in woof?
Username: somnambulant
"Hi Barry- Loving woof so far! Off the top of your (or anyone's) head, any reason why mount-FULL (for nfs) might not be working in woof? I can mount said nfs share np in 3.01, but getting "bad superblock" error in woof.. Thx and great work! woof is VERY fast and solid so far! -Jon

love the jq8 icons
Username: 01micko
"suggestion. dump all your wallpapers and just use zigbert's deepthought wallpapers in woof. Will save you about 300k. still loving it!

Nice direction
Username: brucehohl
"The equivalent of a 100 MB Ubuntu derivative with Ubuntu binary compatibility and all the great light weight Puppy apps. I think this is a great goal and the result will be very useful and well received.

#25
Username: Wow
"Simply amazing, I never expected there to be a sub 250 MB ubuntu distro. (fluxubuntu is roughly 300 MB) If it would not be too much trouble, please include the hibernate/suspend functions from Ubuntu because that seems the be the only thing puppy linux can't do.

NTFS fix
Username: cthisbear
" http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=264224#264224 01micko seems to have a simple fix with his petget. Could you please look at this Barry. Thanks again Mick. Chris.

ntfs nofix
Username: 01micko
"Yes, a fix on one system may be a F* up on another. I got rid of the pet and the other five who downloaded it please be warned it may stuff some settings in XP, according to Chris. May be because I'm not running any service packs on my XP. Guess I'll go eat some humble pie...

Your 2nd Pet was 50/50
Username: cthisbear
"Posted here because the forums been down: ///////////// Can never remember the drive names... HDA or SDA Your second fix worked on the first partition sad1 ???? my XP NTFS. I did my usual XP cleanup. Deleted pagefile...hyberfil.sys recycler...system volume information gave owner read write on the whole partition, in Windows, Program files, Documents and Settings as well as cleaning it out with my Puppy How to clean XP http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=131413#131413 No problems. The third Fat32 partition is always seen as SDA3////... of course no problems because it is FAT. My second partition is always seen as SDA5 ?? Your second NTFS Pet failed. Would not write to the drive. Your first download had no problems. Anyway I am posting this in XP... obviously no problems in booting with your first or second Pet. Strange that your second fix couldn't write to my second NTFS partition. Chris.

Early Alpha
Username: ttuuxxx
"By the sounds of thing, Woof is in an a early alpha stage, So please guys if you have a main vista or xp partition and its really important to you, Don't install woof on it, but if you have an extra hard drive and want to do some xp/vista trouble shooting, then install xp/vista and then install Woof and have a go with it:) I also think that Barry should amend his release to state so, So people won't have all the issues with repairing a broken MS partition, because thats a complicated,frustrating and time consuming process. ttuuxxx

squashing bugs
Username: 01micko
"Hi Jeff Just trying to squash bugs in woof. That's why XP has 'system restore' lol. Next time I wont upload a potentially dangerous .pet but let people PM me for it. Cheers Mick

WOOF Explanation?
Username: edoc
"Do I understand that WOOF is to Ubuntu what Puppy 4.x is to Slackware? That is, I seem to recall that 4.x was customized to leverage the pool of apps developed for Slackware. So now WOOF is customized to leverage the pool of Ubuntu apps? From what I read above the KDE and/or Gnome dependencies in most Ubuntu apps will force WOOF to be much larger and more complex than Puppy users expect - but the trade-off gives access to more resources - is that an accurate assessment?

Woof is a chameleon
Username: BarryK
"Woof is intended to be easily adaptable to build from any binary package repos, not just Ubuntu and Debian. I'll probably have a go at a Slackware build sometime. Yes, it's just like Puppy, currently built from Ubuntu pkgs, just like Puppy3 is built from Slackware pkgs. I still use PET pkgs where appropriate and of course retain all our great in-house-developed Puppy apps. Large? -- well, yes, if you think 100MB is large. Complex? -- no, it works just the same as Puppy, or rather it will when it is finished.

Tags: woof