Woof alpha 2.1

I fixed a bug in the init script, another in /etc/rc.d/rc.update that caused bootup to hang on the next boot after a pupsave had been created. The 'python' package is now listed in the package manager.

I have fixed some bugs with the Ubuntu build. There was a bug in the package manager in the window to choose which URL to download from.

However, the Ubuntu build has highlighted that the Puppy Package Manager is still very much alpha quality. There are two outstanding problems:

1. Too many dependencies
When there are too many dependencies, the window that shows them all, along with checkboxes to choose which ones you want to install, is too big for the screen and becomes garbled. You can see this in the Slack-Puppy build also if you choose to install 'gedit'. I will probably tackle this one tonight. ...you guys who know about gtkdialog, what do you reckon, maybe notebook tabs?

2. Slow
The problem is most noticeable in the main GUI window, running Intrepid-Puppy. The "universe" repository in particular is enormous, and it is easy to get the package manager to seize up completely. In the "main" repository, if I choose a particular category from the radio buttons on the left rather than the default "All", then it doesn't seize but is still too slow.

I'm using 'grep' to do filtering on the Ubuntu database files, like this:

grep --file=file-with-expressions -v database-file

but it is very slow. Well, "file-with-expressions" may have up to 450 expressions, and "database-file" may have up to 19,000 entries ("universe" repo)! So, I'll look into writing a little C app. that does the particular filtering required as fast as possible. Hey, maybe I'll write it in assembly language ...now that's a thought, it's been ages (2003) that I last did x86 assembler coding.

Anyway, if you want to try the package manager in Intrepid Puppy, be prepared for these problems.

As I really do need to fix these bugs asap, I'll get stuck into it and will bring out alpha3 very soon.

Right now though, here is Ubuntu "Intrepid Puppy" alpha 2.1:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/woof-alpha2.1/

Well, I just had a pleasant experience with the new Puppy Package Manager. I'm running "Intrepid Puppy" and I wanted to upload the iso file to ibiblio using the 'sftp' commandline utility. However, I found that it is missing 'libedit.so.2'. So, I ran the package manager and installed it from the Ubuntu "main" repository. Very straightforward.

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Comments

Other processors
Username: Lobster
[i]you guys who know about gtkdialog, what do you reckon, maybe notebook tabs?[/i] Sounds good to me Maybe with a help tab (on the end to refer to) [i] So, I'll look into writing a little C app. that does the particular filtering required as fast as possible. Hey, maybe I'll write it in assembly language ...now that's a thought, it's been ages (2003) that I last did x86 assembler coding. [/i] LOL If you write it in C and then call a search assembly function JUST for the x86 processor those people planning to compile for x64 and ARM processors will still have access . . . and the speed issue is usually not so critical. Is there a C function that can confirm x86 usage? OK gonna try 'Intrepid Puppy' :)

databases
Username: amico
"Hello Barry why don't you use 'sqlite' for such kind of needs; they look frequent.

upup and ra0
Username: DrOwl
"I have been playing with debian on my 901 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/901 ra0 didnt work for me ether, the debian wiki page was very usefull. not sure of woof package manager is debian compatible though

extra-modules
Username: BarryK
"Oh, file permissions are wrong. It should be fixed within half hour of me typing this. Woof will recognise any sfs file name starting with "extra-modules-" at bootup, if you have chosen it by the Boot Manager, and will automatically run 'depmod' so that the modules get recognised. Also, if you deselect the extra-modules-* sfs in the Boot manager, at next bootup Woof-Pup will again run depmod. This is handy, it means that a group of puppy developers could build an add-on sfs with heapsof extra specialised modules. I think also -- well this worked with Unionfs, I don't know about Aufs -- when a module got loaded, it got copied-up to the 'pupsave' layer, so in theory the extra-modules sfs would no longer be needed. Probably soon I'll choose a kernel to compile that will stick with on Woof for sometime.

gtkdialog is slow
Username: BarryK
"I have been examining why the package manager is slow in Intrepid Puppy. Mostly it is due to gtkdialog, not my scripts! For example, if I setup the main gui window to startup showing all packages in the "universe" repo, the tree table that gtkdialog has to display has 19,000 entries. gtkdialog processes that very slowly. Also when I click the exit button, gtkdialog is very slow to exit. Hmmm, perhaps for large repos I will need to break it down into pieces, alphabeticised a, b ,c, ... so the tree would only load pkgs for one letter.

Woof alpha 2.1
Username: Gorilla no baka
"Hi there... I have been playing around with the new Woof alpha 2.1.It is a very nice one i must say.. Congrats on your work mate... Listen..I have been meaning to ask you guys or whomever might know... Is there any probelem with Gparted?? In the Woof i downloaded the Gparted with not work...Luckly the fsdisk and the other one are working as far as i could see tough i have not used the all the way..It was a lot easyer to pop in the other cd with Puppy215CE and firing up Gparted wiping the disk and making a new partition... Also ,when i tried to install the Woof on the hard disk ,I was not able to...THe process goes trough the usually stages till the end but somnehow the Grub is not written.... I even tried the upgrade version way as well... Seems to be working fine except for the part where we have to upgrade the grub ,that part where it ask us to manually upgrade the grub by copying the text from the temp blah blah... Well i was not able to access sda1 :It tells me that it can not be mounted..... To make a long story short , I was not able to install the Woof on the harddisk... I know this is a alpha version an all but the upgrade and install process have been already perfected long time ago so i was asking myself... Is there anyway to install Woof on the harddisk?? Cheers!!!

New petget / 64bit woof?
Username: disciple
""gtkdialog is slow" Yes, slow creation of big lists is one of the big limitations of gtkdialog. The other thing that could be useful is if a user could search for a particular package they want, and petget would show them just the results of the search, without ever showing the huge package list. ------------ What are the implications of Woof for those people who're after a 64bit Puppy? I'm guessing it would make it quite straightforward to build one?

Alpha woof
Username: BarryK
"Gorilla no baka, The "alpha" refers to the Woof build system. How well the resulting Puppy works is not really in the picture yet. I'm using Woof-builds every day -- running Intrepid Puppy right now -- but not putting much attention into getting everything to work. So consider the Puppy-built-from-Woof to still be pre-alpha. I'll probably make a big effort soon to get everything in Puppy functional, like printing, remaster, install. disciple, Yes, it is just a matter of changing the repos to download 64-bit pkgs.

Intrepid Puppy - extremely buggy!
Username: happypuppy
"I've just tried the woof-based Intrepid Puppy The ISO booted fine,but after selecting the display mode in xorgwizard, X failed to start. I opened up xorg.conf in mp to see what's wrong and what I found was really shocking: Xorg.conf detected 12 (!) graphics devices [I only have 1 video card and one display] It detected all NVIDIA motherboard devices (memory controllers,busses,etc.) as xorg devices, assigning the 'nv' graphics card driver to each one. It also detected something I don't even have on this motherboard - NVIDIA onboard graphics. I've deleted all those devices and left only the first one (the video card). I've set the display resolution to 1920x1080 24bits, used 'xvesa' as the video driver and restarted X. The desktop finally appeared,but there were all sorts of problems: - The scrollwheel didn't work at all - The desktop resolution was 1280x1024 instead of 1920x1080 - Pmusic didn't work.It failed to play music files - Ending processes with Pprocess was really laggy / slow. Unlike Puppy 4.12,there was a 2-second lag. - Gxine was gone ???

zh_CN bug?
Username: sasaqqdan
"I run chooselocale switch to zh_CN,but I failed. I download [b]iso14651_t1_pinyin[/b],and put it to /usr/share/i18n/locales/ then I swithc to zh_CN.utf8 successfully.

Tags: woof