The future of Puppy2

I don't intend to keep working on Woof-Puppy2. I have laid all the groundwork, done upgrading of most core libraries and some apps and I'll probably release it as "2.18beta" and anyone who wants to "run with the ball" can do. I think that I have rejuvenated the 2.x series, and anyone with a reason for using it, such as the old 2.6.18.x kernel, or the old Xorg, will love 218.
I'll tidy it up a bit more and probably upload on Monday then will move back onto the mainstream Woof-Ubuntu "Puppy5" build.

On the weekend I might upgrade the kernel to 2.6.18.8, which was the last in the 2.6.18.x series. It won't have all the 3rd party drivers, but anyone will be welcome to add those.

There have been suggestions to upgrade glibc, but that really means a complete rebuild with T2, and that will be a lot of work to get the old Xorg and kernel to build with other later packages. What I have done is a hack that will extend the life of 2.x for quite some time.

Note, I have been testing the various original 2.x GTK2 apps, and most of them seem to work fine with the new version of GTK. With the exception of Abiword which crashes at startup, which I'll see if I can fix this weekend.

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Comments

486
Username: 01micko
Hello Barry, I have a 486 running Puppy-2.16-fat_free ATM. A full install. It is quite useful. It would even be more useful if I can get your Puppy_2.18 to boot and install. I'd love to see if I can do more on the old thing. Puppy Browser should be quite useful. If per chance it doesn't boot, is there a pkgs_distro_soecs file for Puppy2? That way I could conceivably chop out what I don't need to make it lighter for my limited resources. I have 32M ram with an 80M swap. I may try increasing the swap to get the thing to boot if it fails. I expect it will crawl live so I'll give it time. Thanks.

Low-power devices
Username: Raffy
"Great for getting Puppy anew into low-power PCs. Would porting 2.1.8 to ARM be feasible at all? I understand that smartbooks based on ARM are coming in 2009.

Alsa 1.0.18 pet Please!!!
Username: John Biles
"Hello BarryK, All I can say is thank you for taking the time to do all this. The only thing stopping me run Puppy 2.14 on my EeePC 900A is no sound. It works with Puppy 4.2 Is a Alsa 1.0.18 Pet Package possible for the 2 series. I tried compiling it myself without luck. I don't believe Puppy 2.1.8 should have this later sound driver if it stops older PC's from working, but the option of a pet package for it would be great. Just for the record to me Puppy is Linux as I would most likely be back on the Darkside (Windows) if you hadn't created this wonderful OS.

The future of Puppy2
Username: ttuuxxx
"Hi Barry, well I managed to hack your 2.18 release with glibC from 3 series, X-server from 2.14X, plus dbus and it was great, so I can actually use woof to build future releases of series but but it has issues. The following packages are not found all the servers cddetect-2.0.pet cups_espgs_gutenprint-1.1.23-8.15-5.0.0-2.pet hardinfo-0.4.2.2.pet jwm2-2.0.1-pb-1.pet module_init_tools-3.3-pre11-static.pet pburn-2.4.0.pet pmusic-0.6.1.pet rox_filer-2.6.1-pup14.pet rsync-2.6.8.pet unionfs_utils-0.2.1.pet usb_modeswitch-0.9.7.pet xdg_puppy-0.7.6-6.pet I had to search all over the net for these apps, most the time I was given servers where they didn't have the apps, At the end I managed to find just about all of them minus these packages that I renamed pmusic-0.6.1.pet --> pmusic-0.8.2.pet usb_modeswitch-0.9.7.pet --> usb_modeswitch-1.0.2-pup4.pet module_init_tools-3.3-pre11-static.pet --> module_init_tools-3.3-pre11-static-insmod_3.2.2.pet Then after all that messing around it gave me the kernel options for 2.18 linux_kernel-2.6.27.4-woof1.pet linux_kernel-2.6.29.4-ticks_uniproc.pet Ok neither of those are right either, The woof setup program I'm using is woof-10JUN09.tar.gz and now I sit dead in the water without a kernel. ttuuxxx

Tags: woof