First-boot welcome page

The first time that someone boots Puppy, or with "pfix=ram", there is a message at the top of the screen, that says:

Welcome! Click here for getting-started information

The problem in Quirky is that there is no light-weight HTML viewer, so if someone does click that message, SeaMonkey is used to display the getting-started page. This can take a very long time, even fail, on a RAM-challenged PC. Once the getting-started page is displayed, it informs not to run SeaMonkey if not much RAM and to create a 'pupsave' file first -- a reboot will also create a small swap-file if there is no swap-partition, so on next boot there should be enough space to run SeaMonkey.

However, informing after the fact is not good. The horse has already bolted.

Simple solution. The getting-started page is information only, no links, so doesn't have to be HTML. I have taken a screenshot of /usr/share/doc/welcome1stboot.htm and saved it as /usr/share/doc/welcome1stboot.png -- a 49KB file.

I have modified /usr/sbin/delayedrun, if it detects the png image exists, launches it using 'gview' or the 'defaultimageviewer'. The first preference is 'gview', which is in Quirky -- this is a tiny image viewer, no menus just a window. The getting-started page now comes up instantly.

Note, even though there is no menu, Gview does support various mouse and keyboard operations:
http://gview.sourceforge.net/

Note also, I did experiment with converting the HTML file to PDF and using 'pdfview' to display it. That is fast, but there is a big header and footer gap -- I used the print-to-PDF feature of SeaMonkey. There isn't much of a size saving -- when I gzipped welcome1stboot.pdf to compare it with the compressed png, it was 37KB.

Another possibility is to convert the HTML file to RTF (Rich Text Format) and use Abiword to display it. I didn't try that.

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Comments

Genie?
Username: Raffy
Isn't the splash page an opportunity for small-footprint programming? The beauty of that is in the user being able to call up next steps/programs with a mouse click. A short tour of available applications and the use of alternate browser/s are good items for inclusion here."11 May 2010, 9:35"01576"119.95.190.199'links 2.1pre30 pet"broomdodger"Hi Barry I have been using puppy 431 and quirky 100 on several low mem, slow machines and links is great. It shows graphics and text. There is a newer version. I would like very much that links be included always. On a similar note, busybox 1.16.0 in quirky 100 has a very good version of tiny vi. I have had trouble with both mp and e3 but no problem with that vi. I am sending this message with links! Username: 11 May 2010, 10:47
"01576"74.220.68.25'links links"broomdodger"Current version is 2.3pre1 http://links.twibright.com/download.php Username: 11 May 2010, 12:21
"01576"74.220.68.25'

Tags: woof