Wary Puppy 5.0 released

After many betas and one RC, I finally decided to go for the first official public release, version 5.0. Wary is a parallel development to our other flagship Puppy, Luci Puppy (also known as Lucid or Lupu), but with a different target market: older hardware.

Here is a short release announcement:

Wary Puppy is intended to be our on-going commitment to older hardware. Puppies built with recent Linux kernel and X.org may not work properly on older computers. In particular, some analog dialup modem drivers cannot be compiled with recent kernels. Another major area is old video hardware not working with latest X.org drivers. Many of our leading-edge puppies are built with recent kernel and X.org, however Wary is built with an old kernel (currently 2.6.31.14) and X.org 7.3 so as to provide better drivers for the older hardware. However, Wary is in all other respects at the leading-edge like the other puppies, with recent applications, and support for all modern peripherals (printers, scanners, cameras, digital modems, etc.). Wary is also built with the latest Woof, so has the same infrastructure as other recent puppies.

The packages used to build Wary were originally compiled from source in T2, then binary PET packages created. Wary is now built with PET packages, with a small but growing repository. As Wary is intended to be a long-term-supported project, there will be no major upgrade, only incremental improvements such as application upgrades and bug fixes. Thus, the PET repository will remain viable for years ahead and will continue to grow as developers contribute packages.

To find out more about what Wary is all about and relationship with other flagship Puppy releases such as Luci (Lucid), read this:
http://bkhome.org/wary/

The full 5.0 release announcement and release notes:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/quirky/wary-5.0/release-Wary-500.htm

At the time of writing, Wary files have not propagated through to the ibiblio.org mirrors. They are available here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/quirky/wary-5.0/
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/quirky/wary-5.0/wary-500-readme.htm

When the files become available soon on the mirrors, they will offer faster downloads. See links via the Puppy download page:
http://puppylinux.com/download/

Acknowledgements
So many people helped, and I won't attempt to name everyone as I am sure to miss some people. Instead, a general thank you to everyone. Just mentioning a couple of names: thanks to ttuuxxx and Billtoo who contributed PETs for the 'puppy-wary5' repository, and stu90 for the desktop background image.

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Comments

Wary 5.0 forum feedback
Username: BarryK
I have started a thread on the Puppy Forum for feedback: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=63400

slideshow pet?
Username: broomdodger
"Is there an app for doing a slide show? -Bill

Re slideshow
Username: BarryK
"Yes. Do some research on the image viewing PETs, you will find some that do slideshows, ex Fotoxx. Also, Viewnior, in this Wary 5.0, does full-screen slideshows very nicely. If you mean [i]automated[/i] slideshows, that is different. I think that there is an app that does that, can't recall what offhand. You need to ask on the forum.

Re slideshow
Username: broomdodger
"Yes, [i]automated[/i] slideshows. Display an image every 5 seconds. I want to setup a Puppy to do slideshows for a friends cafe, indiajoze.com He travels the world, culinary anthropology. Barry, if you are ever in Santa Cruz, California I will treat you to dinner. -Bill

Re slideshow/screensaver
Username: broomdodger
"I suppose being able to point a screensaver to a folder of images would be good enough. Is that possible? -Bill

Re slideshow
Username: broomdodger
"[code]Viewnior, in this Wary 5.0, does full-screen slideshows very nicely.[/code]Thank you, that is exactly what I was looking for. -Bill

slideshow ghunter
Username: ttuuxxx
"Another app is ghunter image viewer, its about 1/2 the size of viewnior and has all the same functions. http://ghunter.googlecode.com/files/ghunter_0.0.5-1_i386.deb <-- download http://code.google.com/p/ghunter/ <-- homepage It wouldn't compile on 4 series but the deb package even works on 4 series, it makes a 36kb pet. I like it, its also really quick to launch images ttuuxxx

ppm cursor invisible
Username: broomdodger
"wary500 In PPM if I search and nothing is found, the cursor is not visible within the PPM window but is visible in the error dialog or outside the PPM window. Is this known? -Bill

server error plus
Username: scsijon
"getting server errors on ibiblio for the iso's so changed to nluug however getting different hash's on that site for the iso's

flSynclient and Pentium II
Username: broomdodger
"Hi Barry Thank you for suggesting Viewnior to run the slideshow. It was a last minute New Years Eve success, projector hung with bailing wire and red duct tape. The old 300 MHz Panasonic Toughbook worked great. The cafe, India Joze, full of people. The only problem I had with the Toughbook was 'flSynclient' refused to run. I like to turn off track pad tapping. Is it because of the 300 MHz Pentium II? 'flSynclient' runs on all my old PCs. Let me know if I need to get the exact error message, the Toughbook is at the cafe. Wary 500 Panasonic Toughbook, 300 MHz Pentium II, 192 MB ram, 10 GB hard drive -Bill

re flsynclient
Username: BarryK
"Flsynclient is really Jemimah's baby. There has been a lot of development of Flsynclient discussed on the Forum, so with any luck maybe a search of the forum will turn up something on your Toughbook. I have never used Flsynclient, always make sure I have a USB mouse.

Wary Saved the Day
Username: ttuuxxx
"Hi Barry as you know, 99% of the time I compile live, So I never use the menu to shutdown, I just hit the power on the tower and do a cold shutdown, I use my hard drives as archiving only. Never install anything. So after almost 5 years using this hard drive with puppy I started getting a filesystem error that has 290GB of saved files on it, the error was ext3=fs error ext3_get_inode_loc <6>ata1: EH complete basically It made the file system read only and when I backed up the hard drive around 30% of the files were dead links. That's a lot of stuff, So I tried a few fsck commands I found on google and they did nothing, but then I remembered that the latest Wary had a built in file system check I noticed last time I used it. So I figured why not try Wary, I did a frugal install, proper shutdown to make the pupsave, then rebooted, once The desktop was there I did a hard shutdown and rebooted, Wary automatically noticed that I did a improper shutdown and did a filesystem check. Wary found and repaired 100% of the files. everything is working great again, I then backed up all the files. Thanks for this Barry :) a great addition to puppy ttuuxxx

Re f.s. fix
Username: BarryK
"ttuuxxx, Well, that is a Woof feature. The really good news is that the f.s. check also works with a full hd installation -- which as far as I know, no other distro is capable of -- that is, a f.s. check of the partition that is being booted into. These are features of Woof since about 6 months ago.

tg3 driver
Username: phdzaps
"Hi, I believe the tg3 driver needs to be updated, both for wary and also lupu5.2 The particular system which it is for is a dell optiplex 389 with the broadcom netlink gigabit ethernet (wired) card. I was able to get a driver from the broadcom site that I used to overwrite the lupu tg3 with, and it worked, but I can't get the same to work with the latest wary. Thanks. Oh btw, wonderful work all with puppy!

No need to reboot after improper shutdown
Username: Ryan Santos
"Hi, I am currently using wary puppy 5.0 full hd installation on a 1GB CF card. Is there a way after the scan is executed to continue booting up wary pupyy 5.0? Our existing software uses WinXPE and it is able to boot up without any issues. Now we are using wary puppy 5.0 for our new system and want the same behaviour as in WinXPE with regards to improper shutdowns.

Improper shutdown
Username: BarryK
"I don't know what you are asking for. After and improper shutdown, Wary boots and does a filesystem check (in case of ext2 or ext3), then displays a message about the improper shutdown and option to drop to the console, which times out, and if I recall, then starts the desktop. So, what is the problem? The code that brings up the dialog asking about dropping out to console, is about line 351 in /usr/bin/xwin. I don't recall what changes there were back in 5.0. We are now up to 5.1.3.

Improper shutdown
Username: Ryan Santos
"It is not a problem for people with a keyboard and a mouse which is not available all the time on embedded systems so everything has to be automatic. I was able to do the following changes in an attempt to make things automatic 1. Instead of dropping to console I just deleted that if statement and replaced it with "rm -f /etc/.XLOADED" so it would proceed to xwin no matter what. 2. Reduced reboot wait time after filesystem check from 4mins to 1second 3. Reduced xwin waiting time from 30sec to 1sec. Now, I think it would help if after the filesystem check it would go directly into the system just like what happens in ubuntu. So that it can keep up with another WinXPE machine which also had an improper shutdown. I was wondering what changes I could do to the /sbin/init to be able to do this.

Tags: wary