Features of upcoming Quirky 1.5

There are three experimental features that will be in the next Quirky.

1. Automatic Xorg startup
The desktop will start automatically, so less questions at first boot.

2. Xorg vesa only
This is an exercise to reduce size. A minimal Xorg. Any extra Xorg drivers would have to be PETs (they would also need enhanced xorg-server and openGL/mesa PETs).

3. More drivers in 'zdrv'
Extra kernel modules, printer, scanner, camera drivers, and browser plugins, now moved out to the 'zdrv' SFS file. There is a special monitor, that if you try to perform any operation that requires those drivers, a message pops up telling to install the zdrv (I will probably add a button for easy download and install of the 'zdrv').

My latest Quirky live-CD with all of the above is 85.5MB. The 'zdrv' SFS file is 28MB.

So, I could put in more printer drivers for example, without fattening the ISO file.

1. and 3. are actually in Woof. Feature-3 is provided by a new post-processing script '4babybuild'.

Note, my 85.5MB build has the SeaMonkey without Mail&News. If I built with SM Mail&News then it would become about 86.5MB ...still very good!

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Comments

good news
Username: joec.
The conception of Baby Quirk is good news, I hope the gestation period will not be long. Baby Quirk will be the saviour of old computers. THANKS joe

Xorg
Username: mavrothal
"Excellent! You may also want to make an Xorg.sfs or even 2, one 7.3 for older machines and the latest for the newer machines (assuming that the kernel is OK with these). This way you may just have "ModuPup" instead of wary, quirky, retro or any other variant :-)

Q 1.5
Username: Sage
"Why not remove SM altogether? Midori, Dillo. Links or Netsave are more than adequate to enable folks to load a browser of choice. Some Puppy developers already do this very successfully. Linux is all about choice and forcing SM on punters is not always appreciated. In the olden dayes, one was provided with a basic print driver (Epson? C60?). Such generic drivers still work with a range of inkjets, mainly Epson & HP. Otherwise, 1 - 3 is all good news. There is no rational value in pandering to kiddies with too much dosh, multi-cores, >4Gb, Intel graphics, laptops/pads, etc. when most of the world is happy (ecstatic?) with a 1GHz, 256Mb, Trident/Cirrus machine.

Quirky 1.5
Username: Ramachandran
" Dear Sir Please include Dial up modem drive also. I am early awaiting the release of Quirky 1.5. Kindly announce the release date. Thanks in advance

Highmem in Quirky?
Username: p310don
"Hi Barry, Any chance of HIGHMEM64 support via a PAE kernel in this? Some discussion of such has been going on here http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65787

gecko
Username: ttuuxxx
"Hi Barry will it have support for gecko edubook/surf board ? Hope so, technosaurus had a script to remove all the unneeded modules after boot, now wouldn't that be nice if after the video, audio, CPU, MB, modem are set that the script could be updated to remove all the unneeded modules from zdrv and then take it to the next step and rebuild the iso with the highly reduced zdrv, heck in some case you could probably remove 27MB from the 85MB iso, and make a pc specific puppy iso. It would also have to save the default settings that work, but wouldn't that be nice, a 58MB iso that once is booted brings ya straight to the desktop with everything set. Would be great for laptops like eeepc, or surfboard/edubook/acer-one ttuuxxx

Squashfs with XZ
Username: Iguleder
"Barry, XZ compression is available with Squashfs 4.2 and kernel 2.6.38, I'm experimenting with it for Calf Linux. I also compressed the kernel and the initramfs with XZ to reduce size. You should try it if you want to reduce size. At the moment I'm running Moo (my build system, equivalent to Woof), it's in the package processing stage. It's a bit smarter than Woof in this area, it receives raw binary packages (T2 ones in my case) and splits them to EXE/DEV/DOC/NLS automatically. It can also create the devx automatically, even "nlsx" and "docx" SFSs. It's very nice, you choose which packages go into EXE and which ones are separate SFSs, like Puppy's devx. I'm building this one with only EXE in the ISO, the rest are SFSs. I hope XZ compression is good enough to make Calf similar to Puppy in size (somewhere around 80-120 MB), since it has Python and Mesa built-in. If XZ is any good, I guess I'll do some comparison.

Re Calf
Username: BarryK
"Iguleder, That sounds really fantastic! Perhaps you are creating the next-generation after Woof. ttuuxxx, Well, all the Quirky packages are compiled for i486 except for libvpx and mplayer (if I recall correctly). That other guy, um, should know his/her name, had Wary running nicely with a Gecko after substituting mplayer PET -- I think posted about it on the forum. Ramachandran, Iguleder, I am currently building Quirky and Wary with the 2.6.32.28 kernel and it has the full suite of third-party analog modem drivers.

Iguleder
Username: XZ FAIL
"Quick report: the result SFS was 144 MB (521 MB uncompressed) and Calf 001 doesn't boot, it shows a kernel panic - "unable to find /init" or something like that. I think the kernel doesn't recognize the initramfs, I'll try to fix this. The size isn't THAT bad for a first build, since I still need to see which packages are needed (for example, all video/input drivers and X fonts are in).

Size
Username: Iguleder
"It seems that Python isn't that big and I don't know what makes it that big. I built an EXE-only Calf and it was about 200 MB. I found out that Python includes some C headers required for its EXE package, so I decided to build an EXE+DEV build of Calf. It's 240 MB, blazing fast and everything works great. Firefox 4.0 flies like Opera 11 on spup. It boots very quickly, shows a series of "Starting" messages for all daemons, then "starting X server" and X starts into a familiar ROX-Filer and Fluxbox desktop. Wonderful. However, wicd doesn't work and it's a shame, because I don't have a network management wizard. Also, Osmo, trayfreq and Galculator segfault for some reason, I think it's libglade and its history of trouble. I'll play with it to see how to make it smaller. The first improvement I see is a static Busybox in the initramfs.

alpha url's?
Username: scsijon
"is there alpha urls, please, for testing? and, Iguleder, what about using techosaurus's busybox replacement? scsijon

Puppy SeaMonkey
Username: GCMartin
"Over the years, I seen a significant amount of discussion on SeaMonkey and its inculsion in PUPs. Some of it has just been emotional. The whole reason for anyone's use of SM is that its all-inclusive. There are other alternatives "browsers" out there; but there are no browsers which come complete and feature rich, like SM. I understand your mission for Quirky. But, Would your community who will ultimately benefit from your distro be better served if you just gave them the whole thing? This reduces the chance that something errant in your changes would leave such a bad taste in a user's mouth as to restart an emotional path again. I foresee carving up SM and calling it SM is a "very bad thing" for all of us who have relied on SM over the years. If you do go forward with your SM changes, would you differentiate it by calling your "changed" SM QuirkY-Browser or something different, That way it won't affect anyone's opinions or feelings about SM should something not work quite right. Firefox is a SM alternative from Mozilla that does not have email. I hope this meets with good feelings. This is NOT meant in a bad way. It just an offer that might help.

SM
Username: scottman
"About the Xorg vesa only - I like that idea! If it works well for a range of hardware, why not? Then people only need their OpenGL (nvidia etc) drivers. About SM, I personally like [b]FF+SimpleMail+Bluefish[/b] The .xpi file of SimpleMail can be easily edited in place to support later Firefox versions than is does by default. I edited FF to include simplemail, and pass source code to geany (the 'view source' menu entry), although bluefish could have been used too. That gives you a great browser, simple mail client, and nice editor package. But no WYSIWYG ..and i DO like that SM editor... :(

Xinha
Username: scottman
"Not to get bogged down in the SM 'issue', but if anyone cares, you can get Xinha WYSIWYG editor for Firefox. Xinha is basic, but reliable. Once installed, it can be enabled on any textfields. But with a little hack, you can simply type the following into the address bar of a new window or tab, to use the WYSIWYG editor on its own: chrome://xinhahere/content/xinha_editor.xul I used this trick in Firedog 1.2 (my custom FF2 package)..

Mozilla, Firefox, SeaMonkey,now Thunderbird
Username: GCMartin
"[b]Yesteryear[/b], Mozilla broke the browser piece out to created Firefox (FF). Thus, they came away with 2 products using the Netscape engine...SeaMonkey (full feature product) and [b]Yestermonth[/b], Firefox (browser only). Soon after, [u]a separate group[/u] broke the email piece out of SeaMonkey (SM) and called it Thunderbird. But, it was NOT a part of the official Mozilla offering. [b]Yesterday[/b], I see that Mozilla has accepted Thunderbird (TB) to come under the Mozilla umbrella and has accepted Thunderbird. It is NOW an official part of the Mozilla experience. 3 pieces, FF, SM, and TB, are all a part of the Mozilla product line. There are many other off-shoots of both SM and FF. But no-one has called their off-shoots either SeaMonkey or Firefox. We, too, should respect those product names such that if we modify either 3 of these, we should call them something other than those 3 names. Like others have done insuring that their distros are NOT called Ubuntu, even though that base product is use, we, too, should abide by not misrepresenting the name SM. Hope this helps

llvm anyone?
Username: scsijon
"maybe this, from techno, might be a "quirky thought" to add: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=63984 and this is a somewhat interesting thread on the llvm site: http://dragonegg.llvm.org/

great ideas
Username: kathy
" I think puppy linux is great. i have been a programmer for 30 years and would like to help you guys. I love all the different puplets and have been using puppy for about 2 years now. I feel ready to start making my own version. i will be developing for qoriq freescale processors next year and will be working on some software using rebol right away. I am testing and selling laptops and have several installs of lucid 525 and macpup under my belt . Have used Quirky extensively as well. I would love a version of puppy around 50 mb like DSL.

Projects page
Username: Barryk
"kathy, Checkout the project suggestions page, if you are looking for ideas: http://puppylinux.com/development/projects.htm There have been various other ideas that have emerged since I wrote that page.

Projects page database
Username: broomdodger
"Barry Have you looked at the Firebird database project? Does it fit puppy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_server) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7010 http://www.firebirdsql.org/ http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-2-5/#Linux_x86

Tags: quirky