Lucid Puppy 5.2.1beta "256"

Playdayz has announced beta release "256", which may be the last beta before Lucid Puppy 5.2.1-RC:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65136

I'm downloading it now, will help with testing it. Actually, what has mostly motivated me to do this is that Buildroot is more Ubuntu-friendly and not so Wary-friendly. There seem to be two main problems:

1. Buildroot is very sensitive to package versions in the host, and some of Wary's packages are too old.

2. Buildroot gets upset with the location of Xorg in /usr/X11R7 in Wary, even though I have symlinks from the "normal" /usr paths.

So, I am going to run Lucid 256, and do a build with Buildroot. This will be testing Lucid at the same time and I will report any issues.

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Comments

Running Luci
Username: BarryK
My first feedback: a lovely experience :happy: Everything is very streamlined, very nice first-time impression. The getting-started GUIs are superb. So far, it seems to me like release-quality.

Upgrade testing
Username: bigpup
"Barry, There has been a lot of testing in Lucid 5.2.1 concerning upgrading from one version to the next. You can look threw the last 20 pages or so of the topic and see various examples of the results. Basically, results are hit or miss. Really needs your input.

No UTF-8 checkbox
Username: BarryK
"When I ran "make" for Buildroot, it immediately exited with an error message that the host must have UTF-8 locale enabled. I have got Luci set to en_US. So I clicked on the 'setup' icon on the desktop, and got to the 'Country setting' window. It has a dropdown list to choose English/US, English/AU, etc., however no checkbox to enable UTF-8. What I had to do was open a terminal and type "chooselocale", which is the original Woof locale chooser GUI app. This does have a checkbox for UTF-8. I then restarted X, and Buildroot is now chugging along, compiling packages. This is probably more of an annoyance thing for a few people who know that they must have UTF-8 enabled. Most users won't even be aware of the issue.

No xload in tray
Username: BarryK
"Ha ha, it's only a small usability preference... I have Buildroot running in a terminal, hidden behind my browser window, and I keep glancing down to the xload applet in the tray, to see if the CPU is still busy compiling -- but it isn't there. So, I have to click on the rxvt tab in the tray to bring it to the top so that I can see how it's coming along.

utf8
Username: playdayz
"Ah, If you change the language you get the utf8 checkbox. I think it should be default utf8 but I must have overlooked something. Thanks for noticing.

xload lives in jwm
Username: playdayz
"You can use Desktop -> WMSwitcher to switch to JWM, complete with xload! [code]No xload in tray Ha ha, it's only a small usability preference... I have Buildroot running in a terminal, hidden behind my browser window, and I keep glancing down to the xload applet in the tray, to see if the CPU is still busy compiling -- but it isn't there. So, I have to click on the rxvt tab in the tray to bring it to the top so that I can see how it's coming along. [/code]

The answers
Username: BarryK
"playdayz, Thanks very much for the reply. Yes, I didn't change the default en_US, just clicked the OK button. But if I had changed it, then I should have got the UTF-8 option. Ok. Xload, still available, good! Buildroot has been running all night, and I have been playing around doing things in Luci, it looks good to me!

I love to show it off ;-0
Username: playdayz
"But if I had changed it, then I should have got the UTF-8 option. Yes, Even if you had selected English from the drop down menu the next screen would have had the UTF-8 box. It's late to change this--I might add some explanatory text. Ok. Xload, still available, good! Also, fbpanel in Openbox has its own cpu monitor. Desktop setting -> fbpanel config -> plugins -> General OK

Taking advantage of PCs with lots of RAM
Username: GCMartin
"Barry, I don't know if you've seen [url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65787]this forum discussion.[/url] Might be something to consider or advise. Hope this helps

Luci sound bug
Username: BarryK
"I have tested Luci 256 on one of my PCs that has a particular sound bug. At first startup of Luci, the barks don't stop. I have to open a terminal, then kill 'aplay'. This is a bug with the ALSA driver for certain saound hardware, I'm not the only one who has this problem. Sound does play properly in the media players though. The thing is, this problem was solved long ago in Woof. The /usr/sbin/delayedrun script kills aplay a few seconds after it starts, ensuring that only the first 2-3 barks will be heard. It seems that Luci has replaced the default delayedrun script with something else that does not kill aplay. I suggest that the appropriate code snippet be imported into Luci's script.

lupu-525 is out
Username: 01micko
"Barry, I guess you haven't checked your PMs/gmail. Playdayz has announced lupu-525 as 'official'. After a couple of false starts the ver num ended up as 525.. better anyway as it is a little more than a bugfix. Cheers

Tags: puppy