Precise Puppy RC1

Nearly there! This is the 5.4 Release Candidate 1. Here is the announcement for the previous release, beta7:
http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201209/precise-puppy-beta7.html

RC1 has been given version number 5.3.96, and can be downloaded from here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/test/precise-5.3.96-rc1/

The theme that I chose is interesting? Good? Bad? Anyway, this is it:
JWM: stark-blueish
GTK: stark-blueish
Desk icons: Neon
Wallpaper: precise-futwerk-1b

At this stage of course, we only want to make essential bug fixes. I will probably remove hcfpcimodem and hsfmodem drivers from the final -- probably we need to provide documentation to let people know that PETs are available, for those who have those (and other) modems.

Another thing, I have yet to write the Release Notes.

Whether there is an RC2 depends on what we discover with testing RC1. It may be possible to go straight to the final release.

Note, there is no non-PAE build for RC1. I have been thinking of simplifying things. A non-PAE build of Precise Puppy can be done by the Puppy community, along with other modifications.

There are not that many computers (as a percentage) that have i686-class CPUs that are not PAE-capable, so I might not bother with them. People could of course use Wary.

Regarding Wary, I am also thinking of dropping Racy. But, again, someone in the community can build a Racy Puppy if they want.

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Comments

Precise RC1 Forum feedback
Username: BarryK
Forum feedback for Precise RC1 starts in this thread, page 49: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=658555#658555

2things
Username: scsijon
"two things of note, 1/ With my last woof update, last month, I found when having both jwm and gtk themes exactly the same that I had lost my vertical scroll bars to be visable, they were actually there and I could use them with the mouse, just they couldn't be seen. 2/ After pemasu had taught me how to compile my own kernels, a few months ago now, I built two identical wary522's with only the pae setting changed (out of curiousity). When testing both on both i686 (8gig ram) and i586 (1gig ram) processor boxes they all worked, the only differances I could visably see or find in log files was the small amount of extra cpu loading when the pae enabled kernel was in the i586 Base. Everything seemed to still work ok. I did wonder at the time if there was an inbuilt 'workaround' built into the kernel in case this ocurred. Finally, as I'm home now and about to restart with mage2, ?is woof2 up to date, as i'd like to pull a clean woof before rebuilding and bug tracing, my old one was a May download!

Wary & Racy
Username: Sage
"Curious decision? What I have been finding is that Racy works on practically all my old junk (except it stutters on my K6-II) but that Wary still needs a massive work-over by you. Indeed, it's not an understatement to say that Wary in its present state is almost unusable as a reliable platform across a mass (morass?) of HW from many generations. Notwithstanding, I have no interest in PAE, chasing my tail with go-faster machinery for a [b][u][i]COMPACT[/i][/u][/b] distro. There is no future for over-endowed boxes now that gaming machines also connect to the Net, can type a letter to your lady-love and display/record TV & video. The technology is inexorably, maybe faster, moving towards the all-singing, dancing smart mobiles. It's already here folks, so let's not hear more about PAE and 4G loaded tin boxes!

Racy is best
Username: Terryphi
"Frankly, I can't understand why you are wasting your time on Precise Puppy. Linux Mint does it so much better with Ubuntu packages. Sorry to be so blunt but that is my opinion. Racy is the best ever manifestation of Puppy and if it is dropped I will be very disappointed.

+1 for Racy
Username: mavrothal
"Actually, I would go one step further. Racy should be "Puppy linux" (full stop). The kernel/xorg/size combo suits most of the machines from this century and a lot from the previous one. I would also assume that developing only one puppy will give a better chance for a polished, well supported trouble free distro. I can appreciate that polish and support is not a lot of fun, but that's why there is woof ;)

Future
Username: Sage
"That seems to be four votes for Racy? Time to do some more Raspberry picking with the announcement yesterday from cpc.co.uk that the 'new' 512 board is available for immediate delivery. Sadly no vga op, though.

Understanding
Username: GCMartin
"Thanks BarryK for your effort on Precise. I fully understand the word "effort" as it does take much work to produce the kind of distros that the developers (yourself included) produce for community consumption. I also understand the position your are expressing about PAE, for so many (over 99% of all PCs sold since 1994) have this 1995 technology for 32bit PCs. And, I want to THankYou for expressing the platforms that you aim your distro for it is useful when community users plan its deployment. I agree with many of the members who have already shared that your PAE implementations are an adequate solution for a great majority of all PC in use by this community. And, its number 1 benefit to me is that once I deploy, I can add as much RAM as I would care to knowing that the PAE distro will make all of it available to the running system and to the filesystem as well. This supports maintain speeds as more and more apps are used simultaneously. PUPPY just makes the RAM support the system operations at its break-neck speeds without using slower SWAP/PAGE algorithms. Thanks for what you and the others have done for us.

Precise default theme
Username: vicmz
"That's a cool combination! I never thought of that, I usually use dark wallpapers and themes so that the screen doesn't shine too much at me, which reminds me -- I noticed that when I use a dark wallpaper I can't see the text below the desktop icons, is there an app to manage the colour of that text? Anyway, everything working well to me so far, I thought Precise would work slower than Wary on my Pentium 4 but to my surprise it rocks! I think it's going to be my new default Puppy. One more thing: this is the first Puppy ever that can be set to a non English language from its early development. Every time a new test version was released, I announced it in the Hispanic forum through the langpack_es thread, so even those who don't speak English were able to follow the entire process. I believe many people will be grateful for this Puppy.

Desktop text
Username: BarryK
"vicmz, Text below the icons is controlled by ROX-Filer. Right-click any icon and choose ROX configuration to setup text.

exellent!
Username: 666philb
"contrary to some other commentators i really appreciate this version of puppy. Access to the ubuntu repos is a brilliant thing, and has been the main reason my os has been lucid puppy for the last 2 years. Lucid puppy was the most versatile puppy, BECAUSE of it's access to the ubuntu repos. And It's a godsend when compiling and you need dependencies... (i would like to see you do that In racy!!Ted Dog,sage,mavrothal etc) the mint comment made me laugh :) do you realise how slow that would run on my netbook!!! if it ran at all . Puppy precise is extremely nippy on all 3 of my comps a P4, an acer netbook & macbookpro. (racy doesn't work on my netbook !) and i love the design. thanks barry

RE desktop text
Username: vicmz
"Thanks! I set it to display white text with thick shadow, so that I don't have to change setting every time I change wallpaper. 666philb, I agree -- AND there are lots of Puppies to choose from, there must be at least one that works best on a particular computer. No one stops those who prefer to change to CD-sized OS, too, that's personal choice.

no boot with pupsave
Username: broomdodger
"IBM ThinkPad X30 Mobile Pentium III 1.2 GHz PAE 768 MB ram (my favorite travel machine) precise5396 boot from cd frugal manual install Both boot and run very well with NO save file. After the save file, there comes problems: 1) if booted with pfix=fsck, generally it works well. 2) if booted without pfix=fsck, black screen, no tray, need to force shutdown. This has been the case with ALL versions of precise. 3) if booted with pfix=fsck, and some sfs, java or dev, added it will not boot again, need to force shutdown. It seems like the save file is getting corrupted. I like the simplicity of set the icons in precise5396. precise5396 runs fine on the Acer TravelMate. All other puppies I have ever tried on this machine have worked. Currently using racy5300 or wary5300. racy5300 is the winner.

Tags: puppy