Release notes for Puppy Linux version 2.13
As usual, heaps of new features. After going through my News Blog and creating the summary that you see below, I firstly thought wow, we did this in about 6 weeks! Then I thought what really stands out here is what a team effort Puppy has become. So much here is great, so I have listed these items in approximate chronological order and not attempted to order by importance. Release notes:- Ndiswrapper,
which allows Windows XP wireless network drivers to be used in Linux,
was broken in Puppy 2.12. I have upgraded to Ndiswrapper v1.33, which
fixes the problem. Read more
- Jason (plinej in Forum) has created a great little frontend for sox and ffmpeg, Soxgui, which can perform various operations on audio files, including file format conversion. Read more
- Jason has updated PBrename batch file renamer to v0.4 and Pupdvdtool DVD ripper tool to v0.5B. Read more
- Ian (Ian in Forum!) has upgraded Xwget GUI frontend for wget to v0.5. Read more
- Geany text editor upgraded to v0.10. Read more
- Isomaster ISO file editor tool upgraded to v0.6. Read more
- Sigmund (zigbert on the Forum) has created a couple of little GUI gems: PuppyBackup v0.6.3 for backing up to CD/DVD/HD and PuppyMirror v0.1 for syncing directories. Read more
- SeaMonkey upgraded to v1.0.6. The
'profile roaming' extension and an extension for editing Cascading
StyleSheets in Composer have been added. Read more
- At first shutdown the user chooses to save personal settings and
data in a file, that we call 'pup_save.3fs'. This file internally had a
ext3 filesystem, however for various technical reasons we have changed
to a ext2 filesystem. New personal storage files will now be called
'pup_save.2fs', where the '2' indicates ext2. Read more
- The Puppy live-CD is created from a pool of packages that we call
the Unleashed suite. Individual packages from this pool that are not in
the live-CD can be installed later. We used to call the installer the
PupGet package manager and the packages PupGet packages. The individual
Unleashed packages are available for download and are 'tarballs'
(compressed files) with the '.tar.gz' extension. These packages are now
called PET packages, the package manager is called PETget and the files have the extension '.pet'. Read more
- PET packages can now be installed from ROX-Filer. Download a PET
package, click on it, and it will be installed. Currently only
'official' PET packages from the Unleashed suite are available, but it
is expected that 'unofficial' PETs will soon become available.
- PETget now has more powerful dependency checking. The idea is,
you install a PET package and any missing dependency is determined and
installed.
- Omair (Dougal on the Forum) has done a lot of debugging of the GTK2 version of Xdialog and it now works well. This is based on the v2.3.1 source. Read more
- The Xorg Video Wizard now has hardware profiling. For the end-user it is extremely simple. At bootup if there is new
video hardware the Xorg Wizard will automatically run. But, if you
change the video hardware back to something that you had used earlier,
Puppy will remember and automatically use the correct profile. So,
Puppy booting off a USB Flash stick can be used on several different
PCs and the Video Wizard only runs once each time. Read more
- The Rutilt wireless configuration GUI application is now upgraded to
version 0.13. Thanks to Romain Bondue for his continued work on Rutilt. Read more
- This is a very interesting project, a web browser called HV3,
written in Tcl/Tk. This is not a "Puppy project" as such, but we are
working closely with the developer Daniel (danielk1977 in the Forum) as
Puppy specialises in Tcl/Tk apps. I have made the 'alpha13' release
into a PET package. HV3 isn't in the 'standard' live-CD, but it is
feasible to use Unleashed to build a very small live-CD with HV3 as the
only browser. Read more
- Paul (pakt in the Forum) has developed better detection for USB keyboard and mice. Read more
- Omair (Dougal in the Forum) has improved the keyboard configuration in Xorg and has developed a configuration GUI, named XkbConfigurationManager. Read more
- Klh informed me about Zmixer, a nice ALSA sound mixer. I have now made Zmixer the default mixer in the live-CD,
replacing Xtmix. Read more
- Rarsa has upgraded the Network Wizard script to v2.12.3. Read more
- ROX-Filer,
our main file manager and also the manager of the icons on the desktop,
has been upgraded from v1.2.2 to v2.5. This is a major upgrade and
required a lot of work. GuestToo and NathanF had considerable input to
this. Read more
- I have rewritten most of the Video Wizard
script to be faster and easier to use. At first bootup, you may only
get two dialog windows, one to ask about keyboard layout, the second to
choose desired screen resolution. That's it, then Xorg should be up and
running (fingers crossed). Read more
- At first shutdown, the dialog windows have been simplified and made easier to use. Read more
- In Puppy 2.12, the 'modprobe' binary executable was renamed to
'modprobe.bin' and 'modprobe' is now a script. This script will
transparently fetch kernel modules, firmware and associated executables
from a separate file called 'zdrv_xxx.sfs'. I have fixed some bugs in
the 'modprobe' script and improved the speed of loading modules. Read more
- The venerable Gimp-Print v4.2.7 has been upgraded to GutenPrint v5.0.0. This gives support for over 300 printers. Read more
- Puppy is going international! I have replaced the Bitstream Vera fonts with the DejaVu sans-serif fonts. DejaVu is based upon Bitstream but with greatly expanded international language support. Read more
- Plus lots of small bug fixes and improvements.
Upgrading from earlier version of Puppy. No problem. If you run Puppy from live-CD, just boot the new CD and Puppy will automatically perform any required upgrading of your personal storage file/partition (usually pup_save.3fs file).
For USB or frugal-hd installations, just copy the latest files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, pup_213.sfs and zdrv_213.sfs) to the USB or hd boot media.
If you have already tested an earlier beta of v2.13, type the boot parameter "puppy pfix=clean" , so that a proper upgrade of the latest version will occur -- also, look where the pup_save.3fs file is and delete zrdv_213.sfs if it exists (Puppy may have copied it there from the CD). Also delete pup_213.sfs if you previously copied it from the CD to HD. If you want to be extra cautious, make a backup of the pup_save.3fs file before upgrading!
PET packages. So, what does it mean from the user's point of view? For Pup 2.13 you won't notice much of a difference, just the name change from PupGet to PETget package manager, and dependency handling. For example, if you choose to install 'cutecom-0.13.1', which needs the 'qt' library, PETget will automatically download and intall 'qt-3.3.6' package if it isn't already. So, it should be a more pleasant experience.
The current PET packages though are only the 'official' ones. For Pup 2.14 I plan to support PETs created by anyone, including dependency handling -- so, you can download a PET package and just click on it to install. Ultimately I envisage the dotpup package system merging with PET, so we have just the one consistent package system -- but this is someway off and needs more planning.
In other words, the goal is simplicity and ease-of-use.
My Developer News Blog. If
you want more details about all of the above, and learn day by day how
it all unfolded, at a very personal level, then please go here:
http://www.puppylinux.com/news/
http://www.puppylinux.com/download/downpage.htm
History. To get a better sense of how Puppy has evolved, it is helpful to read the release notes for earlier versions.
Puppy v2.12: http://www.puppylinux.com/download/release-2.12.htm
Puppy v2.11: http://www.puppylinux.com/download/release-2.11.htm
Earlier: http://www.puppylinux.com/news.htm
Best regards,
Barry Kauler and the Puppy Team