Retired from Puppy project, etc.

I receive a couple of emails per day from users of Puppy Linux or a derivative. A lot of people don't know that I am retired from the Puppy project, and ask me for help with XenialPup etc. Or, advise me what should be done.

This has increased a bit recently, as a couple of people have mentioned being unable to register on the Puppy Forum.

Maybe I need to put some "rules of contact" on the Contact Me page (see above). Anyway, posting here for now...

I retired from leading the Puppy Linux project in 2013, now just dabbling in some experimental distros, Quirky and EasyOS.

Furthermore, Quirky and EasyOS are very much just hobbies. I'm not really interested whether they become mainline or widely-adopted distributions. So, I am not trying to develop them toward suitability for a wide user-base. On the otherhand, if a wider user-base find them useful, that's OK also.

My interest is in the technology, just to play around with ideas, and have something usable for myself, and usable also for those involved in providing feedback and testing.

For those with Puppy-specific questions, please ask at the Puppy Forum:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/

If unable to do so, like being unable to register, or it is down, there are two alternative Puppy forums:

http://puppylinux.info/

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/puppy-71/

Feedback about Quirky should be directed here:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=106460

Feedback about EasyOS:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=109958

I don't mind receiving emails, as long as not too many. If the forums are unsuitable for whatever reason, and the feedback is Quirky or EasyOS related, or something else that you think would be of interest to me, then yeah, no problem.

One thing though, don't try an involve me in some project. I receive offers regularly, to become involved in something. Please don't. I am retired, introspective, enjoying pottering around in the garden, don't want to be involved in any project, no matter how great it is.

As an example, a chap contacted me yesterday, via the Contact Me form, with a proposal to raise money for spreading Quirky/EasyOS to a wide audience. I do appreciate the enthusiasm!

Yeah, might put a link from the Contact Me page, to something like the above.

EDIT 20180928:
'David' sent me an email, informing of another place to go for Puppy Linux discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/puppylinux

Which reminded me, there is also something on Facebook...

https://www.facebook.com/groups/puppylinuxusers/

And if you really want to know about every Puppy-Linux-and-derivatives forum/blog/social-media site out there:

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppySites

...wow, thanks to you guys who maintain puppylinux.org!

Tags: admin

Thanks for the donations

A few donations have come in, after I created the donate button, thanks guys!

A message to "gys", I tried twice to send you a "thank you" email, both times it bounced.

"gys" is with hotmail.com, and I am wondering, is Microsoft up to funny business?

The first time, it said my post was spam, so I sent another, with hardly anything in it. The second time, it bounced, with this message:

Your message couldn't be delivered because the recipient's email server (outside of Office 365) rejected it because it couldn't determine if your message is coming from a location that is associated with your email domain. This is a security measure commonly done to help prevent malicious email or spam email from entering the recipient's email system. The reason the lookup failed is likely because your domain's email settings aren't set up correctly. To fix this, forward this non-delivery report (NDR) to your email admin.

The email was sent from my online gmail account!

Tags: admin

Contact page with donate button

I have jazzed-up the contact form a bit. Put it in an iframe tag.

Also added a PayPal donation button:

http://bkhome.org/contact/

If you make a donation, send me a message afterward, via the contact-form, or post to the Puppy Forum. I will be posting to the "Pyro64" thread soon, so monitoring it:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=110541

As Pyro64 is built from packages compiled from source, the repository is small, so I will welcome any suggestions.What package would you like to see added to the repo?

These are the packages that were compiled in OpenEmbedded:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/compat/oe/pyro/

Packages that I will compile later, in a running Pyro64, will be PETs, and will end up online also, but I haven't yet decided where.

Both lots, those compiled in OE and the PETs, will be installable via the PKGget Package Manager.

Tags: admin

Old blog hyperlinks fixed

I posted recently that I have imported my old blogs into shellCMS:

http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/

A problem though, it was full of hyperlinks to earlier posts in the blogs, in the form of "http://puppylinux.com/blog/?viewdetailed=01234" and in some cases to bkhome.org.

Also, perhaps odd, but PPLOG stores hyperlinks in the posts as normal html <a> tags, but in comments as [url] bbcode tags.

Google has spidered my site, and it has picked up all of these broken links as valid, some of them anyway. http://bkhome.org/news/?viewdetailed=00123 for example, actually goes to bkhome.org/news, so is technically not a broken link.

I spent all day today, writing a script to fix all those old links, so they now point to the correct page in the new archived blog.

There are still broken links in bkhome.org/news, as I had imported my previous blog (at barryk.org/news) into it. Intend to fix that next.

EDIT
Modified the script a little bit, and applied it to the blog you are reading now. Fixed all of those links.

Tags: admin

Blog archive converted to shellCMS

I had used httrack to convert my old blogs to static web pages, however, it resulted in a much larger archive than it could have been, as httrack follows all links on the blog site, and builds static web pages for every link.

Two of my old blogs cover from April 2008 to November 2013, and a massive 3,451 posts.

I yesterday and today I wrote scripts to convert those blogs to shellCMS, and it is now online:

http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/

There is also a "blog1", which is a collection of old blog posts going back to 2003:

http://bkhome.org/archive/blog1/

With my previous host, hostgator.com, my site got shutdown a few times due to excessive server load. I am now with omnis.com, still a shared account, and this time I am keeping it as a purely static site, to minimize server load.

Tags: admin

Wow, this blog is now huge

Last night I wrote a script to import my previous blog to this one.

The previous blog is still there:

http://barryk.org/news/

It has 656 posts, starting from November 22, 2013, until August 2017.

It uses the pe_pplog perl script, forked from pplog by efia. She changed the storage format somewhat, and I had considerable difficulty importing the comments. Did it, but it was 2am, and although it had issues, left it at that. The comments are there, and mostly OK.

There is a lot of good stuff in that blog. A problem with pplog and derivatives is that they store all posts in the same folder, which taxes the filesystem as the number of posts grows. Ditto for the comments. All flat-file blogs that I investigated store posts in the same folder, simply because it is the easiest way to do it.

As I want my blog to have minimal load on the apache server, blog posts are in folders, named "yyyymm", for example "201709".

And shellCMS is a static CMS. That is, it is a static site generator. This is the absolute lowest load on the server that you can get, and pages load extremely fast.
The blog is generated on the local machine and then uploaded using rsync. A complete rebuild, close-on 700 posts, takes 25 seconds on my PC.

There are some tweaks that I would like to implement, including a search box.

Have a browse!

Tags: admin

Blog moved from easyos.info

I recently setup a new blog at easyos.info/news, using shellCMS, to post news about Easy OS and related Linux topics.

I was thinking of maybe setting up another blog at bkhome.org, for other topics.

However, have reconsidered. It used to be, I just had the one blog, "Barry's News", and it does seem wise to continue that. Everything in the one blog.

So, I have moved the blog from easyos.info/news to bkhome.org/news, and given it a new top banner. Back to the old days, when I could post on any topic in the one blog!

Besides, what if one day, I move on from Easy OS, to another successor, say, SuperDog (or whatever)!

Note, moving this blog from one site to another is easy-peasy. All that I had to do was change the banner, and the remote-sync script to upload to a different URL. Oh, yes, also edited file config, changed the variable "global_site_url" from "http://easyos.info" to "http://bkhome.org".

Tags: admin

Documentation CMS for Easy OS installed

I have installed shellCMS to manage documentation for Easy OS:

http://easyos.info/docs

Only one announcement post so far, but I expect soon to port some earlier doc files.
There is a web page on how to install Easy frugally, and another that outlines how Easy works.

Tags: admin