EasyOS Pyro version 1.2.3 released

Another incremental release of the Pyro series. Although this series is considered to be in maintenance mode, it does have all of the improvements as in the latest Buster release.

Download from here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/1.2.3/

Note, there are also German and French builds. 

Tags: easy

Final bug fixes before 2.1.3 release

Thanks to Rodney for posting some audio streams:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=1036976#1036976

A couple of the builtin audio streams in PupRadio did not work, "Old Time Radio" and "WBGO Jazz 88". I replaced those with working ones, and bumped the PET to 0.22.

Default Applications Chooser (see Setup menu category) was reported by scsijon to give errors when launched from a terminal. Yes, if you run 'default-chooser' in a terminal, errors will be outputted. This was originally created by sc0ttman and last updated in 2014 by shinobar, version 0.9:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=56282

EasyOS has been using version 0.8.9 until now, and Puppy Linux using 0.9.

I discovered three bugs in it: the one that scsijon reported, a shift-out-of-range, a syntax error when executing 'which', and incorrect changing of 'defaultimageeditor'.

I don't know about puppies, but EasyOS has /usr/local/bin/defaultimageeditor a symlink to /usr/local/bin/defaultpaint, and this upsets default-chooser.

I fixed all three and bumped the PET to 0.9.1. Will upload soon. Though, my fixes did introduce a new bug -- the "defaultpaint" drop-down list has "mtpaint" entry twice. Decided I can live with that. 

There are some issues that will be delayed until release-after-next:

EDIT 2019-09-15:
Have added to this list. Numbering them also.

1: The primitive text-mode GUI when you click on the "connect" desktop icon. Want a nice GUI.

2: scsijon reported that if right-click on network tray icon and choose to disconnect from network, it does so, then immediately reconnects.

3: I would like to fix the issue of the optical media tray closing almost immediately after opening. This is on desktop PCs with full-size optical drives -- those in laptops do not have the problem as closing is by manual push.

4: When multiple pages (desktops) are in use, there are some issues, such as windows disappearing. This might be fixed by upgrading to the latest JWM. 

5: Forum member ejazjg reported that if the laptop lid is closed then reopened, the screen remains blank. This will be an issue with the rules for the acpid daemon. It has been reported that if you briefly press the power-button after opening the lid, the screen comes back -- use that as a workaround for now. 

Just so that everyone knows what I plan to work on in the not-to-distant future, might as well document here a few more items that are on my to-list. I write notes on pieces of paper, even scraps of paper, and they are all over the place, and when there is a clean-up some issues that should get fixed, get forgotten. Looking at some of these pieces of paper:

6: Screeny snapshot taker (see Graphic menu) sometimes takes distorted snapshots. This was discussed on the Puppy Forum several months ago, and I think a solution was found, but I wrote a note about it, then forgot about it.

7: On the subject of snapshot-takers, there is also Take A Shot in the menu. Works nice, but defaults to save to '/root'. I need to change that to '/home/media/images'.

8: More recently, I don't like the Crystal font used for the clock in Buster, see bottom-right of screen. The "1" looks too much like a "7". Need another LED style truetype font. 

EDIT 2019-09-16:
Here is another one...

9: Running Easy Pyro, SFSget, the radiobuttons have "easyos/debian/buster" preselected, but it should really be "easyos/oe/pyro". SFSs can be installed from all of the paths, however, the default should be "easyos/oe/pyro" 

Tags: easy

Running in RAM and other fixes

Alfons reported that he installed the Chromium SFS to the main desktop (not in a container), but later booted with "Copy session to RAM & disable drives" and Chromium wasn't there.

Yes, that requires the Chromium SFS file be copied to RAM at bootup, as everything has to be in RAM. I had previously decided not to do that, however have reconsidered. So now, any SFSs installed to the main desktop will be available when running in RAM -- with the exception of the 'devx' and 'kernel' SFSs as there isn't much point in compiling anything when nothing can be saved.

I also removed some desktop icons and menu entries that aren't appropriate when running in RAM and no persistence for any changes. For example, the "petget" and "sfsget" desktop icons are removed.

The shared folder '/home/shared', to enable an app in a container to pass files to and from the main desktop, wasn't working. Fixed.

SFSget does a full probe of the online SFS repository. At subsequent bootups, it is supposed to only require a full probe if detects a change in the repository. However, it was doing a full probe again after a reboot. Fixed. 

I reported about an upgrade problem, with the renaming of the "easy" desktop icon to either "pyro" or "buster", if upgrade an existing installation, the old "easy" icon was also on the desktop:

http://bkhome.org/news/201909/easy-pyro-122-released.html

...a manual fix was posted, however, it is now fixed automatically. 

Tags: easy

Using Easy Containers page updated

I started this page of usage notes for Easy Containers a little while ago, today updated:

https://easyos.org/user/using-easy-containers.html

To work as documented in that web page, requires Easy Pyro 1.2.3 and Easy Buster 2.1.3, neither of which are released. I am working on a few things, and they should be released in a couple of days. 

Tags: easy

PupRadio fixed

Rodney reported that Pupradio (see Multimedia menu) failed to start in Easy Buster.

The problem was caused by /usr/local/bin/defaultmediaplayer having "gnomempvshell" in it. OK, fixed, and the PET is now version 0.21.

There is still a problem with Pupradio and PupTelly: some of the URIs don't work. That is something that someone will have to go through and find replacements. If you undertake that, let me know and I will put the URI fixes into the PET. 

Tags: easy

Easy Pyro 1.2.2 released

This is a maintenance release in the EasyOS "Pyro" series, that have version numbers 1.x. Most attention is now on the "Buster" series, version numbers 2.x, however, it is anticipated that there will be more releases of the Pyro series, mostly just updating the infrastructure.

As Easy Pyro is built with woofQ, same as for Easy Buster, all infrastructure improvements will apply to both series. So, the release notes for the latest Buster also apply to Pyro, that is, anything infrastructure-related and not package-specific:

http://bkhome.org/news/201909/easy-buster-211-released.html

Easy Buster version 2.1.2 will be released soon, and will have some infrastructure improvements that are in Pyro 1.2.2.

Regarding packages, relative to Pyro 1.2, the kernel has been bumped from 5.2.9 to 5.2.10, and SeaMonkey from 2.49.4 to 2.49.5.

This is the download site, and includes German and French builds:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/pyro/1.2.2/

One thing that you will notice after booting 1.2.2, is a slight change on the desktop (snapshot taken on a 1024x768 monitor):

...the label "file" at top-left is now "home", and the label for running EasyOS as a complete-desktop-in-a-container, was "easy", now "pyro".

The reason for the latter change is to avoid having two icons on the screen having the label "easy". I am planning to post some more documentation on using containers, but briefly, if you are currently running Pyro, you can also run Buster in a container -- so the Pyro icon will be labeled "pyro" and the Buster icon will be labeled "buster". 

Important upgrade notice

EDIT 20190916:
The problem described below has been fixed in EasyOS versions 1.2.3 and 2.1.3. The fix will occur automatically.

I have Easy Pyro installed on the SSD in my Mele mini-PC, and I upgraded by the simple method of replacing the three files 'vmlinuz', 'initrd' and 'easy.sfs' in the boot-partition, and of course clicking on 'initrd' to "fix" it, as described here:

https://easyos.org/user/easy-version-upgrade-and-downgrade.html

I discovered that the desktop has two icons on top of each other, labelled "easy" and "pyro". This is a problem due to the name change. I could put in hack-code to fix it, however, it is a "one off" upgrade problem, and it is simpler just to give some instructions for a manual fix.

EasyOS still has a small number of users, and even smaller who have an installation that they would want to upgrade -- most users are, I think, just writing a Flash-stick with the new version and starting from scratch.

So, here is how to perform this one-off fix:

1. Drag the icon labeled "pyro" off the other one, right-click on it and choose "Remove item".
2. Right-click on the "easy" icon, choose "Edit item" and change "/usr/sbin/ec-chroot-easy" to "/usr/sbin/ec-chroot-pyro", and change the displayed text from "easy" to "pyro".
3. Delete the script /usr/sbin/ec-chroot-easy
4. Change the name of the folder '/mnt/wkg/containers/easy' to 'pyro'.
5. Open /mnt/wkg/containers/pyro/desktop in a text editor and change "EC_LABEL=easy" to "EC_LABEL=pyro" and "EC_PATH=/usr/sbin/ec-chroot-easy" to "EC_PATH=/usr/sbin/ec-chroot-pyro".
   

 That's it, you are good-to-go. If you click on the "pyro" desktop icon, the complete desktop-in-container should launch. 

Note, an alternative to those five steps is simply to erase the working session. That will delete browser history, bookmarks, installed packages, etc (but won't affect containers or anything in /home). In the menu Filesystem -> Easy Version Control, click the "Erase the working session" button. 

Tags: easy

Compile system for SeaMonkey 2.49.5

I reported on the journey to get the latest SeaMonkey to compile:

http://bkhome.org/news/201909/seamonkey-2495-released.html

I have successfully compiled SM for Easy Buster and Pyro, and created PETs. It is based upon the work done by Slackware developer guys.

The main reason that it wasn't compiling for me earlier, was that I was trying to use the "cairo-gtk2" backend, however, only "cairo-gtk3" works. It looks like the end of an era. No one has bothered to get the bugs out of the "cairo-gtk2" build.

The Slackware build is configured with most libraries builtin, rather than using system libraries, such as icu, jpeg, libevent, etc. I have changed to use system libraries as much as possible, except for sqlite and png -- those two need the inbuilt versions, at least that used to be the case. The end result is considerably smaller than the Slackware build.

Note, it also used to be that SM needed the inbuilt icu, otherwise it was unstable. However, I compiled with the system icu and tested on various sites and it is stable. Didn't test with non-English $LANG though.

There was a problem with the build on Easy Buster, the install step "make -f client.mk install" failed. So, I put in crude manual install code, which does not create the 'omni.ja' file. This is a zip archive that has all of the 'chrome' and 'components' folders, which is supposed to improve operation speed. I emphasize "supposed to".

Anyway, there is an install to /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.49.5, and on Puppy-like systems if you change the /usr/lib/seamonkey symlink and maybe the /usr/bin/seamonkey symlink, you are good-to-go.

Here is the build system and SM source:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/alphabetical/s/

...you need to expand the 'seamonkey-build' tarball and put the SM source tarball inside it. Then run the script. 

Tags: easy

SeaMonkey 2.49.5 released

Yay, finally! Version 2.49.4 was released in July 2018, so this version has been a long time coming:

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

However, I am unable to compile it. Got configure errors when tried to use system 'nspr' and 'nss', so chose internal libs, but then got compile errors.

I will wait until the Linux From Scratch people figure it out. 

EDIT 2019-09-09:
The LFS guys have posted instructions:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/cvs/xsoft/seamonkey.html

However, compile still fails for me. Then I tried patches from Fedora. This shows the patches to be applied:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seamonkey/blame/seamonkey.spec?identifier=master

And the patches are available from here:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seamonkey/tree/master

Nup, still fails for me.

Then I looked at how the Slackware guys are doing it. I downloaded everything here:

http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-14.2/patches/source/seamonkey/

Made a couple of modifications to 'seamonkey.SlackBuild' script -- disabled rust, changed $TMP to /tmp2, as /tmp is a tmpfs and not big enough. Yay, it compiled ...but install failed.

This is a starting point, a successful compile, that I can hack on. Some of the configure options need to be changed. 

Tags: easy