wish list for next puppy release

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technosaurus · #121 Post by **technosaurus** » Tue 12 May 2009, 03:14

Many of these timely boot things could easily be scripts in /root/startup
this goes for:

autodhcp*
shareethernetwirelessly*

autoscan_wireless_networks*
sharewirelessoverethernet*

autodialforcellular*
sharecellularwirelessly*
sharecellularoverethernet*

cups
pwidgets
asapm
acpid
blinky
freemem
pupeventfrontend (event handler... aka puppy's hotplug daemon)
conky

(I would put Rox here as well but we would need to add another script to run all of the others because for some reason I think ROX is what actually runs the apps in /root/Startup... beside the fact that ROX does so many essential functions in Puppy)

I am all for having these non-essential services moved to /root/Startup for a faster boot to the window manager, but mostly to make it easy to modify to run better on low resource systems (just move or delete the scripts)

*these scripts would need to be adapted and set to use data from pupdial and/or the network wizard once configured by the user

Aitch · #122 Post by **Aitch** » Tue 12 May 2009, 05:48

Many of these timely boot things could easily be scripts in /root/startup .../snip/....I am all for having these non-essential services moved to /root/Startup for a faster boot to the window manager, but mostly to make it easy to modify to run better on low resource systems (just move or delete the scripts)

I just wish I had your understanding of how simple you make it seem ~~

It's obviously sitting atop a deep understanding of the way puppy works

My wish is for someone like you, techno, to do a simple explanation....

"From boot-up to eternity....how the boot sequence in puppy works"

Aitch

technosaurus · #123 Post by **technosaurus** » Tue 12 May 2009, 14:27

@aitch

Unfortunately it isn't that easy - everything is in other scripts right now... but it could be.

I kindof learn things backwards, to learn the boot sequence I first found out where jwm was started using pfind, then what started that script, then that one etc... all the way back to init (I had to use a command to open initrd.gz that pizzasgood posted involving gunzip zcat and cpio) Barry and other contributors have been very good in documenting their scripts so its not really that hard - most of them say #this scriptgets started by XXXX. (Note that I did this for everything that was running in pprocess) If you are a backwards thinker like me and want to learn how puppy works - I recommend this method. Otherwise most forward (or stack/circular) thinking computer science types will do better starting with init and branching out from there.

Many of the init scripts could be optimized to work on an INDIVIDUAL system quite well & extremely faster. I was able to cut boot time over 75% on my kids' DECtops, but that meant having to do a manual frugal install...probably not what the community as a whole wants.

Once the woof...29.X kernel is finalized I will try to adapt the tiny core init methodolgy to Puppy (but without its wbar, tcl/tk and imlib2 & associated programs) ... which should allow very short boot times and sfs files including the base pupXXX.sfs and zdrvXXX.sfs to be loaded "on the fly" as in SLAX and now Choicepup.

if you have been following the additional software section I have started on a gui (and script) packaging tool called pcompile that should allow for much easier updates to packages as well as more new packages.

In the mean time I am playing with qt-4.5.1 and the QT4 based antico window manager (no kde libs) to see if a completely QT based system is feasible for low resource systems... they use it in embedded systems so why not? I am plannning on QT 4.5.x + antico + opera10 and the web desktop as the basic system.

Aitch · #124 Post by **Aitch** » Tue 12 May 2009, 18:06

if you have been following the additional software section.....

Yes, I watch as many of the good guy's threads as I can.....

You definitely rate up there......

Keep 'em coming......

Did you get to have a look at the PPC/Mac thread?

Powerpup was asking about static builds.....

Aitch

Max Uglee · #125 Post by **Max Uglee** » Wed 13 May 2009, 00:02

Pizzasgood wrote:One of the big differences in the Linux mentality to the Windows mentality is to not automatically do certain things without being told, like connecting to the network and mounting drives.

In general I agree with that system. It's polite.

In Puppy's case, I would not consider it rude for Puppy to automatically attempt to connect to the network with dhcp if (and ONLY IF) there is a "pfix=nodhcp" boot parameter added to allow people to disable that feature if they don't want it. (They may have a very good reason for not wanting Puppy to touch their network, and should not be required to manually remove the ethernet cable first).

I think that this would be a great way to handle it while not taking anything away from advanced users. The pfix system is awesome for stuff like that. I am definitely not talking about taking away any functionality or forcing anything. Ubuntu is #1 on distrowatch because it is easy to use and is familiar. I do think however that they have gone too far with hiding things from the user. It may be Gnome that is the problem but either way I think that there should be more "advanced" tabs in most of the settings screens. These advanced menus should have info when hovered over to help the user learn things. I think that Puppy is closer to getting this right but is not all the way there.

Sorry, I am just ranting. I just see a lot of potential in Puppy. Something that can be as simple or as in depth as you want and can teach you as you get deeper and deeper into it.

#126 Post by **Pizzasgood** » Wed 13 May 2009, 00:55

technosaurus wrote:(I would put Rox here as well but we would need to add another script to run all of the others because for some reason I think ROX is what actually runs the apps in /root/Startup... beside the fact that ROX does so many essential functions in Puppy)

Rox just runs the desktop icons and the wallpaper. The stuff in /root/Startup is launched normally (except backgrounded), from the /usr/sbin/delayedrun script:

Code: Select all

#v2.17 suggested by andrei...
if [ -d /root/Startup ];then
 for a in /root/Startup/*
 do
  [ -x "$a" ] && $a &
  sleep 1
 done
fi

technosaurus · #127 Post by **technosaurus** » Wed 13 May 2009, 01:29

Pizzasgood wrote: Rox just runs the desktop icons and the wallpaper. The stuff in /root/Startup is launched normally (except backgrounded), from the /usr/sbin/delayedrun script:

add rox to the list as well then.... probably near the bottom though since it does do so many things

Aitch · #128 Post by **Aitch** » Wed 13 May 2009, 15:01

PG/techno

Rather than considering a no dhcp* for users who DON'T want it, I actually think Max Uglee's suggestion is nearer the mark
*Likewise, e.g. mounting HDDs

A hover over 'Advanced' menu tab, which both encourages adventure in a noob, whilst providing those 'easier use' functions, so many people yearn for, seems a good direction to me

Then if something on the advanced tab became used most of the time, by most users, a script could be posted showing how to make it 'main menu' bootable

Wouldn't want to see the boot process become a real question/answer type screen though - it would deter many from using it altogether IMHO

However, it seems to me, the trend is toward a boot to internet, for mail/messenging/news type setup

Aitch

#129 Post by **ttuuxxx** » Wed 13 May 2009, 15:56

technosaurus wrote:Many of these timely boot things could easily be scripts in /root/startup
this goes for:

blinky
freemem
pupeventfrontend (event handler... aka puppy's hotplug daemon)

Are you off your rocker? lol, This isn't a speed/turbo cutdown version.
really blinky, freememory applet are like blinky-38kb & freememory-20kb, now how much strain or boot time would they take, a millionth of a second, and let me tell tell you something, There is nothing worse than having your desktop appear, and your looking at it, and watching things slowly load, if you place things in the startup folder, anything in there is automatically delayed until the all the boot&desktop things are loaded and then about 4 -6 seconds later things start to load, we are using delays now with blinky and freememory applet and at one time I used to put blinky and freememory applet in the startup folder, But the time was too slow, but if you put the pup event frontend in there, it will be another annoying nuisance waiting for that to load, and if you refresh your menus, all that will happen again, again, again, so your way of thinking is a faster boot up, which those 3 mentioned wouldn't make any speed difference that the average human could notice, and with that slow down the desktop from fully loading. I would say yes to cups, since nobody prints straight away, and it isn't a visual pain in the butt, anything that that I can't see, I'm more than fine with. Anything that I have to look at loading, that just gets on my nerves, you can shave 5 seconds off boot great, but if I have to watch things load on the desktop, I would trade a extra 15 seconds booting to get rid of it.
ttuuxxx

amigo · #130 Post by **amigo** » Wed 13 May 2009, 16:48

Code: Select all

if [ -d /root/Startup ];then 
 for a in /root/Startup/* 
 do 
  [ -x "$a" ] && $a & 
 #  comment out sleep -it is useless anyway since the processes
 # are being backgrounded -10 items is 10 seconds of sleeping!
 #sleep 1 
 done 
fi

Even though ROX only starts the background icons at startup, this can take pretty long. Since Puppy now uses the GTK2 version of ROX, it can takes it several seconds to start. One way to speed up the loading of the desktop icons is to reorder them so that they load from top to bottom. What I mean is that, as you add or remove items to the desktop, the pinboard file gets re-written with the items in chronological order accorsing to when they were added. I wrote a small script which re-orders them in the file so that they get loaded from top-to-bottom or left-to-right. In other words, all the icons at the top get loaded first, then those that are below -row by row. It really speeds things up considerably. But, re-ordering them also takes a couple of seconds, so you'd want to run the script during shutown, 'logout' or after 'login'.

Puppy consumes loads of time during startup because the init scripts are very long with *lots* of 'if' and 'for' loops. Much of this is becasue it must detect the 'style' of booting frugal, from RAM, etc. Segregating the code for each of the styles into separate scripts and then doing an earyl detection of the 'style' and running the appropriate group of scripts would speed this up considerably.

dhcpd can be a major source of wasted time. If the ethernet connection is not connected(not live), then dhcp keeps trying until it times out. There is a program called ethwireck which can check if the connection is live before trying to run dhcpd on it, hence saving several seconds if the network is not connected.

technosaurus · #131 Post by **technosaurus** » Wed 13 May 2009, 17:07

I wasn't concerned about boot times on standard systems - just lower resource systems. Everything becomes significant when you get down below about 400Mhz and 128MB of RAM. Having startup scripts split up to where everything could be easily modified would help these systems a lot (and easier for those of us who just don't want them started). Rather than having the keyboard/mouse/video curses wizard it should just default to the detected keyboard and mouse and start in Vesa...this could all be done in jwm with a GTK gui (like pcp) that would also allow you to change settings, load extra sfs files, start/stop services etc...

Aitch · #132 Post by **Aitch** » Wed 13 May 2009, 17:43

techno/anyone

couldn't we have a memory snapshot of where you were at on last boot, and a simple 'load snapshot' script, like wake on lan/snooze?

that'd make it faster.....

amigo's comment about dhcp timeouts was pointed out by HairyWill about 2 years ago, but nobody felt it important at the time....

It IS important IMHO

Aitch

kethd · #133 Post by **kethd** » Sun 17 May 2009, 12:22

(Hoping this thread is read by developers, and still a "wish list for next puppy release" -- if not, please move to right place, or tell me where the right place is.)

Pctorrent-1.4 in Puppy 4.1.2 (and 4.2 seems the same) is a little too bare-bones and confusing for this new torrent user. The main management window uses the terms "mb" and "kb", apparently meaning MegaBytes and KiloBytes. But then the "Max download rate" shows no units at all -- is this kilobits/sec? Could it say so? How about check boxes for "unlimited"?

The terminal window that launches for a download is also too cryptic. The first thing it seems to do is try to create all the files, and this seems to take forever -- at least minutes, or much longer. (Why does it take forever to make empty files?) We need some progress indication in the window -- ideally a percentage, but any kind of progress bar or count would be an improvement!

Then when the download/upload is finally happening, we do get some progress numbers, but confusing for a newbie. Could an overall download completion percentage be added?

How to do more than one torrent at once? How to easily do all the torrents in a folder at once?

What are the best/easiest pup/pet packages for a torrent beginner running in LiveCD mode who wants something a little better than Pctorrent?

Thanks!

kethd · #134 Post by **kethd** » Sun 17 May 2009, 13:00

This nine-page 133-posts thread dating back to 2007 is getting unwieldy, particularly for the top-main thread in this Suggestions section. Could an admin restart the thread, or archive the pre-2009 material, or make the thread come up last-page-first, or put the thread in most-recent-first display mode?

linuxsansdisquedur · Wed 20 May 2009, 20:43

have you read :
Important ideas for the future of Puppy Linux http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=41951
I think it will make puppy a must !

Master_wrong · #136 Post by **Master_wrong** » Wed 27 May 2009, 16:16

Add grub !

http://orgs.man.ac.uk/documentation/gru ... html#SEC11

Billwho? · #137 Post by **Billwho?** » Sun 14 Jun 2009, 03:29

Please Please Please when a new iso is released also release a delta patch file to upgrade the last iso for a particular series to the newly released iso for that series.
I would have much preferred to use my dial-up connection to download a 16Mb patch file, combine it with my puppy 4.20 iso and wind up with a puppy 4.2.1 iso instead of downloading the full 100Mb of 4.21.

How do I know the patch file is 16Mb?
After downloading the 4.21 iso (2x 3 days {got a bad checksum on the first download}) I created a patch file from my 4.20 and 4.21 iso's and then uploaded it to puppylinux.ca (3 hours)

James C · #138 Post by **James C** » Sun 14 Jun 2009, 06:44

Just keep it small with support for older hardware........

maggotspawn · #139 Post by **maggotspawn** » Thu 25 Jun 2009, 23:44

if it hasn't been mentioned already, S1 sleep.

ragaman · #140 Post by **ragaman** » Fri 26 Jun 2009, 14:53

Old thread but I'll add a little just the same.

A better print manager. Printing to network/shared printers in puppy is such a headache. Why can't it be plug n' play?

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

wish list for next puppy release

Pctorrent tweaks please

This Thread is Too Big

delta please