Fatdog64-700 beta1

A home for all kinds of Puppy related projects
Message
Author
User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#241 Post by prehistoric »

@Just_Greg,

I suspect your manual upgrade. I can also report that I succeeded with a manual upgrade of Firefox to version 33 in Fatdog 631, after which I installed the app. One caution there is that I removed the links to Seamonkey files in the Firefox directory before I inserted the corresponding Firefox files. They might have been compatible, but I'm not taking chances to save a modest amount of memory.
----

As an afterthought I've notified a friend who uses SSL in a custom machine which is unlikely to be a target for attackers. (I'm not even clear on what an attacker might hope to achieve.) The secondary implication for him is that when all common browsers drop SSLv3 support his customers won't be able to connect with up-to-date browsers. This is even true if his SSL code has been patched to remove vulnerability.
User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#242 Post by prehistoric »

Here's a weird problem seen on two different machines, and with different versions of Fatdog (630, 700). When the desktop first comes up I find some problem in the ability to select things with the mouse. I'm using a Logitech wireless laser mouse, and part of the time I'm operating through a KVM switch, but I've seen this behavior without the KVM switch. The problem is that mouse position seems to lag in some kind of input queue associated with xinput. When I click I get actions associated with places where the mouse used to be some seconds earlier.

After I restart the x window system the problem disappears, which is one reason I suspect queued data associated with x.

I'm guessing I will not be able to reproduce this with a different mouse having lower resolution and a wired connection. I did not notice it earlier with such mice.

I'm posting this to see if anyone else has experienced weird mouse/cursor behavior immediately after boot up which goes away if they restart the x window system.
User avatar
Ted Dog
Posts: 3965
Joined: Wed 14 Sep 2005, 02:35
Location: Heart of Texas

#243 Post by Ted Dog »

same here prehistoric. just expected it was my poor muscle control. so never reported it.
kirk
Posts: 1553
Joined: Fri 11 Nov 2005, 19:04
Location: florida

#244 Post by kirk »

The package repo is being updated for the next release which has some significant changes. So you may want to avoid it.
Declan
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun 19 Oct 2014, 08:04

#245 Post by Declan »

Hope these significant changes include updating all the applications to the latest revision as we can't correctly beta test old applications.

VLC for example is out of date and the latest version has significant improvements for Intel CPU/GPU playback over the current one in fatdog.
LateAdopter
Posts: 361
Joined: Fri 27 May 2011, 17:21
Location: Reading UK

#246 Post by LateAdopter »

Fatdog has VLC 2.1.5, which is the latest released version. VLC 2.2 has not been released and I imagine it never will be.
Rémi Denis-Courmont has been pushing various VDPAU changes into libav. I presume that, once that is sorted, they will release VLC as version 3.0
Declan
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun 19 Oct 2014, 08:04

#247 Post by Declan »

My bad , i thought it was an older version.

Thank you LateAdopter
jamesbond
Posts: 3433
Joined: Mon 26 Feb 2007, 05:02
Location: The Blue Marble

Re: Firefox muted on ALSA...

#248 Post by jamesbond »

Illutorium wrote:I have a problem...
When Sound on VLC are be fine... Then Sound on Firefox are be muted (I tried a Mute or Volume) That's doesn't be help...
Use fatdog-default-soundcard (from control panel) and choose the "multiple applications can output at the same time".
Fatdog64 forum links: [url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=117546]Latest version[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/ke8sn5H]Contributed packages[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/se8scrb]ISO builder[/url]
User avatar
Ted Dog
Posts: 3965
Joined: Wed 14 Sep 2005, 02:35
Location: Heart of Texas

#249 Post by Ted Dog »

kirk wrote:The package repo is being updated for the next release which has some significant changes. So you may want to avoid it.
lol. You would never make it in Microsoft marketing department...

:twisted:
jamesbond
Posts: 3433
Joined: Mon 26 Feb 2007, 05:02
Location: The Blue Marble

#250 Post by jamesbond »

Ted Dog wrote:
kirk wrote:The package repo is being updated for the next release which has some significant changes. So you may want to avoid it.
lol. You would never make it in Microsoft marketing department...

:twisted:
Are you sure? :twisted: http://hothardware.com/News/Windows-81- ... Roll-Back/
Fatdog64 forum links: [url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=117546]Latest version[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/ke8sn5H]Contributed packages[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/se8scrb]ISO builder[/url]
User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#251 Post by prehistoric »

Off-topic, but entertaining and apropos the M$ strategy on updates and rollbacks, a close friend I've been trying to talk down from a nasty infestation his netbook acquired while he was way out of town just reported he is up to 169 updates and 689 MB following the factory restore. (Compare with a maximum installation of Fatdog plus Open Office.) He now understands why I insisted on installing currently valid malware protection before he did the updates.

(This consultation via telephone, email and SMS is not something I would do for people I don't know well and like more than most. I'm also maintaining family communication via digital equipment from his wife's location in town during the crisis that keeps him away. If we had to rely on M$ instead of Apple for telephones the situation would be grim. I was also called in to consult on what Brighthouse was doing about their cable connection. Found a problem their techs have been screwing with for a year. This will form a chapter in my magnum opus on the decline and fall of digital empires.)

During the diagnostic phase of this operation we went through a number of explanations about why he was having trouble with Trendmicro that was not caused by software they wrote, and trouble uninstalling Google Chrome when he never installed it in the first place. His son was slow to catch on, "You mean it says a program is Google Chrome just because the program says so?" (Ooh, and what do you suppose a program called "uninstall" does? What happened when you tried to uninstall Funmoods?) We then went through the problem of checking certificates, and evidence this malware had clobbered that. Updates become a problem whenever you diddle with a wide range of networking and validation software, which is a house of cards to begin with. Fixing corrupted system files becomes a problem after malware diddles TrustedInstaller.exe. Rolling back to a previous installation, short of a factory restore, now reinstalls malware. When I found out he had an actual product installation disk for M$ Office, I told him to save the photos and personal documents on a flash drive, and do a factory restore.

By the time I walked him through the Asus factory restore procedure he was paranoid about not knowing what the machine was doing at the moment. This led to a phone call when he tried to type in the URL for the malware-protection site without doing a search with an unprotected machine. "Oh, that's just bing updating the search cache." M$ feels the ability to redirect your searches is more important than anything you might want the machine to do. Next question: how do you tell this from malware? A real conundrum.

The entire family is beginning to understand the importance of making backups that will work even if the system metaphorically burns to the ground. My last service call installed new backup software on two machines currently accessible to me, and that netbook will get a copy when I next get my hands on it. Now, if I can only get those involved to actually use this software to put useful backups on external drives they might be able to use those computers for some purpose other than product recovery. (And to think people complain about technical knowledge and effort required to use Linux.)

The machine requiring all this effort is hopelessly obsolete at age three.

The best line of the whole episode was the suggestion by the musician son that a more powerful machine would be able to power through even if it had malware. There is a high probability this idea originated with computer salesmen.

Added: the latest message was "Now it says it's installing .NET 4, WTF?" By the time you get to .NET 4.5.2 you have downloaded quite a total of upgrades, and may have used up your ISP quota for the month. There are standalone installers for various stages that don't always make it through the upgrade process. If these patches are all necessary we have to ask what was in the original installation disk. If that was in the nature of a promissory note, for future delivery of software, a close reading of license agreements indicates they don't actually promise much. If you are depending on legal action to enforce any explicit or implied contract with M$, you should prepare your legal perimeter defenses for "human wave" attacks, and dig trenches for a war of attrition.

I considered telling him M$ software is less designed than debugged into existence, but this might have falsely implied it is ever completely debugged. I ended up telling him that what he bought 3 years ago was sort of a kit.
Last edited by prehistoric on Mon 20 Oct 2014, 14:27, edited 1 time in total.
jamesbond
Posts: 3433
Joined: Mon 26 Feb 2007, 05:02
Location: The Blue Marble

#252 Post by jamesbond »

prehistoric, interesting story. Thanks.
EDIT: I can't help my laugh when I read this:
The best line of the whole episode was the suggestion by the musician son that a more powerful machine would be able to power through even if it had malware. There is a high probability this idea originated with computer salesmen.
==> If you tyres are dead flat, putting a bigger engine into your car will still allow it to race ... 8)
Last edited by jamesbond on Tue 21 Oct 2014, 04:22, edited 1 time in total.
Fatdog64 forum links: [url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=117546]Latest version[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/ke8sn5H]Contributed packages[/url] | [url=https://cutt.ly/se8scrb]ISO builder[/url]
JustGreg
Posts: 782
Joined: Tue 24 May 2005, 10:55
Location: Connecticut USA

#253 Post by JustGreg »

Great story, Prehistoric! The sad fact is more people will get upset over a slow automobile recall than complete lack of recall on software that is clearly dangerous to your financial health. Too many consumers think computers and software are similar to toast ovens. You just use them even though they maybe dangerous.
Enjoy life, Just Greg
Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much
User avatar
prehistoric
Posts: 1744
Joined: Tue 23 Oct 2007, 17:34

#254 Post by prehistoric »

I had hoped to write finis on that story today, but my latest exchange included a picture message with a screenshot showing that Windows Update had failed to configure one of the last 15 security updates, and was backing out of the changes it had made. I've told him to wait until it finishes undoing changes, then do a power-off shutdown before restarting. I want to get rid of any processes or consequences of memory leaks before we take another run at installing that patch. (We had to back up and take a running jump to install SP1 also.)

Since he didn't send me the number of the update that failed, I've told him to read the knowledge-base article for it to see if it requires disabling antivirus protection, or if there is a standalone download he can install separately.

I have high confidence at this point that we can finish dealing with those last 15 updates, and get on with actually doing something useful with the machine. The cost of this recovery operation, if you count the labor involved, would certainly be higher than buying a new OS, if not a new machine. I don't think this is an accident.

Note: this is not the worst infestation I have ever seen, though it is close. I've successfully recovered a system from malware that even went in and corrupted a specific file in the recovery partition. I strongly suspect that was done by a human attacker rather than an automated attack, since it requires knowing about the structure of the hidden recovery partition for this brand of machine, which is not even mounted in normal operation. I removed rootkits on three separate occasions, showing that these were being reinstalled.

Just to add a modicum of relevance to Fatdog: before I gave the hardware on that severely compromised machine a clean bill of health, I used a separate bootable backup program to make a full image of the entire system drive, including the hidden recovery partition. With no need to keep the backed-up system unchanged, I then installed several different Linux versions to see if they showed any problems with the hardware. Fatdog was one of these, representing 64-bit systems. It took only a few minutes to install and configure. Precise Puppy 5.7.1 supplied a 32-bit system. Linux Mint 17 64-bit took considerably longer, but gave me an independent check on how well the hardware worked without W7. Ubuntu would have taken even longer to install, so I skipped that. I was able to run the machine for hours without a glitch.

None of these alternate systems was anything like the ordeal to install that Windoze was.

I did eventually find two hardware problems: 1) the hard drive was mounted poorly, and tended to overheat; 2) the fire-breathing video graphics card would also overheat in a peculiar way after about three hours. The first problem was fixed by installing a front fan in the case. I went ahead and bought a new hard drive, since the old one was near the end of its design life, even without overheating.

The second problem nearly fooled me. It turned out the video card would overheat while running Windows, but not Linux, while driving the same monitor at the same resolution. I eventually traced this to a higher refresh rate on the Windows driver. This implied the problem was not specifically with the graphics engine, (the problem turned up even when displaying the desktop background,) and pointed to an overheating RAMDAC inside the card. The temperature sensors in the card were poorly placed to catch this. Once I realized what was going on it was easy to adjust test procedures to make it fail in minutes. A modern card with the same performance and lower power consumption turned out to be cheap. The owner OK'd replacement of card and hard drive, plus an added USB 3.0 card, for a total hardware cost of about $120 U.S. He now has a good appreciation of the value of antimalware protection and regular backups.

If I had charged him for my time, he would have been better off buying a new machine.

Added: This just in, the owner of that most recent machine sent me a screenshot showing he has succeeded in installing Internet Explorer 11. It looks like his updates are close to current, not saying they will be current tomorrow.
Added Later: No, I was just too optimistic. He has now discovered the Windows Update looping problem. (Not the one with constant rebooting, the other one which reverts 143 updates when it can't configure one.) He apparently skipped my suggestion to download and run the System Update Readiness Test. My contact also says he is not feeling entirely well. I suspect sight of that machine has become a medical problem.
Atle
Posts: 596
Joined: Wed 19 Nov 2008, 12:38
Location: Oslo, Norway
Contact:

Marketing trick

#255 Post by Atle »

Hi Devs...

Hat of for this great work. Did you guys know FatDog64 700 is one of VERY few Linux distores that has Scribus 1.4.4?

Even the major one like Mint does not have that. They have 1.4.3 :-)

There is even a newer version coming soon the Scribus dudes say and its 1.5svn.

http://bugs.scribus.net/roadmap_page.php

My idea, if I was marketing manager at FatDog Corp, I would say...

Lets look for the larger programs like GIMP, Scribus and what not and try to follow their releases and "jump on the wagon"..

They will love to have a "D Day" showcase of their latest whatever and if that is done in a smart way, FatDog will always be on top of releases, have the latest of the most important things and by dropping the developers of whatever a mail about it, FatDog can be like a thing they link to if you like to try their latest right away...

What do you guys thing?

Slitaz did that once and it worked very well:-)
JustGreg
Posts: 782
Joined: Tue 24 May 2005, 10:55
Location: Connecticut USA

#256 Post by JustGreg »

I have been using the "sandbox" to make a package for fing, a network monitoring tool. I want to have a menu entry under Network. The original package did not have a desktop file. I created on fing.desktop and place in the package directory of /usr/share/applications. The contents are:

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fing
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/midi-icons/network48.png
Comment=Network Monitor
Exec=xterm -e fing
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Categories=Network
GenericName=Fing Network App
NoDisplay=true
It works, but, no menu entry. Dragging the desktop file to the desktop does create an icon and works properly. What have I done wrong for the menu entry? If it is documented somewhere, please point me in the right direction. As always, thanks for any help.

Now, that I know how to use the sandbox, I have found it is really neat in allowing you to try things.
Enjoy life, Just Greg
Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much
User avatar
mikeslr
Posts: 3890
Joined: Mon 16 Jun 2008, 21:20
Location: 500 seconds from Sol

Application does not appear in Menu

#257 Post by mikeslr »

Hi JustGreg;

I don't know if this is the problem, but I noticed that your desktop file's category definition reads:

Categories=Network

Try adding a semi-colon at the end so that it will read

Categories=Network;

I haven't begone exploring Fatdog64-700 beta1. But I've noticed that some window managers on some Puppies are finicky about the Category arguments. If what follows the = sign isn't recognized --such as Kde, or gtk [especially common when the application was flinched from Ubuntu-- and arguments aren't ended with a semi-colon, the application won't appear on in the menu, even if the correct category appears somewhere in the arguments. As a rule of thumb, when in doubt I'll open the desktop file of a different application which DOES appear in the desired menu category and copy its category definition.
Similarly, some window managers on some Puppies will fail to display an icon on the menu when either when "png" ISN'T the file format used by the icon, or the desired icon is buried too far down in the directory tree.

mikesLr
JustGreg
Posts: 782
Joined: Tue 24 May 2005, 10:55
Location: Connecticut USA

#258 Post by JustGreg »

Thank you, Mikeslr! That corrected the problem. After I made the change, I right clicked on a blank area of the desktop. This brings up the menu, select openbox, then select refresh menu entry. Then fing was shown! I knew it had to be something simple.

However, when I clicked on the menu entry; nothing happens. I am still confused.
Enjoy life, Just Greg
Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much
kirk
Posts: 1553
Joined: Fri 11 Nov 2005, 19:04
Location: florida

#259 Post by kirk »

JustGreg,

You need to remove this line "NoDisplay=true".
User avatar
Ted Dog
Posts: 3965
Joined: Wed 14 Sep 2005, 02:35
Location: Heart of Texas

#260 Post by Ted Dog »

playing with mac backup and fatdog64 worked well thanks. is it possible to change the spot user group to 20 to match macOS?
Also Mom got a new win8.1 ( I protested and tried to push her toward a win7 box but lost out. ) its like a massive table with a touch screen. Is the touch screen something that fatdog64 supports? It looks even bigger.than the one in the store so around 24in.
I will play with it after it finishes updates and pulling down email. see if I can get fatdog64 to boot. bios is very lockeddown.

EDIT its not lockeddown. after reading manual and using F1 got to a busy menu and it even lets you have it try first Legacy boot then UEFI need to find a DVD to burn, no bluray not even an option!
Post Reply