Carolina: Vanguard Edition Release 2 December 2014

[Geoffrey]

NOTE:

re my problem with flash earlier in this thread...

I also had problems running games under WINE. Red Alert 2, very old game low requirements, ran like a dog. I changed to the Nvidia driver instead of the default Nouveau, now everything runs super smooth.

Flash works better, WINE works better, Paul works less..

Any chance you could package them, shinobar's getnvidia-1.0.pet creates sfs/pet packages http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 726#571726

I've used this before on my now defunct pc with nvidia card, so I'm unable to do so now, would be nice to have a package in the repo, or am I a bit behind the times and there is a package somewhere.

[p310don]

Tried Shinobar's tool, but didn't seem to work so well. (read, I got impatient and closed it)

How would I package the driver I created?

It's not hard to compile the driver, it comes in its own .run file from nvidia. The hardest part is disabling nouveau so that you can use the nvidia driver. For me, that involved a few restarts and xorgwizards.

[battleshooter]

What do I do with a new toy? Keep trying things until it breaks.

Must've been a nightmare as a kid. Christmas would have been fun.

For those who are interested: rg66's Thunar-1.6.2 with tabs, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 692#685692 works.

Tabbed Thunar eh? That's cool. Wonder if I should include it? That whole thread's pretty cool as well actually. A lot has been implemented in to mainstream Carolina but there are a few that haven't. I'd like to consider adding them if they don't duplicate anything. But then again I need to cut back on Vanguard's size, but on the third hand these apps are quite insignificant in size.

Regarding the working packages from Carolina's repo, in general they are expected to work, most of the problem ones are ironically the ones with work arounds for new glibc requirements. Nonetheless, thanks for the reports, it's good to know things are working out as expected.

I don't really enjoy breaking things irreparably. Consequently, I prefer running under Pupmode 13 with "ask at shutdown" whether to save. But I also find it handy to have an easily accessed "launcher" to Save-on-demand when I know that an installation won't break something. So I also installed my Save-Session pet.

That's not a bad idea. Should help me cut back on trashed Pupsaves if I could save on demand. Did you attach it though? I can't seem to see it.

I noticed on Vanguard's Multimedia sub-menu the inclusion of QWinff. My understanding is that application depends on Qt, suggesting that Vanguard already contains --at least in part-- that structure. I'm interested in trying out some of the other fine qt-dependent pets rg66 and Geoffrey built. Is there anything I should know, or avoid?

Yep, Carolina (not just Vanguard) has always come with QT. It's handy cause QT is such a common dependency, I can really cut down the size of QT dependent packages. The only thing I would avoid would be packages including QT. If you stick to packages for Carolina, you should definitely be safe. Vanguard uses the same QT as Carolina. No upgrades.

You will have to be choosy with what can be replaced from them all, a lot aren't needed and a majority of the existing commands are symlinked to busybox. > coreutils-8.23.tar.gz

Thanks for the package and the heads up Geoff.

Warning if anyone else uses these tools you do so at your own peril

Ominous.

NOTE:

re my problem with flash earlier in this thread...

I also had problems running games under WINE. Red Alert 2, very old game low requirements, ran like a dog. I changed to the Nvidia driver instead of the default Nouveau, now everything runs super smooth.

Flash works better, WINE works better, Paul works less..

I guess the Nouveau drivers are no good for your graphics card. I'm glad the nVidia ones are working out though. Has there been any troubles with them? Billtoo reported the desktop blanking out grey.

Any chance you could package them, shinobar's getnvidia-1.0.pet creates sfs/pet packages http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 726#571726

Hmmm, that's an interesting and good idea. I wasn't aware it existed. I wonder if there's one for ATI?

[mikeslr]

Hi Battleshooter,

I removed the Save-Session pet because:

I started by manually creating a frugal install and adding it to Grub4dos' Menu.lst, with "pmedia=ataflash" as an argument. Booted into it, setup networking, and shut down, creating a SaveFile. Booted into it again, and knowing that I intended to remove all desktop icons, maneuvered to "storage" and installed the Save-Session pet before running PupSaveConfig, or checking what was already in the system.

As indicated by my previous post, I realized that Vanguard is going to be a greatly adaptable OS.

Having the impression that kost@s' play-on-linux by default, "sandboxes" XP applications [which turned out not to be the case, see my next post]. I wondered whether it could be run under --or be adapted to run under-- Vanguard. Decided to experiment with a clean SaveFile. So I moved my SaveFile to a protected location and rebooted. This time, however, after creating a SaveFile and again rebooting, I discovered that when I set save interval to Zero and looked at the Menu a Save listing was there. Maybe it had been there all along? Wondering whether I had installed my Save-Session pet without thinking about it, I checked PPM> Uninstall which revealed that I hadn't. So if seems that if you setup Vanguard to run under Pupmode 13, and configure PupSaveConfig's time interval to Zero, an easily accessed Save Listing will show up on the Start-menu; and my Pet wasn't needed.

If, however, someone wants it, I'll be happy to repost it.

mikesLr

[rg66]

As mikeslr stated earlier, if pmedia=usbflash or ataflash, ControlPanel > System > pupsaveconfig has the option of -0 = never and +0 = ask at shutdown.

[mikeslr]

Hi All,

As my previous post indicated, I was interested in exploring the possibility of running kost@s' PlayOnLinux under Carolina Vanguard Release 2 and had created a new "virgin" SaveFile.

I was familiar with PlayOnLinux, having found it to be of value under Zorin OS and Peppermint OS, where it facilitated the installation of some XP programs, while presenting some albeit solvable problems handling XP portables.
Having the impression that Kost@s' PlayOnLinux in its default configuration could not access files outside of its own folders, I thought it might limit whatever security risk might exist running, as Puppies do, wine as root.

Kost@s' build of PlayOnLinux, together with instructions and links to necessary pets, can be found here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 720#738720. My initial concern was that his instructions required that the specific version of python with wx he provided be downloaded and installed. One of Carolina's and Vanguard's strengths is their video editing programs. These depend on a different version of python and I was almost certain the two pythons would conflict. Fortunately, running the test he gave revealed --at least to me-- unresolvable errors. But since I already had a virgin Vanguard setup for testing, I wondered if Carolina's python with wx would suffice. So, running Pupmode 13 with "Save=never/only on command", I chose not to save and rebooted into an again virgin Vanguard.

Selecting the wxPython-2.8.12.1.pet from Vanguard's PPM, it automatically found as dependent the Python-2.7.2-i486.pet and the wxGTK-2.8.12.1u-i486.pet, and downloaded and installed all three.

I then installed from links on the PlayOnLinux's thread the following: POL-009.pet and PlayOnLinux-4.2.5.pet.

Kost@s had suggested that PlayOnLinux would work with "any" version of Wine. Hoping that PlayOnLinux would work with Shinobar/version2013's Portable Wine, I "looked in" its folder and clicked "register" to install it into Carolina. But when PlayOnLinux was started via the menu, see attached screenshop, it was unable to find a "wine" installation. Frankly, I don't understand how Shinobar/version2013 worked their magic. Modifying either it or PlayOnLinux to co-ordinate is beyond my capabilities.

So I took the easy way and installed the 1.6.2 version of wine for which Kost@s had provided a link. That version has a working version of Winetricks.

And viola!, PlayOnLinux enabled me to install InfoCental, the Relational Database Manager masquerading as a PIM for which there is no analogous Linux, or even Windows, program to be found.

But to do that, I mounted the sda3 partition where the InfoCentral's setup file is stored, and browsed to it using PlayOnLinux built in file manager. The PlayOnLinux folder was a hidden file on Vanguard's /root. And Vanguard was run from a folder on sda2. So it seems that the suggestion that PlayOnLinux could not, by default, access other than its own folders was in error.

And so, for now at least, evaporated my interest in further exploring PlayOnLinux.

mikesLr

[Terry H]

As mikeslr stated earlier, if pmedia=usbflash or ataflash, ControlPanel > System > pupsaveconfig has the option of -0 = never and +0 = ask at shutdown.

I am assuming that this post is in response to my post. The problem is that my post appears to have disappeared.

I now understand, as I checked on a USB flash install and see the pupsaveconfig dialogue.

[Marv]

We all have our ways of breaking Christmas toys One of mine is to see how many pieces I can take off something and still have it work. I did it with a hammer as a kid , lots easier with Thunar and his Carolina stable of right-clicks. Anyway, while playing with the Main SFS, I got around to running this pup without the Adrive. Runs suprisingly well, Still with that Carolina look and feel and a nice logical selection of core apps..... and the master chefs Xorg and kernel brew. Some fixes from this thread, a font or two and .desktops for the external browsers added, a little pruning and the Main SFS weighs in at 112Mb. Did manage to hit Geany on the head with a modified Adrive but that's what Adrives and frugals are for isn't it Just having fun.

Edit: Figured out how I borked the adrive. Using the rightclick tools or running sfs2dir or unsquash in a terminal, I was not getting a complete extraction of the 373Mb adrive on my 2Gb RAM laptop. Twice letting it run unattended it looked ok but didn't complete all of the /usr/share directory. Stopped prior to geany. When I watched the process, it did give an out of RAM warning and If I canceled at that point, an empty directory. Behavior the same across vlina, xslacko, and lxpuptahr. Logging out and using unsquashfs with the -d option without X running completed correctly and much faster. Hadn't run into this before as most of what I extract tends to be less than 200Mb. Lesson learned.

[Keisha]

Try Luxi-Mono from http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 813#819813 as the terminal font. My old eyes love it. Thanks to Keisha for pointing it out.

Hmm. Not sure if I love it...

Luxi Mono is restful on the eyes because its pronounced serifs make identification of individual characters easy. Which is especially vital if you're using transparent windows. But it looks good that large only if you have a decent version of libfreetype to render it with. In a urxvt console I set it to size 8 with this line in ~/.Xdefaults:

Code: Select all

urxvt.font: xft:Luxi Mono:style=Regular:pixelsize=11,000000

Here's a screencap of Luxi Mono at size 8 in Geany, and a trial Abiword page with all the monospace fonts I have on my system.

Once in awhile I change to something else for variety, but I always come back to Luxi Mono.

[Geoffrey]

Who hates the "Show Full Path" in the thunar right click menu, well I've made a better one, I got sick of using the existing way of getting a file/folder path.

Now it just works, right click on a file or folder and click Copy Path, now you can paste it in any application.

battleshooter you will like this, makes it so much easier as there is no dnd from thunar to gtk.

It requires xclip from the repo, it's a small 15kb binary and the copy script is 67 bytes, why did I wait so long.

EDIT: this new copy path only adds to the thunar right click menu entry with the command

Code: Select all

echo -n %f | xclip -selection c

For those who have installed the old package just uninstall it, this will only remove the script located in /usr/bin not the menu entry, manually edit the remaining Copy Path entry with the command code above.

[rcrsn51]

Who hates the "Show Full Path" in the thunar right click menu

I've always wondered how Thunar users drag-and-drop files into gtkdialog apps like you can in ROX/JWM.

[Geoffrey]

I tried the Luxi-Mono font, as soon as I copied it to /usr/share/fonts/default/TTF it took over from monospace,
I don't know if it was the cause but Xlock now doesn't work, well I'm not sure that it did in the first place, as the screen save hasn't shown it's self either that I remember.

Can anyone confirm that these are working.

[yerc1]

My third post on R2 is about fonts and the chromebook touchpad.

@battleshooter, so sorry for keeping you in suspense
I previously posted from my mobile on the train to work, a short 25 minutes trip.

>>Fonts<<
In Puppy (not just Carolina), there are bound to be areas where fonts don't look right. No useability impact, but is a distraction nonetheless. This is an issue that surely have been raised in the forum and solved (or maybe not) but digging around to find a way to tame fonts leads attention away from the awesome work of puppy developers.

Some examples in Vanguard R2 are the Notification pop-up and Firefox fonts.

The notification font in Linux Mint XFCE is the same size for both the pop-up window name and the pop-up message. Not so in R2. Attachment Notification font.png shows the difference.

In Firefox...

• >Text in the Puppy Linux Forum appear much smaller than text for google search results. Attachment VL_Firefox fonts.png says it better than any word can.
  >Changing the size of the default font in Control Panel, Appearance affects the menu text only. Increasing the Zoom level in Theme Font Size Changer increases the forum text size but if menu bar is shown, its size changes too (so I reverted to hidden menu)
  >I have this with the default R2 theme and Appearance settings, but changing to a different theme doesn't help.
  >The Firefox Fonts settings in R2 is the same as that in Linux Mint XFCE but the looks are miles apart.

So I know this is not happening to me only, can someone confirm?

And yes the >>touchpad<<.
Though enabled, it continues to not have right-click, scroll, and configure options.
I think R2 has enabled it as a mouse.
Control Panel, Mouse and Touchpad shows one device (Mouse0) only.
Fatdog shows the touchpad as a separate device and offers right-click, scroll, and configure options.

There may be a fix to the fonts issue somewhere in the forum, or maybe not but regardless of the outcome, R2 has earned a place in my choice linux installs for my Chromebook in a 64 Gb usb stick http://www.sandisk.com.au/products/usb/ ... ltra-fit3/

A pet for xf86-input-synaptics-1.8.1 might address the touchpad problem. That package is present in Fatdog.

Hi @battleshooter/ @Geoffrey can i trouble you with compiling one?

[yerc1]

Weirdness.
My post went through without my message, just the attachment.

If i try to add the whole message here, the post comes up blank???

Edit: I clicked on "Close Tags", re-sent, and the message appeared.

[Marv]

I tried the Luxi-Mono font, as soon as I copied it to /usr/share/fonts/default/TTF it took over from monospace,
I don't know if it was the cause but Xlock now doesn't work, well I'm not sure that it did in the first place, as the screen save hasn't shown it's self either that I remember.

Can anyone confirm that these are working.

Don't use either so I had to go after them. Neither is working in R2 for me in the following:
Luxi-Mono installed.
Luxi-mono removed, mkfontscale and mkfontdir run, reboot.
Pfix=ram boot of R2, SFS files fresh off the iso

Password accepted setting up Xlock and screensaver time can be set, but trying a preview of either or Xlock from menu or waiting for screensaver gives no response at all.
All on frugal install, Grub4Dos to SSD, core 2 duo laptop. acpid running, lid suspend works, no other oddities noted

Edit to add:
xlock run in terminal on pristine boot gives:.

Code: Select all

# xlock
  Key: 
Again: 
Could not create FontSet -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-medium-r-normal--24-*
Could not create FontSet fixed,-*-14-*
xlock: can not create fonset -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-medium-r-normal--24-*!!!
#

[Geoffrey]

Neither is working in R2 for me in the following:
Luxi-Mono installed.
Luxi-mono removed, mkfontscale and mkfontdir run, reboot.
Pfix=ram boot of R2, SFS files fresh off the iso

Password accepted setting up Xlock and screensaver time can be set, but trying a preview of either or Xlock from menu or waiting for screensaver gives no response at all.

Yeah, I did the same, no action, I have a locale problem, unable to set font.

Code: Select all

# Xlock
++ awk '-F|' '{print $4}'
++ cat /root/.screener
+ SCRSVR=pacman
++ awk '-F|' '{print $5}'
++ cat /root/.screener
+ PASSPRO=FALSE
++ pidof shutdown-gui
+ SHUTDN=
+ '[' '' = TRUE ']'
+ '[' '!' -s /root/.xlockrc ']'
+ '[' -e /root/.xlockrc ']'
+ '[' -s /root/.xlockrc ']'
+ xlock -mode pacman
Could not create FontSet "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-180-*", using "fixed"
Could not create FontSet fixed,-*-14-*
xlock: can not create fonset "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-180-*", using "fixed"!!!
# xfontsel
Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C
Warning: X locale modifiers not supported, using default
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset

I tried changing the font in /root/.Xresources but no change.

[Geoffrey]

I booted cleanly into ram the xlock doesn't work, the xfontsel won't set selected font

Code: Select all

# xfontsel
Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C
Warning: X locale modifiers not supported, using default
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset

I have tried to compile a new xclip and xsel, no luck, cannot find -lX11

[Moat]

>>Fonts<< ...

...So I know this is not happening to me only, can someone confirm?

Me. Something is definitely "off" regarding font rendering in V'lina r2 - like you, Firefox being particularily bad. But it seems to be happening throughout the system (menus, Thunar and app windows), to varying degrees. Playing with anti-aliasing/hinting/RGB settings in the Control Panel>Desktop>Appearance window does change things as expected, but only from terrible (no anti-aliasing - almost illegible) to coarse/mildly straining, at best.

Either running live from the CD, or a frugal install to USB stick.

I spent a few hours over the last few days searching for a fix (here on the forum as well as generally, via Google) and tried a few things - but to no avail (I'm just a total noob with these things, though).

One possible (?) clue, is that my Pwidgets Weather Station's Pcompass font (normally shows as a wind direction arrow, running inside the conky's window on the desktop) - no longer displays correctly... the font is now just a stationary rectangular box, instead of an arrow (regardless of wind direction). Other conky fonts are noticably badly aliased, as well.

But it all works just fine on Carolina 1.3 with the 3.17 kernel... Something involving font rendering has most definitely changed between the two...

I wonder if the other font issues you guys are working on above, may be related...?

Aarghh... so fast and gorgeous, otherwise!!!

Bob

[Marv]

Me. Something is definitely "off" regarding font rendering in V'lina r2 - like you, Firefox being particularily bad. But it seems to be happening throughout the system (menus, Thunar and app windows), to varying degrees. Playing with anti-aliasing/hinting/RGB settings in the Control Panel>Desktop>Appearance window does change things as expected, but only from terrible (no anti-aliasing - almost illegible) to coarse/mildly straining, at best.

Try changing themes. I was puzzling over why the menu etc didn't 'seem' to track my font changes while the display/icons did. Probably I was in the default theme. I switched to another theme (currently using Gold Rush with Faba brown icons) and an old xfce WM theme, one of my stash, Default 4.0, and bingo, tracking. Superquick to try. I don't use firefox so no help there. I also noticed that there is a fonttweak in /root/.gtkrc-2.0. Might that override the sys choice? I don't know. If the theme change makes a difference, might be a missing engine.

[rufwoof]

Sound works ok on bootup, however if I do run Alsa Config it doesn't detect any sound cards at all.