Puppy In-House Development

[Keef]

Ok, maybe that wasn't the best description.
Basically it would not respond when when any of the links were clicked, just stayed on the home page. No error messages.

EDIT: While what I said previously was true - I had a working internet connection and Dillo would not connect, I just tried again and it worked correctly.
However I made sure the connection was up properly first. Network does not start automatically. Ran dhcpcd eth0 - it takes about 30 seconds before the *.pid file appears in /run. Takes about the same time again before the command completes and cursor returns. Starting Dillo after that was successful, but don't know why it was playing up last night. I tried it again after internet was up, but still no joy.

[Iguleder]

Just rebuilt the entire thing without -fPIC - there's a 2 MB difference, which brings the 32-bit flavor down to 90 MB (without UEFI support). RAM usage is somewhere around 20 MB on my Eee PC.

The next logical step is to build DSLR-based, tiny and extremely lightweight Puppy

Keef: I'm removing all watchdog drivers, both because of immediate shutdown/reboot issues and because I think most users won't need them.

[linuxcbon]

hi Keef, what are your Grub4Dos boot options ? I cannot boot it, it stops at "searching for the home partition". Thanks

[Iguleder]

It doesn't need any boot options.

If you're booting from a really slow USB drive, add "sleep=5".

[Ibidem]

J
Keef: I'm removing all watchdog drivers, both because of immediate shutdown/reboot issues and because I think most users won't need them.

That's what watchdog drivers are meant for.
Basically, they wait n seconds for a reset, and if it doesn't happen in that time, the system is considered hung and it reboots.
So you'd need a daemon to do the resets; busybox inludes some tool related to this.

The theory is that this improves availability for stuff that people don't usually have the ability to reboot.

I believe there's a config option somewhere telling how many seconds to wait for a reset, but I don't remember what or where that is.
(Sorry to be so vague.)

[Iguleder]

I don't find these drivers useful enough for the average Puppy users. It's kinda weird that having them as built-in drivers causes an immediate reboot only on some machines.

[Keef]

@linuxcbon

This is what I started with:

Code: Select all

title DSLR
   uuid 9544e76c-4dc2-4023-97f5-bad2a907641d
   kernel /bzImage 

Run blkid in a terminal to get the uuid for your partition.

I also had to add acpi=off to the kernel line else I got the problems mentioned above.

Code: Select all

kernel (hdx,x)/bzImage 

also works (eg hd0,6) without needing the uuid line.

RAM usage is 25.4mb on my machine.

[linuxcbon]

ok it boots, but it took 5 minutes to copy the root file system to RAM. I used

Code: Select all

title DSLR FRUGAL
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel (hd0,0)/bzImage
  initrd (hd0,0)/initrd.xz

I think it takes time because I boot from ntfs , and looking kernel messages, many errors due to ntfs and fat fs, so kernel doesn't like it.

And then I am with the console, how do I start jwm ? It complain it doesnt find /dev/fb0 ,something like that...

[Iguleder]

First of all, what is initrd.xz? DSLR doesn't have or need that.

Second, booting from NTFS may work, but it's totally unsupported.

Finally, Your graphics card is unsupported - DSLR requires a framebuffer. What card is it?

Try to add vga=ask ("APPEND vga=ask") to your boot loader configuration.

[linuxcbon]

initrd.xz comes from dslr-10082014.iso
the card is hd6850.

[Iguleder]

I've just replaced Xfbdev with Xvesa in the 32-bit flavor. This should solve the problem.

[anikin]

Magnifique!
The fastest booting thing, I've ever seen.
I like the mount wizard, makes the desktop drive icons absolutely redundant.

edit

iguleder,

DSLR is fantastic, I will be keeping a watchful eye on its progress. However, I'm so impressed by its' mounting wizard - completely pissed off! Can you please make a "pedestrian" version, that will work in Debian and Puppy? I'm convinced, it will be to the benefit of this community. Here's a quick shot from the hip http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 381#798381

Thank you in advance for all your work and knowledge.

[Iguleder]

It's /bin/mount-wizard. IIRC, theoretically, if you kick the <wtitle> tag and change from "gtkdialog1" to "gtkdialog", it should work just fine.

EDIT: after reading the other topic - have you tried to modify the script?

[anikin]

Here's the modified one:

Code: Select all

root@debian:~# /bin/mount-wizard

** (gtkdialog:3271): ERROR **: gtkdialog: Error in line 1, near token 'string': syntax error

root@debian:~#

[Iguleder]

I remember I had to remove the <window> tag when I ported it to GtkDialog1. Maybe you should add it.

EDIT: tinyxserver's Xvesa doesn't seem to work. On one of my laptops there's a blinking line of random pixels at the bottom and on another, Xvesa runs at 648x480 with 4 colors or something. It's simply horrible - it's way too broken.

[linuxcbon]

I tried both 32 and 64 bits version, still no joy, my card is not going to X.

[Iguleder]

Try to add "vga=ask" to the kernel command-line ("APPEND vga=ask" under syslinux), then choose a resolution when it boots.

By the way - I just uploaded a new 32-bit snapshot. It's smaller by 4 MB, boots faster and doesn't copy the root file system to RAM if there's 256 MB of RAM or less, so it works even with ancient machines that have 64 MB of RAM.

[linuxcbon]

Try to add "vga=ask" to the kernel command-line ("APPEND vga=ask" under syslinux), then choose a resolution when it boots.

I did that and chose 1280x1024x32 and the screen turns to black, but the os still works because when typing a command like "reboot" or "shutdown" in the "dark" it works.

[anikin]

By the way - I just uploaded a new 32-bit snapshot. It's smaller by 4 MB, boots faster...

And I just gave it a run - it is incredibly fast. I started counting - 1, 2, 3 before I said 4, it came to the desktop. I'm on extlinux, which might have reduced the boot time by a fraction of a second. I can't bring up eth0, though. And I got stuck in the terminal, after doing "pkill X" - startx does nothing, how do I get back to the desktop?

[Iguleder]

xinit, not startx