Ecopup 0.7.3.2 - Beta release now with AUTOMATED INSTALLER!

[ecomoney]

Ecopup 0.7.3.2 – beta

This is a smallish update on the previous version....with one major new feature.

The Smallish updates....

- Browser and Frostwire download locations fixed
- It now has the keyboard map fixed for Supertux
- Wine 0.9.17 included (doesnt run a lot! Pokerstars does work though)
- Updated Transmission (which doesnt crash after long periods)
- Automatic recognition of file types downloaded from FF and in ROX
- Firefox updated to 2.0.0.20 final
- Skype updated to version 2.0

The big feature...

It has been mentioned that Ecopup is tricky to install...(with major thanks to Rcrsn51), this version now has an AUTOMATED INSTALLER!

When you first burn the CD and boot, it will give you what is basically Puppy 2.15ce, with an installer icon...



Clicking on the install icon in the bottom right of the screen brings up a confirmation screen..which I hope pulls no punches..



Clicking the "Proceed" button starts the automated installer. This formats the computers hard disk, installs the GRUB bootloader and the puppy 2.15ce files, as well as unzipping a custom boot menu and the eco_save.2fs file (Ecopups pup_save.2fs).



The confirmation dialog is not quite accurate...as a last minute idea, the installer also installs the latest Standard Puppy Linux 4.2.1 also!. Once the installer is complete, it pops out the CDROM and its time to reboot. One last step if you wish is to save a eco_save-[yourname].2fs for if you would like a standard puppy 2.15ce install as well.

The whole process takes about Seven Minutes from start to finish. This means that old computers can be refurbished very quickly, by people with very little training...making it even more economically viable to do so.

For more advanced users, its still possible to install this just by unzipping the ecopup.zip file onto root of the computers hard drive, and booting from the CD. This can be done on a windows or a Linux computer. This is particularly handy if called to a Windows computer as it means ecopup can be installed without reformatting their hard drive/losing data. The CD can be left with the client to enable them to dual boot between Ecopup and Windows.

Heres more about Ecopup....

The main wallpaper screen.

The icons are now arranged in groups (headings down the right hand side) for quicker and easier identification on an not-used-before computer, i.e. at a cybercafe.

heavily customised firefox

The 'Looks Familiar' theme allows new firefox users to feel comfortable. It comes with a wides selction of pre-defined bookmarks in various catagories, designed to assist low income households

Various Applications

AMSN messenger, Abiword, XMMS and Frodo - a Commodore 64 Emulator

Its been getting on for a year since we've posted in earnest on here, and what a year it has been. The economic downturn has meant an large upturn in business for us.

The cybercafe as a testing station has been lost to us, after the local Adult Education Authority offered large sums to the its base the Riddings Drop-in Centre for holding its courses there, on the proviso they install heavily subsidised XP/M$ office applications. Obviously after the time and effort spent for free by us this soured our relationship somewhat, but from what we have heard the PIII 600's are practically unusable and ridden with virii. This is a shame as it was as important a resource for local community as it was for the development of our in-house puppylinux-based OS – Ecopup.

Our domestic, educational and home markets have really opened up over the last year, providing us finally with some sort of income. We install ecopup on two to three computers a week in peoples homes, and have recently been in receipt of another batch of 37 retired school computers. We've been selling these through the local newspaper (and word of mouth) and have since sold all of them for between £30 and £80 each as full systems.

We've retained our existing clients at the Priory Preschool, the Westcliffe Drop-In and elsewhere. They've been providing us with valuable feedback which we've ploughed back into this latest release. Mostly it is our home customers who have provided the majority of the suggestions/inspiration for the new features in this release.

Features in this release

Standard puppy, while being technically superb in concept, lacks so much in its packaging and presentation. We are testing puppy on “linux newbs

[Sage]

Fascinating - I'll read in more detail later. Amazing how the devil has muscled in on the netbook scene and brainwashed regular punters into believing they need XP - pile of BS, of course. Otherwise I agree with most things you say. BK may be a genius but an undisciplined one! To be successful in the long term, one needs stamina, broad shoulders and some substantial parallel support on a daily basis. Patrick Volkerding is a remarkable man indeed.

Your link is giving me a 403, Forbidden at present. Want to unhook it, please?

[ecomoney]

Unhooked...I look forward to hearing your feedback again sage.

[Artie]

I'm downloading it right now, is there an md5sum available?

Artie

[Lobster]

Hi Robert good to hear from you and your projects.

Some important points about expectation.
Please keep involved with Puppy were your obvious enthusiasm and efforts are an inspiration to many of us

[ecomoney]

md5Sum

8cefd87856cda99df21f84c2426ae330 ecopup0.7.3.2-alpha.iso

Thank you Lobster for your kind words. Although work has gone pretty well, its been a pretty turbulent time, and I was a little disappointed (with myself) about the 2.14r CE project. Ive put those demons to rest now.

[Sage]

Your server must be nearly melted it took so long to d/l!
Although it gives a 701Mb .iso in 'doze, it burns OK to a std. 700Mb CD - something to do with the crazy way of calculating bytes, I guess.
Yes, there have been a lot of changes up to 4.1.2.
- localisation is limited to AUS or US. I guess every Brit hankers after being in the former; some reluctantly settle for the later, but neither if they're at home & broke.
- MC not working, cf. separate thread about this, presently.
- no Opera. Once you remove Seamickey, many problems will disappear. There are solutions to all the issues raised about Opera setup, eg Flash, etc. Most have been discussed here. Worth the extra effort to get it set up.
- boot-up k/b selector hasn't been corrected by any developer yet; duplicate entry for US. On reflection, take out both, at least until 28th Jan!
- overlapping icons top right @ 800x600 Xorg
- Hardinfo is much better than Xproc, although I prefer SysStats as per DSL
- there are significant advantages to swapping to Xfce (cf. NOP) or LXDE (U.P. by wow) for neophytes. The additional overheads can be recovered by economies elsewhere, maybe deletion SM alone? Claws recommended, too.
- never liked BK's games selection. The ancient tuxpuck has to be small? but tuxracer is a sine qua non if you want to hook incomers!
- Fotox?
Hope this helps for starters.

MC & HNY.

[smartboyathome]

I hope you got permission from Opera to be distributing it. Opera is closed source, and their license does not permit distributing it other than when you get permission from you. Just thought I would let you know.

Other than that, it looks like a very good release. I have an old laptop which I have been running puppy on, but was wondering how it was with PCMCIA cards. I have only tried Puppy 4 on it, and it seems to run fine. Yours may run just as well on it.

[richard.a]

Merry Christmas guys... and Robert, sorry to hear about the typical bureaucratic decision-making

totally off topic... I have a Toshiba laptop given me... and the only puppy I've been able to get work on this T1800 was the MacPup 411F... nothing earlier (I tried 215ce, and back as far as 202), which is strange. Plenty of other distros work. The 411F is far far faster than not just the native XP but everything else of course, in both HDD type 2 install and live CD.


Toshiba T1800 Celeron 896 2x128Mb=256Mb

XP SP2 from Grub to desktop loaded
Startup 78secs
Shutdown 30secs

MacPup 411F from Grub to desktop loaded
Startup 30secs
Shutdown 10secs




Take care folks,

Richard

[cthisbear]

You 2 Lurkalots ...........ecomoney and richard.a .

Seasons greetings to you both.
I hope that you both have a brighter and happier 2009.

Chris.

[richard.a]

lol Chris.... and thanks.

Happy Boxing Day all,


Remembering ecomoney's request to write to the lady in the office at the cybercafe, I just sent this email... and have not received a bounce, so I guess she is still in a job...


Hi Jean,

And a merry Christmas to you, albeit a bit late as it is now Boxing Day

You may remember me from my previous email.

Just a note to say how sorry I felt on hearing about the huge costs that your computer room is now going to eat up from the authority's change in funds allocation.

I hope that it doesn't mean the cessation of the underprivileged community-associated projects, because that would be a crying shame that the "have-nots" will miss out next year as a result of succesful lobbying by those with an expensive product and very high ongoing maintenance costs, to say nothing of hopefully your own job not being in jeopardy as well.

Hope you enjoy your holiday break, and return to work revived and invigorated, notwithstanding the financial crisis all over the world. Their decision to take this backwards and costly step could not have come at a worse time, I'm afraid.

Most sincerely,

Richard Ashton.


Now off topic,

Previous email sent August 2007...

Hello Jean,

I've been reading about your cybercafe from about a dozen different web addresses and finally discovered Robert's descriptive thread on the PuppyLinux forum - which I hadn't read until tonight!

I'm really impressed with the way it has been set up using open source software.

I used to use Microsoft Windows, and was a professional designer of electrical control systems among other things, and in about 1992 added instructing old draughtsmen in how to convert to computerised "CAD" because they felt uncomfortable with junior employees teaching them.

Since my retirement I've been involved in returning time and effort to the industry that has paid me handsomely for using what I've picked up in user support the last 10 years or so of my working life. I shall be 73 in January 2008.

Working with people in my retirement where I don't have to waste my time with fixing unfixable (in the long term) problems like virii and trojans through Linux, I thought I'd give you some encouragement with your fantastic venture if you don't mind

My background with open source software is varied... I've been involved with testing BSD Unix for a year or so, testing a commercial Linux over the previous 3 years, and now Puppy Linux for about a year, including the 2.15 Community Edition you are using. A brand new one is just starting, that we are excited about.

Some of my efforts with puppy have been seeing how fast I can run it on time expired old MS Windows computers! It's been a fascinating experience, because my suspicions that we are dumping perfectly good hardware into landfill have shown that I was right! I like being proved "right", as I'm sure most of us do <joke>

Sure there are a few differences from Microsoft Windows - but there are actually more differences between Windows 2000, WindowsXP, and WindowsVista, if we look at them in detail!

Please feel free to contact any of us if you have ANY problems, and we'll find a suitable solution - in my case it could be overnight as I'm in Australia. You can use my phone number at the bottom of this email if you need to, but just check the time difference <grin> or you'll end up on my answering machine!

That's one of the joys of Open Source Software - contributors are literally all over the world!

Enjoy your day, Joan. I'm headed for bed here, it's 10.30pm in Adelaide (the capital of South Australia) - and we are 9-1/2 hours ahead of GMT here, your time is 2.00pm.

If you are into IRC chatting, I'm involved in the running of several chat channels on undernet.org where I use the nickname of eagle`s

God bless you

Richard


--------------

Richard Ashton

Retired PC & CAD Consultant
Linux operating system beta tester
Sound and video recording
Chatroom and website management
On-line technical and personal assistance

08 8396 0440 - 0412 795 400 (within Australia)
+618 8396 0440 - +61 412 795 400 (outside Australia)
skype (by arrangement) - eagles-lair

[ttuuxxx]

I have a Toshiba laptop given me... and the only puppy I've been able to get work on this T1800 was the MacPup 411F...
Take care folks,
Richard

Hi richard There is a toshiba older laptop fix
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... ch&id=8940

basically you would have to load a puppy cd on a desktop or another pc that works, install the program and remaster the cd with the fix included, then take the cd and try it on your non booting toshiba laptop, the difference with macpup 411f is that Barry I think included the fix, The original page that it came from is http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 522#188522
and the user "recycler" uses it all the time.
ttuuxxx

[ttuuxxx]

Ecopup 0.7.3 – (Phoenix?)

If you need a hand with anything I could do, I'm here, no problems.
I don't use 2.15 anymore but if you had some icewm themes that you wanted changed, or any part of icewm, just let me know.
Your networking issues can be sorted out easly just talk to tempestuous I think there is a general upgrade for that version.
I could reword text in scripts also.
well maybe some point forms of what you would like done and maybe images. I'm sure a few of us are willing to help.
ttuuxxx

[ecomoney]

Thanks for your help everyone, Jean always did take a lot of pursading, Im actually trying to get more local cybercafes involved. I recently did a presentation to one, but unfortunately the type of Dell machine that was there didint seem to want to run ANY linux. I went through a whole roll of bubble wrap that night

Ecopup represents several years worth of usability research into the "linux newbs" mentioned in Puppys Goals. Although it meets a great many of its other goals, on the point of being "extremely friendly to linux newbs" it drops some complete howlers. These are things like

- not autoconnecting via ethernet when starting up
- being set to single, not double click
- the wording of the wizards and setup scripts being overly "techie"
- being grey and old looking.

Many points have thankfully been addressed in puppy 4 i.e. it does something now when the user plugs in a pendrive or a cd/dvd (though not really enough) and it finally doesnt revert to a black screen full of code if not powered off properly (having to type "xwin").

What I would really like ecopup to be used as, is a base of ideas that are implemented in future editions of the mainstream puppy linux.

Tuxx, thank you for your offer of assistance. Is there a way to easily get icewm to automatically change the desktop wallpaper when the theme is changed?

Puppy 2.15ce is getting rather dated now, and we are beginning to see more and more devices that arnt supported by the kernel. We would like future versions to be based on the newest kernel (we will be watching the development of the 4.2 community edition very carefully, and adding our input when we can).

[ecomoney]

Some early bugs have been identified by some of the testing crew here in scunthorpe. We are offering reduced rate support in return for testing alpha/beta software.

Bugs so far

Critical - Restore function in the shutdown menu will delete the eco_save.2fs, and not restore a backup if one has not already been created!

Moderate - Firefox download folder is still set to the wallpapers folder, not to /mnt/home/downloads.

Moderate - Flash player needs depreciateing, as latest version keeps crashing.is resource hog.

Moderate - Final firefox 2 update shoud be applied. firefox update was causing some people to lose profile information.

[richard.a]

Robert, I have downloaded the ISO but as yet haven't had the time do anything about it.

I'm looking at seeing if I can offer a mirror download for you but nothing set up as yet.

There is a suggestion I'd like to make for better compatibility. Desktop icon size on MS Windows has always been 32px x 32px.

I've created a directory of 32x32 and 24x24 for use with older laptops, and I'm wondering if when I get yours up and running if you'd like me to create a 32x32 icon directory for your desktop icons, and send it to you?

Get back to you later as I'm headed for bed right now, and I'm a bit busy for the next week or so. I should also take a further look at the menu idea we were discussing some months ago. Nobody ever switches window managers in the environments you and I talk about, so editing the IceWM menu should be straightforward.


Enjoy

Richard

[jamalexa]

While all this talk of installers was going on, our Lead Developer, (a very talented programmer from Australia) has been working on something that I think is a bit of a first for any linux distro (correct me if Im wrong). This is what will happen when the next ecopup cd is inserted into a running windows machine (95,98,98se,me,2000,NT,xp and Vista).

http://ecomoney.eu/ecopup/screenshots/i ... review.avi

This is still testing, and already weve altered the final screen to give instructions. Any more suggestions would be very helpful.

I was curious what happened to the planned installer?

[ecomoney]

Hi jamalexa - Im afraid we didnt posess the resources to keep gekko on long enough to finish it. We do have the origional files to update, but its been that long since Ive programmed windows to do anything with them (I used to be a professional VB/Access programmer....before I saw the light). They are stored on an old hard disk somewhere and I will upload them...once I have a perminant desktop development computer again....I keep selling them

Richard...yes I didint realise about the icon size but do now you mention it. A change of icon size would necessitate a change of default wallpaper (as it has the catagory stripes). Many of our users have problems with their eyesight so I think the bigger icons would suit them. Generally speaking as long as customers see the "teletubby" wallpaper and the blue and green theme then theyve got what they expect and pay up

Something that would be useful for you to do is if you would go through the menu listings in /root/.icewm/menu and organise them a bit better. One of the big problems for "linux newbs" is knowing which package does what. I think that the form of [purpose] - [function] would be the most easily understood. for example

[Addressbook - Seamonker]
[FTP Server - BetaFTP]
..etc etc

The multimedia menu is particularly large and could do with some subdivisions.

Ive done a quick and nasty update to the restore function for the next version, hopefully this will eliminate the bug where the eco_save.2fs file is deleted before it is discovered there is no backup to restore from!!!!

Code: Select all

### Restore eco_save.2fs file
### 2008 - Rob Simpson/Ecomoney Systems

# Check to see if there is something to restore from
if [ -f /initrd/mnt/dev_save/ecopup.zip]
  then
    gxmessage "Restore is about to start - DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS!!!! Computer will restart when complete"
    # File exists, do the restore procedure
    rm /initrd/mnt/dev_save/eco_save.2fs
    unzip /initrd/mnt/dev_save/ecopup.zip 
fi
reboot

[ttuuxxx]

Since your pup is so large maybe include gnome, then you could have the full XP menu you can get the menu from-->
http://www.gtk-apps.org/content/show.ph ... tent=93807


ttuuxxx

[ecomoney]

Supurb! But does this really require all of the gnome libraries to work? It is apparently a gtk/python script, could it be got working in XFCE? I for one would be very interested in getting it going.

The trick is here is to get something saleable out of an old computer that redmund have decided in their wisdom to force users to replace, thus denying them a sale! If we give what the customers expect (i.e. a menu like this) without all the virus/slowdown hassles they are going to totally go for it.