Internet access while on holiday
In 24 hours from now I'll be in Melbourne, on the other side of Australia. Great place Melbourne, I'm looking forward to it. Melbourne is the capital of the State of Victoria, in the South-East corner of the country. It's the second biggest city.I have a pretty full plate of activities lined up, and don't know when I'll be able to get online. I will try to do so regularly though. I decided to prepare some Puppy 4.1.2 CDs ready-to-post, so that I can still process orders while on holiday. I have had two orders in the past week, so if that ordering rate holds out, fine, I'll take four CDs along in anticipation.
Probably take the camera too.
Today I'm going to install 4.1.2 onto the Classmate laptop, with all the Woof stuff on an external 2.5inch hard drive. So, I should be able to keep working on Woof, even if a bit more slowly.
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New electric car for California
How about this?:http://www.aptera.com/
Apparently they have setup a production facility, and news releases late 2007 and early 2008 stated production would start at the end of 2008, but the website has nothing to say about any release date. Nothing much about performance specs either. There is mention of 190Km range.
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Woof 0.0.2 available
I have taken a snapshot of my Woof development system. I built a live-CD iso file, 'woof-002.iso', and it is 99.78MB.The tarball 'woof-unleashed-002.tar.gz' is the Woof build environment. Expand it anywhere in a Linux partition. As lots of packages will be downloaded later, use a partition with 8 - 10GB free space. It will expand to directory 'woof-unleashed-002'.
The 'woof-unleashed-002.tag.gz' tarball is 23MB, but this will become considerably smaller in the future, perhaps about 10MB. The reason for this is that it contains a directory 'packages-templates' which is mostly full of auto-generated package template information, one-half to three-quarters of which is not needed.
I have written part of the '1download' script, the skeleton of it, that determines each package name to be downloaded and the path where each is located on the repos. If anyone wants to finish it, it should now be fairly straightforward, just find out what Ubuntu repos to access and how to use wget or gcurl to probe if a pkg exists on a repo and if so to download it.
This is a snapshot, it is not intended to show any degree of completion or polished presentation. The desktop theme is definitely a work-in-progress. It has all the same applications as Puppy4, but in many cases replaced by Ubuntu equivalents -- Gnumeric for example -- although I noticed that when I opened /usr/share/examples/spreadsheets/Sample.xls, the graph was missing.
Anyway, apart from the rough edges, this build has almost all Ubuntu packages underneath. It really is a "99MB Ubuntu". And of course, just as fast as you expect of Puppy -- after all, "a rose by any other name is still a rose".
To get it, go here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/test/woof-002/
And I must repeat again, please please do not report any bugs! I don't want to know. If you fix something, that's different!
This is a very early snapshot only, not intended for regular use. It is probably only going to be of interest to a few people.
The Ibiblio site also has the 'devx' file. This is also auto-generated by the Woof build scripts, and works fine. There are some mysterious things though -- for example 'new2dir' does not work, and perhaps the 'installwatch' utility that new2dir uses may have to be updated and recompiled -- don't know, just guessing.
One more little problem -- as the menu is incomplete, it doesn't have an entry for shutting down. You have to do CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE then type 'reboot' or 'poweroff'.
Note that 'hal' and 'dbus' are different from the Ubuntu packages. I recompiled the source, also substituted some startup scripts from Slackware. Actually, I could probably go back to the Ubuntu dbus and dbus-glib binary packages, but for hal I wasn't happy with the pre-compile config options and its dependencies.
Personally, I think that the most exciting thing about this Woof build system is that it should be fairly easy to do a rebuild when the next release of Ubuntu comes out. Or for Debian. Perhaps in a matter of days Woof-pup can be upgraded to be compatible with the latest Ubuntu/Debian release.
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For the XFCE fan...
I already mentioned this one. Grab the Woof live-CD snapshot, play with it, fix things.The panel is currently a bit sick. It works, but the menu is a mess and many icons are missing.
This is not something for users to tackle. You would need expertise with how to install and setup XFCE and how the XDG menu system works.
This is another suggestion for someone who finds Woof exciting and would like to help out.
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For the Debian fan...
Another suggestion for anyone interested in getting involved with Woof:Woof should be able to build from the Debian repos. This is particularly interesting considering that a new release of Debian is not far away.
It would involve examining the table in DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu and changing the package names in field-3 to suit Debian. Create a copy with the changes as 'DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-debian' -- my '2createpackages' and '3builddistro' scripts are supposed to recognise these files with different last name '-ubuntu' and '-debian' and offer a choice which one to use -- but the scripts would need to be checked as I haven't actually done it.
In most cases the Debian part-names are the same, for example, 'abiword_' but in some cases Ubuntu may have some version information like for example 'abiword0-1_' which may need to be changed.
You would need to obtain the package lists from the Debian repo. I downloaded the 'Packages' files from the Intrepid 'main' and 'universe' directories and renamed them as 'Packages-ubuntu-main-intrepid' and 'Packages-ubuntu-universe-intrepid'. You would have to do the same thing for Debian and name them as 'Packages-debian-main-<releasename>' and 'Packages-debian-universe-<releasename>'.
The '1download' script can be generalised to recognise these files, for Ubuntu and Debian.
Oh yeah, the way I have set it up, file DISTRO_SPECS has this in it:
DISTRO_VERSION="002"
DISTRO_NAME="Woof pup"
#prefix for puppy files... exs: woofr555.sfs, woofsave.2fs, woofz555.sfs
DISTRO_FILE_PREFIX="woof"
DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT="ubuntu"
That last one determines what distro Woof builds from. So, the scripts will look at DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-${DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT}
So, we can write '1download' to also look at 'Packages-${DISTRO_BINARY_COMPAT}-main-${DISTRO_COMPAT_VERSION}
...I plan to add DISTRO_COMPAT_VERSION=intrepid to the DISTRO_SPECS file -- in fact, will do that right now.
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Woof plans while I'm on holiday
I'm flying to Melbourne on 1st January, for a couple of weeks. As it turns out, I will have a pretty full schedule, and I'll be at places where I will have limited or no Internet access.I plan to take the Intel Classmate laptop, so that I can keep working on Woof, even if in a more limited way, however, this activity is likely to be severely constrained.
I won't be able to process any CD orders.
On the 31st of December I intend to upload a snapshot of the Woof build system, plus a snapshot live-CD. I don't want any bug reports, however, if you find a bug and fix it ...yes, then I'm interested!
There is one problem with the Woof build system: I have not yet written the '1download' script. The purpose of this script is to download all Ubuntu and PET packages needed by Woof, into 'packages-deb' and 'packages-pet' directories respectively. I will provide a file-list, so you can download manually, however, if someone wants to help out by writing the download script, please do.
There's a file, DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu, that has a table. The entries in the table look like this:
yes|a52dec||exe,dev,doc,nls
yes|abiword|abiword_,abiword-common_|exe,dev,doc,nls
I won't give a full explanation here, but the first one means to use the PET package with the name 'a52dec-<version>.pet' (as the 3rd field is empty) and the second line means to use the Ubuntu packages 'abiword_*.deb' and 'abiword-common_*.deb'.
There two other files, 'Packages-ubuntu-main-intrepid' and 'Packages-ubuntu-universe-intrepid' that can be looked-up to obtain the exact path and filename of the .deb package, then it can be downloaded from an Ubuntu repo.
Note that I found some Ubuntu repos are missing some packages, so the download script would have to be able to search more than one.
The Ubuntu and PET packages have to be downloaded into packages-deb and packages-pet without any subdirectories.
Note, entries in DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu are partial package names, so can have multiple matches:
yes|xserver_xorg|xserver-common_,xserver-xorg_,xserver-xorg-,-xserver-xorg-core-dbg_|exe,dev,doc,nls
In this example, 'xserver-xorg-*' is going to have a lot of matches, but I wanted to exclude one, so '-xserver-xorg-core-dbg_' is excluded. That is, the '-' prefix means to exclude this package even though it is earlier matched.
The above is a suggestion for someone with Bash coding skills and some Ubuntu or Debian familiarity who is interested in Woof and would like to help out. I'll be busy on other things for the next couple of weeks!
Ok, I have just created file lists for manual download. Very tedious though, as you would have to find each one individually and download it -- and there are 689 .deb packages! No man, you'll go mad. Better write the download script!
Regarding .pet packages, look at the 'pet_packages-5' directory on ibiblio first, failing that look in 'pet_packages-4'.
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Left-click to unmount
One thing that is perhaps a bit awkward in Puppy 4.1 is the need to right-click on a desktop drive icon and choose "Unmount" from the menu.I have now added a little yes-no dialog that pops up when there is a left-click on a drive icon. It only pops up if the partition is mounted.
The downside of this is that it always pops up, so if you click on the drive icon with the intention of launching another ROX window, you will get the little yes-no dialog first. However, it only pops up if the partition is unmountable, that is, not in use by Woof/Puppy.
The script that I have modified is /usr/local/bin/drive_all. If you want this modification in Puppy 4.x, just grab the script when I upload a Woof snapshot soon.
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Back to XFCE
I have gone in a loop, now Woof is back on XFCE.Yesterday I had a mammoth session of testing window managers, including Icewm. They all have something I don't like, in some cases many things.
I conducted an experiment: I built Woof with Openbox, OBconf and LXPanel, and the .iso file is 99.41MB.
I then built Woof with the XFCE panel, window manager, mcs-manager and menu (from XFdesktop), without extra panel plugins, and the .iso is 99.79MB.
Considering the advantages, I can live with the extra 0.38MB!
And of course it also means that the infrastructure is in place for the other XFCE applications.
XFCE is working nicely. Thanks to forum member 'gray' and his nice NOP Puppy, I got some good ideas for setting up XFCE.
However, I haven't quite got there yet -- the panel can't find all the icons. The menu is a mess, apart from only some icons being found. I tested a few extra plugins, and a couple seem to be missing their icons.
...so, a work-in-progress.
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Merry Christmas everyone!
The title says it all. For you guys who read this blog, have a great Christmas and New Year.6 Comments - Edit - Delete
A grumble about Ubuntu/Debian
<grumble>I have been noticing that some Ubuntu packages are quite old. I would like to give an example:
netpbm
Again, Ubuntu uses a very old version. The 'pnmtopng' utility is broken.
In this case, the problem was fixed by using more recent versions. We are talking about a really old version being used by Ubuntu, and I presume also Debian, which I think is weird -- makes me wonder that maybe they are neglecting some packages.
As I'm in grumble-mode right now, I'll complain about Openbox. I find the bug with SeaMonkey download dialogs to be most annoying. So much so, I might dump it, maybe use Pekwm that plinej has also prepared a pet package for.
LXPanel -- one thing I have noticed is that the nice grouping of items with separators in the second-level of the menu is no-more, as LXPanel just automatically scans the .desktop files.
I really don't know about this automatic scanning thing anyway, in terms of the CPU overhead.
</grumble>
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