Hi guys.

Sorry to present this cry for help, but I'm stuck.

Running the Version 2 LiveCD in pfix=ram mode, both the Dillo browser and the Seamonkey browser versions, in both root and default user modes, the problems are identical...

1. On clicking "Set country" button, it prompts for root password (unless logged in as root). Thereafter nothing happens.

2. On changing the time zone, no root password prompt is received, but the change time zone dialogue appears, and it is set to +8hrs as default. It refuses to save any change you make to another time zone after you close the window having thought you had changed it. It's still at +8 next time you open it.

3. Changing the date AND/OR time forward is fine. Changing backwards locks the computer, sometimes with HDD access light showing continuous running. From here on, no keyboard entry will enable reboot or shut down. The date and time under those circumstances has been changed in the CMOS and requires booting another OS (installed or live) to reset to correct day and time.

Yes, the md5 checksums were correct, and I burned both CDs in K3b in SuSE.

Grafpup 104 runs well on this machine, as does puppy 1.08 (I think) installed, its live equivalent (in pfix=ram), and puppy 2 up to 2.16

I wonder if there are supposed to be any squashfiles or usr_cram.fs in the host partition? There are some for 1.04 which perhaps are incompatible?


Two questions please...

1. What is the black square (looks like a small control panel of some sort) for, bottom right, immediately above the taskbar?

2. How do you change the desktop background?
The themes changing seems to me to be rather user-unfriendly, I preferred that in 104 actually.

Hopefully there's a quick-n-ezy solution

Richard in Adelaide
South Australia

Okay, I bit the bullet and created a grf_save.2fs file through the shut-down script.

Actually I created two, from two separate pfix=ram start-ups and they both have the same problems like the Live environment described above. I let the system choose the name of grf_save1.2fs for the second one.

They also have a weird missing icons situation on the main menu and its daughters. The icons are all missing, except for the bottom 4 - Exit, lxpanel, RUN and Help on the first level of menu. This appears to be able to be fixed by doing a menu refresh from the menu, but on every reboot the problem is back.

Whatever login is used the problem persists until lxpanel > Refresh Menu is clicked on, when it seems to fix the problem across all user logins.

The menu calls appear to work though, so perhaps its a missing (or misnamed) directory in the copying into the grf_save file? Or a script error on start-up?

Probably unrelated, launching dillo, I get a message "File Not Found" /usr/share/doc/home.htm .

I have these problems exactly plus a couple more.

When installing synaptics.pup the xorg.conf updated but it was not remembered at next boot. I had to change this manually several times before realising that all the xorg.conf* files had to be changed. One of them muxt have been overwriting the xorg.conf file during shutdown or boot.

I'll get to the other things in time, but for now -
You may be looking at the volume control, wmix. It's a small black box with a little knob in the corner, and a few other little controls in miniature. Click on the knob and drag up or down to change the volume.

There is also an even smaller little square around that area, which is just a side effect of the program which manages the cut buffers. That one is very small and empty. Not sure which one you were referring to.

Right click on any desktop icon and choose "Background" from the popup menu. You can more than likely figure everything else about the background changer out in five minutes or less, but holler if you need more on this.

This has a new structure, so no squashfiles will be present unless you add them or do a hard drive install, in which case the only one will be zdrv_200.sfs (which contains drivers).

The missing icons phenomenon is caused by a script I wrote, and will be fixed by the next release. Without going into too much detail, Lxpanel does not have an icon search path, so icons must all reside in a single location for the xdg menu system to work right. The generator is hard coded to write a config file with all the icons located in /tmp/icons. The current problem is caused when the icons don't all manage to get copied by the time the boot has finished. I have a few ideas about how it could be better.

The missing page is unrelated. I used the same Dillo package as that found in Puppy, which has a little "jumping off page". I guess I never got around to changing the default home page for Dillo. As an aside, I'm axing Dillo for the next release because the project is all but abandoned and still has no css support. I'm going to use hv3 instead, which is the tkhtml based browser and has excellent css rendering.

I'll have to look at the steps to set up a synaptics pad and make an "official" package for Grafpup. I've heard this particular complaint before.

Thanks Nathan, appreciated.

I was involved with the puppy 2.15ce project and the many many changes to thinking showed me just how a version upgrade is far more than just an humungous number of changes from slight to complicated, but in many areas is also a complete re-think, so I can relate to these things that one thought should have worked but didn't.

Didn't realise you were using xdg menus either, I hadn't looked that far below "street level"

Thanks again,

Richard.

A couple more...

Pmount won't mount and open USB IDE drives, although if you have started mut and mounted them there, pmount will then open them.

I can't find LinNetwork anywhere; is there another LAN browsing tool/file manager instead?

Only if you are logged in as root are you able to write to any mass storage that isn't the local file system; perhaps it would be useful to have a popup entry box to type the root password?

XLock desktop locking configuration doesn't appear to do anything, and there appears to not be a desktop or menu button to initiate desktop locking once configured.

And the Remote Desktop login appears to not work.


I've created a short tutorial on how to change desktop wallpaper here and if anyone wants to incorporate it into a help file, that's fine by me. I'll add other thoughts as I have them

I have put up a page of how grafpup looks with a range of other wallpapers too... very impressive imho. The link, is here on that site.

Richard in Adelaide.

I don't have that problem, and I worked very hard to make this work for all users. There must be someting about your hardware confusing the system. Could you run pmount in a terminal and send me the output please (after trying to mount a flash drive)?
It's not installed by default, but can be added later using the package manager. I usually fire up the ftp server if I need to transfer files from one computer to another.
The missing menu entry is my oversight, and I will correct. Xlock should work for rot, but perhaps not for nonroot users. Something which will have to be investigated and worked on.
This application was written by Rarsa on the puppy forum at http://murga-linux.com/puppy/. I would suggest all queries about it go to Rarsa, since it is written in tcl/gnocle and I do not know the code.

Nathan

Nathan,

Thank you very much for your detailed reply. I hope this is helpful in return.

It is actually not a flash drive, but a miniature 40Gb portable IDE HDD of the type that fits inside a laptop, mounted in an aluminium case, and connects to two USB ports for power and data. However here are the results you are looking for, taken on two machines, identified by their motherboards, as the case is irrelevant. If you'd like me to try on perhaps 3 other computers of various ages, I can, and post the console output for you...

Intel i440BX-W977-2A69KM4GC-00
Intel PIII-MMX 550MHz 256M 100MHz bus

User - it would not mount
Root - it mounted
MSI KM266-8235-6A6LVM4DC-00
AMD AthlonXP 1150MHz 512M 133MHz bus

User - it would not mount
Root - it mounted
I used the wrong name, sorry, but you knew what I meant

It is, of course, LinNeighborhood.

I downloaded the zipped file and it unzipped into a zillion parts unfortunately. I don't know what to do with them all, being spoiled with dotpups, dotpets, CNR, pbis, etc.

Help!!!!


I think I used the wrong terminology, or got confused. I think what is called Remote Desktop in SuSE and PC-BSD is actually a variant of VNC, so I imagine if I go and look for the dotpet of TightVNC client and TightVNC Server, I should be cooking with gas. Remote Desktop appears to be different after having a close look at the various puppies I've downloaded.

Do the menu entries get put in the right place in the XDG menus if you use petget or pupget or whatever?

Thanks again for your help.

Richard
Adelaide

Okay, next step, partly referred to in another thread.

I decided to install this distro to a small partition in a small HDD. Previously I had put four seperate puppy 2.02's on to a 10Gb HDD just for the heck of it, and customised the looks of each differently, to justify the effort

I did one install there after creating four identical partitions, then used Norton Ghost which works well on ext2 and ext3 partitions, to effectively copy-paste the same .gho file into the other three partitions. Copy-pasting sections of the grub config file made easy booting to each of the four distributions.

Doing the same sort of thing here, I grabbed an otherwise useless 6Gb HDD from an old IBM Aptiva I since rebuilt, and running grafpup in pfix=ram I deleted the exiting FAT32 partition and created two ext3 partitions, using GParted.

Using the menu click-able installer in grafpup I chose hda1 and installed it, and then ran grub's installer. Making sure I scrolled down to see all the options, I completed that and rebooted, greeted by the grub menu.

Unfortunately grub wrote the boot instructions for hda2 (which was an empty ext3 partition), so a reboot from the CD and a copy-paste section of /boot/grub/menu.lst at the top of the selection menu, changing references to hd0,1 to hd0,0 and hda2 to hda1.

This gives the opportunity to put puppy into the 2nd partition without having to install or configure a boot loader for it

Like mentioned in another thread about running grafpup in a VirtualBox, I had to do the exact same directory surgery because the script on my copy also failed to create a home directory and its contents.

I was then able to create two users without a problem.

Nathan, I have a suggestion about the User Manager though. Can you change the text on the "Cancel" button to read "Cancel/Finish"? Or maybe add a second button that does the same thing but called "Finish"? It might be easier for dumbos like me to follow, lol.

So far, it seems very nice.

Thank you Nathan


Edit: Postscript
There is a console statement "session not saved" as one exits from the GUI of the installed grafpup before it actually shuts down. Not quite sure what this means.


Edit: 2nd Postscript
The beautiful light blue splash screen (that has the nice graphics on it) that sits above the scrolling text at startup on the LiveCD has gone when you do an install. I wonder if this is just a question of copy and paste in the directory structure, maybe while running in LiveCD mode?

I can experiment with this if it is the case. Please let me know.

And maybe try some creative work on and for the puppy 2.15ce which is now installed and working in hda2. That really needs such a thingy imho.


Unrelated to the above, I think it would be lovely to create a VMware appliance from this, but I have absolutely no idea how to go about that.


Richard
Adelaide

Yep, I've seen this too on a CF drive install. It would be nice to have the splash screen back!

Ah, the splash does go away. You can add it back by specifying the framebuffer resolution at the boot prompt (either added to your grub line or in the case of a flash install syslinux). What is happening is that you are getting the default plain text Linux console. The resolution which fits it in there nicely is 640x480, so the line would be "vga=785" or "vga=0x311". You could use a higher resolution if you want, but then the graphic will be smaller and displaced to the left.

You may also want to specify "loglevel=3" to get rid of some of the extra boot messages.

Nathan

Works nicely, thanks.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to access that graphic in any way? As I said it is a beautiful one, and it would be nice to offer it to Scotgold to create a one-inch square case badge from.

As I'm dual booting with Puppy 2.15CE, it would be nice to know how to add a similar graphic (which I'm working on slowly) to its boot, if you could give me a pointer

Where do you put that?

I'm still looking for a dotpup or dotpet or whatever of LinNeighborhood.

And have created some help files on the HDD installer, changing passwords, adding and deleting users, and changing desktop wallpaper. I can point to a temporary address if interested.

Richard in Adelaide.

Richard - I'm not in Grafpup at the moment, so I can't check that it works, but I looked, and it's in the Grafpup.org packages directory, so you should be able to just install LinNeighbourhood with the gpkgtool package manager. If that isn't working for some reason you could always try installing the package from Puppy.

I think you might actually have to recompile the kernel to add the splash screen to Puppy. I'll have to check out this famoush splash screen now I've heard of it

Correct, the splash screen is compiled into the kernel. However, when I am able to access the drive I have the original image on I'll post it somewhere. Right now that whole computer is sitting in a storage unit.

Nathan