Inspired By Something that Makes Sense here's F96-CE_5-alpha3

[rockedge]

I was feeling down, not worthy of the lofty positions in rarefied atmosphere some Developers are accustomed too. So I did the unthinkable and skirted automation, by building mostly manually due to fears of total deletion by remaster scripts that have occurred recently, an updated woof-CE generated F96-CE_5-alpha3.

This is the newest Fossapup64 from woof-CE but also with some newer version packages supplied here on the forum. Not quite F96-CE_4 in shape or form but does offer a very fast responsive system.

Some of the experimentation has led to the inclusion of gtk3 and gtk2 so there maybe some odd looking GUI's when a program is looking for gtkdialog gtk2 but finds gtkdialog gtk3 because some conversion coding is not happened yet. I do this as I find them and usually is just a change to gtk2dialog which points to gtkdialog-gtk2 compiled against gtk2. This is an attempt to have gtk3 but still use some gtk2 utilities because those work well.

Uses the conk-gtk with updates for Lua scripting
Outfitted with @ozsouth's real time low latency kernel 6.6.28-lolat

If interested any tests and response will be highly appreciated but remember this is an ALPHA and works like one.

Download F96-CE_5-alpha3
SHA1-MD5-.txt

[rockedge]

F96-CE_5-alpha3 is non-usrmerge, using AUFS just as Fossapup64 is. Did experiment with the Focal Fossa package usrmerge converter but dropped that angle for the moment due to warning messages.

Not really sure what the effects will be on this Puppy Linux using the program which apparently will convert Foscal Fossa packages into usrmerge style structure as a package is installed. This is not yet in order so not included.

Equipped with the apt file manager!! Give it a try! Also has the Synaptic Package Manager included. There are problems with pkg on the command line and the PPM may or may not work correctly. Testing will tell. And when apt file management works PPM and pkg can (will) be dropped

Uses pulseaudio and connman network tools.

Considering VLC as the included audio program.

[Jasper]

Posting from this offering ........... well done @rockedge

Two applications did not start up for me:

Inkscape
Redshift

You might want to include an Asian font for some of the games only for display purposes. Not needed for playing.

Synaptic works as well as using Apt via the command line

Had to select my Audio Output device for playback

[mikeslr]

Redshift isn't needed. Among radky's creations is Desktop Display Control.

DisplayControl.png (44.33 KiB) Viewed 2828 times

And I'd recommend Lazpaint as an alternative to Inkscape. https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 11#p108311. Lazpaint has run from every Puppy I've tried. It can be deployed to /opt.

[dimkr]

Did experiment with the Focal Fossa package usrmerge converter but dropped that angle for the moment due to warning messages.

Yes, it won't work for various reasons. Better set USR_SYMLINKS=yes in _00build.conf before 2createpackages and let the entire build run with the file system layout converted.

[Puppy]

Considering VLC as the included audio program.

Yes please update to latest version, I always use vlc for videos & audio in F96-CE_4
Maybe OscarTalks can create vlc-3.0.20 .pet for F96-CE_5 like he did for BookwormPup
His vlc-3.0.18-x86_64-fossa.pet works very well in F96-CE_4

[Clarity]

A lot of real-time system behavior is reported via BTOP if available and added during GIT builds. Also, TLDR is welcomed for easy command use answers, again, if available during builds.

Results of booting and operations in a VM posted here

F96 v5a3.jpg (32.34 KiB) Viewed 2628 times

.

This is merely a comment to be helpful. If it make sense, and matches your vision...ONLY!
I know the propensity to want to drag along our past, but, maybe with this distro, we move to GTK3 which is already replaced with GTK4 in newer distros. The work effort should be only GTK3 reducing your toil and allowing a focus. The past Fossa releases and remasters from 2020 cover the old GTK2 for you. So, this release should be GTK3 as many/most mainstream apps have already moved to GTK3 and beyond.

I ran into this problem in screening associated with your effort.

ScreenShot.jpg (35.97 KiB) Viewed 2622 times

[Clarity]

Info on booting bare-metal shown in "Results" from above.

During boot the F96-5 is reporting issues when attempting sessions use (my sessions are in /Sessions on Persistence drive)

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e2fsck 1.46.2
/dev/sdb3 has unsupported feature(s): FEATURE_C12
e2fsck: Get a newer versions of e2fsck
Persistence: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors **********

Hope this is helpful

[ozsouth]

@Clarity - this post may be useful re- newer e2fsck: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1497523 ... -of-e2fsck

[Clarity]

Thanks @ozsouth

After reading your find, this now has me questioning what exactly is the 'true' problem. I have sessions on the Persistence that dates back to Feb,2023 with sessions from Fossa, BKW, Fatdog, DevaumPUP, VoidPUP, KLs etc.

Now, I am unsure how to proceed while protecting the integrity of the sessions and information on disk and in the Sessions folder. Further that advice does not set well with me that a newer FS utility somehow will affect overall distro operations.

Thanks, again

Curious

[Clarity]

OK, on this test PC, I have found that I have overlooked this message in the past. It also appears when booting BookwormPUP64 v10.0.6. I'll need to check the other distros that have booted and saved their sessions on this rig.

Its a old Xeon with 2 80GB SCSI HDDs setup back in the day when Windows was used on this platform. Since acquiring this, I have used the Ventoy ISO to convert the 2nd drive of use in booting-testing forum distros having the ISOs in addition to it having a Persistence partition dedicated to Sessions. I had instructed Ventoy to create the disk for non-secure-boot and is MSDOS. The Persistence partition is GParted formatted as an EXT4 with its journaling active.

At boot, the PUPs are trying to run e2fsck on the Persistence partition. Upon abandoning the check, posting the message shown, it continue on capturing its session and proceeding to desktop.

These PUPs are using older GRUB2 (v2.02 and v2.04) and E2FSCK (v1.46).

Again, I'll need to check the other forum distros that have been used on this platform.

[vtpup]

I can't get the ISO to boot off of a thumbdrive. Tried stickpup, f2stickpup and

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# dd bs=4M if=~/Downloads/ISOs/F96-CE_5-alpha3.iso of=/dev/sda status=progress oflag=sync

It always jumps to main drive Grub and my normal boot screen.

Downloaded twice.

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# sha1sum F96-CE_5-alpha3.iso
79ff5840991aeb8cb6669dd2345eb7da0866cdb1  F96-CE_5-alpha3.iso

Checked Bios boot order (knew it was good anyway as I frequently boot from stick).
Stick: I just used this same stick to boot Linux Mint. Then Gparted back to a plain vanilla FAT32 single partition (not that it should be necessary since all of the installers rewrite anyway. dd should completely re-image the stick, yes?)

I can't figure it out.

[vtpup]

Finally got ti to work after Gparted again, rewriting partition table, formatting to FAT32, then using stickpup in F96CE v4 to write the ISO to stick.

Rebooting into v5 alpha3, unfortunately seeing all of the old problems on this new laptop (listed in sig) :

no touchpad function (have to use a USB Mouse)
no internet (conman doesn't see this hardware's Wifi 6 Intel AX211 wirreless wifi portion, though oddly it does see the Bluetooth section of the card)
no sound (volume control reports failure of pulseaudio server)
Intel Iris xe raphics: Mesa problem (Using Wine 9.3 portable, Google SketchUp 8 produces black (blank) screen when click dragging to select an object.)
Solution probably requires Intel MESA v. 22.x or later)

Thoughts:
Though the 6.8 lolat kernel version seems late enough (Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon edge has a 6.5 kernel and everything above works except speakers) I'm guessing the kernel is missing some things and/or firmware is also missing to support this laptop. FWIW this particular laptop was chosen with all Intel standard components to try to make it as Linux compatible as possible, but it is very recent.

[ozsouth]

@vtpup - would be good to know what drivers you need, so would you please boot up Mint & in a terminal run:
lsmod > /mintmods.txt

& attach that file here.

[vtpup]

Thanks ozsouth.
From the live install ISO on thumbdrive:

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mint@mint:~$ lsmod > /mintmods.txt
bash: /mintmods.txt: Permission denied
mint@mint:~$ sudo lsmod > /mintmods.txt
bash: /mintmods.txt: Permission denied
mint@mint:~$ su
Password: 
su: Authentication failure

so irritating.....

So I just lsmoded and copied the screen output into a text file -- attached.

[vtpup]

Also:

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mint@mint:~$ glxinfo | grep Mesa
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
    Device: Mesa Intel(R) Graphics (RPL-P) (0xa7a0)
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) Graphics (RPL-P)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1
OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1

And for touchpad, there is no 70-synaptics.conf in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d , instead, there is 40-libinput.conf. And nothing in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d.

libinput seems to be the touchpad method of choice. I've found in my own experiments in my modified F96-,CE v4 that 70-synaptics.conf is problematic, so I've defeated it and use libinput, which has been entirely satisfactory.

Method of defeating synaptics: make a symlink to 40-libinput.conf in etc/X11/xorg.conf.d . This takes precedence over what's in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

[ozsouth]

@vtpup - WOW! - I'm used to seeing around 40 lines in lsmod - you have 194! Dozens of those are drivers I've never seen. I could try to incorporate them into a kernel, but it's going to take ages to sift them. Therein lies the challenge for kernel compilers. Seriously, have to say I think at this stage, with that new PC, you're better off with Mint. This is a case where Puppy's minimalism lets you down. Maybe F96CE5 will be a better fit though, with some tweaks like the above.

[vtpup]

Well ozsouth, nope to Mint, it's Puppy for me til I croak. I used Ubuntu back in the Gibbon days hated it and then found Puppy 3 series, and never looked back. To me Mint/Ubuntu is like driving a school bus when you're used to DIY dune buggy.

Presently F96-CE v4 with the tweaks I've made does everything I need on this laptop with the exception of speaker sound (not really needed) and the Wine/Sketchup graphics problem. That is worked-around by running Win7 in quemu. It would be nice not to have to do that, but certainly not a big enough hassle to force me to jump ship out of Puppy onto Mint.

My thought is that if the hope is that the 6.8x lolat kernel will make v5 more suitable for a modern computer than v4's, sorry I don't think it's going to do that. It might be a step backwards that way. And the 6.1.8 kernel I'm using now actually provides more support.

I doubt whether a huge number of those Mint kernel modules are actually necessary just to make a touchpad, stock Intel graphics and 2 year old intel wifi work. Most are support for Mint's bloated gui apps.

[ozsouth]

@vtpup - ok, would you post a copy of the 6.1.8 DOTconfig please? (hopefully, is under /boot, as config-...). Then I can try to make you a later kernel based on that. Perhaps pm it to me, as it might be a bit off topic here.

[bigpup]

Using a very new Linux kernel is half the needed support for very new hardware.

The firmware provided to work with it needs to also be the newest firmware package.

Get the latest from here:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... rmware.git

I assume this firmware package is what is turned into the fdrv.sfs.

[Jasper]

I have just downloaded the zipped up firmware file, be warned it is 539mb in size.

[ozsouth]

@Jasper - if you make it an fdrv .sfs, could compress to about 180mb.

[Jasper]

@ozsouth

I did use PackIt to make a SFS using Zstd and Xz, both were approximately 400+ mb

I used the highest settings (or so I believe).

I simply copy over the contents to an existing fdrv ......... maybe I should have removed surplus contents eg docs ?

[ozsouth]

@Jasper - for a generic fdrv, only /lib/firmware should exist (/usr/lib/firmware if usrmerge), however, bookwormpup64's fdrv also has microcode included.

[vtpup]

PM sent, oz. and thanks.

[rahulboora]

I would like to request to please update the python to latest version currently in alpha its 3.8 please update it to latest 3.11 or higher.