EasyOS Kirkstone-series version 5.7

[BarryK]

EasyOS 5.7 released, February 3, 2024
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 67#p110867

EasyOS 5.6.7 released, January 31, 2014
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 61#p110661

EasyOS 5.6.6 released, January 30, 2024
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 36#p110536

EasyOS 5.6.5 released, December 6, 2023
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 45#p105245

EasyOS 5.6.4 released, November 27, 2023
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 56#p104456

EasyOS 5.6.3 released, November 16, 2023
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 36#p103636

Easy 5.6.2 released, November 12, 2023
Announcement:
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 91#p103191

Easy 5.6.1
Easy 5.6.1 has been released. However, for most people, don't bother. See why here:

https://bkhome.org/news/202311/easyos-k ... eased.html

Crap, the FF window has flickered a couple of times while typing this post , no 3 times, lose focus.

Unless you want to test FF on your computer, wait for 5.6.2 which will be back to Chromium.

Reminds me, when using FF as default before, did have some GPU problems.

Another annoyance, the page refresh doesn't do anything, have to hold down the shift-key and click the refresh icon.

Another thing I have just discovered. A bug that has been there forever. Click on the three horiz dashes menu icon. If you take too long to make a choice, the menu icon locks and cannot be selected anymore and you have to restart FF

Sorry FF, old bugs still not fixed, now a new showstopper flicker.

[ghoen]

Strange.I am using FF 118.0.2 and Easy 5.5.5 with no flickering experience.

I will try 5.6.1. and see if I will have the same experience,

[ghoen]

Strange.I am using FF 118.0.2 and Easy 5.5.5 with no flickering experience.

I will try 5.6.1. and see if I will have the same experience,

Did an update and had no flickering experience.
computer is a laptop lenovo yoga 530.
Greetings

[scsijon]

Crap, the FF window has flickered a couple of times while typing this post , no 3 times, lose focus.

Unless you want to test FF on your computer, wait for 5.6.2 which will be back to Chromium.

Reminds me, when using FF as default before, did have some GPU problems.

Another annoyance, the page refresh doesn't do anything, have to hold down the shift-key and click the refresh icon.

Another thing I have just discovered. A bug that has been there forever. Click on the three horiz dashes menu icon. If you take too long to make a choice, the menu icon locks and cannot be selected anymore and you have to restart FF

Sorry FF, old bugs still not fixed, now a new showstopper flicker.

i've 3 different machines with different hardware, with a memory stick with 5.6 I see none of the mentioned problems with firefox119.0 added. Can you check if you have a driver/monitor issue using a different screensize or if the gpu driver has been updated for your specific GPU (not just free drivers), also is there another tool taking focus away from the screen for some reason (ctrl-esc in a working firefox), don't remember if your machine was touchscreen or not that can affect you if it's set too sensitive as firefox has toucscreen settings in it's system. Also are you using a cable keyboard or bluetooth, etc where it's the loss of connection and reconnection problem with too mny things wanting to control the bluetooth at the same time (was fixed with a linuxconfig switch a couple of linux version ago). I haven't had any visable firefox bugs for some time so i'm leaning towards / wondering if it's your hardware/firmware/linuxconfig maybe something needs changing or setting in the linuxconfig to suit your hardware system. Will download 5.6.1 later today when back home and check it.

[BarryK]

Interesting, booted 5.6.1 from usb stick, same Lenovo PC that exhibited the flickering, now FF is rock-steady no flickering. I got the flickering after updating the Easy installed on internal drive, from 5.6 to 5.6.1.

I'm running FF right now, no problem. Can't make that 3-horiz-bars menu button misbehave either. That might be related to the flickering problem -- the flicker causes text-entry focus to get lost, might do something like that to the drop-down menu.

Another note about old bugs. When login somewhere the first time, there is a popup window asking if want to save the password. That window can disappear before able to click a choice in it. FF still has that bug.

Note, there is lots of online advice that FF window flickering is due to hardware acceleration. But FF has that disabled.

[BarryK]

Found the cause of the flickering. FF is the default in the un-released Easy 5.6, in which I had set hardware acceleration enabled.
When updating to 5.6.1, this carried over.

Here is the menu button problem. I clicked on it, got the dropdown menu, moved the mouse pointer around without selecting anything, and suddenly the menu disappeared, leaving the button greyed-out and unusable:

ff-menu-locked.png (3.48 KiB) Viewed 4950 times

...requires restart of FF.

This menu button problem is probably also due to hardware acceleration. I didn't see whether it coincided with a flicker.

GPU acceleration has been a longstanding problem with FF. A year or so ago, I was forced to turn it off, as it caused FF to freeze for awhile at startup. Chromium on the otherhand, has hardware acceleration enabled and works great, on my computers anyway. And there has been no feedback from other users that Chromium misbehaves in that regard.

[tammi806]

Easy OS 5.6.1 installed and running great from a usb flash drive no flickering or any other problems with Firefox.

Thanks Barry K.

[bugnaw333]

EasyOS 5.6.1
FF--so far so good.
but for containerized FF, flickers every 30-40 secs. Also, the disappearance of the 3-line pull down menu during the 1st flicker and it wont come back after that.

[scsijon]

Feedback from a online message to a couple of firerfox people I know gave the consensis is with firefox if your using hardware accelleration you need the resources to enable it to run it, usually with linux it's not needed though unless your carrying out high scale or size graphics work as firefox does have a decent minimum settings and hardware interfaces without pulling in and using the extra externally based resources. Think of a nvidea graphics card with 1GVRAM= off vs one with 4GVRAM = on, while trying to run a 4K screen movie.
Also greyed out buttons with firefox is a sign of a error warning for the buttons underlying function, a reboot of the xserver or relevant hardware should restart it but it may mean your becoming resource short in your config.

[bean]

Installed 5.6.1 earlier this afternoon then updated to 5.6.2 all good, i mean brilliant. Those Networking issues are now a memory ( i cant remember clearly way too many versions and re-installs etc)

5.6.2 with Chromium Yay Whoopee, i like Chromium, because imo the security is better Dns is encrypted Bounce Mitigation etc chrome://flags

Barry huge big thanks im back in the saddle again,

[don570]

EasyOS Kirkstone-series version 5.6.1 on Dell optiplex 990 with nvidia GT 1030 graphics card

-I tried Easy OS 5.6.1 and everything was testing perfectly. the nvidia SFS
installed beautifully (see image)

nvidia settings

screenshot-easy561.png (90.85 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

I even tested Blender 3-d app and it worked perfectly. The Subdivision Surface Modifier worked.
So I thought that the installation was correct, but then I checked if Blender had recognized my graphics card,
and I saw that it hadn't (see image)

Blender system preferences

screenshot-easy-blender.png (26.76 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

This is rather odd. I assume that the app is partially recognizing that the nvidia driver is installed????

__________________________________________________________________

I did a comparison with my nvidia pet package that I offered on the forum. My pet package definitely works with Easy OS 5.5.5 ,
but not with Easy OS 5.6.1 ( because of kernel difference 155 versus 157 )

I extracted the packages and did a comparison of yours versus mine....
Note that my package has more kernel drivers and the ko files are located in a different folder

screenshot-drivrs.png (50.31 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

By the way I do a copy of /mnt/.easy_rw/mainrw/ when making a pet package.

____________________________________________________________

I also did a comparison of blacklist file.
(see images in next post)

My conclusion is that my pet package is loading in more stuff and that allows Blender to function better i.e. run CUDA

[don570]

continued nvidia package comparison

Here are images of blacklist
Note that my pet package is loading nvidia_uvm.ko

screenshot-blacklist.png (55.55 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

screenshot-easy.png (55.47 KiB) Viewed 4841 times

_____________________________________________

[BarryK]

My conclusion is that my pet package is loading in more stuff and that allows Blender to function better i.e. run CUDA

Yes, I compiled nvidia with peermem and uvm disabled, thinking to make the sfs smaller.

OK, next time that I compile them, will enable those two features.

[BarryK]

Easy version 5.6.2 has been released, see blog announcement, with download links:

https://bkhome.org/news/202311/easyos-k ... eased.html

Regarding the return to Chromium, what I might do in the future is investigate the "ungoogled" patches.
Note that I compile Chromium from source, in OpenEmbedded, which achieves a smaller binary and highly compatible with the shared libraries in Easy.

After updating from 5.6.1, I clicked on "www" icon, and Chromium did not run. Checked /usr/local/bin/defaultbrowser, that's ok, ran "chromium" in a terminal and got an error, something about "icu".
The latest Chromium has been linked with an update 'icu' package, and it seems there is some leftover of the older icu package. I didn't record the error message, just did a rollback:

"Shutdown -> Rectify -> Reboot, with rollback -> Rollback to pristine first-boot"

...that will put up a window with checkboxes to retain things. I ticked all the checkboxes then clicked the "OK" button and it rebooted. Chromium then worked.

The downside of my fix is that I had SeaMonkey PET package installed, via PKGget. That was gone, so had to reinstall it.

It would of course be nice if we can find whatever that leftover of the old icu package is causing the problem.

[tammi806]

I tried to do an upgrade of 5.6.2 from my 5.5.5 that's installed as a frugal on a usb flash drive but for some reason the upgrade locked up and everything froze had to do a hard restart.

A new raw frugal install of 5.6.2 on the flash drive and all seems to be working well so I don't know what happened to make the upgrade lock up and freeze.

Anyway all is well and I'm up and running again.

Thanks for the new Easy OS's Barry K.

tammi806

[BarryK]

I tried to do an upgrade of 5.6.2 from my 5.5.5 that's installed as a frugal on a usb flash drive but for some reason the upgrade locked up and everything froze had to do a hard restart.

A new raw frugal install of 5.6.2 on the flash drive and all seems to be working well so I don't know what happened to make the upgrade lock up and freeze.

Anyway all is well and I'm up and running again.

Thanks for the new Easy OS's Barry K.

tammi806

Did it lockup while doing the download?

Doing a new install is ok, but it would be nice to at least be able to import the old browser history, bookmarks, etc.

[tammi806]

I tried to do an upgrade of 5.6.2 from my 5.5.5 that's installed as a frugal on a usb flash drive but for some reason the upgrade locked up and everything froze had to do a hard restart.

A new raw frugal install of 5.6.2 on the flash drive and all seems to be working well so I don't know what happened to make the upgrade lock up and freeze.

Anyway all is well and I'm up and running again.

Thanks for the new Easy OS's Barry K.

tammi806

Did it lockup while doing the download?

Doing a new install is ok, but it would be nice to at least be able to import the old browser history, bookmarks, etc.

Yes it locked up while doing the download.
I did a hard restart using the power button on the front of the computer and tried again and had the same results so decided a new raw install was the best choice.

All is working well from the new raw frugal install to the usb flash drive.
Yes an upgrade would have been cool but wasn't cooperating as it usually did in past versions.
As for my bookmarks learned to copy and paste them to a folder in Libreoffice and saved to other usb media.

I kind of look at it this way things can go sideways sometimes when upgrading and this was one of them times.

All is up and running and working well.

Really appreciate your work Thank You.

tammi806

[Vverve]

5.6.2 fresh frugal ,as i've update for too long to test,wanted to be shure not one of my homebrewed pet or sfs was causing some glitches.
I do got that weird thing ,since before 5.5.5 ,or .4 ;
if in /tmp/anything/data
packit ,or dir2pet to make an anything.pet, it pickup parent /tmp in the pet ?
-------------
xvkbd is still supplied with wrong french layouts ,both are belgium layout !!!
Got some belgium roots in the familly BK?
-------------
Oh ,i've missed voting for browser thing,
gg-chrome was not a possible choice anyhow!!
i guess from where ff vs chromium income come from is what bother so many ,
to me ,they both make $ of ads & users search engine stats...
yep,fox share genetics with dogs & a male fox is called a “dog fox” ,
brothers ,i love puppys too..so cute..

[BarryK]

5.6.2 fresh frugal ,as i've update for too long to test,wanted to be shure not one of my homebrewed pet or sfs was causing some glitches.
I do got that weird thing ,since before 5.5.5 ,or .4 ;
if in /tmp/anything/data
packit ,or dir2pet to make an anything.pet, it pickup parent /tmp in the pet ?

I don't know, anyway /tmp is probably not the best place to be doing that kind of thing. It is a tmpfs filesystem and may exhibit oddities.

[BarryK]

xvkbd is still supplied with wrong french layouts ,both are belgium layout !!!

I don't know about that either. I have just included the xvkbd package as-is from the Puppy days.
Someone will have to take that on as a project.

It starts by /usr/bin/xvkbd-wrapper, maybe something wrong with that script?

The source was downloaded from here:

http://t-sato.in.coocan.jp/xvkbd/xvkbd-3.8.tar.gz

Homepage is here:

http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/

[Vverve]

xvkbd package as-is from the Puppy days.

Never build xvkbd from source ,made pet of it from 3.7 to 4.1 always with deb build.
This xvkbd-4.1-x86_64.pet with correct layout did overwrite those french-belgium ones,just surprised nobody else saw it.
Oh ,i might be wrong with stating its belgium replacing both french in easyos , could be swiss/german but for shure not Mr Sato supplied french layouts !!
---------
Yes ,creating a pet from anywhere else dont include parent folder , i previously did not encounter that /tmp problem .

Easyos fill all my needs!!
Thank you BK

[Vverve]

creating a pet from anywhere else dont include parent folder

My problem is worst then i remembered it , creating a pet from anywhere do include parent folder
Could someone else confirm it's only on my side , so i dig further what happening !!!!!so strange.
Sorry , been testing other distro lately , did not create pet in easos from it for a while !!
Could it be since usr merge thing !!!!
i'm affraid it could be ...
,i should reinstall 5.?.10 to be shure ,pretty busy now, in a few days i will try it.

[don570]

My problem is worst then i remembered it , creating a pet from anywhere do include parent folder
Could someone else confirm it's only on my side , so i dig further what happening !!!!!so strange.

I create pets in /files and there is no problem
________________________________________________________

Latest Audacity appimage 3.4.1 (Nov 8) works fine . I could record with it.
https://www.audacityteam.org/download/linux/
_______________________________________________________

[BarryK]

xvkbd is still supplied with wrong french layouts ,both are belgium layout !!!

@Vverve
What is the content of /etc/keymap in your system?
It should contain "fr".

[Clarity]

Loaded v562 image onto my Ventoy USB. Boots fine ...works fine. Is there a selection app for adding nvidia support with any of the 2/3 SFSs that are floating around?

Curious.

[Vverve]

It should contain "fr".

ok , got ''us''
And? that is related to that weird behaviour ?
Start to doubt of the ssd health !! i will check it..

[BarryK]

It should contain "fr".

ok , got ''us''
And? that is related to that weird behaviour ?
Start to doubt of the ssd health !! i will check it..

I presumed that you are running with French locale, in which case /etc/keymap should contain "fr" for a French keyboard.

Anyway, if you change it to "fr" then try xvkbd.

[Vverve]

ssd is good , got bad checksum of 5.6.2 image !!!
Let's try again a clean frugal install , encore en francais ..
it's so weird .

[Vverve]

So , download 5.6.2 ,checked md5, frugal install , on another partition,wont hurt ,en francais, .qlang = fr .
installed nothing ,rien ,pas un program ,same troubles...parent folder included in the pet...
from any places i've tried .
I can create pet in any other puppy ,use them in easyos ,not a problem .
Still weird weird...

I create pets in /files and there is no problem

good and extracting it give you what??
installing it give you what??
here;
i copied a working-create in another puppy.pet in /files/ download , right-click(personalised choice) pet2dir , look fine
right-click(personalised choice) dir2pet ,does create the pet ,
installing it give me no abnormal warning(hmm i thinck the usual this pet installed correctly) , ending in /root /.packages with an file name /files(see note) ,empty.

if
extracting and looking inside ;
all parent folders are there (worst it seems in /files ...fun !!!) end up with ;
/files/downloads/working-create in another puppy/***all normal***/usr/bin/whatever**
that , in /files/downloads
get it ? path to his ,lets say executive is ;
/files/downloads/files/downloads/working-create in another puppy/***all normal***/usr/bin/executive** ?

(note; funky , a non-working pet(with parents folder) created in tmp then installed does create a .packages with the right name and all details
of that non-legit pet inside!!!! put creating one in /file does not!!!! )

Any questions? anyone?
seen a more bizarre case?
i guess i should try on another computer?
or another galaxy ,same computer?

[BarryK]

@Vverve,
Testing in a separate ext4 partition, I expanded a PET, then ran dir2pet to check that it will correctly create a new PET.

Had folder 'desk_background_precise-1.1', renamed it to 'desk_background_precise-1.1test1' so as to create a different PET, then opened a terminal and ran:

Code: Select all

# dir2pet desk_background_precise-1.1test1

And it created a PET. Copied the PET somewhere else, right-clicked on the PET and chose 'pet2dir' to expand it, and it is fine, no parent directories.