Perceptions of Peter Piper's Puppy's Pickled Printers (very long posts)

[PuppyandCo]

[edited 09/01/2021 - this started off as a long post about user perceptions of Puppy, but turned into an even longer post about printer support. Since posting it I have moved the text around so it follows some logical order, and listed a summary of 8 problems that might affect other users... a few have fixes that could have been more obvious from google or the forum search.]

Hello all,

I've been using Puppy Linux since there was only one flavour of it, so 10-12 years and thought I would say thanks for it and give some (extremely long) feedback on it.

Currently I'm using Puppy USBs very successfully/enjoyably for:-
- work USB that I take into the office instead of using their IT stuff (Slacko 6.0)
- Samba fileserver (forget which)
- bedside laptop for writing (Bionic64)
- CCTV box (Bionic something)

The main PCs in the house are a Windows 7 one in the old "home desktop PC" role, and a Ubuntu Studio (xfce) media centre + gaming.
I personally have come to prefer single-function PCs over one big PC that does everything, and puppy is best for this.

I don't have any technical qualifications but I'm comfortable with terminal commands, and will happily take on challenges like setting up simple scripts, or compiling software. Some stuff takes me a long time, and much of this post is about user problems the user doesn't understand, but hopefully it won't be complete nonsense. Seeing what people find confusing might be useful (I'm not posting this because I need any help or advice with anything btw, my puppies all work as I need them to and I'm very happy overall)

The massive attractions of puppy for me are that:-

A: user=root (The user is God. If God has to enter God's password every time they copy and paste a command from the internet, and very frequently ends up without permissions to save God's display settings... that's a bug. And about security, if God can't access *your* online banking (to give you money)... that's also a bug!)

B: everything is in RAM. I started off using puppy on older PCs but on newer PCs I find it's more responsive than Windows or Ubuntu. I can't say if that's due to everything being in RAM, but I guess Windows loads what it thinks you need into RAM, and fetches what you in fact want from off the HDD. Puppy already fetched everything, that seems like better service to the user.

C: the networking sets up really easily. I have relatively little know-how compared to the complexity of my home network so this is a huge plus.

To auto-mount a drive on ubuntu I have to work out a config line like this by trial and error:-
#//192.168.1.xxx/ONE /mnt/Disk-I cifs users,exec,dev,suid,rw,credentials=/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm 0 0
(and god help us if the permissions on .smbcredentials aren't set)
On puppy I just run pnethood and drag a folder onto the desktop

The Samba fileserver was as simple as plugging an external hdd dock into a micro-PC, and pressing "Samba On"... it beats the hell out of a home NAS.I can plug in any internal HDD, tell Puppy's Samba interface to call it "ONE", and all the other PCs in the house can see it. It would be nice if it wasn't limited to three drives but three is fine

Between Frisbee and Network Wizard I can report 100% success connecting to other people's networks. Some of the other options in the Network Connection Wizard (like dial-up and Simple Network Setup) feel redundant to me.

D: with Firefox, LibreOffice, and Qoppa pdfstudio (commercial/paid-for) puppy can do almost anything I would need Windows for. I have a windows machine now because of janky applications like MS Teams that clients expect you to have, or in case I particularly want to play a game that only works on windows.

E: the hardware support is incredible. Touchpads and wifi cards on obscure Chinese-made laptops work first time off the kernel. No display problems ever. I haven't yet had cause to install proprietary Nvidia drivers and run projectors and graphics tablets, and higher-spec games on puppy linux like I do with Ubuntu Studio, but I've got Steam and GoG running nicely for recent indie titles.

[PuppyandCo]

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1. Choosing a puppy
My perception is that in 2008 or whenever I started there was one flavour, then there was a confusing proliferation of different sorts of puppy in 2013 (when I next looked because I began using slacko at work), and now there are a few survivors-of-the-fittest.

As a user I can't tell the difference between any of them, and I don't remember what puppies I've installed.

I think that is a great virtue of puppy linux, e.g. compared with Firefox where they constantly pull the rug out from under the users for the sake of it.

I would find it useful on the main puppy page where it lists the different flavours to have a bit more of a steer as to why I'd want each one: I understand the basic logic like Raspbian is for Raspberry Pi and slacko works with slackware (but with slacko I only chose it because it recognized my printer, and find most debian apps run on it anyway or people have turned them into pup files). I chose Bionic most recently because it said it supported UEFI (but my laptop BIOS can't seem to boot it that way and has to be set to Legacy Boot, so again it's arbitrary what puppy I've ended up with and to me that doesn't matter). I can't see from the homepage and don't understand things like why someone would want Fossapup vs. Xenialpup.

==

2. Installing the puppy
My perception (sorry to say this) is that puppy linux is hideously difficult to install, but incredibly robust once it's done. My slacko work USB has been continuous since 2013. I'm conscious my experience isn't a fair test: I find windows and ubuntu tend to get glitchier as time goes on and the more software has been installed... with ubuntu in particular always ending in some library/repository mismatch breaking the entire system.

Puppy linux can take me a WHOLE DAY to install though and I'd rather clone a USB from 2014 than risk installing a more recent version.
It takes 10 minutes to download, 10 minutes to burn the Live USB, 10 minutes to run the install tool... multiplied by like 10 attempts.

My user case for Puppy is to unchain the OS from the PC... to run everything off the USB, so I can carry it round and plug it into any computer, and use all my apps, logins, and settings. I like to have a 128Gb USB key, boot from it, and then keep my user files inside a 100Gb NTFS-formatted veracrypt container. I don't want savefiles or anything else putting on the local HDDs. I don't really like the savefiles concept (despite having read all the advantages and for reasons I'll go into), but the "full install to USB" I've never been able to do, so I go along with frugal installs as recommended. A great thing about running an OS from USB is that you can easily clone a USB key and it will work.

I've used Universal USB installer from Windows, and unetbootin from Ubuntu... I haven't tried Rufus or Yumi. I personally took a long time to work out that these tools set up a "Live USB" on FAT32 and then the "Live USB" next has to be used to install puppy to an ext4/3/2 partition on a second USB stick. Creating a Live USB feels like an annoying, confusing, and very time-consuming extra stage when I just want to install puppy on a USB.

Making the USB keys bootable is often a nightmare for me, as the GUI application offers defaults that won't boot (despite the LiveUSB booting fine) or calls GParted and lets me choose from even more combinations that won't work. I'd like it much more if full/frugal installs were there as options INSIDE the third-party USB installers (I feel they shouldn't assume the USB is to be used in place of an install CD with the contents eventually destined to go onto a HDD). I also feel the whole concept of Live CDs is slightly apologetic, like there would be windows there in the first place.

I find it weird that Live USBs often won't install over themselves once puppy is loaded into RAM... and that "Universal USB Installer" doesn't have a linux version and its windows version can't create ext 4/3/2 partitions... Fat32 and some of the other formats with drawbacks seem like they could be in an "advanced" menu.

I've sometimes found it worked better to copy boot files (sorry not sure of the terms) like vmlinuz from another usb key I had got working, than to generate them during install.

Overall, my user case is simple and to achieve it feels like balancing a complicated tower of BIOS>Grub>GParted>Install Tool>LiveUSB Installer

The tips presented inside the "Install" Tool could be better. Some of the either/or choices the user has to make depend on arcane or puppy-specific concepts. On my one currently in Bionic64 v8 the first choice is between:-

Universal Installer (required for full install)
OR
Bootflash USB Installer (install to flash drive - destructive method)

tbf there is a link to the "Installation Introduction Homepage", but I just want to install an OS, without learning arcane concepts first

I always arrive at this menu thinking I want to do a full install to a USB, but the one I need to choose is Bootflash USB Installer.

==

3. Savefiles and Frugal
The only major limitation I see there to be in Puppy is that when an application has a memory leak, through no fault of puppy's, puppy tends to let it carry on consuming more and more of the PC's resources until it's no longer possible to right-click that application and Kill it.

The Kill command itself works (with a beautiful perfection and efficiency that Windows' ctrl+alt+del altogether lacks), but too often you don't get the chance to actually send it to the application: puppy is quite happy, the network access light is flashing, but 99.999% of the CPU or memory are servicing an error in Libreoffice or Firefox. The mouse pointing starts updating every second... every other second... every ten seconds... and so on forever. The power switch can be good for getting out of this into an orderly shutdown, but I find it's about 50/50 whether it can. This leads to applications forcing hard resets even though they haven't actually crashed the OS.

Hard resets are A Bad Thing when your computer is a USB key, and A Very Bad Thing when all your user data is inside an encryption container on a USB key. What I would find invaluable is an emergency key combination (or maybe the power button) that pushes through phases: (1) close every application except for stuff like X and JWM (2) same as 1 but bloody well kills them if necessary; (3) same as 2 and forces the PC into an orderly shutdown. pprocess can do anything the windows ctrl+alt+del task manager can do - this would be for situations where you can't open pprocess anymore

Another problem (I find) with savefiles for my USBs is that sometimes if you swap them from PC to PC a few times, puppy will fail to boot because it can't find the .sfs and savefile... until you remove the USB key and re-insert it into the "right" USB port. There might be some other cause, but this *feels* to me as if puppy looks for the .sfs and savefile based on the device number (sdb1 sdb0) when for my user case it should be using the UUID. FIXED 08/01/2021 (note below)

The savefiles themselves always still work after hard resets, but installed software or settings changes since the last save vanish which I guess is to be expected.

To me, even after 10 years, the relationship between puppy's sfs's, its savefiles, its "personal storage", and the storage partition on the USB might as well be voodoo. I don't know which parts of the filesystem I can save stuff to without it vanishing in the (exceptional) cases of a hard reset or the personal storage running out... so I end up only saving files to the encryption container.

I know it operates rationally, it's just that I've read the explanations dozens of times without it sinking in. I think it was along the lines that everything in puppy's / directory is really inside the savefile... which only exists in the RAM until it's "saved".

The Veracrypt container is good because unlike the encrypted savefile it can be opened off the USB without booting into puppy first.

I suppose the original/primary/intended puppy user case might have been to run everything in RAM whilst using the HDD for storage (notwithstanding it probably also had a windows install on it), and that the apps that react badly to these hard resets are ones like FF/TB/JWM which perhaps have made assumptions like "profiles are on a hdd and not a savefile in RAM, so they can be extremely large". I want to divorce from the HDD as well though: ideally I would only have one HDD in the house (the one plugged into the fileserver).

Ideally ideally my puppy fileserver would be a webserver as well and I could plug my puppy USB into any PC in the world as a client and listen to my mp3 collection at home on it. Not like a thin client... my data is universal across my network and the terminals I use to interact with it are specialised to different roles whilst being independent of hardware. For Steam games in the dining room, find the Steam Gaming puppy image on the fileserver, and burn it to a USB.

FIXED - set savefile location based on UUID of a USB Key
This is possible by editing menu.lst (or creating this file using grub4dos) and it is explained here
http://puppylinux.info/topic/about-your ... s-uuid-etc

but it's so important it should also be explained here imo:-
http://wikka.puppylinux.com/BootParametersPuppy

It took hours to find this kind person's explanation - and the time this problem has wasted me over the last few years has been horrific, the first time it happened before I worked out that it (sometimes) matters which usb port the usbkey is in I drove across town thinking I had lost all my files.

[PuppyandCo]

==

4. JWM
Related to the above, JWM feels like it has a lot of file handles. When Puppy has to be hard reset, I find most everything recovers from it well. The encryption container on Veracrypt sometimes locks itself to Read Only until I repair its filesystem in Windows, but even after having this happen dozens of times I haven't had any actual data loss in 6+ years. (I should say I am pretty conscientious about storage and backups, I don't keep user files on my puppy USBs apart from work in progress). The one thing that always seems to get corrupted is JWM, which causes various parts of the panel, or sometimes all of it, to stop working. This is normally recoverable by reinstalling JWM, but on the USBs I have been using longer there are some minor things like broken icons.

Also about the desktop, JWM treats the desktop as a place to put .desktop launchers. This is philosophically superior to it being a place I can put files I'm working on or have just downloaded, except that I hate it. On my desktop, I have a .desktop launcher to a directory in the encryption container called... "desktop", where I put files. What would be good is if there was an option for the desktop to automatically create .desktop launchers for those files, as then it could offer a pure user interface wihtout telling users how to use.

==

5. Software that's unavailable (afaik)

I find that software either works perfectly on puppy or doesn't work at all. I resist installing new applications in case it forces a hard reset, but once something is installed it will carry on working for years of daily use with fewer glitches. Firefox and LibreOffice I mentioned have some specific problems to do with opening malformed content in them.

Some types of applications I've had trouble installing or substituting are:-
- "collaboration" apps (like MS Teams/Slack/Zoom) (Fixed:- for Teams https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams ... x/releases and for Zoom http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=118289 )
- "remote access" apps (like Teamviewer)
- "webdrives" (like Dropbox/Google Drive)... bearing in mind though I don't want to sync+backup, I want to mount the webdrive.

These things have in common that they are still perceived as monetizable and linux is seen to be is too small a "market". But where they even have Linux clients they are often a bit sensitive and won't run on Puppy.

==

6. Tweaks I have to make after each install

pprocess - I find easier than lxtask
lxterminal - I find easier than rxvt
xfreerdp - tiny but vital for work
hplip - legacy printer drivers
engrampa - needed to edit .xpi extensions to work on the old versions of firefox that puppy always uses
screenshot - default is set to mspaint when TAS is better and hotkey has to be taken off up arrow
fonts - arial and times new roman (appreciate there might still be license issues)
FF/TB profile folders and Wine C drive - moving these outside the savefile is so important that it should come up as an alert
Changing grub time limits down from 15 seconds (1-2 is fine)
Making an icons directory in an easy-to-find place
Setting up keyboard shortcuts + scripts to control volume and monitor brightness
Script in root/startup/ to create mountpoint: mkdir /mnt/vol2/
Command to mount LAN hdd: mount -t cifs -o username=XXXX //192.168.1.XXX/vol2 /mnt/vol2/
Add line to fstab to automount LAN hdd
Script to mount encryption container at boot (the reason for encrypting is in case the USB key is lost, not to protect from puppy's user)
[I find puppy always crashes if commands like the above one that expect a password are made into executable scripts... I guess there is a different syntax in puppy from Ubuntu, but it should give an error rather than crashing - fixed - this must be done by setting up etc/fstab and .smbcredentials (like in the guides for Ubuntu) and then putting mount -a into startup. This is better than what I wanted, but it's still strange that running the command in terminal works but running it as a script crashes the PC...]

===

7. Shutting down doesn't switch off the power at the end (ACPI=force?)

8. The PPM supplied version of Flatpak (v.1.0.9) doesn't work well because of a default setting min.required.space=3%. In my case this prevents any flatpaks from installing if the free space falls below 500Mb but it's looking at the Puppy's home folder. More recent versions of flatpak removed this setting.

9. Copying a puppy:

2-day nightmare to copy a puppy.

Normally I do this by cloning the USB in Windows, but that doesn't work when the master_USB (128Gb) is larger than the new_USB (32Gb).

"Remaster" produces an 8Gb .sfs (probably duplicating the savefile into it).
"Install" automatically formats the new USB to FAT32.

The only way I could eventually find to do it was to go back to the original Live-CD I installed my puppy from, run a destructive-install to a third USB key ("new_USB") with the Grub4dos option to a ext4 partition... then go onto my puppy ("master_USB"), delete all the files from the new_USB that was just installed, and replace them by copying across all the files from the master_USB.

I wonder if frugal-to-USB puppies would be easier to install with just a GParted command with some options to format the USB key to be bootable, and then you manually download ~234Mb of files onto it. Defaulting to FAT32 without asking the user is a bad default behaviour because it prevents savefiles or encryption containers larger than 4Gb.

===

??. Future ideas

(i) If I could mount a webdrive in puppy, even a small one, I could avoid carrying an encryption container around everywhere
(ii) If BIOSes could boot not just from USB or from LAN, but from internet, I wouldn't need to carry a USB key at all
(iii) Commercial portal-based internet services will hopefully die off and be replaced with self-service (e.g. serving my text from the localhost without FB Messenger, my webcam without Teams, P2P webspiders+locally-hosted search engine wihtout Google). If so, puppy will prosper mightily.

[rockedge]

If I could mount a webdrive in puppy

I do all the time with an ownCloud server I run. The sync app works well on my Puppy's

[Clarity]

Hello @PuppyandCo

In reverse order #7. I have used my Google Account (PUP utilities available) and Dropbox (both available in FATDOG.

Also, early on, you mentioned you have various PCs scattered about. Thus Puppy come with SAMBA and the mount command of shares over your LAN should give both access as well as NAS options you can gain thru your home's router or other PCs. This affords you several electable options for storage needs beyond your local PUP PC via both your LAN, Web, and Remote Desktop solutions..

More on the other topics later. Hope this helps

[PuppyandCo]

Bionic64 v8.0

Zoom - the version of Zoom available via Quickpet is no longer supported and says it has to be updated. But the Ubuntu version doesn't display properly (application opens but window is entirely black. buttons work as normal and bring up meetings etc, but can't see anything) (Fixed:- remove the .pets from PPM and install the .sfs of Zoom version 5.1 from the forum post at http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=118289. )

Also:- "log in via Google" allows a Google account to be connected, but the button calls the browser that then can't call the app

Google Drive - the version of Google drive available via Quickpet can't connect to a Google Account, giving the error:
"Couldn't sign you in. This browser or app may not be secure. Learn more. Try using a different browser. If you’re already using a supported browser, you can refresh your screen and try again to sign in."

====

This is another perception of Puppy generally:- due to the appearance of strong Ubuntu compatibility, people get stuff working once and then it doesn't anymore. I haven't tried dropbox as I know it doesn't do what I need.

It seems to me that rather than supporting web services, it's that Puppy can be made to support web services that support other flavours of linux. But it's dependent on i) the provider maintaining itself considerately e.g. with legacy support to old versions of clients and old versions of browsers ii) volunteers in the community updating Puppy versions of clients every time a provider changes something. Very few commercial providers maintain Puppy .pet packages, I've only seen this to occur one time.

==

PRINTERS
Installing a HP laserjet printer (network printer over Samba) that I know works on puppy, and takes 30 minutes to set up on Ubuntu on Puppy.... has taken... 4 days.

problems are listed below and described in more detail in the other posts...

[PuppyandCo]

LIST OF 8 PROBLEMS INSTALLING A PRINTER

1 - The "printer wizard" GUI in the menu literally just loads an html page with general help (about CUPS, missing the installation of proprietary drivers beforehand)
2 - the Puppy Package Manager could list the installed packages more usefully (e.g. options to list in date order)
3 - libnetsnmp-devel library requested by the hplip installer (when the network drivers option is selected) isn't available in PPM and couldn't (easily) be compiled from the net-snmp source code. It might be possible to improve support for hplip by making a puppy version of this library. [workround: the option isn't actually needed]
4 - The devx .sfs file puppy uses for the gcc compiler and python isn't at http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pe ... -bionic64/ [fix: get it from archive.org]
5 - loading the devx .sfs when the filename had been accidentally changed broke x [fix: reboot with pfix=clean option]
6 - GCC links in /usr/include/sys all broke giving the error ""fatal error: gcc "Too many levels of symbolic links"" [fix: they can be replaced from a clean copy of the .sfs] (this may have been a user error or caused by installing and uninstalling packages)
7 - it wasn't possible (for an ordinary user) to reconcile the dependencies for the HP developers' hplip installation program against puppy's repository
8 - During printer setup in Puppy's CUPS it provides a link to work out the network URI... but it's a dead link making it harder to get the Address: correct in CUPS

[rockedge]

Setting up a Puppy for compiling, using PERL and some of Python 2.7, will be present by loading the Devx SFS.

A solid Python3 environment is tricky to set up. So after many many failures and missing python modules I've come to the conclusion for a great Python3 set up just use an ActiveState python.
Download, extract and run ./install.sh. I choose usually to load it in /opt. A couple of symlinks that I add and ready to go. I have good results in Puppy Bionic and Focal (Fossapup) with it. Also at the ActiveState website one can customize completely what modules will be included from start in your python set up.

Getting the printer to work.....well HP libs I've grabbed from all over and from many different distros that eventually I got going in Puppy. What works on one system may or may not work in another that seems almost exactly the same as the first...but that's computing (since I started in 1975 that has held true over and over)

I did manage to to use a Tahr-6.0.5 to simulate an AirPrint network printer with a dirt cheap Canon printer. Still to this day not sure how I did it exactly...the configuration of Avahi so iPhones, iPads, tablets, Android can print reliably on our home LAN is working, but if I had to do it again right now? I would be starting from zero since I did this like 5 years ago and it's worked solid since without intervention and as of late I've been making a 32 bit operating system with a JWM+ROX desktop so printing technology has been on the back burner.
That now reminds me that WeeDog32-Void has no CUPS installed at all.

Getting python3-opencv installed and working is a challenge. But once it is Puppy can do face recognition among many other tasks well.

[PuppyandCo]

Getting python3-opencv installed and working is a challenge. But once it is Puppy can do face recognition among many other tasks well.

Thanks for this! On my layperson's rules that is an excellent package because i) it's in package manager, ii) it has a short name, iii) it has a keyword (python)

I think my python environment is alright, but the official net-snmp tarball either has bugs in it (developers who post bugs on sourceforge are getting similar errors at a similar stage in the compile) or I need a very specific set of 'configure' options. Disabling things seems to make it better, but there are too many options to guess it by trial-and-error and I don't even know for sure that installing this will give me the missing package for hplip.

I did succeed in this once before on Slacko 6.3 in about 2016 so I won't give up. But it's the typical Linux user-experience.
I suspect puppy's hplip needs a look if the default package tries to install a GUI but doesn't bring up the GUI and the commands don't seem to do anything in terminal
I suspect puppy generally needs a printer wizard, the menu makes it look like it has one but it just loads a html page
I don't blame puppy for hplip not installing, it looks to me as if it stems from HP having 10 dependencies an ordinary user can install and 1 that they can't

[rcrsn51]

Another community member has reported getting a functional hplip-print-scan package from a Puppy repo at archive.org.

That might be worth investigating for your situation.

[mikewalsh]

@PuppyandCo :-

The reason Puppy uses the CUPS web-interface is simple; we all have a browser. And it saves having to create yet another app just to "coddle" ex-Windows users, for most of whom it's too much like hard work to have to get used to summat different...

Most folks are comfortable with what they DO know, and see no point in having to learn a new way of tackling the same issue.

(*shrug*)

Mike.

[PuppyandCo]

Another community member has reported getting a functional hplip-print-scan package from a Puppy repo at archive.org.

That might be worth investigating for your situation.

Thanks you're right about that there is a .pet file there (at least one). I tried keywords puppy+linux+hp+printer and it brought up this (which is sadly 32-bit)
https://archive.org/download/rcrsn51_foomatic20140426

========

In a way, if a user who knows how to patch an install file... is finding it necessary to patch the install file... that kind of tells me that getting an HP printer to work on puppy is very difficult indeed. It seems like a collision between the philosophy of stripping down all the libraries and the HP linux developers assuming the end-user can apt-get a list of 10 relatively complex software frameworks. From what I read of snmp, it lets devices on networks talk to each other, on virtually any -nix... it looks like quite a big operation, with an ecosystem and regular updates, and all the rest. Puppy linux be like "yyyeah, we'll let users build that if they want, saving 256kb comes first!".

========

DAY 1+2

Problem 1 The "printer wizard" GUI in the menu literally just loads an html page with vague help.
I know that I need hplip and the plugin so I download v.3.17.10 through the package manager, it won't open. It creates a menu link for a GUI but that doesn't work, and the command line tools fail.

The hp-lip installer at the HP developers throws up a large and nasty list of dependencies but I get them all except libsnmp-dev
libsnmp-dev is available online for Ubuntu in some .rpm packages, these convert into .pets but don't work / whatever they install doesn't meet the installer's dependency.
I can nearly compile net-snmp from source, but there's a bug.

I was nearly able to complete the hplip installation script by switching off all the optional items. Removing network support (which did not seem a good idea) got me almost all the way to the end, but it started giving a new dependency error for libjpeg.so.8 which needed to be symlinked from the Steam folder (of all places). And then ghostscript... and then the GUI to configure the printer started, and immediately crashed the PC.

GCC then broke (because the headers were somehow deleted from /usr/include/sys and replaced with infinite or circular symlinks), returning an incomprehensible error message. In the process of trying to mend GCC I downloaded another 2Gb of cruft... which I can't remove easily because...

Problem 2 the package manager's uninstall utility doesn't list what's been installed in date order... doesn't show the sizes of the packages... doesn't show what came with the install... doesn't provide any way to roll-back... can't export them as a text file to assist manual reinstallation... and the packages all have names like libsn-python.cruft and descriptions like "library to sign cruft plugins for python". The personal space has now been filled. And this might partly be caused ironically: by the space-saving philosophy of removing unnecessary libraries.

Problem 3 the snmp library required by the hplip installer's network option would not compile in any circumstances. Workaround 3 fortunately the hplip installer only needed to complete so that the HP drivers were available to CUPS and the hp-plugin command could be run. It was able to complete with all options set to No.

DAY 3

Removing and re-adding the devx .sfs doesn't change the headers back

But an sfs is not like a package... The menu doesn't let you install-or-delete them, it is load-or-unload. SFS stands for squashed filesystem, so hopefully I have messed up some files inside the sfs which are then unloaded and loaded whilst still being wrong. This might also be why trying to 'find' the messed up config file didn't work - it was packed back into the .sfs. So I can try replacing my devx_bionicpu64_8.0.sfs with a new one from the file repository and loading that one instead.

Problem 4 The devx .sfs file puppy uses for the gcc compiler and python isn't at http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pe ... -bionic64/
Workaround 4 It is available from https://archive.org/download/Puppy_Linux_Bionicpup64

Problem 5 loading the devx .sfs when the filename had been mistakenly changed broke x
I had renamed devx_bionicpu64_8.0.sfs to devx_bionicpu64_8.0.sfs.bak and forgotten to rename it back before I shut down. JWM gave a screen full of errors on shutdown and on startup it went to a tty1 login: prompt then bash shell.
Fix 5 Typing startx at the bash shell worked though. I then rebooted puppy with pfix=clean and that repaired it. Except that root is now called bash-4.4 and my terminal history is gone. From doing 'less /etc/passwd' I believe the user is root and the name change is just cosmetic.

Problem 6 Although the sfs has been replaced, gcc still doesn't work though. The error is shown in config.log as "fatal error: gcc "Too many levels of symbolic links""
Fix 6:- the C headers in /usr/include/sys/ had all been replaced with symlinks that linked to symlinks and so on for at least 8 levels. I needed to copy them from inside a clean copy of the devx sfs (mount the .sfs, navigate inside it to /usr/include/sys and copy the files to ~/usr/include/sys... not sure if I have expressed that accurately the sys is like a virtual filesystem with the same directory names so I copied the files across into the real filesystem.

DAY 4

Fixed lost C headers. SNMP now gives the error from day 2 again:-

Code: Select all

making install in /mnt/veracrypt1/Downloads/net-snmp-5.9/man
make[1]: Entering directory '/mnt/veracrypt1/Downloads/net-snmp-5.9/man'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target '../sedscript', needed by 'agentxtrap.1'.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/mnt/veracrypt1/Downloads/net-snmp-5.9/man'
Makefile:983: recipe for target 'installsubdirs' failed
make: *** [installsubdirs] Error 1

but hplip might work now if the options to install the network AND gui are both marked No. I think this will probably cause the printer not to be able to print over the network but let's see...

hplip completed installation but asking it to setup a printer crashed puppy again. starting again again.
Among other things, I removed hplip v3.17.10 from PPM, reinstalled it... ran it (unsuccessfully) and then downloaded and installed the installer from the hplip developers site for v3.20.11... I chose option 7 (ubuntu), option 15 (Bionic Beaver), install (d)iscrete drivers... and the rest of the options were straightforward.

once hplip was installed, the hp-plugin command could be run in terminal. Installation made the driver visible to CUPS and the plugin stopped the CUPS error saying "filter error". I installed numerous other packages by trial and error to get to this point though, including (names are approximate) xsane_DEV, glibc-source, python-avahi, avahi-discover, libavahi-core-dev. Several sub-packages (sorry I don't know the right term, I mean the little files that are only available in a library package) were requested including libhpmud.so.0, libhpip.so.0, cupsext...

Problem 7: basically it wasn't possible (for an ordinary user) to reconcile the HP installation program's dependencies against puppy's repository. I'd have been happier if the help file could have listed 10-20 packages to start with, like a shopping list. I also suspect the HP installation program doesn't make enough concessions to end-users (other than Ubuntu ones for whom "it just works").

Problem 8:
CUPS couldn't discover this printer as Ubuntu does. During printer setup in Puppy's CUPS it provides a link to work out the network URI... but it's a dead link and I wasn't able to find a correct list of URIs. Fortunately I had a huge head start in being able to copy the Address that Ubuntu's printer toolbox discovered, probably I wouldn't have managed this otherwise. For some reason Ubuntu accesses this printer (usb printer plugged into windows 7 and then shared) via smb:// but for CUPS on puppy that doesn't work and it needs the ("install windows features") LPD service to be running and for CUPS to access the printer via lpd:192.168.1.xxx/printer_name

The test page prints, it may be there will be other fun and games but on slacko 6.3 with this printer (both HP CP1215 and HP CP1217) I never needed to do anything further once it was working.

List of installed packages

Code: Select all

.:
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[PuppyandCo]

@PuppyandCo :-

The reason Puppy uses the CUPS web-interface is simple; we all have a browser. And it saves having to create yet another app just to "coddle" ex-Windows users, for most of whom it's too much like hard work to have to get used to summat different...

Most folks are comfortable with what they DO know, and see no point in having to learn a new way of tackling the same issue.

(*shrug*)

Mike.

The CUPS interface is superior to the windows print manager, whilst being pretty familiar/accessible to windows users.

Puppy's "CUPS Manage Printing" menu entry isn't part of CUPS though, and instead of doing what would make sense for it to do (open the CUPS interface in the browser, which would help train the ex-windows user in the new way of working, away from reaching for Start Menu>Control Panel) it opens a help document in abiword. The help document might be very helpful regarding CUPS, but CUPS won't install a proprietary driver for them - the user must first get their printer installed so CUPS can talk to it. This menu entry should say "guide to setting up printing" or something.

screenshot of CUPS Manage Printing menu entry

Puppy Printing.png (26.67 KiB) Viewed 870 times

And it saves having to create yet another app

Behind this there is another question whether yet another app (or apps) should be created for installing proprietary print drivers. If the drivers can't be installed without the compiler, and getting compilers to work on puppy is challenging (because of what they are, and given upstream developers may package source code assuming libraries are being apt-gotten correctly rather than individually curated by an incompetent like me), it follows an app should be created. (Someone's gotta program it, and it ain't the user.) CUPS can load a .ppd so it might be that my printer is unfortunate in needing the proprietary driver along with its plug-in, in which case Puppy can say HP is supported as long as you don't need the proprietary driver... that's fine I can buy another printer, I don't *expect* 14-year old laser printers to work it's that I've kept mine this long partly because I've known it to work well on linux, including puppy.

[Amigodetux]

I think Cups is great, opinions can vary according to the needs of each person. In my case, thanks to CUPS, my printer works without the annoying messages of incompatibility of cartridges and other inconveniences when I used it in Wind0ws. I'm not an expert, but as a home user, I have had no problems using CUPS. It has worked for me with HP although I currently use a Canon.

[Geek3579]

I am currently using Bionicpup64 as my do-all-go-to desktop, and must have a printer connection. HP printers from my experience have been difficult to make work. But it seems Bionicpup64 and perhaps Fossapup64 have better or updated HP software.

All I do is search for HPLIP in the Puppy Package Manager and load any software that comes up with HPLIP in the name (about 3). Of course you have to set it up (add new printer, and configure) in the CUPS printer management section. I have a scanner/printer combo and It seems to connect better if I try to scan a document first before printing.

[gusfagan]

When will Puppy Linux put an updated hplip package in PPM? It's currently 3.17.10. There have been quite a few printers added since then.

[gusfagan]

When will Puppy Linux put an updated hplip package in PPM? It's currently 3.17.10. There have been quite a few printers added since then.

[pcplague]

In Fossapup 9.5 installed HPLIP version 20 after updating ppm.
In CUPS page in administration there was my printer HP 4200.
Also tested the scanner with Xscale