What if Puppy no longer worked?

[ozsouth]

Realising that my cognitive powers are not increasing, I have sometimes indulged in 'what would I do if' scenarios. Having faced this in the mid-90s with hardware, where my job depended on a left-field solution, I worry about a time when Puppy
will no longer run on new pcs. My thoughts go something like this:

1. Try ubuntu
2. Try openbsd
3. Try android tablet
4. Try Mac
5. Try windows 10s

I actually experimented with items 2 & 5 last year & have an android phone. I gladly returned to Puppy.
Win 10s is an interesting attempt by ms to limit damage by limiting exposure, allowing only windows store software, with side-loading limited & difficult. Despite being rather frustrating, it actually has some merit, particularly in a 'doomsday' scenario.

[wiak]

You could always join the Window's Insiders Program:

https://insider.windows.com/getting-started

and install WSL on Windows:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... tall-win10

I didn't know about win 10s (free availability?) Just found:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... baebeebc85

How do I get Windows 10 in S mode?
To get Windows 10 in S mode, you need the right volume license agreement and qualifying devices that are already enabled in S mode. Or you can work with the manufacturer or partner to get it installed when you buy a new device.

But I could still upgrade old machine from Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free apparently - not that I could be bothered to.

[8Geee]

Curious about your thoughts about openBSD #2... what made you run-away?

8Geee

[ozsouth]

@wiak - win 10s is distributed with many small netbooks, but I guess most folk would take the free one-way upgrade to win 10 home option. A win 10s multi-licence is for schools etc.

@8Geee - the size of openbsd, some driver issues & how comfortable I am with my customised Puppy made me discontinue testing openbsd. It certainly has merit though. I also tested GhostBSD & found it a bit friendlier.

[bigpup]

I worry about a time when Puppy
will no longer run on new pcs.

Not going to happen, as long as a newer version of Puppy, is released every year or so.
That is the biggest reason to release a new version of Puppy, having the latest support files and programs, along with the latest Linux kernel.
All that is needed to be able to run on the newest computers.

I have a very new computer, that is only fully supported by Bionicpup and Fossapup, or other newer Puppies, with similar software.

[01micko]

Don't worry, some nice things are happening to support modern gear and still should support old gear.

[mikeslr]

Don't worry, some nice things are happening to support modern gear and still should support old gear.

And Barry K has developed EasyOS which can run a distro in a container. See my post here, viewtopic.php?p=24515#p24515. As long as you can boot to desktop --with perhaps an early version-- mastering the art of creating a contained OS and a little fiddling with the contained OS you should be good to go.

In addition, Dingo has re-introduced us to CDE which can run even old software under any Puppy, viewtopic.php?p=25559#p25559.

So I would guess the bottle-neck would be compiling drivers ala the FatDog Team: FatDog in an EasyOS container running software via CDE anyone?

Maybe easier: A 'debiandog'.

[ozsouth]

Thanks folks. Some comforting info. And some exciting possibilities!

[6502coder]

At the risk of drawing down upon myself the wrath of the Puppy faithful, for my situation I think I will simply move on from Puppy, with grateful thanks for the many years of good service it has given me.

IMO Puppy's wheelhouse is 32-bit hardware. That's where its ability to squeeze the most out of the hardware really makes a difference, and justifies putting up with a few eccentricities. Once you start talking about new 64-bit hardware, for my purposes, there is less reason to reject more mainstream distros.

I run 6 flavors of Puppy on my collection of ancient laptops, but my daily driver on my Win7 64-bit desktop is LXLE, and on my relatively new Win10 laptop I like MX Linux booting off a fast USB3 flash drive. As my 32-bit machines die off or become unusable on today's Internet and are replaced with 64-bit hardware, I am sure I will continue to move on to more mainstream, but still relatively light OS's like LXLE and MX.

[8Geee]

I might go Rpi pups.

8Geee

[wiak]

IMO Puppy's wheelhouse is 32-bit hardware. That's where its ability to squeeze the most out of the hardware really makes a difference, and justifies putting up with a few eccentricities. Once you start talking about new 64-bit hardware, for my purposes, there is less reason to reject more mainstream distros.

Which is a very valid comment and really an indication that hardware has progressed far faster than computing software has become bloated in terms of resource needs. Ten years ago and prior to that small laptops/computers struggled to run the desktop environments of most mainstream Linux distros. Nowadays that issue is all but gone. Even Rasp PI is becoming quite a powerful wee beast, though perhaps that sort of device is limited enough to still benefit from non-multiuser highly pruned distros.

[8Geee]

I will also add that some of the most secure/private CPU/MPU are 32-bit. ARM 7's, and Intel Atom top the list, and a few ARM8's based on the Cortex A53/55. Without Out-of-Order execution and predictive branching these chips almost completely immune from Spectre/Meltdown.

Regards
8Geee

[Grey]

almost completely

Doesn't the first word contradict the second ? This is important in this matter.

[foxpup]

Wait for the new Slackware
Try TLC
Try BSD
Install Debian
Use EasyOS

edit: omg, I forgot Arch

[wiak]

edit: omg, I forgot Arch

That's a big omission...

I had never used Arch prior to now using it all the time (since, apart from the overlayfs frugal boot facilities WDL_Arch64 is entirely Arch-based-fully-compatible underneath). I had gained the impression that Arch was a system for tinkerers only and not the best to adopt as one's stable desktop. The idea of absolute 'rolling release' based, sounded unstable to me and I imagined a lot of commandline expertise might be required all the time with Arch. I have a fair amount of expertise, but am lazy when it comes to having to continually tweak my desktop distribution, so Arch did not seem attractive to me on above basis. However... I now know differently - Arch do a great job of checking what they release in rolling-release form. I have never had any issue whatsoever with stability (the opposite actually - it has been rock solid). It is great to be able to rely on the underlying repos to provide very up-to-date software versions that can also be relied on for stability, and that's how I find it. Furthermore, for learning, or experimenting with Linux - be it the likes of overlayfs, or Wayland, or whatever, Arch provides fantastic documentation in its Wiki - I doubt any distro provides better technical help (and especially with new technical resources, where Debian tends to be very slow on the uptake in terms of their stable releases). So on in all, Arch-based distros are, in my opinion, a good alternative to Puppy Linux for those who love experimenting with their distro, but also fine for those who simply want to trust upstream developers to provide them with a great, reliable up-to-date distro out-of-the-box. For example, if you want to try Wayland (with or without Xwayland for older X app support), no problem - here is a (recent) howto using Arch:

https://www.fosskers.ca/en/blog/wayland

That uses a specific tiling manager as an exemplar, but Arch Wiki details many alternative desktop managers designed for pure Wayland use (e.g. the actively developed "labwc" provides a subset of openbox functionality - for pure Wayland meaning not requiring Xwayland, which is basically an X server running on top of Wayland - a Wayland 'client', which I imagine will vanish as no longer required if Wayland proves better in the end to old X... will take a long time to occur I expect though - many apps/libs needing re-written to use Wayland):

https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland

That is the nature of Arch - its users and developers like to try new things as soon as they come out, so there is always someone who has tried and subsequently provided a reliable howto way ahead of the other-distro pack.

I also like Void Linux as the basis of distro design. Indeed, Void Linux package manager xbps, plus its repos, and runit init system were the basis of the original WeeDogLinux design, and remain the best in terms of the simple build-your-own WeeDogLinux system starting with only busybox and an (optional) upstream repo package manager. In many ways, Void Linux organisation is very similar to that of Arch Linux so I guess some of its development has also been influenced by Arch Linux (though some of the ways Void does things seems to have been influenced by its original author's NetBSD experience, and until recently used LibreSSL, but has recently given up on that and moved to using openSSL like most other Linux distros). Actually, even recent Debian seems to be moving towards Arch-like filesystem hierarchy where, for example, the likes of /lib and /bin becomes simply symbolic links to /usr/lib and /usr/bin and so on. Thus putting all libs together and all bins together, in practice, really simplifies matters in terms of simplified lib and bin PATHs. Howver, it is important that if you design a distro, such as Puppy Linux to not use the same filesystem hierarchy as the underlying upstream repo used for packages then side-effect problems become inevitable, so it is far from always good to 'do all things your own way' in practice anyway.

[8Geee]

Ya know, it might mean nearly 100%, perhaps above 95%, maybe there is one bug in the lowest level cache that cannot be remedied.

[tosim]

wiak-Do you use the full ArchOS, or one of the other versions of it?

[rockedge]

I think WeeDog-Arch. I have been using WeeDog-Void, based on Void Linux at least half of the time as main system. I still have excellent performance of Bionic, Fossapup and Tahr still on my newest machines. Tahr with a 5.4.70 kernel built with AUFS5

[wiak]

wiak-Do you use the full ArchOS, or one of the other versions of it?

WeeDog Arch64, but it is build using archbootstrap so the build is official Arch - except I don't use full install, but via WeeDog special overlayfs initrd/init it becomes a frugal installed Arch system, which is capable of being used in a very flexible modular way since WeeDog provides 100+ overlayfs layers capability via a special _addlayers algorithm that loops round finding the sfs modules rather than fixed adrv, fdrv, zdrv sort of scheme used by Puppy linux:

viewtopic.php?p=21859#p21859

The init further allows the sfs modules to be stored in boot partition, or anywhere else in the filesystem, or even in the initrd itself (or a mix of these) with all the usual changes save partition mechanisms to be expected by a frugal install (some being worked-on/improved at this very minute).

The key to all this is that simple, but really flexible _addlayer approach to loading in filesystem layers though. Per extract from above post:

In simplest to understand form (maybe) WeeDogLinux's _addlayers algorithm is basically (in rough english) as follows (but with lots of extras to deal with many very flexible save persistence options):

Code: Select all

Make a directory in tmpfs for mounting layer filesystems to.
while not all files done:
  Look through the directory where the filesystem modules are
  looking for .sfs module filesystems and raw module filesystems.
  For each one found, mount it ready for use in unionfs layers.
  Keep track (variable or array) of each found.
end_while_loop (i.e. keep doing the loop till finished)
Sort all the results found above in the order you want them in the layers.
mount the overlay (be it with aufs or overlayfs) to a tmpfs directory in RAM using the stored list of filesystem modules found above.

The resultant overlay is simplified to use numeric sfs layers and with that additional idea being part of it end looking like:

Code: Select all

overlay ...,lowerdir=save_sfs00:06:05:04:03:02:01,...work

In earlier WeeDogLinux creation (a few years ago), I had the idea to use chroot to the main root filesystem (so early WDL designs use choot in that way) rather than use the usual switch_root (such as traditional Puppy uses), however I now prefer switch_root with more flexibility available through using that alongside the _addlayers algorithm additions. I guess some people, who don't like to acknowledge others, think that if an 'intellectual idea' is simple and elegant enough then they can 'synthesise'/translate-it/modify-it/take-it-freely without credit. Wrong - should withdraw their publication despite the differences it has. I consider such actions a measure of Puppy no longer working well enough and some credit-grabbers trying to seek attention as if all-knowing (disrespectful) Saviours.

I've seen the idea blatantly copied recently, so don't be surprised to find the basics of it turning up in some Pups - it actually comes from WeeDog design, whatever may be claimed (I have heard it said that imititation is the sincerest form of flattery, but giving due credit for inspiration is a minimum form of honesty in acceptable open source development really). Anyway, I've learned from that and don't publish so much or so openly or so quickly/regularly as I did anymore - I wasn't impressed by such translation/modification/publication - I have no respect for any dev work from some quarters therefore, no matter how intensive, good or bad that dev work may be overall. Disgraceful, very low behaviour. I used to work in a postgrad research group (ERG, Univ of Aberdeen), developing TCPIP protocols/RFCs in pre-public-Internet days, so am well versed in spotting and avoiding plagiarism since even a whiff of it invalidates research publications - there is a serious code of conduct involved by competent researchers. Certainly the algorithm is simple, but wasn't used here in Puppyland by others before that I know of, and was certainly very well documented for WeeDogLinux in recent times; yes, simple/elegant algorithm, but good and worth respectfully copying/modifying/simplifying for simpler use and whatever, with due acknowledgement and reference. Anyway, not something I'll ever forget and I'm not an idiot in terms of being able to read code (whether recoded, translated, modified, whatever) and recognise copied ideas - really not good. Users don't care about such things, I understand that, but as a developer who puts hundreds of hours into thought and design ideas, I do. But I'll say no more about it - my memory of the event will live on regardless. Unacceptable, disgraceful, and pathetic - that's all except that I'm still contemplated publishing and contributing nothing further in the future - not on this forum at least - though my behind-the-scenes dev work will continue for my own purposes, albeit much more slowly and with significantly less enthusiasm. WDL init remains pretty much unique, however, and not some modified/code-translated initrd/init from any other source (though full credit is given elsewhere when applicable), however, and I'm pleased with that, despite any uncredited cherry-picking.

But yeah, aside from all these frugal install features WDL_Arch64 is fully Arch compatible so everything in Arch Wiki, Arch repos (including AUR) applies. However, if you want a much much smaller pacman capable Arch system, it is perfectly possible to tweak the firstrib rootfs build script for that purpose (well, actually, for that Arch slimming down purpose, you would tweak the archbootstrap script, which, unlike say debian's debootstrap, is a very simple single script).

wiak

[tosim]

wiak: Thank you.

[JASpup]

Puppy vitally evolves with a mission like the most efficient distro family on 64-bit hardware, with exceptional features like being able to run completely in ram.

Or it just dwindles a relec. That's a choice.

My educational background is more business-oriented, but in real life I'm more of a philosopher and activist.

Generally STEM are smarter, but they ignore social constraints and are prone to the same groupthink as every other group.

For example, there's a reason Mint and Ubuntu have 'flavors'. It's a natural evolution, and it's not just about taste, but desktop environment resource efficiency, Puppy's forte. They have business people in the fold. I can see it without knowing any of them.

I've yet to understand containers and EasyOS or the plans for it, but my business-orientation can see Puppy is still a vital creation (if not market-oriented).

If you want to increase Puppy popularity, donations and the user base, the beginning is focusing on the 64-bit future with multiple flavors on the Downloads page, e.g. XFCE, LXQt, and JWM.

Then perhaps start thinking about user-friendliness and gaming. How about a replacement for Chrome OS? Netbooks?

Or we can just spin around in a customization silo like the Arch Warriors (small bias admitted). The technical environment has a lot of competition and not nearly the user base, for this exceptional brand named Puppy.

[TomaszQ]

from my personal linux experience (besides puppy), Ive liked very much :

- elementaryOS (style, workflow, minimalism)
- triske linux (very very competetive to puppy, great MATE with ca. 700 mb load with open browser and apps)
- slax (great minimalism)
- lubuntu 11.10 booting speed.

[BologneChe]

Hi!
I am already using;

- Solus 4.2
- macOS
- Easyos Dunfell64

[mikewalsh]

Mm. I guess, for me, the order would go something like:-

• AntiX - 'cos it comes with JWM/Rox as one of the OOTB options

• ZorinOS - which I've been playing about with, on & off, for over 7 years. Very user-friendly

• ....and I agree with the above poster, TomaszQ. Definitely Slax; I only tried it for the first time this weekend, but it's great fun...and the fact that many Puppy 'portables' will run on it is just a bonus!

You can definitely forget MyCrudSoft & Crapple. They wouldn't even get a "look-in", as far as I'm concerned.

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

Hi!
I am already using;

- Solus 4.2
- macOS
- Easyos Dunfell64

Oooh....(*ouch!*) You have my deepest sympathies....

Mike.

[BologneChe]

@mikewalsh
You can go with a positive formula ... like I would use this or that.
It may be less relevant to know what you don't like.

All with respect;

[mikewalsh]

If you want to increase Puppy popularity, donations and the user base, the beginning is focusing on the 64-bit future with multiple flavors on the Downloads page, e.g. XFCE, LXQt, and JWM.

.....all of which assumes we WANT Puppy to compete on a level 'playing-field' with the Big Boys. And Puppy does that.....and slips into the obscurity of being just another one of the crowd.

<snip>....but in real life I'm more of a philosopher and activist....</snip>

Really? Get away! I'd never have guessed......

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@mikewalsh
You can go with a positive formula ... like I would use this or that.
It may be less relevant to know what you don't like.

All with respect;

Oh, don't get me wrong; no insult intended. I won't deny that Macs probably work okay.....but I don't like the prices, and I definitely don't like Cupertino's "philosophy". Timbo has forgotten what innovations for the sake of innovation IS....all he sees is an opportunity to raise his personal standing on the Top 500 Rich List.

And by so doing, has unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally!) raised the "snob" value for those who pay through the nose for a brand new Mac. No WAY are they worth what Apple charge for them...

Mike.

[JASpup]

It's not majority about competition but vitality, vision of the future, the organic nature of an entity, etc. I'm in XFCE right now. JWM is also a choice. That was a lot of work (understanding the systems and getting them working smoothly).

The reason I'm in XFCE now is I want to be live, and it's a lot easier running a live XFCE Puppy from scratch than it is a JWM version.

I have to set up 64 JWM and XFCE to be solid live setups like my 32 system. I'm not booting JWM because it takes to long to customize for usability.

So that would take one more component: empathy for a reasonable other. If you really like your car, a restaurant, a pair of shoes, etc. you tell people in your social network what benefit you receive and how you like them. If compelling, they'll try them too. If what you say matches their experience, they'll adopt.

There it grows, or you say, "Hey, check out this interface designed for slow 32-bit hardware with technical menus and a bunch of basic app icons on the desktop for your new Windows 10 machine." They won't adopt.

Users, right. The masses. Redmondtopia. Not people who took FORTRAN in college who have dozens of Linux families to choose from. The prior will get Thunar and but be wary of Rox.

I hear the infamous Australian Julian Assange writes code. So I defer.

[bigpup]

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