4 questions about Fossa 9.5 desktop setup

[Cleveland]

Hey everybody, I am new to the puppy linux community! I've read through a lot of pages but never posted anything myself. I am currently using fossa pup 9.5. I have a few questions regarding the following topics.

1. Customizing the desktop - Which dock/tray should I use? I saw some older posts that mentioned cairo-dock, but I'm not sure what files to take from the repository to get it working in a reliable way. I admittedly don't know what I'm doing in that regard, but thankfully I'm not looking to do anything complicated. I want to transfer what I have as desktop icons to a better looking dock on top ala bionic pup 32. I'm certain that there are better options than the built in tray that sort of resembles vanilla debian xfce. What do you use?

2. My wallpaper keeps disappearing on restart, I've tried lower res .svg files, jpeg, png, I've tried changing the location of the file, using the original directory where the stock wallpapers are as well. I'm sort of stumped but I assume the fix is an easy one that I just don't know about. I settled on one of the stock plain grey wallpapers because those are the only ones I could get to stick when I reboot. Just for the record, this is a frugal install and everything else that is changed or altered during my session restores correctly.

3. My process for creating desktop shortcuts for things like my pictures, music, notes etc. has been - create a new directory in my documents for each folder - drag the newly created file to the desktop as a shortcut - Is my solution correct or problematic? Am I just creating a duplicate? I don't want to break anything, or start off on the wrong foot as this is a fairly fresh install.

4. Is there a repository where I can find sfs files? What happened in my experience recently - The official discord .deb file failed to work - I went on a hunt and found one that was either here in this forum or in the Murga linux forum, I honestly don't recall. Thankfully the google drive link still worked and the compiled sfs file that a user in good nature created and posted still worked! Is my process correct, if a deb file doesn't work, look for sfs because it is pup specific?

My computer - Asus X202E 11.6 (glorified netbook) Intel i3 3rd gen - 4gb ddr3 1333 mhz- a newly installed 250gb Seagate barracuda SSD- Intel HD 4000 -

Touchscreen works out of the box, trackpad works flawlessly. I'm a writer and a musician, so I could have settled with ubuntu/manjaro/mint but I really like this OS for being snappy, resource friendly, and a little bit different than the others. As with any newer user, my understanding of it's internal processes could be better, that's why I reach out to the forum today. - Thank you

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Hallo.....and to the 'kennels'..!

I'm going to give you my personal 'take' on the matter.....OK? When it comes to desktop customization, the only limit is your imagination; at least, that's always been my experience. With Puppy, in particular, being what's considered a 'hobbyist' distro - no hard & fast rules.....you can tear it apart & rebuild it any way you want to - so long as it's stable, doesn't crash, does what you want and, most importantly of all, WORKS for YOU, then there isn't really a "right" or "wrong" way to do things.

The Linux "purists" will be up in arms at this..! Those, in particular, who have come from a mainstream Linux background, when everything is expected to be carried out via terminal commands, and they've had it drummed into them from day one that running as 'root' is a BAD THING, will insist that, yes; there ARE proper, 'correct' ways of doing things.

But Puppy was always intended to be fun. Many of us here in fact use it as our sole "daily driver"; I, myself, have for at least 6 years or so. She'll do whatever you want to do; certainly, anything the 'big boys' can do, although installation and trouble-shooting, etc, may be rather more manual & 'hands-on' than most. And, er.....who needs Windoze?

This might give you some inspiration:-

[Click to enlarge:-]

(Graphic design is a long-standing hobby of mine anyway, dating back more than 40 years. Gawd, where does the time go..?)

---------------------------------------------------------

SFS packages; best thing is to search around the Forums, both this AND the old one. The old Murga-Linux forum is now a giant read-only archive, and there's tons of stuff in there. Not all links will still be active, though all mine certainly are.....not everyone made the move from the old forum to this; I think some saw it as a good excuse to make a break with Puppy.

Feel free to have a dig around in my repos; the links are in my sig.

You may find this particular search tool handy. It's a 'custom' Google search, specifically set to point at the new and old Puppy Forums:-

https://rockedge.org/psearch/

.......courtesy of our webmaster & admin, rockedge.

If necessary, we can soon teach you how to build your own SFS packages. It's not hard, and every Pup contains the tools by default. There may even be direct conversion utilities kicking around the community somewhere; I'm sure I've seen the odd one here & there over the years.

----------------------------------------------------

Any questions - anything at all - ask away. That's what we like doing.....helping folks to get the best out of Puppy. If we can't help directly, 10 to 1 we can point you towards somewhere, someone or something that can..!

Mike.

[666philb]

hi @Cleveland

not sure what's going on with the wallpaper .... are you using menu>>desktop>>jwmdesk to change it?

for official sfs packages for a puppy type into a terminal

Code: Select all

sfsget

others from the forum may also work.

for a dock, there's a simple launch bar in jwmdesk>>>options>>>accessory tray.
cairo-dock does work but is big and brings in a whole lot of gnome stuff. you might want to consider wbar & wbar.conf in the package manager for a lighter dock..

as for the short cuts yes you are duplicating. the desktop is a pinboard and anything from anywhere can be dragged and dropped onto it. then right clicking on the item once on the desktop allows you to edit the name and change the icon without altering the original file.

good to hear that the touch screen is working well

[mikewalsh]

@666philb :-

Phil, Cleveland could always do what I've done on occasion. Stick the desired wallpaper in /mnt/home, then set it via the pinboard right-click 'drag'n'drop' option. It's always worked for me; I had to use it in one of your early Tahrpups, 'cos the darn thing wouldn't "stick" when set in the normal way.

IIRC, one of the 'service packs" eventually fixed that behaviour.

Mike.

[bigpup]

for a dock, there's a simple launch bar in menu>>>jwmdesk>>>options>>>accessory tray.

JWMDesk Manager main window has tabs for different stuff.
After you select to have the launch bar and number of items on it. Select apply.
On the tray tab will be tray 1 and tray 2 selection buttons on bottom.
Click tray 2 button. (this is the launch bar)
Notice the attributes section changes to tray 2
Here you change attributes of tray 2 (launch bar)
On launch tab.
Panel buttons should be showing buttons: tray 2
Here you can add or remove launch buttons for tray 2 (launch bar)

Select apply button on any of the tabs to make the changes.

Back at the tray tab
Click on tray 1 button to change everything to affecting tray 1 (the normal desktop tray/launch bar.

[Cleveland]

Thank you all for your help, I really appreciate the detailed fixes in your responses. I guess that the best thing to do for anyone in the future who may stumble on this page is to address each one of the questions that I asked and fill in what has worked in my situation thus far.

1. Dock/Tray - wbar & wbar.conf is exactly what I was looking for as far as a simple dock. I'll probably tinker more with the settings later. SOLVED

2. My wallpaper disappearing - Using JWM manager I tried several things including /mnt/home as suggested. Nothing worked. I noticed that on restart, as soon as conky started my wallpaper would vanish prompting me with a warning.

"Error loading background image: Failed to open file
"/usr/share/backgrounds/gray": No such file or directory
Backdrop removed"

My test wallpaper was labeled "gray tiles" with a space.. As soon as I noticed that no other stock wallpapers had spaces I removed the space.. it worked..

SIMPLE FIX and not a conky problem like I thought. An EPIC facepalm moment if there ever was one. SOLVED

3. Desktop shortcuts - After I installed a proper dock, I had no need for most of my shortcuts. However I still don't understand one simple thing. Where is the ideal place to create new folders for pictures, music, videos, notes etc. so that I can launch the folders from my dock? I wonder if the process is a bit different being that they are not applications like discord or vlc. Wbar did not like my process of simply entering the location of the directory no matter where it was.

4. .sfs files - upon entering "sfsget" into terminal I get a great starting off point, thank you! SOLVED

https://postimg.cc/s17TPf6V

By the way, not only does my touchscreen work out of the box.. Reaper through bone stock ALSA is currently running my Soundcraft multi-track console over usb at a respectable 2.6/5.3ms latency!.. On specs this old, that is commendable performance. Meaning I could record 12 simultaneous tracks and mix them in real-time with very low latency using zero I said zero proprietary drivers. I'm assuming it's the same story in Audacity or other Linux friendly DAW's. The pup works out of the box as a portable studio or podcast recorder in this regard with a litany of built in plugins in Reaper.

[MochiMoppel]

My test wallpaper was labeled "gray tiles" with a space.. As soon as I noticed that no other stock wallpapers had spaces I removed the space.. it worked..

SIMPLE FIX and not a conky problem like I thought. An EPIC facepalm moment if there ever was one. SOLVED

Not your fault. Looks like a bug and maybe @666philb can fix it:
File /root/Startup/conkystart starts conky and 2 seconds later tries to set the wallpaper:

Code: Select all

wallp=`cat /root/.config/wallpaper/bg_img`
sleep 7
conky -c /root/conkyrc &
sleep 2
set_bg $wallp

The last line needs quotation marks, otherwise any filename with spaces will lead to the error you described:
set_bg "$wallp"

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Thank you all for your help, I really appreciate the detailed fixes in your responses.

Hey, no worries. We've ALL been there at some point.....

3. Desktop shortcuts - After I installed a proper dock, I had no need for most of my shortcuts. However I still don't understand one simple thing. Where is the ideal place to create new folders for pictures, music, videos, notes etc. so that I can launch the folders from my dock? I wonder if the process is a bit different being that they are not applications like discord or vlc. Wbar did not like my process of simply entering the location of the directory no matter where it was.

This one is a bit of an old chestnut, TBH, and gets asked by probably 70% of beginners at some point. Have a think about this for a moment...

The OS itself - in Puppy's case - never gets corrupted in the way that most mainstream distros - running as a "full" installation - sometimes can. Those 'read-only' files are also easy enough to replace in the event of complete disaster.

Your personal data, however (material that you may have accumulated over a period of years) is valuable to no-one but you, okay? Nobody else gives a hoot whether your collection of 10,000 cat pictures goes down the drain.....but to you, that might be a life-changing event!

The point I'm trying to make is that your personal data is not easily replaceable, so.....you need to take care of it. What many of us tend to do - and this advice is echoed all round the Linux community - is to create a separate partition somewhere, specifically for personal data, and to create and save directories for your own stuff there. Having done this, it's a simple matter to sym-link those directories into /root. Puppy will see them there, and as far as the file-system is concerned, that's their permanent location.....but they're NOT occupying space in the 'save', and have the advantage of remaining safe even if Puppy goes into meltdown.

Because they're NOT really there.... (With me so far?)

You can drag those directories onto the desktop & just drop 'em; they're then permanent shortcuts to those locations. You can also dress them up with an appropriate icon for the directory content; Google/DuckDuckGo is your friend here; do a search for, say, "PNG icons for xxxxxx(whatever)". That'll bring plenty up; PNG is the best format because of the transparency layer. (JPG/JPEG, however, are smaller.....but you don't get such good effects.)

Wbar is not alone; I have, in years gone by, had the same issue with Cairo-dock. It, too, doesn't like 'pointing at' a directory; executables, yes.....scripts, no problem. Directories though....uh-uh.

Mike.

[Cleveland]

@mikewalsh

I'm very upset about not having quicker access to my 10,000 cat pictures! In all seriousness thank you for the help, you're desktop looks sweeeet by the way.

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Summat else just occurred to me. If you enjoy music-production, that kind of stuff, you could do a lot worse than take a look at 10wt3ch's Studio 1337.

He's been into this stuff for years. It was originally based around a much older, Slackware 13.37-based Puppy (hence the name), though it has been updated a couple of times over the intervening period.....most recently, to being based on BionicPup64.

He used to have his own web-site, and made a modest income from selling ready-to-go flash-drives for a a very reasonable fee. Couple of years back, he gave up on the commercial aspect, and made the files available for anyone to use. You just unzip it to a flash drive, and you're ready to go. I've got it on a flash-drive myself; I keep meaning to start experimenting with it, but never quite seem to get around to it...!

If you're interested, you can find it here:-

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=126

Mike.

[Cleveland]

@mikewalsh Woooow now you've piqued my interest. Their link is broke, but I'll dig further on this. -Thanks

[rockedge]

@Cleveland

Some more work you might be interested in. I think there is a description and link in English also somewhere!

viewtopic.php?f=110&t=1046

[mikewalsh]

@mikewalsh Woooow now you've piqued my interest. Their link is broke, but I'll dig further on this. -Thanks

@Cleveland :-

Mm. Yah; I see what you mean. I'll upload my own copy; stuff like this is too important not to share.

@rockedge :-

Rockedge, does Ally have a copy of this over at archive.org, d'you know?

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Right. Now then:-

I've uploaded the "unzip-to-USB" variant to my MediaFire a/c. You can find it here:-

https://www.mediafire.com/file/0l28qpc6 ... k.zip/file

All I did was to prepare a USB flash drive with a single ext3 partition; you can add a 'swap' partition at the end if you want. I'm not certain if the unzip operation creates a file-system or not, but then all you do is to extract the archive TO that partition on the stick. Sets up the bootloader and everything.

Then you just boot from the stick. Easy-peasy.

(With regard to your observations about Reaper over in the other thread, I think both versions are installed to this; the Linux one, AND the full Windows version running under WINE. But don't take that as 'gospel; I haven't booted into it for a few months, and I may be remembering incorrectly.)

Mike.

[Cleveland]

@mikewalsh I grabbed it and will test it out later on. Thanks for not only uploading but clarifying the installation process. Yea Reaper with wine doesn't make much sense to me unless, biiig unless, it can recognize VST plugins without a hitch. These are the building blocks that make a digital audio workstation go round. I know many who have upwards of 20k dollars worth of VST plugins built up over decades and are tied to Windows or Mac solely because of it. Mac may be an even worse offender with Pro Tools and it's subscription based model. Regardless, the answer is not always a simple wine/carla bridge, some plugins will lose their gui with carla, suffer performance drops, some VST's require iLok or have weird anti-piracy windows/mac specific installers with companies like my favorite (sarcasm) IK Multimedia. I will be digging into this later, I'll let you know what I find.

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Please do. As far as digital music production goes I'm a complete 'noob' (I never progressed much beyond playing 'Chopsticks' in my youth!)

Even so, I figured this was worth grabbing while I could. Someday, I may actually start looking into it for real.....

(Graphic design is, and always will be, my first love. Video-editing is also developing into quite an interest for me too.)

Mike.

[Cleveland]

@mikewalsh I tried but could not figure out how to set up the drive. I formatted my ole 128gb corsair survivor usb stick to ext3 in gparted, took a while but it worked. After that I could not copy files to it and when I tried to was given an error saying permission denied. I went digging a little bit and could not find out how to access the drive as root in order to copy the files over, first time I've seen this with a removable storage device probably due to the ext3 format, perhaps gparted set it up that way by default. Any tips? Just another day in noob land population me myself and I...

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

Mm. Probably be better to format to FAT32; it is, after all, how most sticks come OOTB.

I'm going to need to do some experimenting over the next few days. I've discovered that the thumb drive I had it on has been re-purposed for something else, so.....I'll need to refresh my memory as to just how I DID set it all up.

One question; are you using UEFI, or MBR BIOS?

Mike.

[Cleveland]

Ahhh I see said the blind man. Just read through a couple of conversion instructionals to switch it to UEFI. Looks fairly straight forward, I think I'll give it a go. I don't believe this will work otherwise. https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/bios-uefi @mikewalsh

[puddlemoon]

Hi @Cleveland
From what I'm hearing, you may consider checking out the remaster I have made of fosspup.
After using 1337 for at least a year I modified it so much that it was time for a fresh take.
It is set up for audio production with some of my favorite tools and hundreds of plugins. however I have removed almost all the vst plugins in favor of the open source lv2 format. They can of course still be used and wine installed etc...
I have also set up cairo-dock with just the core and a few extras that require, if I remember correctly, no extra deps at all.
Could be just right.. Or not.. Just thought I would mention it.
Link is in my sig.

[Cleveland]

@puddlemoon This looks outstanding, unfortunately the link doesn't work at the moment so I've been reading up about it over here. https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_jackalpup

[Clarity]

@Cleveland on this PUP thread, user @ETP has shared useful offerings that I personally swear by for FossaPUP64. He has also posted a PET somewhere that I love: It allows an automatic Desktop background changer for each day of the week that I use quite a bit of. Mine is set for midnight but the PET allows flexibility.

I too am a touchscreen user and ALL of my new PCs/tablets have a touchscreen/touchpad component to them.

This is one of the fascinating things about woofCE developers in their steps to keep Puppy current with the manufacturers hardware upgrades.

2020-2021 WoofCE PUPs strives to insure concurrency that we take advantage of.

Enjoy!
Edit: Apologies!!! I did not include the link when I said "on this PUP thread". Fixed, now.

[mikeslr]

@puddlemoon This looks outstanding, unfortunately the link doesn't work at the moment so I've been reading up about it over here. https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_jackalpup

It's working. But it's on puddlemoon's google-drive. You may have the problem reported here along with its work-around. viewtopic.php?p=18937#p18937
"for some reason I had to rebuild iron's profile. In doing so I set Iron to "Block third party cookies." Guess what. Now I couldn't download google-chrome portable but received a notice that I could find out why. I clicked the offer and the webpage which opened advised, among other things, that "Blocked Third-party cookies can prevent Drive Web downloads."

[Cleveland]

@mikeslr I'm not sure what you mean, I found the uefi image for jackal pup right on archive.org and downloaded it. You mean it's hosted on google drive? I had no issues with that, but as far as accessing the old puppy linux forum yeaaaa it's a no go at the moment.

[Cleveland]

@puddlemoon This really is something great you have done here with jackalpup! I've only scratched the surface with it so far. In about an hour of late night tinkering I am really impressed with this version of pup, you have integrated a whole heap of audio tools all into one simple resource friendly system! Bravo! This is less a review and more an impression. After my initial jaw drop was over I did notice some instability with the cairo dock, it may just be me and my hardware/setup I'm not really sure. I noticed that it created a duplicate of itself and placed the duplicate directly behind the original so it took a minute to spot. Maybe I just fat fingered a quick setting?? Here's a couple of screens that I took after I was done fiddling, all that changed here from the original was the wallpaper which was just sort of a test, and I removed the desktop icons. I also was playing with conky so in these shots it's not present. Being on a laptop, I still need to find a clever way to show my battery life whether it's in the dock or on the desktop. But I think I've found a home here with this one, you really knocked it out of the park!

https://postimg.cc/gallery/SkyVzZy

[Cleveland]

@Clarity Isn't it funny that even ubuntu and canonical can't even get it right out of the box?? I have always had issues with either the touchscreen or the trackpad, if it's not one it's the other!

[mikewalsh]

@Cleveland :-

@mikeslr I'm not sure what you mean, I found the uefi image for jackal pup right on archive.org and downloaded it. You mean it's hosted on google drive? I had no issues with that, but as far as accessing the old puppy linux forum yeaaaa it's a no go at the moment.

Cleve, you might connect better if you use the old forum's original URL, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php. Until rockedge gets the DNS issues sorted out that hit us a week or so back, the "oldforum" URL for Murga-linux WILL be a "no-go".

Here's the plan going forward.

Mike.

[puddlemoon]

@Cleveland
First thanks for checking it out.
I could see from the screenshots that you got the older version from archive.org, really worth getting the newest version from the top link. I have just added the files to my archive account...
here

Thanks @mikeslr for pointing that out.. google has annoyed me with this quite enough!

Yes, cairo-dock does start a second instance on the odd occasion for me too. just restarting jwm (from the exit menu) fixes it I think, or you could kill one instance through it's own menu or the task manager.
There is also a little jitter in the popups you'll see when the mouse is in a certain spot. For me, any easy trade off because cairo gives me the best feeling workflow. (plus it's kinda flashy)
Feel free to ask away in the thread about the setup etc.. or pm me if you like.

[geo_c]

Jackalpup is the bomb. I used puppy studio (Studio 1337) throughout its development, and puddlemoon has carried the torch forward in a very stable way. It's everything a linux studio is supposed to be, and as far as my experience with other linux studios, it seems a puppy base is the best approach due to it's portability and light weight. I've been running Jackalpup as my main OS for about two months and totally love it! I love it so much I deleted windows 10 from my best laptop and did a frugal install on the hardrive. I'm a musician and the only tool I was worried about replacing was Presonus Studio One, which is very good software, probably the best of its kind, but honestly, Ardour, Jack, and the other linux apps are way more fun because their modular versatility allows for a much more creative workflow. So I took the dive. Every week I produce sheet music, lead sheets, teach by zoom meeting, organize rehearsals and record audio. I'm doing it all on Jackalpup with the help of sfs modules, browsers and tools provided by Mikewalsh and others.

[BarcodeMaker]

Is there anyone who provide me information regarding the Fossa 9.5 in simple word. Also provide the feature and usability information.