Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

@bigpup

Here's gparted on the latest test, sda2 & sda3 don't contain any Pup files. Sda is internal drive, sdb is USBhd. As noted before, if I delete the sda3 partition and reboot from sdb2 everthing works OK.
See if I missed something.

Thanks
wizard

Edit: Something weird must have happened, see https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 530#p95530. Since Bookworm has run-in-terminal built in, the attachment has been deleted. The balance of the post is left just for the sake of continuity.

I've attached an application which will enable Right-Clicking a File and attempting to run it via a terminal so as to obtain a display of what's going wrong.
This is a TRUE tar.gz. Download, extract and place the enclosed folder in /usr/local/apps.

I'm leaving it up to the User to decide what type of files --scripts, AppImages, etc.-- to configure it to work with by customizing the Right-Click Menu.
Background:
With SFS-Load being limited, I was attempting to provide modifications to Mikewalsh's LibreOffice-portable, viewtopic.php?p=54048#p54048 so that there would be menu entries and the ability to Right-Click an appropriate file and have it open in an appropriate application: e.g., a .odt file in LibreOffice-writer. Those familiar with AppImages and Mike's frameworks for working with them will appreciate their advantage over even using synaptic to install an application. Just to mention one: to upgrade LibreOffice, or use a version customized to your native language its almost as easy as downloading the appropriate LibreOffice AppImage, renaming it and substituting it for your old version. Almost.

As almost the first thing I do is obtain some version of LibreOffice I can use, and as I had done that under BookwormPup64 by using synaptic to install it, I had to setup a 'virgin' version of BookwormPup64. Absent from BookworPup64 are Puppys usual diagnostic tools, their Right-Click availability and the Right-ClickTools I had painsteakingly built originally for use with VanillaDup, viewtopic.php?p=69513#p69513 did not work. Despite that, I was able to construct an application (installable as a pet) that accomplished all my goals by placing all necessary files in a folder --and after booting into another Puppy-- using dir2pet on that folder. But when I replaced the Libreoffice.AppImage the application no longer worked.

I spent hours examining code, making guesses, editing code, creating versions of the pet and trying them. Finally, it dawned on me that being able to run those codes in a terminal might provide a clue. It did. It told me I had forgotten to make the substitute AppImage executable.

Hence the attachment. It's not included as a pet because Bookworm can't make pets. My suspicion is other Rox-Apps are missing from /usr/local/apps (and likely necessary scripts in /usr/local/bin).

The feed-back on Bookworm by now reveals that the inclusions of apt and synaptic are not a panecea. A Puppy is not the Linux sourced in woofing it. A Puppys needs diagnostic and building tools --such as those I included in the Right-Click pet and the others I discussed here, viewtopic.php?p=69514#p69514 to figure out why some application built for a different Linux doesn't work, and overcome that failure.

Frankly, from a User's prospective apt is not as capable or user friendly a package manager as PPM. Both (and synaptic) will fail to install components included in the Source distro but left out of Puppy. PPM provides a GUI. Apt requires use of a terminal and knowledge of its commands.

Synaptic provides the GUI apt lacks. But synaptic does not increase a distro's popularity. Linux Mint provides a Software Manager, https://www.fosslinux.com/103961/the-co ... anager.htm and IIRC, GNOME Software, https://fossnoobs.com/gnome-software-is ... edesigned/ may be used with many Linux Oses. These, however, do little more than what was accomplished under Puppys with Quickpet.

The problem with Quickpet was that it depended on the Puppy's creator and his/her access to the repository accessed via Quickpet. Those limitations need not exist. Anyone can create pets, SFSes, even AppImages and provide a link to an AppImage which can be used. We do. But they get scattered all over the web with links on the Forum to them scattered all over the Forum. Anyone can test whether an application works. We do that as well.

What Puppy actually needed was a repository and someone (or more) willing to maintain it by copying proven applications into it (and perhaps providing links from it to proven AppImages). Again, this is something pretty much anyone is a capable of doing. Given the limited expertise required and many people who already volunteer may I suggest @rockedge, "If you build it, they will come."

@mikeslr

Hence the attachment. It's not included as a pet because Bookworm can't make pets

Hi Mike,
I'm puzzled by that, here is a screenshot from BW64-10 and it can make .pet files. Did I misread your message?

Thanks
wizard

@mikeslr
@rockedge
@radky

What Puppy actually needed was a repository and someone (or more) willing to maintain it by copying proven applications into it (and perhaps providing links from it to proven AppImages). Again, this is something pretty much anyone is a capable of doing. Given the limited expertise required and many people who already volunteer may I suggest @rockedge, "If you build it, they will come."

We knew that many existing .pets, .sfs, deb, appimages and portables would no longer work OOTB in BW64. Even some of the apps installed with Synaptic do not work OOTB. I've been fixing apps that I use, some easy, some hard, some not at all. I would vote with mikeslr to create some kind of repository just for BW64 that can document what works (including links) and what does not. Better yet, a place to house those apps and make them available for download would be best. I think mike just volunteered to be a maintainer probably some of our other capable members might step up, and if I can help count me in too.

Thanks
wizard

@mikeslr wrote:

Absent from BookwormPup64 are Puppys usual diagnostic tools, their Right-Click availability and the Right-ClickTools I had painsteakingly built... (and) Bookworm can't make pets...

@mikeslr

Bookworm Pup64 10 has comprehensive ROX right-click menu options including:

1 - Run-In-Terminal options for executable files, shell scripts, Appimages, etc.
2 - Archiving tools for building the following formats: iso (dir-to-iso), pet (dir2pet), sfs (dir2sfs) and tar.gz (dir2targz)
3 - ListDD for evaluating missing dependencies
4 - And quick access to a plethora of utilities and convenience applications

Which diagnostic tools or right-click options are missing in BW64 ?

So we need a repo storage space? How big?

radky wrote: Wed Aug 02, 2023 9:19 pm

Which diagnostic tools or right-click options are missing in BW64 ?

I can't confirm or reproduce mikeslr's problems because so far (almost) everything works as expected and the software collection is excellent, containing gems like FSearch and Diffuse, to name just a few. But since you asked: The other day I was looking for @rcrsn51's PeasyPDF converter to convert a scanned document to PDF. I eventually mounted a Slacko 5.6 sfs and directly ran PeasyPDF from there, but it would be so much easier if this little script was included in BW64. After all most of the Peasy apps are. I tried puppyPDF, but this app is - well, let's say "very limited in its abilities" and can't convert image files.

Concerning PeasyApps: This project contains a version of PeasyPort that claims to be mine but has a number of anonymous, un-annotated changes.

I would not trust it.

I have reported this issue in other Puppies but was ignored.

rcrsn51 wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:41 am

Concerning PeasyApps: This project contains a version of PeasyPort that claims to be mine but has a number of anonymous, un-annotated changes.

The only changes I found was gtkdialog to gtk2dialog or - in PeasyDiff - gtkdialog3 to gtk2dialog. As far as I can see all PeasyApps are affected and changed to gtk2dialog. Certainly un-annotated and anonymous, but not unreasonable.

rockedge wrote: Wed Aug 02, 2023 10:40 pm

So we need a repo storage space? How big?

If people would use it.

All Puppy versions need to have a software repository here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/
The official repository on ibiblio.org, where Puppy has been kept for many years, until recently, when BarryK stopped support for Puppy.
Note:
He is probably the one that had posting ability for Puppy Linux at ibiblio.org
When 01micko took control of Puppy as the Puppy master, he was given the access information Barryk was using, to post at ibiblio.org.
But 01macko has said he is no longer providing much to support Puppy Linux.
I think peebee has the information, because i see stuff posted that peebee produced.

Someone or several people, need to get this ability to post to ibiblio.org and update the repository.

Notice that all the Puppy versions that are listed have two separate directories.

1. puppy-(name of the Puppy version)
A repository of their specific ISO's

2. pet_packages-(name of the Puppy version)
A repository of any software specifically compiled for the specific Puppy version.
Software pets that are known to work in this specific Puppy version.

@wizard

I specifically asked what operating systems are installed on the internal drive sda?

@bigpup @rockedge @wizard and anyone else that's interested.

I think the idea of each Puppy having it's own repository of software (that works properly) is brilliant, having had one or two failures in the past. So I will try to make a very small contribution to the idea.

I'm fussy about music players, and my preferred one is Strawberry. So I was delighted to find it available in Synaptic, and installed it. Plays the music ok, but didn't show any song lyrics. I know that lyrics can be a bit hit and miss sometimes, but it didn't show any at all, and I tried some very well known songs to test it. I guess there's some dependency missing, but I've no idea what and haven't had time to dig about much yet.

Usually my next option is to fall back to Clementine. Installed that from Synaptic, and all worked properly, including lyrics. Which surprised me a bit as Clementine has an awful lot of dependencies, and all my previous attempts to install it in any Puppy have failed miserably. At least it was a success in Bookworm.

The only changes I found was gtkdialog to gtk2dialog or - in PeasyDiff - gtkdialog3 to gtk2dialog. As far as I can see all PeasyApps are affected and changed to gtk2dialog. Certainly un-annotated and anonymous, but not unreasonable.

This change is key to keeping it working because we need gtkdialog compiled against both gtk2+ and gtk3+. Which can't be the same...so we carry now 2 versions of gtkdialog, one for gtk2 and one for gtk3. To use the gtk2 gtkdialog we needed a symlink called gtk2dialog. So as a hack we go back to software that is using gtk2 and need to change it or no more program working.....

Maybe start converting to gtk4 because it's on the way

Had to use the gtk2dialog symlink and a gtkdialog compiled against gtk2 to use Puppy Linux utilities in Kennel Linux variants

wizard

I'm puzzled by that, here is a screenshot from BW64-10 and it can make .pet files. Did I misread your message?

I was puzzled as well. I was almost certain that I had previously done so. However, even before setting up LibreOffice, the first thing I do is create/modify ydrv to include all my usually needed applications. But to make sure that the project I was working on should be functional under all BookwormPup64's "I had to setup a 'virgin' version of BookwormPup64." Something weird must have happened.

dir2pet is a rox-app which runs from /usr/local/apps. So are run-in-terminal, and many (most/all?) other diagnostic and building tools. But as the following screen-shot show, Right-Clicking the dir2pet folder --which should display an option to dir2pet that folder-- doesn't.

Fortunately, that setup isn't for daily use so I'm not going to try to figure out why it's weird. My suspicion is an error failed to write the necessary files to /root/.config/rox.sourceforge.net.

Sorry for everyone --particularly myself-- for the misunderstanding. I've edited the post initiating this discussion.

@bigpup I went back to look through any correspondence that I might have archived that has the login details for https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/ but I can not find any.

I think peebee might have the details. Access to the account on distro.ibiblio.org would be a key to bringing it up to date. Maybe it is?

There is experimentation with some ideas happening or going to happen soon that accessing the repo for packages might be needed.

mikeslr wrote:

dir2pet is a rox-app which runs from /usr/local/apps. So are run-in-terminal, and many (most/all?) other diagnostic and building tools. But as the following screen-shot show, Right-Clicking the dir2pet folder --which should display an option to dir2pet that folder-- doesn't.

@mikeslr

In ROX-Filer, right-clicking a 'rox-app' directory in /usr/local/apps will display context menu options appropriate for that type of directory (such as Copy, Cut, Duplicate, Rename, Link, Delete, Look Inside, Open With, etc...).

On the other hand, right-clicking any generic directory displays the additional context menu options appropriate for that type of directory (such as dir-to-iso, dir2pet, dir2sfs, dir2targz, ListDD, MultiRename, Packit, Search with pFind, etc...).

@bigpup

Sorry for the oversight Big, the internal drive sda1 is NTFS and has W7 Pro installed.

Thanks
wizard

radky wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:50 pm

mikeslr wrote:

dir2pet is a rox-app which runs from /usr/local/apps. So are run-in-terminal, and many (most/all?) other diagnostic and building tools. But as the following screen-shot show, Right-Clicking the dir2pet folder --which should display an option to dir2pet that folder-- doesn't.

@mikeslr

In ROX-Filer, right-clicking a 'rox-app' directory in /usr/local/apps will display context menu options appropriate for that type of directory (such as Copy, Cut, Duplicate, Rename, Link, Delete, Look Inside, Open With, etc...).

On the other hand, right-clicking any generic directory displays the additional context menu options appropriate for that type of directory (such as dir-to-iso, dir2pet, dir2sfs, dir2targz, ListDD, MultiRename, Packit, Search with pFind, etc...).

Radky, of course you're correct. That's the way it's supposed to work. But I didn't know about the limited Right-Click options when a rox-app is selected. Never had a reason to try to just make a pet out of only one rox-app. I thought I could demonstrate both the presence of the rox-app and it's failure to function with one screenshot.

Both the 'virgin' deployment of Bookworm and ordinary folder* still being on /mnt/home, I booted into the former and Right-Clicked the latter: no dir2pet option is offered.

As I wrote, something went wrong in this deployment of BookwormPup64. I've deployed many Puppys from ISOs including several versions of BookwormPup64 as it evolved. This is the first time such a problem has occurred; other than something both stupid and obvious such as failing to copy vmlinuz from the ISO.

--=-=-----===
* This is not the folder I used to build the pet. Once the pet functioned I deleted its 'work-folder' as I could always UExtract the completed pet. The folder shown in the screenshot was for a similar pet I had extracted to reference and forgot to delete.

wizard wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 7:25 pm

@bigpup

Sorry for the oversight Big, the internal drive sda1 is NTFS and has W7 Pro installed.

The last time you used Windows 7 pro.

Are you very, very sure you did a normal complete shutdown?

Any other type shutdown of Windows will not fully release control of the drive.

Need to make sure this is not possibly causing your issues.

@bigpup

Good thought Big, but don't think that's the issue because:
1. F96cce_4 boots OK without error (same hardware)
2. Just remove the ext3 partition (sda3) and BW64-10 boots OK

To be certain, I deleted the ntfs sda1 partition = BW64-10 still loads and can't find the save folder.

Thanks
wizard

What exactly is on sda3 partition?

Or is it just sda3 being there all that is needed to mess up booting?

You do have the save in the same location as the install of Bookworm64 10.0?

@bigpup

What exactly is on sda3 partition?

Or is it just sda3 being there all that is needed to mess up booting?

You do have the save in the same location as the install of Bookworm64 10.0?

1. nothing
2. yes, just having an ext partition causes it to error
3. yes

Thanks
wizard

How to compile xapp 2.6.1?

linuxunix wrote: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:10 pm

How to compile xapp 2.6.1?

At a glance it looks like you would compile it with meson and ninja
When asking questions like that it would be helpful if you could post a link to source code and any other information so that we don't have to go searching for it.

MochiMoppel wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 4:28 am

rcrsn51 wrote: Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:41 am

Concerning PeasyApps: This project contains a version of PeasyPort that claims to be mine but has a number of anonymous, un-annotated changes.

The only changes I found was gtkdialog to gtk2dialog or - in PeasyDiff - gtkdialog3 to gtk2dialog. As far as I can see all PeasyApps are affected and changed to gtk2dialog. Certainly un-annotated and anonymous, but not unreasonable.

I can imagine that such simple changes are done anonymously for the "good cause", but still IMHO it's not a proper way to handle things (if without asking the original developer).

Those are not the changes I was talking about. But that's the last I will have to say about the issue.

OscarTalks wrote: Tue Aug 08, 2023 4:32 pm

linuxunix wrote: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:10 pm

How to compile xapp 2.6.1?

At a glance it looks like you would compile it with meson and ninja
When asking questions like that it would be helpful if you could post a link to source code and any other information so that we don't have to go searching for it.

http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ ... rig.tar.gz
http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ ... ian.tar.xz

I don't know if it's due to HTTPS or other network issues. This forum is too slow to open and I can't open it after trying to reply

linuxunix wrote: Wed Aug 09, 2023 3:14 am

http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ ... rig.tar.gz
http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ ... ian.tar.xz
I don't know if it's due to HTTPS or other network issues. This forum is too slow to open and I can't open it after trying to reply

No problems with the forum here.
Debian do upload copies of source code packages, but I grabbed it from here:-
https://github.com/linuxmint/xapp/tags

I am curious to know why you need this program, it appears to be something to help with compatibility across various desktop environments which normally would not apply to Puppy?

Anyway, as I said, to compile you would extract the source code package and from within the top level of the extracted source you run meson.
I did test this and it was trying to work, but there is (reported by meson) missing dependency libgnomekbd (and possibly others) so you would have to install those first, either via package manager (including DEV components) or by compiling those from source beforehand. (I did not want to do these steps myself).

Once that is all done you should be able to run:-
meson setup --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu builddir
followed by
ninja -C builddir install
to compile and install the package.

Bookworm Pup64,

Bookworm Pup64 10.0.1

• New release
• See first post to download and second post for changelog