KLV-Spectr running a Spectrwm Tiling Window Manager

[rockedge]

@geo_c For WiFi connection there is a totally easy way

in a terminal:

Code: Select all

nmtui

Not sure if you will have to create a WiFi device using Networkmanager first or not. Try first just using the nmtui command.

[geo_c]

So last night I fired up my 2GB one cpu netbook that was sitting in the closet and installed all of these

fossapup64_9.5
F96
jackalpup0.0
KLA-xfce
KLV-airedale
KLV-spectr

Everything but jackalpup runs in the 500-700MB of ram territory (which runs about 1.2GB), but KLV-spectr is sitting at 146MB of ram.

This is great!

EDIT: KLV-airedale is actually running at 337MB of ram, so it's the perfect compromise of effieciency and desktop convenience.

[amethyst]

So last night I fired up my 2GB one cpu netbook that was sitting in the closet and installed all of these

fossapup64_9.5
F96
jackalpup0.0
KLA-xfce
KLV-airedale
KLV-spectr

Everything but jackalpup runs in the 500-700MB of ram territory (which runs about 1.2GB), but KLV-spectr is sitting at 146MB of ram.

This is great!

EDIT: KLV-airedale is actually running at 337MB of ram, so it's the perfect compromise of effieciency and desktop convenience.

Are the Pups copying the Puppy sfs's to RAM at bootup (which is the default behaviour)? That could account for the difference in RAM after bootup. Anyways - RAM readings immediately after bootup does not really mean much.

[dimkr]

KLV-spectr is sitting at 146MB of ram.

Nice, maybe you'll be able to go even lower with Wayland. Many tiling WMs have a Wayland equivalent.

[geo_c]

Are the Pups copying the Puppy sfs's to RAM at bootup (which is the default behaviour)? That could account for the difference in RAM after bootup. Anyways - RAM readings immediately after bootup does not really mean much.

Yes, the pups are default copying sfs to ram.

So to follow up, yes, you're right, because fossapup64_9.5 seems to operate a lot faster than KLV-airedale. Which is quite sticky,

Surprisingly though KLA-xfce runs a lot snappier than KLV-airedale. So there are certainly a lot of factors involved.

I couldn't get get this netbook to connect to wifi at home using KLV-airedale, but F96 connects just fine. Both of them see the card, whereas fossapup64_9.5 doesn't see the wifi card at all, not unusual for fossapup9.5

I'm plowing through these OS's figuring out what runs best on it.

EDIT: Maybe I should start a new topic comparing these OS's on a very old Toshiba netbook.

But another observation about the wifi-card:

KLA-xfce and F96 both connect to my home router, whereas KLV-airedale does not, and I find that interesting in that KLV-airedale and KLA-xfce both use the same Network Manager, so it must have something to do with the driver/firmware complement.

And as I noted above KLA-xfce runs very fast on this netbook, as fast or faster than F95/96, and KLV-airedale seems bogged down.

Arch based approach has a lot going for it I think.

[geo_c]

@geo_c For WiFi connection there is a totally easy way

in a terminal:

Code: Select all

nmtui

Not sure if you will have to create a WiFi device using Networkmanager first or not. Try first just using the nmtui command.

Well on my netbook, the connection shows up, and the wifi router, I configure it with the password, but trying to connect it returns connection cannot be found.

This machine doesn't connect using KLV-airedale either, it's an old box, but it does work in F96 and KLA-xfce.

I like the nmtui tool. Really simple.

I'll have to try it on my other machine known to work with KLV-airedale. However last night the power supply would not charge the battery which is sitting at 50%, so I either have a bad power supply now or a bad jack. I suspect the jack, and I'm going to to get it repaired.

It's always something.

[rockedge]

@geo_c can you take a look at the networkmanager settings and check what wifi security protocol (wpa2) and if the rest looks good. Interesting that in KLA it works. What firmware SFS does it use? Is it different from the one in KLV-Airedale and KLV-Spectr???

[geo_c]

@geo_c can you take a look at the networkmanager settings and check what wifi security protocol (wpa2) and if the rest looks good. Interesting that in KLA it works. What firmware SFS does it use? Is it different from the one in KLV-Airedale and KLV-Spectr???

Well I was just jumping back on the forum, because after a reboot of KLV-airedale, the wifi connects.

I'm using whatever firmware @wiak put in KLA-xfce.

So I don't know what changed, but it works!

Wifi always seems a bit like voodoo to me.

And yes the protocol is WPA2, WPA3 Personal. Using nmtui the protocol was WPA-2, maybe that one will connect on a reboot of KLV-spectr.

[geo_c]

So KLV-airedale on the netbook running LibreWolf with a resource heavy social media site is sitting at 880M of ram, that's way better than fossapup95 and 96 which with same site is usually running over a gig.

I suspect that once I get wifi connected on KLV-spectr with this netbook that same website will be down around 600MB

Which makes this 'netbook' actually usable for browsing heavy websites. I never understood why they call these 'netbooks' anyway because they're downright useless on the web without stellar frugal OS's.

[geo_c]

So I don't know what changed, but it works!

I wonder if it has something to do with copying upper_changes from one machine to another and it takes the system a couple of boots to reconfigure all the hardware.

And also KLV-airedale is running snappier this time around.

[geo_c]

What firmware SFS does it use? Is it different from the one in KLV-Airedale and KLV-Spectr???

Actually KLA-xfce looks a lot different. There is no firmaware.sfs, but there is an fdrv-upup_22.04.sfs and zdrv_upup_22.04.sfs. Some additional scripts.

KLA-xfce seems worth polishing up.

I have KLV-airedale and KLA-xfce loaded with exactly the same software, from their own repos of course. The only thing I think missing in KLA-xfce is cups.

[rockedge]

@geo_c Looks like Puppy Linux kernel components so I will check the KLA ISO to find out what the difference is.

UPDATE: I was able to boot KLV-Airedale and connect with 01fdrv_upup_22.04.sfs instead of 01firmware-6.0.0 to eth0 running on a QEMU machine. I wonder if this change would help boot KLV-Airedale on that machine you had trouble with and connect to the WiFi router

[geo_c]

@geo_c Looks like Puppy Linux kernel components so I will check the KLA ISO to find out what the difference is.

UPDATE: I was able to boot KLV-Airedale and connect with 01fdrv_upup_22.04.sfs instead of 01firmware-6.0.0 to eth0 running on a QEMU machine. I wonder if this change would help boot KLV-Airedale on that machine you had trouble with and connect to the WiFi router

Well you know how I said once I rebooted KLV-airedale it actually did connect to the router on that machine. And now I just got home and decided to boot back into KLV-Spectr and use nmtui and it also worked.

So sorry to give you the runaround. It appears all I had to do with both KLV-ariedale and KLV-spectr was reboot the machine. I don't have any idea why, except maybe something that gets configed needs to be reloaded, or like I was saying earlier could have something to do with moving upper_changes from one machine to another.

So on my little netbook I'm connected to wifi in KLV-spectr without having to install any kind of fancy gui, and I'm posting on the forum running LIbreWolf, and it's zippy.

Also, the wifi autoconnects at boot. So it's all working very smoothly.

This netbook is a real computer now.

[geo_c]

So KLV-spectr with two forum tabs open on LibreWolf is using about 600MB. That's fantastic when all you have is 1.78GB of ram to work with.

Addendum: Yeah I had to add more to this post and say I'm completely amazed at how well this little netbook is handling resource intensive websites. Definitely not my fastest machine, but completely up to par with using websites that play embedded videos and all that.

Nice stuff this KLV-spectr,

running 4 tabs, 2 forum, one social media site, one a new tab with a video site playing, still haven't broken the 1GB ram usage barrier. Video plays smoothly.

[geo_c]

I installed conky-cli, but I'm not clear on how to get it running properly, and I'm not finding much information doing searches. I did find at least one interesting item that notes conky-cli will remove conky-std when installed. I don't think conky was included in the iso, but if it was perhaps the conkyrc is leftover, only I don't find a conkyrc on my system even after running conky-cli, so I'm not sure what config it's trying to use.

The package description says it's without x11, but when I run it I get the following output which looks like it's configured for X. I may need a special conkyrc:

[Sofiya]

I installed conky-cli, but I'm not clear on how to get it running properly, and I'm not finding much information doing searches. The description says it's without x11, but when I run it I get the following output which looks like it's configured for X. I may need a special conkyrc:

installation:
viewtopic.php?p=76717#p76717

[rockedge]

@geo_c something like the conkyrc below which came from a spectrwm set up. I do not have it working yet:

.conkyrc

Code: Select all

out_to_console yes
background no
update_interval 2
total_run_times 0
use_spacer none

TEXT
    Uptime: ${uptime_short}   |   #/
CPU: ${cpu cpu1}% ${cpu cpu2}% - ${loadavg}   |   #/
Memory: ${memperc}% ${mem}   |   #/
Vol: ${exec amixer get Master -M | grep -oE "[[:digit:]]*%"}   |   #/
Home: ${fs_used_perc /}% ${fs_used /}   |   #/
Net: ${upspeed eth0} ${totalup eth0} - ${downspeed eth0} ${totaldown eth0}#/

[geo_c]

installation:
viewtopic.php?p=76717#p76717
[/quote]

I did find the conky.conf files in /etc/conky. There are two:

conky.conf
conky_no_x11.conf

[geo_c]

@geo_c something like the conkyrc below which came from a spectrwm set up. I do not have it working yet:

So was conky-std installed, because I probably shouldn't have installed conky-cli in that case

[geo_c]

@rockedge using the command:

conky -c /etc/conky/conky_no_x11.conf

works to display conky in the terminal:

[Sofiya]

Code: Select all

sleep 10s
killall conky
cd "/root/.conky/Conky"
conky -c "/root/.conky/Conky/conkyrc" &

[geo_c]

Kind of cool that editing the conf file and saving immediately updates the conky running in the terminal. I changed the update interval to 2s so I could see the processes a little better and when I saved the file conky immediately changed to the 2s interval.

[geo_c]

Code: Select all

sleep 10s
killall conky
cd "/root/.conky/Conky"
conky -c "/root/.conky/Conky/conkyrc" &

Since I only have conky-cli installed, as of now I have no conkyrc in /root/.config. It's running completely from /etc/conky/conky_no_x11.conf as far as I can tell.

I kind of just wanted a command line conky in KLV-spectrwm, because as much as I like conky it does do some whacky things in some desktops. For instance in fossapup it tends to blow the desktop drive icons off the board if the rc is set own_window=false. I think if it's false, it's that setting that does it anyway.

But I do like the terminal version. Same information, low overhead, no desktop issues.

[Sofiya]

Code: Select all

sleep 10s
killall conky
cd "/root/.conky/Conky"
conky -c "/root/.conky/Conky/conkyrc" &

Since I only have conky-cli installed, as of now I have no conkyrc in /root/.config. It's running completely from /etc/conky/conky_no_x11.conf as far as I can tell.

I kind of just wanted a command line conky in KLV-spectrwm, because as much as I like conky it does do some whacky things in some desktops. For instance in fossapup it tends to blow the desktop drive icons off the board if the rc is set own_window=false. I think if it's false, it's that setting that does it anyway.

But I do like the terminal version. Same information, low overhead, no desktop issues.

the file can be called any name, not only "conkyrc". The main thing is that the name should be at startup too

[rockedge]

In the spectrwm conf you can change the bar_action to conky and have it display on the bar

[geo_c]

In the spectrwm conf you can change the bar_action to conky and have it display on the bar

I will have to try that. Sounds fun.

[geo_c]

In the spectrwm conf you can change the bar_action to conky and have it display on the bar

So that works.

I made a shell script named ~/conky-nox11:

Code: Select all

conky -c /etc/conky/conky_no_x11.conf

Then in spectrwm.conf I added the line:
bar_action = /root/conky-nox11

And I'm getting the clock which I originally configured in spectrwm, and to the right of the clock what appears to be the 4th top process, so in other words the most recent output of conky.

So now I should figure out what kinds of things I can get conky to display in the status bar, and design a separate config for that. It would be cool to maybe have it show the network status, total ram usage, but since the status bar is only one line vertically, it appears that may be difficult to do.

I can run conky in the terminal and simultaneously watch what's displayed on the status bar.

I wonder if I can run two instances of conky-cli, one in the terminal using a specific conky.conf, and the other in the status bar using a different one.

EDIT: Definitely can run two instances with different configs. So in the status bar I just have it showing ram usuage. The membar is displayed with hash marks and periods:

[geo_c]

Just tried to run a system update, and the repo returned an error:

Maybe a fluke download and I should try again?

Well tried running a second time and failed before downloading any packages.

[rockedge]

@geo_c same happened to me!

I think it's the Void repos being updated upstream that causes this. We have seen this occasionally since starting with FirstRib Void Linux builds.

Try again later today. I saw the same early yesterday with KLV-Airedale but later on worked as expected

[geo_c]

Try again later today. I saw the same early yesterday with KLV-Airedale but later on worked as expected

Update successful!

I added @Burunduk's terminal bookmark script to KLV-spectr:

Code: Select all

# cd bookmarks
# function to add a bookmark; usage: bm [<bookmark_name>], run again to remove
bm () { local b="/root/puppy-reference/${1:-$(basename $(pwd))}"; ln -svn "$(pwd)" "$b" || rm -i "$b"; }
# set CDPATH, don't export it (it can be without a leading ":")
CDPATH=":/root/puppy-reference"
# cd alias that dereferences links
alias cdd='cd -P'
# set bash-completion for cdd and bm
complete -o nospace -F _cd cdd
complete -o nospace -F _cd bm

side note:
Strange intermittent issue I seem to have is the clock being 4 hours off. Last night I re-linked the zoneinfo file and rebooted, which didn't seem to fix it But after booting a third time it went back to normal. Don't know if it's a hardware issue, or maybe some kind of boot timing thing. It's not the rc file setting the time zone, because I checked the file and it's commented out.

I'll keep an eye on it.