Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

3. A healthy ecosystem of knowledgeable users that help each other, share (good) tips and correct information, and even advanced users that tweak the system, build their own derivatives or contribute to development

To me, I find this statement a bit troublesome. The fact that this is expressed this way, emphasizes that "Only those need apply".

This, to me, is a departure of what other developers on the forum subscribe to.

@Clarity Why do you find the developer's desire to have advanced users that truly understand the system, to be problematic? A single developer and a single source of knowledge are always bad in a software project that wants to be sustainable. You're misreading what I wrote or looking for a scandal where there is none.

These are development builds, so they're not ready for 'regular users' yet and it would be very bad to attract users without the skills to use them properly without constantly losing personal data. Without a community of resourceful and helpful people that's already present in day 1 after the official release, it will be hard to attract new users even if this release is stable and polished and what not.

If you want to ignore this information and use the system anyway, go ahead. I don't have a way to prevent people from using it. When you run into problems or lose files, remember you didn't read what it says on the tin, or chose to interpret it differently.

Not much to reply to with your follow-up post. You said it again.

I think you feel that post to be helpful, but it is clear; you only want ...

For the rest of this forum community who want a quality wayland product, look also at the KL forum distros that have progressed significantly, too. Those developers welcome everyone with several stable and safe product offerings!

Enjoy

For the rest of this community who want quality, ignore trolls.

This forum has always been welcoming to weirdos and oddballs. Even people who are just plain wrong.
Life goes on...

Clarity wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:38 pm

You said it again.

Said what?

Clarity wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:38 pm

Those developers welcome everyone with several stable and safe product offerings!

I also welcome all users, as long as they understand these are development builds, understand that data loss and instability are real possibilities, and know how to repair things if something goes wrong. I can't tell people 'go ahead, use it, it's safe' when even the Debian base is not considered stable. I don't understand what upsets or offends you so much, and I think you're taking things waaaay too seriously when you're talking about 'products' and complaining about a developer trying to be responsible and helpful. People here build things out of their good will and provide it to you free of charge, and you're complaining.

I am not trolling you OR have ever done so to anyone...ever! But you keep saying it, to emphatically make it obvious. "ONLY those who ..."

Clarity wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 10:48 pm

I am not trolling you OR have ever done so to anyone...ever! But you keep saying it, to emphatically make it obvious. "ONLY those who ..."

Make what obvious? What is it that I said that bothers so much? These are development builds and not what you call 'product'. Want to use them despite the risks? Go ahead and do that. Want to wait until the release so you don't have to deal with bugs and disruptive changes? Also fine with me.

You're trying to read between the lines and look for a hidden meaning, but there is none. I gave a short list of my current priorities as the developer, for those who want to support this project, but this doesn't mean that anything else is somehow prohibited. I didn't use the word 'only'.

Your false accusations clearly don't support the project and I wish I had the power to ban you from this subforum. We all know you're going to repeatedly ask for ISO images, Samba, btop and tldr, if you ever become truly interested in this distro, so let's just stop this futile 'conversation' and reserve this space for actual development and testing work.

If you feel offended, denied access unfairly or something else, please report me or my replies to one of the admins and let them handle the situation.

LIsten to reason @dimkr,, I did not "accuse you" of anything, nor have I taken ANYTHING out of context. The point I raise is NOT something fabricated by me. THOSE ARE YOUR WORDS and the meaning you emphasize is clear! I have never seen a distro provider on this forum EVER make that profound request of the staple community they desire.

AS this IS YOUR THREAD, I will refrain from your point and focus attention on Product.

Enjoy as you steer around with your comments: Those are not my words. I have pointed to only your words.

BTW: I dont feel offended by raising a point of yours. Unlike you, I dont go around offending members of the forum. The fact that you mentioned "offended" when there was no pre-position, shows your intent...to me.

I must agree that this is pointless.
These kind of post accomplish nothing and are just a waist of resources.

On the other hand I have a question about acpi.
I see a quick press of the power button is configured to popup a shutdown gui.
My questions is even if the windows manager is messed up and I can't see the gui will this still shutdown the computer gracefully?

@d-pupp Hard to answer this question without any logs and a technical definition of 'messed up'. If you see a shutdown procedure that takes time, it's clean shutdown, otherwise it isn't.

@dimkr This question comes from my post about my wife's laptop partly freezing.
The keyboard didn't seem to work. I did have a mouse and could get a menu. However nothing would run.
I thought maybe the power button would bypass the windows manager all together and run a normal shutdown even if I couldn't see what was happening.

11.0.195 fixes three small bugs, nothing exciting.

---

I'm working on a very big feature which will probably be ready next week: ability to run the entire desktop as an unprivileged user (in this case, spot) and without the sandboxing applied by run-as-spot:

This is not an alternative to running select applications as spot, but the ability to run everything as spot on a per-session basis.

This should be very convenient for people who run most of their applications as spot anyway, people who want to run rootless containers and people who use applications that usually don't work well as root because they have integrated terminals (like IDEs).

The tiny pkexec replacement is greatly improved and shows this prompt (above all windows + default button is "No") when applications request to run as root:

This is modernized, actually working multi-user support and something Puppy never had. Even in old Puppy releases that had the "finn" user, it was a trap because it didn't work.

I'm still not sure how to connect everything, currently I'm thinking about adding a configuration tool that allows selection of the user to run the desktop as - root (the default), spot, or newly created user. Running the desktop as spot is super convenient because you can jump back to root when you need convenience, or use spot when you need an unprivileged user: if applications like the browser run as spot, all your data remains there when you run the desktop as root.

I'm thinking about adding a configuration tool that allows selection of the user to run the desktop as - root (the default), spot, or newly created user.

Would this be like a login shell with a choice of users to login as?

I'm assuming there home would be /home/username with all the normal configs and startup files?

d-pupp wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 4:42 pm

Would this be like a login shell with a choice of users to login as?

Still not sure what would be best. Currently logging in as root or spot work equally well but with some rough edges. I'm not sure if I want to support creation of additional users or not.

Ok thanks. I wait and see what you come up with when you release it. It should be interesting to play with.

I'm not sure if I want to support creation of additional users or not.

I guess additional user could go both ways. For a single user computer not needed. For a family sharing a computer?? Maybe..

@dimkr I'm looking at how dpup boots up for my own interest.

# pstree
init─┬─acpid
     ├─bluetoothd
     ├─2*[busybox]
     ├─connmand
     ├─cupsd
     ├─2*[dbus-daemon]
     ├─2*[dconf-service───3*[{dconf-service}]]
     ├─fakelogin───bash───startlabwc─┬─dbus-run-sessio─┬─dbus-daemon
     │                               │                 └─labwc───4*[+
     │                               └─pipewire───2*[{pipewire}]

I have traced most of it but I can't find where startlabwc is it started from.

d-pupp wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 8:14 pm

I have traced most of it but I can't find where startlabwc is it started from.

~/.profile

Good progress with work on support for unprivileged users!

Everything runs nicely as spot, with access control and sandboxing:

As today, spot can't touch files outside /home/spot, /tmp and other places, but the entire desktop (including labwc and waybar) runs as spot and not just specific applications like the browser or Xwayland.

Applications that ask to run as root show a prompt like this:

And run as root with no sandboxing, if approved:

If needed, it's possible to run a terminal or a file manager as root:

I think this should be very convenient: robust and secure by default, full control when needed. If most of us spend most of our time online, I believe this won't be a disruptive change.

11.0.196 changes many things:

• The desktop runs as spot, not as root

• Synaptic and gdebi replace gnome-software

• Menu entries for applications installed through Flatpak should "just work"

• The Landlock-based sandbox for applications running as spot is gone; it breaks Flatpak and other things (I'll need to think if I can re-introduce it somehow)

• acpid no longer locks the screen on lid close

• spacefm's "Root Terminal" and "Root Window" menu items now work

• swaylock and swayidle are no longer patched and built from source; now they're Debian packages

• vm.page-cluster is now lowered from 3 to 1 when using zram swap; this should improve responsiveness in low RAM conditions

• pkexec is smarter and more secure now: it sanitizes environment variables and runs the prompt as an unprivileged user; currently, I don't have good ideas how to bypass the prompt and run something as root without the user's consent

If you're on <11.0.196, start a new save because these are big, breaking changes.

@dimkr Thank you for the new version, I am testing it now.

My first impression is kinda frustration. I have to figure out and change owners and permission. I'm getting it figured out but it will take time.
Edit I got this now. Not so frustrating today. I was up and running with my modified setup scripts is about 20 minutes. And everything works.

I like the idea of running as spot but it will take some getting use to.
Edit Everything I tested as spot works OOTB except printing. I had to set the root password so I could login to cups.

Here are my observation so far...

When opening a spacefm root window the "run as root" prompt runs off the page. The text path at the top is to long and runs off the screen.

There is no way to tell if i'm in a spot spacefm window or a root one and when I turn on show root indicator color. It's red on black text making it unreadable. I''ll have to look at changing that.
Edit I set the spacefm status bar highlight to red. I'm not sure if this is persistent or not.

The open root terminal window doesn't work when other terminals are open. Not sure if that by default or not in spacefm.
Edit the F4 open terminal here will open as root if you are in a root window.

So far I have not been able to make my custom icons in spacefm work.
Most of the rest of my customization is working.
Edit I got this to work. Must have been something I did because I rebooted and it worked

I'll keep working on it.

Edit
I almost forgot the biggest issue. There are no drives in spacefm even in a root window and all my files are on external drives. I had to open a root terminal and then manually mount sda2. Then I could see it in spacefm.
I did try to add spot to the disk group but this test version has no save folder and I couldn't find a way to log off and on again.
Edit This was just the show internal drives not being checked by default. Devices menu > Settings > Show > Internal drives.

Edit
I did run into another issue shutting down after exiting to the prompt. The only option that worked was startlabwc. I had to use the power button. (quick press did a proper shutdown)
Nope I just did a normal shutdown and it dropped me at the prompt.

Thanks d-pupp

Good morning @dimkr
It's my third day testing dpup 11.0.196 and things are going very smoothy now. Good work on this. I was looking at your github page that's a lot of changes...

Here is a screen shot of the run as root dialog.

Here is what I come up with to tell spot from root spacefm windows.

Am I assuming correctly that there is no direct run as root login?

d-pupp wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2024 3:32 pm

Am I assuming correctly that there is no direct run as root login?

Correct.

After changing locale, the dialog box with "Setting locale to en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8" sits over the top bar and won't go away unless I restart the graphical server.

Is there a way to set the default keyboard layout? I can do it manually in .xkbrc, but wondered if there was another method.
Using 'Add layout' in Keyboard settings does just that, but I had to delete 'us' so that 'gb' was the first entry after XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=.
EDIT - never mind, I just re-read the help file and re-discovered that this the way it is meant to be for now.

As d-pupp mentioned. Clicking on reboot just drops to the terminal. Have to press the power button to shutdown.

Apart from that, nice and snappy as ever.

Posting from dpup 11.0.197
I'm impressed. Nicely done @dimkr
I'm going to be daily driving this one.

I like the password prompt for running a root.
I like the foot terminal app.
I was able to get the color prompt to work by un commenting line 46 of bashrc and I added a new line before the prompt.

I'm just curious if you are looking at any other native wayland apps you might want to add?

Is there a way to make pupsave and save2flash run as spot?

Keef wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2024 9:12 pm

As d-pupp mentioned. Clicking on reboot just drops to the terminal. Have to press the power button to shutdown.

What version?

d-pupp wrote: Fri Nov 15, 2024 8:37 pm

I'm just curious if you are looking at any other native wayland apps you might want to add?

Currently - no. If you have suggestions for small and useful applications, maybe.

d-pupp wrote: Fri Nov 15, 2024 11:26 pm

Is there a way to make pupsave and save2flash run as spot?

No, they both touch files spot can't (and shouldn't be able to) access.

Conman-gtk not runing.

I've upgraded to 11.0.199.
Connman-gtk now working.
I couldn't open a terminal in spacefm, but it is set to 'defaultterminal' which doesn't exist. Changing it to foot solves this.
Still get that "Setting locale to ..." dialog which will not go away after changing locale.

apt is complaining about locked files, but I'll get back to you about that one. My middle mouse button is refusing to copy from the terminal (not a VaniilaDpup problem), and the forum is not displaying the screenshot properly.

'su root' gives me an authentication failure.
These were all present in the last couple of versions.

Rebooting worked correctly as of the last version, but not exited this one yet.

@Keef
Did you create a new save folder?
It sounds to me like an old save folder is causing you problems.
su didn't work for me either. However Spacefm open a root window does. This is the best way to get root access without having to type root password all the time. You can open a root terminal with F4 from the root window.

Are you daily driving this one or just testing?