Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Afternoon, gang.

I swear, guys; the older I get, the crazier & more convoluted my thinking processes become.

['Malcolm Reed' from Star Trek "Enterprise" - the modern 'fore-runner' to TOS (the original series)]

Here, mes amis, we have NetFlix running in Firefox. Nothing remarkable about that, you may think.....but of course, this has to be a 64-bit browser, given that Google deprecated 32-bit Widevine some 4 years ago. Up until that point, it made no difference what Puppies I happened to be using; I could always watch NetFlix.

Over the last 10 years, out of all the Puppies I've tried, my overall favourite has always been Micko's Slacko 5.6.0, the immediate predecessor to the 'classic' 570. Smooth, very sweet, ultra-stable, it's always kept out of the way and allowed me to get on with what I wanted to do. You cannot ask more than that of any OS.

The above screenie was taken here in Slacko 560 just 10 minutes ago. So; 32-bit Puppy, but utilising a web-app that will now only run in a 64-bit browser....hmm? How did I do it?

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As stated above, 560 was always my overall favourite. On my old BIOS-based hardware, it would run on bare metal without any fuss. Fast-forward to today, and the UEFI on this HP desktop prevents the use of many of my old favourites.......which seem to be hunting for something that only a BIOS can provide. A UEFI no longer does, it seems......."Vesa BIOS extensions". They always quit at this point, and won't go any further; they're running, but unusable. Anyhoo....

I started playing around with Slacko 560 again a couple of years ago. Initially, I installed it to a 2GB SD card. I re-built the base SFS to make use of the k4.1.48 'legacy' kernel from radky's DPup 'Stretch', and while I was in there, upgraded the glibc from 2.15 to 2.20, along with a slightly newer dbus. I soon discovered that, with the addition of the 'extra' UEFI bits from 32-bit Tahrpup 6.0.6, it all started and ran very nicely.

Fast-forward to just a few days ago. I got a hankering to play around with Racy 5.5 again. I decided on a re-build here, too; re-wrote the initrd to allow for a modular kernel, and upgraded the glibc from the original 2.10.1 to Xenial32's 2.23. Installed the vmlinuz and zdrv from my Xenial32 install, the k4.1.30 huge kernel from archive.org. Fingers crossed, and.....amazingly, it fired up and ran, though the fonts were all weird. I then realised it was the Nvidia GPU that was at fault, so the kernel line got "nouveau.modeset=0" added to it. This dropped me back to Vesa graphics, but everything was clear & legible once again. Hurrah!

I then put my thinking cap on again. Having got the hang of the modifications needed to turn an older Pup into a modular one, I had a go at doing the same with Slacko 560. This has had quite a few changes made; it now uses a save-folder, NOT the original save-file. Glibc has gone up again, also to glibc 2.23. The initrd has been re-written again to permit a modular kernel & zdrv.....she's now running @ozsouth 's 32-bit k4.19.217 (or was, until a few hours ago.) A newer dbus has been installed here, too.

For these older Pups, I have for long enough been running a Xenialpup 7.5 chroot to allow running up-to-date browsers, which all works very nicely. During the last year or so, peebee has developed - originally for his ScPups - a method which will allow the user to run 64-bit browsers inside a 32-bit Puppy. Which requires running a 64-bit kernel, and loading a special SFS.....that adds a shed-load of 64-bit dependencies in a separate directory, plus a start-up script that runs a bit of black magic and makes it all work. And work it does.....exceedingly well. @mikeslr & I have for a while been running this with 32-bit Xenial, and to a lesser extent, 32-bit Tahrpup. Xenial32 is the sweet spot, though.

I have a separate Xenial32 install set-up specifically to make use of this very neat trick, alongside a 'standard' install of the same Puppy. Anyhoo; I got to thinking. Having just modularized Slacko 560.......and having the use of a Xenial 32 chroot (you can see where this is going, can't you? ), I thought I'd try the 64-bit within 32-bit trick with Slacko 560 and the Xenial chroot (just for the hell of it, like.) So.....

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I added the 64-bit compat stuff to the Xenial chroot, and set up a script for running the 'black magic' script of peebee's through 560's /root/Startup to emulate the same effect. I then copied a couple of my 64-bit portable browsers to the chroot, and set-up/linked the appropriate run/launch scripts in the right places to allow firing them up. Finally, I swapped-over to Xenial64's k4.9.58 kernel as the necessary finishing step.....

Chromium64 was complaining about a lot of stuff, more or less as expected. Midori 64 fired straight up, but NetFlix moaned about the browser being "too old" and wouldn't play anything. Firefox-portable64, however, not only fired-up immediately but played NetFlix programmes without a murmur.... YES!!!

Posting from it now, in fact....

Again, this WAS kind of expected. 'zilla-based browsers have always been more amenable to running within a chroot than Chromium-based ones. On this occasion, it's worked to my advantage.......and for the sake of a couple of hours messing about, can now play my favourite Star Trek shows in NetFlix under Slacko 560 via the use of a chroot (with peebee's magic added).

Howzabout that then??? I'm a "happy bunny", tonight..!

Mike.

Thanks for this Mike!

I am still in the position of having to keep some 32bit puppies running so this is great news.

I've been experimenting with Dpup Stretch 7.5 as a Slacko 5.6 replacement (purely to get newer browser accessibility....) but it's not an easy fit.

The idea of being able to port modern browser functionality onto Slacko5.6 makes me feel happy. Not sure how far down this road I can go but there's light in the tunnel...
Cheers!

@greengeek :-

In this case, Ian, it mostly boils down to how much RAM & storage you have available! Don't forget; to achieve this effect - running 64-bit browsers inside a 32-bit Chroot, then accessing those browsers from your 32-bit Puppy - you're essentially running two Pups at the same time. Even so, it's not really an issue for most of us, since the general impression I get is that the majority of Puppians are these days running far more capable hardware than, say, 10 years ago. A pair of Puppies together generally aren't using anything like as much in the way of resources as a single, 'mainstream' distro, so...

What was more or less fantasy for many of us a decade back is now stone-cold reality due to the sheer speed of tech developments, and massive over-production.......which means you end up with a TON of high-powered hardware kicking around on places like eBay & Gumtree for very reasonable prices.

Let me know how you're thinking of approaching this, and I'll see if I can advise... Like I said elsewhere, it sounds like a right dog's dinner.....but it's surprisingly very stable, once set-up correctly.

Mike.

mikewalsh wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 10:20 am

In this case, Ian, it mostly boils down to how much RAM & storage you have available! Don't forget; to achieve this effect - running 64-bit browsers inside a 32-bit Chroot, then accessing those browsers from your 32-bit Puppy - you're essentially running two Pups at the same time.

Yes, this may be a roadblock that makes it impractical. For my current project I prefer to use 32bit pups as they seem to be snappier on machines like this CompaqCQ60 which only has 3GB RAM. But of course I need as much browser functionality as I can squeeze out of a 32bit pup.
Currently finding Dpup Stretch 7.5 with a few mods and running Chromium Ungoogled is doing the job for me (no need for Netflix) - but the person who will be using this machine is a big Slacko 5.6 fan and does not enjoy the learning curve of changing pups - so I may decide to give your method a try if they are not happy with Dpup.
Going to have another look at your suggestion on the other thread (64bit compat libs) as that sounds more lightweight?

@greengeek :-

Going to have another look at your suggestion on the other thread (64bit compat libs) as that sounds more lightweight?

Frankly, it IS lighter if your Puppy will run the SFS directly. Just the extra libs - coupla hundred MB or so, plus about the same for one of the 64-bit portable browsers.......as opposed to perhaps 1.5 GB or so for chroot PLUS compatibility stuff PLUS portable browser PLUS the Pup you're running all this from!

You'll see my reply over there, proving it'll all run direct under DPup Stretch.....though 560 needs the chroot approach because much of the 'native' infrastructure is just too old now to be able to pull it off directly.

Mike.