Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Evening, gang.

I'm very pleased to be able to announce this one, I really am! I've been messing about with this for what must be, oh.....something like 15 months now, on & off.

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I forget exactly when I first became aware of it. I was having a mooch around the tech blogs, looking for something "different" for a terminal emulator. Urxvt is okay; nothing special, of course, but it's nicely lightweight in the traditional Puppy mould. I've used Sakura before now; I quite like this, because you can set it up with background images if you want.

I was looking through one of these "xxx best alternative terminals" type of lists that the tech blogs are so fond of, where they basically list as many different alternatives as they can unearth. One of the 'alternatives' listed was this Cool Retro Term; the guy who developed it, one Fillipo Scognamiglio, has built it to look exactly as though you're running your terminal on an ancient CRT screen, like we all were back in the 80s & 90s.....complete with corner curvature, et al.

It's Qt5-based. I always seem to have 'issues' with Qt5..... (*sigh*)

It comes as an AppImage. On initially trying it out from the terminal, every time it kept coming up with 'couldn't find the Qt5 libs'. This is not unusual for Qt5-based AppImages in Puppy, I've found, bearing in mind they unpack themselves into, and run from /tmp for the duration. I messed around with it some more, and eventually put it to one side.

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Middle of last year, I briefly tried out Ubuntu 'Focal Fossa' 20.04 LTS. Out of curiosity, I gave this thing a go in Focal, annnd.....exectly the same issue. 'Couldn't find the Qt5 stuff...' Ah, well. Obviously built wrong. I put it on the 'back burner' again.

Fast-forward to this evening. I was reading another of these type of lists, this time over on MakeUseOf. Once again, this thing was mentioned. 'Hmm...', I thought. A plan was starting to hatch....

Fred's recently released a new script for creating AppImages, one which I've already had considerable success with. I opened the AppImage up with the "--appimage-extract" switch, and had a poke around inside. It appears that the way Master Fillipo has built this, it would be a small miracle if it could find its own libs'n'stuff; it's not been assembled in a way in which it would be able to, frankly. A couple of pretty basic 'errors' have been made.

Anyway; with the addition of a wee launcher script employing the 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH' trick, and making use of Fred's new 'cr-appimage' script - appropriately edited, of course! - I've re-built the Cool Retro Term AppImage in such a way that it'll now work in Puppy the way it should have done all along. Take a gander at this short demo vid below:-

Obviously, it's a fair bit 'heavier' than standard, lightweight Puppy terminals (30 some-odd MB).....but since many of us are now running far more capable hardware than we would have been some years back, the space/RAM limitations don't apply to anything like the same degree. As stated in the video, I was in two minds as to exactly where to post this; one thought was 'Eye Candy', but despite its unusual, and quite striking appearance, it IS a fully functional terminal emulator.....so I plumped for 'System' in the end.

A word of warning. Don't mess around with the colour profiles too much; some of them cause it to abruptly crash. The default 'Amber' & 'Monochrome green' (my personal favourite) ARE stable. I suspect Master Scognamiglio could have put a bit more development into this, but it was released around 2 years ago, and the project seems pretty quiet ATM. He might come back to it in the future, and then again he may not. AS it is, it's fully functional, within limitations.

For anyone who'd like to take a look at it, you can find the rebuilt, tarballed AppImage at my Google Drive, here:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

As with all AppImages, you'll need to make it executable before using it. (Rt-clk->Properties->tick the 3 'Exec' checkboxes down the bottom->Refresh->Close). Stick it anywhere you like; it'll run just as well from outside the 'save' as it will from inside. Then click to run. It takes a few seconds to fire-up like all AppImages, given that it's unpacking itself into /tmp before starting up.

This works fine with Xenialpup64, Bionicpup64 and Fossapup64. Will probably work OK with other reasonably current 64-bit Puppies, too.

You'll also find a 'standard', 'portable' version in the same location.....one folder further in.

Thanks - and mucho appreciation! - go to Fred, for the efficacy of his new scripts. Enjoy..!

Mike.

That is very cool!

Don't mean to spoil the fun but ...
on Fossapup I am using CRT for a while now and it just installed fine from the PPM.
A lot of qt5 stuff installed with it of course.

I think it is in ubuntu's repo since focal (FF).
@mikewalsh Nice to have it for older Puppys as well. Thanks.

@foxpup :-

foxpup wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 11:16 am

Don't mean to spoil the fun but ...
on Fossapup I am using CRT for a while now and it just installed fine from the PPM.
A lot of qt5 stuff installed with it of course.

I think it is in ubuntu's repo since focal (FF).
@mikewalsh Nice to have it for older Puppys as well. Thanks.

Mm. O-kayyy....

D'you happen to remember the exact name you found it under? 'Cos I can't find it in Fossa's PPM at all. I can find instructions online for installing it from a PPA - sc0tty's pkg-cli would handle that, I imagine.

If that's the only app you run in Fossa that needs Qt5, it wouldn't make any difference. But this is built around an older version than Fossa's PPM will call natively.....and Puppy doesn't like mixing different versions of Qt5, any more than it likes mixing different versions of Qt4. So unless you can devise a way of segregating them, the AppImage is probably the best way for most folks to use this, I guess.

Mike.

hello @mikewalsh

mikewalsh wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:33 pm

D'you happen to remember the exact name you found it under? 'Cos I can't find it in Fossa's PPM at all.

"cool-retro-term_1.1.1" it is.

If that's the only app you run in Fossa that needs Qt5, it wouldn't make any difference. But this is built around an older version than Fossa's PPM will call natively.....and Puppy doesn't like mixing different versions of Qt5

The qt5 libs that got installed with it are version 5.12.8, which is also the version of qt libs already in Fossapup, as expected.
The CRT from ubuntu/PPM works fine with that, as expected, the ubuntu devs have taken care of that.

the AppImage is probably the best way for most folks to use this, I guess.

I guess the same.

@foxpup :-

Probably my own fault for not updating the PPM for a while. After doing that, it was easy to find. Though it still doesn't explain why I couldn't find it in the main Ubuntu repos.....

Ah, well. One of "life's little mysteries", I guess..!

Start-up is definitely more immediate when installed this way. There IS a noticeable delay with the AppImage, but this is because it's unpacking itself into /tmp prior to running, of course. And it seems just a little bit more stable like this; some of the colour 'Profiles' occasionally cause the AppImage to crash, though you quickly learn which ones don't.

Never mind. It's nice to now have it available for more than just the one Puppy.

Mike.

Wow, I really like this terminal. Thanks for introducing me to it.