32-bit Carolina Puppy

[jerryababione]

Many People right off the older Puppy's. I don't. I co-own a Computer Company in Enid, Oklahoma, USA. We support 300+ Radio Stations. They are mom and pop organizations with old equipment and limited budgets. Initially I tried to keep up their existing software (Worked up until recently so many software manufactures dropping 32 bit support). That has become untenable. With the exit of Ubuntu and Microsoft from the 32 Bit Marketplace, their support has began dropping rapidly. With Covid another chapter opens where income, to their Businesses are dropping and new equipment is out of the question. The Idea of reforming an older Puppy came to mind. Here is what I am doing: (1) Install Carolina Puppy (Obtained from Smokey01's site).(2) Download Wine 3.6 configure, compile and install it.(Later Versions will not Compile and 32 bit Windows 7 Apps are still Current (i.e. Palemoon current versions), (3) Download and Install Palemoon or MyPal current Web Browser Versions The Auto update in both works just fine. (4) Pull msdos.sys and io.sys from Freedos. De Assemble them (re assemble them with a macro-assembler, obtained from Winworldpc.com, within a (.so) library Linked to the wine dlls (restoring support for 16 Bit Apps still in use without using Dosbox (keeps Memory usage under 128 MB). Is there A way to get in touch with Geoffrey or rq66 to update the aging repositories? I'd even maintain it myself.

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[TerryH]

Welcome to the forum. sounds like a great project have undertaken. Both @Geoffrey and @rg66 have accounts on this forum and have had some activity in the last 2 months. My mentioning them will send them a notification, so if they read it they will see this thread. You could also send a private message to them.

There are also many new members asking for a current puppy, to prolong the usage of old equipment, so your revitalization project would be much appreciated if you were to get it going and shared it.

[Clarity]

Hello @jerryababione

Wish you were near I have a ton of old 32bit (some 16bit too) to unload onto someone.

I do not do anything on 32bit anymore, I cannot help. BUT, the developers of WoofCE have taken steps to allow a builder to build whatever they find useful. Because you have a computer shop and it sound as if you've been 'around the track' awhile, you will have no problem using GIT to allow your 32bit Puppy productions using the WoofCE builder. ALSO, there is a couple of DOG members who, like WoofCE, have builder utilities to produce a DOG version.

If you choose not to produce, @Peebee is one of several who routinely makes 32bit PUPs for consumption.

Hope this is helpful info.

[mikeslr]

Just a couple of things which may be helpful later on. Jemimiah woof-build Saluki based on racy. When Jemimah's 'real-life' precluded her from continuing with Saluki's development, rg66 and Geoffrey forked it under the name Carolina. You probably know that Puppys are modular build ('though the advantages of modular building are lost with Full Installs). AFAIK, while there were application up-grades, no change was made to the 'core' from the first Saluki thru Carolina 1.2. Battleshooter developed a technique for upgrading glibc libraries, https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... 89#p806989 and published Carolina 1.3.

From the foregoing, it is usually safe to assume that any application which will run under racy or any version of Saluki will run under Carolina. [The main reason for Battleshooter's upgrade was to support THEN new web-browsers]. Smonkie's repo may have some 'Saluki' applications not duplicated under Carolina.

Racy, itself, was a 'souped-up' version of Wary. You'll find many applications here, http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pe ... ges-wary5/ which will run under Carolina. Moreover, many applications for Puppy are 'no-arch' --that is they will run under any Puppy. Look into the following pet-package Sub-Sections at http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/: Common, Common32 and no-arch. https://archive.org/ may have others as Ally has preserved the contents of some now extinct repos. And, of course, both the current and old Forums have links to some applications on File-Storage Sites and to small applications provided as attachments. https://rockedge.org/psearch/ is a dedicated 'google-search' engine for 'all things Puppy'.
For newer Wine builds, you might try those which version2013 publishes, https://version2013.yolasite.com/page1.php#wine.

FWIW, 32-bit versions of new Puppys are no more RAM demanding than old. See for example, viewtopic.php?f=119&t=692: busterpup booted to desktop using only 84 Mbs of RAM on an Asus 701SD. dpup-stretch is reported to need only 68 Mbs of RAM, albeit the test was run in VM with a Swap.The real question is whether a computer has the hardware for which a Puppy provides drivers. To provide support for new hardware without taking the time and using resources to publish drivers needed by computers thought to now be rarely in use, support for old drivers gets dropped. But note, the Asus 701SD was manufactured in 2008 while busterpup was published a year ago.

What does take place is what might be referred to as Application-Size-Creep. Often, new versions of applications provide more 'bells & whistles' and employ slightly larger libraries. Slightly more RAM is needed. And these upgrades have an accumulative effect. The 'work-around' is that as long as a Puppy's builtin or installable libraries --or those of a 'self-contained' application, itself-- will support it a newer Puppy can run any application version.
And some application although increasing in size are actually more RAM efficient. LibreOffice is an example. Versions 6 and above use less RAM than version 3, 4 & 5.

While a 'Full Install' may be required by some old computers, that system was developed at a time when computers rarely had even 512 Mbs of RAM. A Full Install is no better suited for handling today's RAM demanding Websites and Web-browsers than a Frugal Install. If you locate a frugal Puppys' System Files on a Linux Formatted partition on shutdown you can create a SaveFolder. Then you'll have almost* all the advantages of a Full Install and all the advantages of a Frugal Install. See the many posts on the Beginner's Section of the Forum detailing the latter.

------
* On low-RAM computers Full Installs boot to desktop slightly faster. With 512 Mbs of RAM or more, the difference is measured in micro-seconds.

[jerryababione]

Much of what was passed on I knew, but appreciate the updates. A Little history, I have been around the block a bit. In my storage shed sits a Univac 1005a, Card system. Yes I'm that old. I bought it when the U. S. Army decided they were obsolete. I'd been writing code for the Army, at that time for 5 years, in 1984. At that time I was writing IBM 360-30 Assembly code daily, with a bit of Cobol thrown, in at the old (now closed finance Center at Fort Ben Harrison, IN). Long story short, I survived all the upheavals and changes with the Army until 1997, when I was forced to retire. In 1982, my current wife, started Mulebarn Express Computer Services. We combined my sideline programming and her business support services in 2000. We are now semi-retired. The radio stations came to my attention when the first one screamed for help in 2004. Their servers were (9 still are) running BeOS 5 on their servers and the aging apps had no support. Haiku wasn't much help at that time. Today is another story, most were migrated to Lubuntu, which still had an acceptable PPC/32 bit version and kept there. Today's Lubuntu is unacceptable to them, V. 12.04 works but v.14 and newer crash too much to offer the stable environments they need. X11 will run in that environment by Wayland based stuffed crashes the old GPU's with out exception. Cross compilation works marginally better than 12.04. XFCE has found client acceptance but I can quite get them sold on JWM. Their migration would be easier with the current Puppy 32 bit lot, but grafting XFCE with WOOF-CE is yielding mixed results. Carolina is a compromise while I work out the kinks with the modern puppy. I'd love to work with the Folks to revitalize it. Saluki hangs when compiling Wine 3.0 or I'd have used it as it doesn't have as large a footprint as even Carolina's small paws. I'll also introduce Prissy our constant companion since May 2009. I'll keep working. Maybe with a little help I can get this done and retire a third time.

[rcrsn51]

Just out of curiosity: if these people have stable systems using the old Lubuntu, why not stick with it?

[Clarity]

In the US, its been known for awhile of people throwing old PCs, both 32bit & 64bit. You indicate that you are seeking to prolong PPCs and if I understand what you write, those are rather OLD (I mean really OLD) PPCs. As well you mention a Computer company you own, so you as well as I know how many almost modern PCs (i.e. 5 years-old+) that have been donated to your company by users getting rid of dead Microsoft PCs.

So as you indicate your attempts here is to try to "migrate' using Puppy resources to create an OS that is used for US 'talk radio' use on PPCs.

I am older than you by all accounts and yes I did work with same military teams on old systems back then when US was upgrading central and field system. I do understand that. As well. in corporate setting I am familiar with the 'talk radio' of Indiana as well.

In my past, I did have couple old PPCs but got rid of them many years ago. Great hardware which should continue to run as the PPCs family is battle hardened.

I must agree with @rcrsn51. "IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT ..." which incidentally is why you were working on Army's S/360s in 1984. IBM abandoned S/360s in the 1960s which during a time when the US had a massive upgrade in those 60s years. In the 1980s US Armed services abandon all S/360s as they modernized thru-out the 1980s entering the 1990s in prep for year-2000.

You have "correctly' observed this community's resources and its willingness to help.

BTW: Which Radio Station management packages are you populating for your customers?

[jerryababione]

Clarity,
The PPC Systems are going to have to go. They are old and breaking down. Many of the stations including the KOMA (Now owned by the late Dale Weeba's family) group in Oklahoma City have not upgraded, because what they had has worked for 30 plus years. The Unisys Mini-Computers they still use are patched beyond belief. The upgrades to their network will include Puppy because the Look and Feel that they are used to can be preserved. Replacing the IBM Smart Terminals with bulk purchased PC's is the first chore along with wifi over existing wired. XFCE or Enlightenment 17 would allow me to orchestrate a transition, keeping the look, feel and functionality they want. JWM is not conducive to that kind of Panel manipulation in overlay. AMD Semprons should be sufficient with solid performance where administrative functions are needed. The Baptist Integress chain of hospitals are in the process of setting up a computer dump and replacement. Those systems are going to be available for penny's on the dollar. The are more than sufficient numbers of used PC's therefor coming available in the next 3 months.

[jerryababione]

@rcrsn51 until the 32 Bit PPC Systems and the Unisys Mini-Computers started breaking down there was no desire for them to change hardware. In 2004 the first of the Servers (a BeOS 5 server) died and was replaced with xubuntu then lubuntu. Version 12.04 is less maintainable than even Carolina because the state of the kernels makes the newer apps (Wayland Apps) un-runable. Creation of ".so" libraries can help compatibility but add overhead that the systems shouldn't have to contend. I kept the old alive since 2004. It's time to move forward. They know it and I know it. The smaller owners group in Emporia, Kansas want to be the trial installs. In 2020 everything went on hold, for Covid. Today the direction is for as cheaply and using as much of the old hardware as possible, replace the old OS's and keep look, feel, apps and functionality. As the hospitals retool they are selling off masses of 1.8 ghz AMD Sempron based PCs. They are old Compaq's and Dell's. Mostly the Hospitals just want the old hardware hauled off (free equipment) some want nominal fees (so far $4.00 or $5.00 per working PC). All these systems are EFI style Bios machines. (No bowing and scraping to the UEFI Microsoft god's). My current contracts would pay $45.00 per up to 5 hours for the Install and loading of each PC (Minimum of 2hrs each). At the minimums we stand to make a great deal of money. The smallest of the Radio stations has 9 PC's to replace. I'll gladly spend the time to teach the in-house maintainers to keep a Puppy alive using available existing utilities for the Intenal Servers which are also under contract and frankly as old or older than the PPC's. Most are Point 4, Unisys or Datapoint Mini-Computers. Only Unisys is still in business and only old folks, like me, know what to do with those Basic based OS's, the BeOS 5 and 6, or Unix System 5 (Unisys Variety). The antique Microsoft Publisher (1997 release) (already owned by most of the stations) gets an upgrade to the 2007 version and we get paid for the training.

[rcrsn51]

Thanks. Here is my only thought about your project. Creating a new system based on an old code base like Carolina could be a recipe for problems. For example, people may want to add wifi adapters for which Carolina has no driver. Or they may eventually want to extend the system onto laptops whose video is not supported.

There should be more modern alternatives that will be compatible with Sempron-era hardware.

[mikeslr]

Hi again jerryababione,

About requiring xfce or Enlightenment 17, it may be worthwhile to read this short xfce-puppys thread back-to-front, https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... 7#p1003057. Also, perhaps a search for Puppys published by josejp2424, the latest litter being DpupBuster, viewtopic.php?p=2208#p2208 among which is an xfce-pup.

But I think the 'debiandogs' or 'ubuntudogs' may provide a better fit for your project. These are designed to emulate the functionality of Puppys but are true debians/ubuntus, employing apt-get and synaptic as package managers. While you'll find published ISOs of OSes using xfce --for example https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... 98#p928498-- there are also 'build-scripts'/'starter kits' such as linked to here, http://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopi ... 54#p983654 and here viewtopic.php?p=14736#p14736

My understanding is that such 'starter kits' enable you to build an operating system with just those components you want. A OS employing Enlightenment is even a possibility. See, https://pkgs.org/download/enlightenment although I suspect that Enlightenment might have to be an 'after-market' product*. Posts to threads on the Dog House Sub-Forum, viewforum.php?f=22 and/or emails to fredx181 or rcrsn51 --who create and publish the Starter Kit scripts-- will help orient you, and would likely result in avoiding mis-starts and mistakes.

-=-=-=-=
* Installed post build as not supported by a build-script/starter-kit; unless you modify it.

[jerryababione]

I'll gladly look I don't want to re-invent if I don't have too! Carolina is old. It may well give me the "Dog and Pony Show" I need while the "Debian and Ubuntu" adherents provide the answers. It will take 5 to 10 years to work through all the stations and their needs. I suspect my company will be in my Grandson's hands by the time transition will be complete. He's working for Dell now, but has expressed an interest in coming home. We will see.

[jerryababione]

@mikeslr and @Clarity Turns out all I had to show the clients was a current html 5 browse. Doing the ports to PPC may not be necessary because of the failure rates (current failures) of the Apple G3 and G4 hardware. Audacity was acceptable over Adobe Audition, for the recorded streams and commercials. 3 of the Hospitals did their computer dumps, and KOMA (OKC,OK, USA) plus Kansas Public Radio groups grabbed 932 Compaq and Dell AMD Sempron 3100+ 32 bit Computers. That leaves only 278 Radio Stations to go. Calolina Puppy Lives as the Broadcom Boards (in those systems) driver isn't available on the current Ubuntu, SuSE, Arch or CentOS distrobutions (Yes, it is already in the Carolina Distro). One final thought, before I move on to weeks of work, @Geoffrey did a great job building Carolina in the first place. It would be great if the the Repo at Smokey01 was updated, but it isn't necessary. KOFM here in Enid, OK, USA has offered to host a repository for their peers. We're going to use Torrents to handle the downloads and shell scripts to do the install. For now, the Puppy Package Manager will be hidden after install and configuration is complete. Palemoon auto updates Apple TV and Chrome Cast are the next big challenge. No, I'm not doing it alone Counting my wife and 8 employees there are 10 of us. I'm attaching a screenshot of the Menu replacement. Other than wine 3.6 it's a stock Carolina install.

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[ally]

repo mirrored here, archive org provides torrent for all it's pages

https://archive.org/details/PuppyLinuxCarolinaPetFiles

and ISOs

https://archive.org/download/PuppyLinuxCarolina

ps (if you have page load probs please delete the 's' from https and try again)

[rockedge]

A most interesting project! I hope to follow the progress and be able to see what the OS will become.

Also to note there is also a custom search engine (Google) for searching the new and old forum here -> https://psearch.puppylinux.com

[mikeslr]

Hi jerryababione,

Read your recent post just before I uploaded the text and screenshots of a project I've been working on for a couple of weeks: Chrooted Puppies with or without Wine, viewtopic.php?p=33971#p33971.

You could use Carolina as the Puppy in the Chroot after adding necessary applications --e.g. Wine and the programs to run under it-- and remastering. The Chrooted Carolina could be run from any Puppy either by SFS-Load, or by renaming the SFS to ydrv_name&version#-of-MainOS.sfs,

Once packaged & done unless and until you want to change the applications within Carolina.

On second thought, it would probably just complicate things. But the technique might be useful for computers which, for some reason, couldn't run Carolina directly.

[jerryababione]

Points taken. Outside the 32 bit Vacuum The 64 bit Apple G5's and Intel Based Macs are a ubuntu fossa built on a minimal server install. Woof craters on the G5's so they are a manual build. Puppy Woof build with xfce 4.13 works on the Intel based systems. It's important because of Apples move to their own implementation of ARM processors in new systems. I'd like to turn this company over to my Grandson in about 3 years, and move to a advisory role. Bouncing all over the U.S. to support radio stations is a job for the young. He hasn't yet got the "build from scratch" tech down. Still stuck in University mode. I wish they'd teach what people really use. Any way here's a screen shot from the pre-alfa woof build on his Intel Based MAC.

[jerryababione]

It's done. The Radio Station's techs trained.Installs ongoing by in-house techs. They signed a maintenance contract for basic updates, with us. Security on the old native firewall had to be extended. IObit's Anti-Malware software doesn't crater under wine. The only real changes will likely be kernel changes. I want to get to at least 4.5 before I quit tweaking the installs. Considering all the issues it boiled down to people being used to what they used for so long. 317 installs later and they are finally ready for change. Their own techs are on board and we're getting paid to send our people to oversee the installs rather than doing them our selves. About 500+ more to do.... Carolina will live, although we had to point them away from the repo at smokey01.com. Built two repo's on Griffin Communication's servers that the mom and pops paid for. They are only accessible for down-line servers registered in their data base. We'll add the rest as they come up. I'd like to thank the community your ideas made the difference. Containers and Vmware wouldn't have met the need Carolina Puppy is filling. The next iteration to be built on the Slacko Puppy distro because it does accept XFCE with few crashes. My grandson got the build it from scratch installation media bug. If any problems arise I'll let the community know.

[chilibowl]

hELLO fellow LINUX -Puppy user . Is therea link to your cAROLINA puppy??
it sounds really neat.

Can it render hTML5webpages??

Iam looking fora Puppy Ver that can PLAY youTube videos~ Ihave yet to find one1! or am I just Impatient to do a proper setup??

regards -chilibowl

[bigpup]

@chilibowl

You should be able to run YouTube videos in any Puppy version.

Start a topic in the Beginners Help about the issue.
I am sure you are doing something wrong if, you are unable to get it working in any Puppy version.
In your topic will need specific info about the computer.
Make and model.
Specs if you know them.

[chilibowl]

@chilibowl

You should be able to run YouTube videos in any Puppy version.

Start a topic in the Beginners Help about the issue.
I am sure you are doing something wrong if, you are unable to get it working in any Puppy version.
In your topic will need specific info about the computer.
Make and model.
Specs if you know them. Really!! Running YOUtUBE videos <jusat watching /receiving them isa Royal Pain -In -the Arse to me. Coming from a aWindows Background or even Android Phone / Samsung Blue-ray player Back ground setting up Youtube Viability in Puppy Linux shall Ibe kinder To say -is most daunting.

The only Linux I have ever had ANY sucess with with Playing Youtube with no "trickery" or separate players is STELLA LINUX a REDHAT ENTERPRISE / CENT os Derivative ..

the videos played right off ofa Active Webpage -no seperate player<s> as far as I can remember.

Imight just have to re-install Stellae even though its old -depreciated !!!!!

I really DO like puppy with its Graphics layout and ease of use , and the FACt it CAN RUN on older Hardware -but its just the Nature of the Damned Internet Compaies , services that they Had to Update HTML and all other Codecs just to do infotainment apps !!!

Regards -CHILIBOWL