The Oldest Pups

[666philb]

On the old forum was a thread called 'into puppys past' where a number of very early puppy isos were discovered and collected into a single place. Unfortunately along with losing that thread, a number of websites hosting the old collection have disappeared.
Fortunately user @ally has backed most of these up to https://archive.org/details/puppylinux.

I've sifted through some of allys collection and uploaded the very earliest pups 0 to 1 to ibiblio here .http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-0-1/

the earliest yet found is puppy-0.4. if you have an earlier version please let me know so i can upload it to the puppy repository.

[666philb]

found the puppy 0.3 release page https://web.archive.org/web/20030703200 ... com/puppy/

[ally]

@666philb

thanks for finding cd-puppy 0.4, I've added it too the legacy builds page on the archive

attached is today's list count, fake .gz

[666philb]

old time puppy user and member grundey1 has found a puppy-0.3 iso in his collection.
this has now been uploaded to ibiblio.

EDIT: unfortunately this turned out to be the same iso that we have for 0.4 so still looking for 0.3

[666philb]

@666philb

thanks for finding cd-puppy 0.4, I've added it too the legacy builds page on the archive

attached is today's list count, fake .gz

that's a hell of a lot of pups!!

[666philb]

puppy release timeline. 3 weeks from puppy 0.1 to 0.4

9July03
Uploading Puppy version 0.4 today, to this website. image.gz is 18.6M. Not yet on Ibiblio -- for convenience, I will place the ready-made live-CD ISO on Ibiblio very soon. A couple of issues:

For some unknown reason, the ABS spreadsheet program's startup splash window won't go away --seems to be waiting for something. The fix for now is to quit ABS then restart, then the splash window does go away.
The MP console text editor still as a couple of issues, one of which is not all the menu shortcut keys work as the Fvwm95 window manager has hijacked them. Also, always close MP from the menu rather than the close-box.
Issues number 3, 4 and 5 of the previous v0.3 release still apply (see below).
7July03
Puppy has undergone major surgery. I took out all of the Siag Office suite, consisting of PW, Siag, Gvu, Xfiler and Xedplus. The Siag apps are very nice, however for various reasons I decided to go for Ted, a wordprocessor, ABS a spreadsheet, and Ghostview. Also included fig2dev, a file conversion utility needed by ABS for printing.

I have also upgraded Xpaint to the latest, version 2.7.0, as the old version I was using saved XPM files corrupted --now ok.

When will v0.4 be out? The people at ibiblio.org have kindly agreed to host Puppy, so when v0.4 does come out, I'll make an ISO available. As to when... maybe another day or two.

5July03
I've created a "Modem Wizard", that locates the modem. It's a shell script, but displays nice GUI interface.

I have communicated with Angel Ortega, author of mp, a great console text editor used in Puppy. mp was ignoring SIGTERM, meaning that after exiting X I would find mp processes still running. Angel explained how to edit the source to fix that. Another problem I have with mp is that some keyboard shortcuts have been taken over by Fvwm95 --I've installed ~/.mprc, which can configure key bindings.

4July03
I've created a daemon that runs in the background and watches the ramdisk, informing if it's getting full and suggesting what files may be to blame.

Internet ISP setup, connection and disconnection now work from the Fvwm95 menu.

3July03
Puppy has acquired Xrun, which is a commandline, to be invoked by the "Run..." button in Fvwm95, just as in Windows. Also we now have Host-connect, a basic GUI frontend for secure telnet with ssh.

There is still a problem with the Fvwm95 "Screen settings". The "Browse..." button enables to select an image (that will become the desktop background image) however after pressing "OK" it isn't returned. This seems to be a problem in the Fvwm executables themselves, not any script. Can still manually type a image file with full path, without using browse, and can change the background image.

I need to find a small application to set the transparent color on images. Xpaint doesn't seem to do it. On my Redhat system I tried to use Gimp to do it, but despite (or maybe because of) the huge number of menu selections, I just couldn't choose a transparent color. I really do have reservations about Gimp, and don't want it on Puppy ....Xpaint is very good and easy to use, and can be supplemented with a few utilities if necessary. However, Xpaint seems to save XPM images in a corrupted format -- need to check that out some more.

30June03
I've installed the xli image viewer, partly as I wanted a commandline tool for viewing images, in particular to set onto the root window (desktop background). I did not want to use xv. Works real nice, have now got a lovely background image when Fvwm95 starts up. I now need to edit the Fvwm95 scripts to use xli for screen setup.

29June03
Version 0.3 now available. Major visual and feature enhancements. image.gz is now 18.7M.

Flash card:
If you are upgrading from an earlier version, please erase all files on it first. You can leave vmlinuz and ldlinux.sys on it so it remains bootable, but wipe everything else. Then copy the new image.gz and syslinuz.cfg onto it.

CDROM:
If using a floppy disk as home device, please erase it.

I do intend that once the structure is settled on, you won't have to wipe your personal files.

Some brief (and important) release notes:

The Gaby personal database is now nicely integrated with the Spruce email program, however the telephone feature needs attention (ie, doesn't work).
In Fvwm95, the "Restart WindowLab" item in the "Start" menu is supposed to restart with the WindowLab window manager running, except it doesn't.
The "Start/Settings/Screen Setup" item is mostly functional, but don't press the "Browse..." button as it hangs Fvwm (CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE will get you out).
A useful note about the Endeavour file manager. Before collapsing a directory tree, click outside it first. If a directory inside is highlighted, Endeavour hangs.
Another useful note about Endeavour. For cd-Puppy using a floppy disk as "home device", when you exit Endeavour you will be asked if you want to unmount "fd0" --say no.
The Fvwm95 taskbar looks just like Windows 9x, and is configured to auto-hide. I find this to be a bit tricky to use, but I think that it is a matter of technique --move the mouse pointed down to the bottom of the screen fairly quickly helps, maybe. I don't yet know how to change this behaviour.
To connect to the Internet, use the "ppp" program in a terminal window as described on the main Puppy page. "Start/Network..." menu does have items for invoking "ppp", however the connection step doesn't work (so don't use it!).
Hopefully all these issues will be resolved by the next release!

A couple of interesting points about images. If you choose "Image browser" from the "Start" menu, and go to /usr/share/images/, then right-click on an image, you can make it the desktop background image --however it isn't saved.
If you want to take a snapshot of the screen or parts thereof, open Xpaint. It has a nice screen capture facility.
--it would be nice if both of these features could be invoked direct from the commandline, so they could be put into Fvwm95's menu ...anyone interested in hacking some code?

28June03
Major news! I have gone over to the Fvwm95 window manager. LWM and WindowLab are still there as alternatives. This gives the look-and-feel of Windows 9x, and gives an excellent first impression. Fvwm works beautifully, very fast. Now we have desktop icons, start-button, the works.

Puppy has only got console sound players/recorders, wavplay, wavrec and mpg123, and only console mixers, aumix-minimal and volume. So, I found Xtmix, a nice GUI sound mixer that uses the Athena/Xaw widgets. I cannot find an Athena or GTK v1.2 GUI sound player, however I did locate Relief, an ncurses (console) quasi-GUI frontend for any sound players -- works for wavplay and mpg123.

When are all these goodies going to get released? I'm currently tuning the Fvwm95 config file, which is no trivial task, so perhaps... maybe we will see v0.3 tomorrow.

26June03
Puppy has now gained Gnetconfig, a utility program to examine and configure the network interfaces. I also found a nice little GUI utility to monitor network traffic, Xnetload, and it does a real nice job of displaying the packet flow to and from my modem while connected to the Internet.

I managed to find the source code for Gnews, a newsreader written in 1999 by a student, Jan Blunck. Jan lost interest, but it's a nice little program, though some features missing. It has potential, and it would be nice to see it taken up by somebody. Gnews requires GTK+ and can be compiled with or without need for the Gnome libraries. So, now Puppy has two newsreaders!

25June03
Hey man, we're getting there! I just had a revelation -- discovered that all this time the X server was only using the bitmap fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ even though the docs state that the server automatically searches misc/, 75dpi/, 100dpi/, Speedo/ and Type1/. Puppy only has misc/ and Type1/. With X running, I typed this:

# xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
I then fired up Xpaint, and there they all are! Maybe it's a hack, but I've added this command in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc, so it will execute when X starts.
Note, also tried Siag's pw, it has all the fonts for selection, but they don't all display correctly -- the Dingbats for example display as plain text, not symbols.

By the way, right now I'm using the Bluefish HTML editor in Puppy to edit this news.htm file, which resides on my Windows partition. I have also configured the external settings for Bluefish, so can preview in Links web browser and edit images with Xpaint.

24June03
Puppy now has Xcal, a nice calendar/reminder program, based on the Athena widgets (Xaw/neXtaw). This should nicely complement the Gaby personal database. Xcal will appear in the next release.

I have a problem with Egon, the animation creation tool, which is part of the Siag Office suite. It takes up a lot of space, but I don't see it as being very useful. If there is a need to create animations, there are some other choices, but this kind of thing is perhaps a bit too exotic for Puppy. So, Egon may be gone by the next release.

Ok, Egon is gone. I have finetuned the Siag Office suite. I have installed Siag's Xedplus, yet another text editor -- Puppy already had vi and mp. I have installed Antiword, for viewing MS Word files. I have also installed the Siag plugins, which turns on "object embedding". I placed an environment variable into /etc/profile, SIAGDOCS=/usr/share/doc/siag, as I had placed the docs in a different place than the default, and the Siag apps couldn't find their docs.

...darn, the Siag apps still can't find their help docs. I still can't figure out those plugins, only got the "hello world" plugin to work. have no idea how Antiword is supposed to be used by Siag apps.

I have removed the TTF/ folder, that had TrueType fonts. I also overhauled the misc/ folder, as some apps complained of missing fonts. misc/ has the bitmap fonts (non-scalable). There is still a warning that cannot find a complete fontset, but much improved and also the folder is half the size of before.
As the TrueType fonts are removed, it would seem that Puppy no longer needs the libfreetype.so* libraries, and indeed the X server is the only app that calls it. I tried to recompile X so that it is not dependent on this library, but failed. So, I have to leave in an unused 260K library.

Fonts are still a mystery... Xpaint for example only allows selection of the bitmap fonts, yet docs indicate should be able to select scalable fonts.

23June03
Version 0.2 released. Puppy now boots off a CDROM, as well as any USB device. File image.gz is 18.6M, vmlinuz is 1.1M.

IMPORTANT: I have made some changes to the structure of directories and config files, so if you are upgrading from v0.1 and will be using the same flash card "home device" as before, please erase all files on it first (you can leave vmlinuz and ldlinux.sys on it so it remains bootable, but wipe everything else. Then copy the new image.gz and syslinuz.cfg onto it). I do intend that once the structure is settled on, this kind of thing won't be necessary, and upgrading will be a simple matter of replacing the old image.gz with the new one.

20June03
A CDROM version of Puppy should be released in a couple of days. First time I tried it, I was pleasantly surprised how fast Puppy booted up.
I am refining the file structure, so these early versions should be treated as experimental, not for mission-critical use. My intention is that v1.0 will be when Puppy is ready for mass use.

I would like to try Gnews, a GTK+ based newsreader. There is a product called Gnews for Gnome, also a newsreader, but a different product. The Gnews that I am after was written around 1999 by Jan Blunck, a student, and his download link no longer works, email appears to be dead. His Gnews can apparently work with just GTK+, not Gnome. If anyone has the source code, I would love to have it!

19June03
The Xrn newsreader now works. I found that the nntp/tcp entry was missing from /etc/services. The fix will be in the next release.

18June03
Puppy version 0.1 placed on the Internet for download.

[Moose On The Loose]

Just 2 days back now, I had cause to fire up a version of puppy 4.20.
I say "a version of" because I had re-mastered to add a few things.

How well it worked under VirtualBox made me both happy and sad as it was like meeting a old friend again. It was where I started using Puppy.

Part of the sadness was a gripe I've had with all the newer versions that powering up the old one brought back to mind. On 4.20, before the graphics fired up, it would ask which resolution to use. On a new puppy it assumes that I want the highest resolution that the graphics claims to be able to do. This means that I have to get out my magnifier, squint and guess to get the resolution to something other than where all the text is flyspec-3 sized. As the world migrates to 8K video on screens that are 3x5cm, more people will be facing this to the point where call computers will be like the ones shown in the movie Brazil. (If you haven't seen it go watch it)

BTW: 420 booted faster on an EEEPC than 528.

[ndujoe1]