Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

g'day all

Some time ago I began a thread. The topic was something like: I clobbered firefox.
I don't remember all the circumstances leading up to clobbering firefox, but it went something like this.
Firefox was running on my desktop - all "A-OK".
I installed uPupBB32 on a friend's laptop.
She said: I need a better browser. Me: OK - no problem! But there was a problem. I live "here" and Jane lives "there" = 80km away.
Naturally I decided to make a complete set of notes about downloading/installing FF. To test my notes I uninstalled FF.
I re-installed FF. After that, the wheels fell off my car. I tried to run FF.
Now you know why I'm writing this. FF didn't run! I could un-install. The FF icon would vanish from Applications > Internet > Browser list.
I would 'do something' - probably click on 'Firefox.sfs' to re-install.
The icon for FF would be visible on Applications > Internet > Browser List.

That's it. Clicking the FF icon (on the list) -> nada/nothing/zip.

When I un-installed FF - the icon disappeared. TBH I don't remember what I did to un-install FF.

Generally I use uPupBB32 - it's my only OS. I know very little about Puppy as an OS. I'm just a user, not a developer.
I know basic 'shell' commands. (find, grep, cd, sed, ....) I wrote a few simple scripts. I compiled a trivial program in "C".
But I use Linux - that's all. Word-processing. keeping notes about stuff. keeping *.pdf spec sheets about 'stuff'.
Generally installing/running a *.sfs works. That's how I got/ran Libre-Office.

The details of where FF files are found on my desktop are in the file attached. 'cobaka_firefox_locations.txt
I just need to re-install FF for uPupBB on my desktop.

Details about my PC + OS are below, but note this: I boot from /mnt/sda3/ You can see 'inside' that folder by looking at one of the attached files. There is another folder on that drive called FF_browser_on_date. Something of interest in that folder too ...
Oh, one last thing. I'm using the Chromium web browser to post this.

Any help appreciated.

cobaka.

Motherboard Vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: Z68X-UD3-B3

Distro: BionicPup32 19.03 (Yes, I'm running 32bit Puppy on a 64 bit machine, but who cares? Puppy runs like a dream!)
Window Manager: JWM v2.3.7
Desktop Start: xwin jwm

Development:
Bash: 4.4.20, Geany: 1.29, Gtkdialog: 0.8.4, Perl: 5.26.1, Python: 2.7.15+ Yad: 0.40.3 (GTK+ 2.24.32)

Personal Storage Folder:
Name: /OS_BOOT/upupbbsave-GByt Total Size: 201G Free Space: 183G Location: partition sda3

Memory Allocation:
Total RAM: 8075 MB
Used RAM: 3337 MB
Actual Used RAM: 1332 MB Used - (buffers + cached)
Actual Free RAM: 6743 MB Free + (buffers + cached)

.sfs are more loaded than installed. We install .pet and .deb.

Think of a directory called Firefox. All files in it and subdirectories are compressed into a single file archive. Also included in that archive is the menu entry in a different directory.

When you load the Firefox .sfs by clicking on it, it is made to appear uncompressed and part of your system, but you're really looking at that one .sfs file. Then the menu is updated with the Firefox .desktop launcher included in your .sfs.

I currently have two .sfs browsers loaded and neither appear in /initrd/mnt, rather /initrd/pup_ro* (the .sfs layer directories).

Based on what you've written, I would go to a terminal prompt to see which .sfs appear loaded (this should appear the same as the gui):

sfs_load -i

If you see Firefox loaded, you can probably run it with a full command path.

In my .sfs in would be:

/usr/lib/firefox/firefox --private

(I always use private browsing)
It could be in a different directory. You can be sure searching in pFind.

If this works, the full path is easy to add to a desktop launcher.

Your old thread: viewtopic.php?t=4383

Hi cobaka,

Since Firefox is used all of the time, and it has periodic updates, you might want to install it into your savefile, versus using a SFS file. Please try the following steps as a baseline to get Firefox up and running. Note that I clicked on the 'Configure" button in the Puppy Package Manager to bring up these extra windows.

First, update your Puppy Package Manager to get the newest Firefox listed.

Next search for firefox, and install it. You can add language packs and other features if you want

You might get some missing libs errors like in the above image. They are in fact installed by Firefox, so it is not an issue.

Start

If you still have problems...
In a Terminal windows, you can try to run the following

/usr/lib/firefox/firefox.sh

@cobaka :-

I concur with the others, Les. When running Firefox as an SFS package, you are stuck with that version. It cannot be updated, due to the read-only nature of an SFS file.

The update process wants to overwrite the contents of the main 'firefox' directory. In your case, it can't; the permissions as set by the SFS file-system won't permit it, and whenever you re-load that package you're back to the version that was originally packaged again.

Since Puppy runs in RAM, initially that update will occur in the virtual file-system. It may even save it into your save-file. But at the next boot, the SFS package will once again 'overwrite' it with the old version, because SFS packages have priority in Puppy.....

You CANNOT 'update' an in-situ SFS package. You can only do so via another SFS package of the newer version. And this is another reason I developed the portable browsers; 'zilla-based browsers have always been able to update in Linux. Chromium-based browsers only have the built-in ability to update from the package manager, as & when a new build is provided.....and for Puppy, this doesn't work, because stuff from the 'parent' distro's repositories is always built for a multi-user environment.

---------------------------------------

Take a look at the 'portable' Firefox package, here:-

viewtopic.php?t=4083

These can even be run from a flash-drive, because absolutely everything - including your profile - is self-contained within the portable directory. You can, if you wish, add a Menu entry from wherever you've located the portable; built-in scripts allow you to do this.

Just a thought, of course. It's entirely up to you.....many are only comfortable with the existing .pet/SFS infrastructure.

Mike.

First - thanks to @mikewalsh, @snoring_cat & @JASpup

Thank you for this well-presented info. Now I understand (to some degree) the nature of my problem. It's me or rather my ignorance. I did not understand how Puppy Linux worked and I assumed that FF.sfs was just another file. Silly, silly me! I downloaded another version of Firefox (or -more correctly - a copy of the same version, but in a different directory). I imagined the firefox.sfs file was a "common" file (perhaps like a compacted *.exe file, such as I might find in Windows). Thus I brought a problem down on my head (or at least on my operating system). "Woof" to you three (Mike, "snoring" and JAS) for info that helped me understand the problem.

Off topic: Forging a 'home-brew' Puppy.

Now to a distantly related topic - forging a 'home-brewed' version of Puppy Linux.
A thread on this forum has grown to approx 20 pages of hard-argued discussion about the nature of 'home-brewed'. Most of that has gone over my head, but my experience here, with the failure of FireFox.sfs is relevant to a the nature of a new Puppy.

First, the internal construction of Puppy Linux seems to make the OS more resilient to viral attack. From my point of view (just a user) that's of great value. The idea that I can boot Puppy "cold" into a "like new" config and then shut it down is another valuable feature. I use this whenever I want to transfer snapshots from my mobile. Puppy has some bug that will not mount my mobile; when I 'boot' into RAM I transfer the files from mobile to desktop. Then: 'bingo' I have them! Sure - I'm using one aspect of Puppy (booting w/out PupSave) to defeat some trivial bug that certainly has a work-around. Ideally Puppy should have zero bugs - but nothing is perfect and I'm happy.

Second: The para above suggestes the biggest deficit of Puppy - documentation. The documentation may exist (somewhere - probably the Wikki) but I haven't read it. I would like to 'have a go' at the documentation, but time always seems to be scarce. Plus my ability to comprehend the whole Puppy "thingy".

Third: Again - wrt documentation. At the beginning when I first used Puppy, I thought all puppies were equal. I put Puppy "this" on a thumb-drive. I put Puppy "that" on another thumb-drive. And so on. On Monday I booted from one drive. On Tuesday another and another and another. Shock! Horror! Weird things happened on my computer and (embarrassed) I understood that "all Puppies are not equal". Now I use only uPupBB32 (even on 64 bit computers). Perhaps I should have read more before I made the mistake described, but I didn't. I just 'jumped in' and mixed different versions of Puppy. (As they say: My bad.)

Fourth: I get older computers, install Puppy and put them in the hands of people who don't have a computer. Remembering that "old stuff" must eventually fail, and agreeing on that point, an OS that runs on older hardware has it's place. If you don't watch you-tube videos, a Pentium P4 at 1.6GHz runs nicely on a 15yo CPU.

#5. I love the simplicity of installing Puppy Linux. Maybe I spent a lot of time learning/testing/experimenting (and so on) but it beats Windows hands-down. Plus - I know that when my drive "falls over" I can re-generate my complete OS simply and easily (because I just back-up whole directories onto another storage device) and I have the original Puppy files in a safe place too. Much, much friendlier than Windows.

#6. Puppy Linux creates a didactic environment. Using PL I learned to do many things over a 3 year period (starting in 2018) that I didn't learn after 25 or 30 years using Windows. It's about 'getting under the hood' and help available on the forum. Because PL is open source there is no reason to 'hide stuff' from the user. On the contrary, there is every reason for disseminating knowledge.

#7. Puppy Linux lacks 'gloss'. Windows has 'gloss'. Window's looks pretty. MS expended huge effort to make Windows 'friendly' (and glossy). Example: File system does not distinguish between u/c and l/c (as I understand it). So why not make Linux (in general) glossy? No! "glossy" => more code => more bugs. I'm content to trade "less gloss" for "more reliablity" (less lines of code and smaller overall OS). Puppy is reliable.

OK. This should probably be part of the "let's roll our own Puppy OS" thread. Nothing technical here - just observations from a user of 3 years. I love Puppy the way it is. Uncluttered. Functional. Manageable. Runs on "anything".

cobaka.

Hi again cobaka,

If after this reply you want to discuss more on this alternative topic, please make a completely new post regarding your Puppy Linux experience and your numbered points. It will help other people browsing/searching the forum find this alternative topic.

I too have noticed a documentation deficit for Puppy Linux and helping new users. As an FYI, I and others are actively working on addressing documentation. For instance, it would really help if in the documentation it immediately covered what makes Puppy Linux so special...in ways that you discovered by testing Puppy Linux out. The WIKI is currently locked for new users to add entries. I'll work with the WIKI moderator on that.

Regarding a more shiny, sparkly glossy UI...there are puppy versions that are addressing that (e.g. X-Tahr and Friendly Fossa). For further inspiration, please see the show us your desktop thread to see how many of us tricked out our Puppy Linux.