Discussion, talk and tips
https://forum.puppylinux.com/
PROJECT CLOSED - see Fossa64 - Mini.
When Fossapup64-9.5 was released, creator 666philb made the adrv removeable, leaving a skeleton system.
From that, I made a small usable system for older pcs with basic functionality - Fossa64-low, forerunner of others.
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V2 released - I missed something.
on v2, my external HD icon is missing on the bottom partition row...
@gychang - that's weird. Mine works ok, whether I plug in before or after bootup. Might be a timing thing. Restarting X might solve that, or unplug (if unmounted) then replugin. If either if those works, you could try adding 'sleep 3' as the 2nd line of /root/.xinit.rc .
@ozsouth as u said, replugin does pickup the external HD, adding the line sleep 10 to the 2nd line (after the shebang #!/bin/sh ) to the .xinit does not work...
@@gychang - In System menu, run Puppy Event Manager.
Under Activate, both should be ticked. Under ROX Icons, top 2 should be ticked.
ozsouth wrote: Tue Jun 20, 2023 1:04 pm@@gychang - In System menu, run Puppy Event Manager.
Under Activate, both should be ticked. Under ROX Icons, top 2 should be ticked.
@ozsouth good ideas!, I cured the problem by frugal install to the internal SSD (had been running on a usb stick) and when I booted up without any save folder first time I saw the external HD!. Unfortunately I did not try to boot from the original usb stick without the save folder initially. My guess is that I may have copied some configuration from another save folder (from Fossapup64?) and that messed up the config files when running from usb stick. Your Fossapup64-min is a good one and I blame myself for the missing internal HD partition, thanks
is there a working gthumb (photo editing) app somewhere?, one in the PPM doesn't seem to work.
@gychang - I'll look at gthumb later today. Only way to build it is to run it in fossa64-min on its own & see what libs are missing.
LATER: Sorry, that has 72 dependencies - total 291mb. Unfortunately, in a cut-down version that happens.
@gychang, the value of a 'bare-bones' or almost 'bare-bones' operating system is its use on computers having little storage space and/or especially little RAM. On those a bare-bones OS may at least enable you to accomplish 'real-world' task such as surfing the web, recording simple notes and basic drawing. If you 'flesh it out' so that you can do more, you'll end up having to add to it all the libraries you could have just had by not starting with a 'bare-bones' operating system. And remember how efficiently Puppys manage buffering and RAM caching. See, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 070#p4070 :
Although optimized for working with graphic files, in the end gThumbs is essentially just another file-manager with some graphic editing capabilities. You might be able to duplicate its file-managent advantage over rox by installing xfe (note there's no 'c'). Xfe can be configured to provide dual-panes and a tree view. It's in PPM has (IIRC) one dependency if you exclude 'themes' which would only add one other. I combined all into a pet so I didn't have to download it again if I rebuild Fossapup64. That pet is 2030 Kilobytes.. geo_c provided a ready made SFS here, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 043#p42043. The 2nd post on that thread, by rockedge, shows its GUI.
xfe includes its own text-editor, which IMHO,is as good as Leafpad. It also has an image viewer. But you're not limited to those. You can change Edit>Preferences>Programs to specify your choice of available applications.
I haven't set up Fossa64-min, and don't intend to. But you might want to try to add Lazpaint to it. A deb and a portable version can be downloaded from here, https://lazpaint.github.io/. The portable is all of 4 Mbs, the deb smaller. Runs OOTB under Fossapup64. I don't know what, if any, libraries would be needed for Fossa-min. Lazpaint can edit and create both raster and vector graphics, and combine them. If you can get it to run under Fossa-min, you can set XFE up to use it as its default viewer & or graphic editor. Combining the two you'd end up with a full featured graphic file-manager and editor less than 10 Mbs in size.
Edit: I have set up Fossa64-Low and just booted into it. Both xfe and lazpaint-portable worked OOTB. I don't think it likely that many libs would be needed to render them functional under Min.
By the way, you can configure Xfe's panels to provide a BIG Thumbnail view of jpg and png files.
I never got the hang of using mtpaint for resizing. Resizing of the above was done under Fossa64-low using gimp.AppImage connected via script to create a menu entry.
Your posts are always informative and full of ideas/suggestions.
ATM I am moving between the full fat version of FP95 and the Min-Low.
I am not really fussed about the HW acceleration and can teach myself to live without Python.
For my basic day to day needs, this works really well and the use of portables/AppImages is a benefit.
My only concern is OpenSSL implementation moving forwards. Things like online banking etc would be problematic. I don't like the idea of cross-installation of variations of OpenSSL.
As a matter of interest, how large is your library of applications and how far back does it go?
mikeslr wrote: Wed Jun 21, 2023 2:56 pmAlthough optimized for working with graphic files, in the end gThumbs is essentially just another file-manager with some graphic editing capabilities.
@mikeslr I use gthumb as my main photo editor only. It lets u rotate in fine detail, crop, convert to B&W, autolink to gimp with just "g" key. Being a photo buff, I had used gimp and darktable in past as my main photo editor but for my needs, gthumb is much faster/lighter. I am considering minimal version as my main pup but would like to have gthumb. I made a youtube here:
The folder holding Fossapup64-9.5 applications has more than 90. I haven't gotten around to 'doing house-keeping' as I now use many portables and Appimages which has superseded them in my use of Fossapup64. That number does not include the folder I named 'libs-many' which holds over a hundred libraries and symlinks I had to hunt down, or hunt down and create while rebuilding applications to function under Fossapup64.
Among the applications in Fossapup64's folder are both a pet and an SFS named gThumb_fossa64-3.8.0. [Likely, I used PaDS to combine debs, tested the SFS it built, mounted that SFS, copying its content into a folder to edit the desktop file and supply missing libs, using dir2sfs to repackage that folder as an SFS for testing and when satisfied, using dir2pet to produce the pet].
If you want, I'll upload one or the other to mediafire and leave it there for a little while. I don't want to abuse the benefit mediafire free account provides by using its space for applications which are either not generally wanted or easy to create.
You can install ListDD from here https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 260#p32260. With the SFS loaded or the pet installed you can restart-x, then file-browse to /usr/bin and Right-Click each of the following binaries: bwrap, gthumb, unity-scope-loader and xdg-dbus-proxy. From the pop-up menu select ListDD. The "Missing" tab at the bottom will identify all missing dependencies. I may have them among my accumulation.
FYI, it's easier to work with SFSes than pets. With SFSes you can load them, then mount them and file-browse into the mounted SFS to check the binaries with ListDD. ListDD does not examine the contents of the SFS, only what's currently on your system. Hence the need to load the SFS.
Compiling from scratch is always a better way to obtain an application as it will be able to specifically take advantage of your system and avoid its disadvantages. But I don't compile. That would require that I learn the language of compiling. Remind me someday to recount my failures with 6 'Human languages' and my abortive attempts to learn a couple of programming languages. They all play to my 'weak suite': the ability to internalize foreign terms and grammar.
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@gychang, have you looked into either digikam or shotwell. Both are specifically designed for managing photos with some editing capabilities, including (I think both) opening a photo in a different graphic editor.
Again, remember that I have fossapup-low rather than 'min'. But the following AppImages worked OOTB:
digikam Version 6.4.0 https://www.digikam.org/download/
shotwell 0.30.10 – “Celle”: AppImage seems no longer to be available. PPM can install the application.
mikeslr wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 8:37 pm@gychang, have you looked into either digikam or shotwell. Both are specifically designed for managing photos with some editing capabilities, including (I think both) opening a photo in a different graphic editor.
Again, remember that I have fossapup-low rather than 'min'. But the following AppImages worked OOTB:
digikam Version 6.4.0 https://www.digikam.org/download/
shotwell 0.30.10 – “Celle”: AppImage seems no longer to be available. PPM can install the application.
@mikeslr I don't have any opinion on digikam, but I was not impressed with shotwell... On the 'low" version gthumb works very well. I may just stick with that iso.
gychang wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 11:14 pm... On the 'low" version gthumb works very well. I may just stick with that iso.
Dah 
Why didn't I think of that while testing things under 'low'? 
@gychang - glad gthumb works in fossa64-low. That would mean some needed libraries are already present.
Testing in fossa64-min is recommended to guarantee all needed libraries are present, as a general rule for those wanting to post packages.
ozsouth wrote: Fri Jun 23, 2023 3:19 am@gychang - glad gthumb works in fossa64-low. That would mean some needed libraries are already present.
Testing in fossa64-min is recommended to guarantee all needed libraries are present, as a general rule for those wanting to post packages.
@ozsouth Figured out missing libraries and now working!, very good distro for my meager PC.
V3 released.
28/6/23 - made a Firefox-esr adrv, can swap in, but Fossa64-min also needs ffmpeg for decent media compatibility.
I've decided that this is too minimal - a basic browser is a must & folk shoudn't need to chase the basics,
so I'm starting Fossa64-Basic (which I hope will be the final in this series of experiments).
This project is closed.