Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

BW 64 10.0.0.2 is beautiful. apt/synaptic seem complete stable and robust. BW is the only one of many puppies i tried that alsa pulse and pipewire correctly configured the sound on my weird test case. The weird test case is an Acer C738T Chromebook, that a seller on ebay had replaced the bios and loaded Ubuntu. And oh yeah it has an hdmi slot.And oh yes again, BW recognized, installed, and configured my D10 USB Topping DAC perfectly first time. I just love the ex-Chromebook now with Bookworm, it is small and light with a nice clear bright touchscreen, and it folds back into a tablet, and the battery is much better than either of my 14" laptops. Plug in the hdmi cable and it mirrors to the external monitor automatically. The main weirdness is that it has two soundcards, the digital one on the intel quadcore and the analog on a 98090. No other Puppy got the sound right the first time, meaning usable sound at the speakers, and what's more, try as I might I couldn't use the utilities to get it configured. And I was looking at asound.state and sysinfo etc. That's about all, or more, than could be expected by a new user to Puppy, which seems important to me because I can see them saying, "nope, too much trouble, get Mint." In fact, I tried to make Puppy work 6 months ago, with no luck, and that's exactly what I did! But, 1) Mint was not snappy and that was why I wanted Puppy in the first place, because it runs in memory and the speed never disappoints, and 2) Puppy has soul! So a couple of weeks ago I tried again and found Bookworm. Also, speaking of other Puppies, isn't it time to retire Retrovol--well, in my opinion it was time for that 10 years ago.

What have I learned? This is not a complaint, but Syanptic is dangerous. Just like many other people I expected to upgrade, I mean that's one of the things synaptic does, right? The way Puppy is built, individual programs should not be updated in that way. Yes, I saw a warning on someone's PPM, and I saw the question and answer in this forum. But that big Mark All Upgrades button is right there in the middle, you can't miss it. This was so much trouble I gave up on it, fortunately. In trying to get the sound working on another Puppy I tried to upgrade pulse and install or upgrade pipewire--NO, dependency hell, that was totally irrecoverable and it made things seem fragile. The lesson, use synaptic only to install extra programs and don't even try to upgrade those.

Again not a complaint, but Mint, Neon, and Ubuntu all got the sound right. All the Puppies chose the correct 2 drivers, they just didn't configure them correctly, or give me the tools or help to fix them. Yes, there's only so far I will go now, but I bet I went farther than most, new users especially, just because I love Puppy and have some knowledge of it. The lesson, examine and include the config routines from the whales. This would be fed back into Woof-CE for the benefit of everyone, I think. Use the resources of the community to do more betas and test it till it is bulletproof, or as near as, so those newbies don't get disappointed. Easy tor me to say, I know

Again I say that with Bookworm, this is a fine machine, I use it in preference to my other two more elaborate newer bigger and more expensive laptops. Not only is it light , can be a tablet if I want, it is more fun! They sell equivalents on ebay for $60, with Ubuntu etc, but this Puppy is noticeably more responsive. It would be cool if the forum could offer them, yes, no doubt possible problems, but it would still be cool.

OK, now the question. I didn't even notice for 2 weeks but BW didn't grab the touchscreen driver, which shows how much i use the touchscreen. It appears I need elants_i2c. I thought I remembered good instructions for adding a driver, but I can't find them. A link would help if anyone knows. Also, from reading in the forum it seems that dkms might be the new solution to missing drivers, so a link to those instructions if there is one. Thanks. And another dangerous thing I did see warnings about. but did anyway. I thought trying a huge kernel might have the touchscreen driver, but the warning that some kernels might cause corruption was right. It cratered the sound stuff and nothing I tried would fix it, even after I reverted to the original kernel, and even after I deleted the save file and rebooted as first time. I know that doesn't seem possible, but it freaked me out because the sound was so important to me. I finally did a new frugal install from the original iso and WHEW! So no more casually changing kernels for me. Finally, after I fell in love with Bookworm I went to the forum to see who made it. Haha, I saw the name on the first message, and I wasn't a bit surprised.

@playdayz - nice review. You are perfectly entitled to critique our 'short'-comings . Re- the huge kernels - I'm pretty sure Bookworm needs a USRMERGE kernel - very few of those have been posted, but check the kernels section.
I see my 5.10.174 & 6.1.23 usrmerge kernels don't have elants_i2c, but do have TOUCHSCREEN_ELAN. But then some sound drivers may be missing, as I don't know which ones you require.

@playdayz

Thanks for your review of BW64.

Long-time forum members still remember your development and release of the ever-popular Lucid Puppy -- thank you !

Your successful integration of BW64 with the Acer C738T Chromebook is good news. In Woof-CE, dimkr has implemented dpup builds with kernels and firmware that provide hardware support similar to upstream Debian. If I recall correctly, @wizard and other forum members also report success with various Chromebooks.

Concerning your non-functioning touchscreen, the current 6.1.38 kernel of BW64 10.0.2 does not support Elan touchscreens (CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_ELAN is not set). Maybe @dimkr will reply concerning possible support for Elan touchscreens in future automated Woof-CE builds of the dpup kernel.

EDIT: @playdayz, as time permits, please check your forum PM -- thanks.

Does this touchscreen work under Debian 12? If so, I can investigate.

EDIT: I see CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_ELAN is disabled in Debian 12 (we inherit this setting) and wonder why

EDIT 2: I added CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_ELAN=m to the automated pipeline that builds the dpup kernels

Here is a topic about using Puppy on Chromebooks:
viewtopic.php?t=431

Most of the info is from people getting Puppy to work on their specific Chromebook.

Those things are all over the place on how to get specific stuff working on a specific Chromebook.

@playdayz :-

I missed you when you re-appeared back in January. Nice to see you back, mate.

I think you'd 'dropped off the radar' when I first joined the community nearly a decade ago, but I certainly used Lupu quite a bit; it was one of only a handful of Pups that worked OOTB with our anciente 2002 Dell Inspiron (P4 and a gig of DDR1). Then Richard Erwin took over maintaining it, and it got even more use.

Browsers became a problem after a time - that glibc 2.11 wasn't helping none! - so I modified watchdog's glibc "tweaks", and got an up-to-date PaleMoon working in it with glibc 2.19 from Tahrpup. Then watchdog pointed the way with his use of a second Puppy as a 'chroot', and I built an SFS with a Tahrpup chroot running an up-to-date build of the Iron browser. That one raised a few eyebrows........

Wonderful to see one of our revered veterans return to the fray. Don't leave it so long next time......we've ALL missed you!

Mike.

@playdayz Please try Vanilla Dpup 10.0.27 (from https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/releases/releases) and report back if the touchscreen works. If it does, it should work in the yet to be released Bookworm Pup64 10.0.3 (if the kernel is updated). Every old computer we rescue using Puppy is a blessing!

@dimkr

Joy, I found a copy of the 6.1.38 source, I think it was the one @ozsouth compiled as rt, It had the elants_i2c driver source I needed, and I was able to compile tit, and better yet it works.

I will test that Dpup.

Thanks for the help.

@dimkr

Tested 10.0.27. Touchscreen worked with Xorg variant but did not work with Wayland.

HAHA, I could have waited a day and just grabbed the module out of 10.0.27.

playdayz wrote: ↑Mon Sep 11, 2023 1:33 am

HAHA, I could have waited a day and just grabbed the module out of 10.0.27.

Or just wait for radky to release 10.0.3

After about 19 years of using Puppy, BW is first one that's worked so perfectly that I haven't bothered to check for a new version yet. Most of the annoyances are probably an easy fix (like partition icons piling up on each other on the desktop in Fossa), but I always find it a battle to do my own fixes, so something that just does it all without fiddling is like gold for me. Thanks for BWPup!

Steve