working on a new image

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quotaholic
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working on a new image

Post by quotaholic »

webdt366-kde3.jpg
webdt366-kde3.jpg (111.88 KiB) Viewed 30522 times
Hi All,

Started to run Puppy Linux on a LX800 tablet and was rather surprised with how well it ran. Started playing with the newer builds some and have a photo to share of what will hopefully be an upcoming image. More later...

Its later....
Took a stock Puppy Lucid iso and installed it on my LX series DT366. After a while I figured out the right combination of things to get a working touchscreen. Penmount drivers are installed. We are autobooting to the gui and the base install took 200mb. I am using the smaller drive found in the webdt for a reason. 478mb is what I get after formatting. Later I added the Trinity Desktop and that took 80 megs up so we are sitting with around 130 megs left on the drive right now.

Anyways I found a .sfs file for Trinity Desktop 3.5.12 and installed that. A few cli entries and we were booting to KDE 3.5.12 ..... yay! When I first got in to Linux KDE 3 was the more popular window manager at the time. I really did miss it. I am so excited to have it back.

Since this Puppy is built from Lucid - Ubuntu one can go right in to the ubuntu repos and download .deb files. Click on them if in jwm / openbox to install. If in Trinity we need to go to a console and use "petget" to install the package via CLI.

Went to Kubuntu repos and grabbed us a nice kvkbd keyboard. Find that in the Utility menu. Basically this image has all the broad strokes done. KDE is in. Touchscreen is in. Hardbuttons are mapped via xmodmap to f13 - f16 and the dpad is up down.. etc. Bluetooth is installed however it is not autostarting on boot. Wifi should be fine. The menu structure needs to be rebuilt. KDE took over and put almost all puppy apps in "Lost and Found". I did not install a VT6656 driver, sorry DT360 owners. I will update this post with a link to one in the future. We DO have a nice on screen keyboard at least..... Finally!

The gist of this image is that it has all the things it needs however all the configuration needs to be done. Shutdown is not appearing in the menu however there is a pds application installed that will give one a puppy style shutdown menu. Link to it from the desktop if you wish with an icon. Even MacPup, another puppy distro, has unconventional shutdown buttons.

I may upload another image once I get the configs done. This also may take me a month or so looking at how much there is to do.

Here is a link to some pics:

https://picasaweb.google.com/1163403755 ... directlink

I'll do a youtube video after a market run and after this image uploads. Looking in to a gho as well but not optimistic. Will keep everyone posted.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/3uzj4f6 ... ppyKDE3_7z

This is by far the best linux image to date for the WebDT. This image should install on all tablet models.

Edits:

Adding a link to the app located in /usr/bin/start-bluetooth-server to /root/.trinity/Autostart will get bluetooth started on boot

Doing the same for kvkbd will get one a on screen keyboard loaded to the system tray. find kvkbd at /opt/kde3/bin/kvkbd

Still working on buttons within kde's input actions found in the accessibility menu. Then on to cleaning up menus.

quotaholic
Dave7341
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Re: working on a new image

Post by Dave7341 »

Looks great, I'll give it a try. I'll try to make a ghost image and post it for the ghost users.

Thanks for the hard work.
quotaholic
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Re: working on a new image

Post by quotaholic »

Thanks Dave!

Super appreciated on the ghost part. I tried and I failed.

I had a few hours in to redoing the menu's last night when my girlfriend sat down next to me and hugged me. At that moment I fat fingered a button and deleted the whole puppy menu entry I had worked on up to. Will put more time to it this evening.

Curious to learn if this is something that will install on multiple hardware sets? GX, LX, 368 etc... I just ghosted my 4gb tablet running windows. I may install this on that with intentions of remastering to an installable ISO. Something puppy offers out of the box.

Please let me know if you find any major problems.

One bug I see deals with a crash handler in the background when quitting xwindows. I think its kvkbd related but not sure.

Thanks
quotaholic
Dave7341
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Re: working on a new image

Post by Dave7341 »

Tried but failed.....how do you mean? Do you need the tools for your USB flash drive so you can run ghost? I can email because they are not large.

I won't have time to play with your image until the weekend. My experience with Puppy is that it's perfect for older computers as well as computers with limited resources. I think it zips along really well in the WEBDT tablet. I'm not much of a Linux guy but I'll try it out.

-Dave
quotaholic
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Re: working on a new image

Post by quotaholic »

Hmm, Tried with ghost 8.0 and 8.3 on a 16gb usb stick formatted to fat32. Made it with the hp utility. SP2xxxx.exe from memory. First time it asked me to fsck the source volume. Did that and tried again. It got about 5 percent in and crashed with a general error. Grabbed a ghost v11.x buts an iso and I havent gotten it to work on a usb stick yet.

I'm having problems with this kde3.5 sfs. System keeps freezing intermittently. Especially when wifi is active. That may be the intel 2200 card. I see ipw2200 firmware errors all over dmesg. That is a side car to the kernel module loading if i remember right. Hopefully its not the sfs. I really like this interface.

Dave, If you have a different wifi card and you get a chance to try this image out this weekend can you watch for freezes?

Thanks
quotaholic
Dave7341
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Re: working on a new image

Post by Dave7341 »

My DT366 has the same wifi card but the DT360 uses a different card - I'll try it there too.

I have not had lockups with Puppy 4.31 - that's what I usually use on these tablets.

-Dave
quotaholic
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Re: working on a new image

Post by quotaholic »

Yeah I have 431 running on my 360 as well. Nothing wrong there. I should move the image I am working on over to the 360 to test wifi being the source of lockups. I just got a touchscreen working on 5.4 or Puppy Precise. I may switch over to that as the base to build from. Will update this evening.

quotaholic
Dave7341
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Re: working on a new image

Post by Dave7341 »

I have a 431 install working OK. I have tried newer versions and I have found the easiest way to test. I simply install the new Puppy (QUIRKY, WARY and LUCID are OK) and then when you exit the installation it asks to create that 2FS file. I save it and then copy the old pupsave.2fs from v431 while naming it the same as the one that was created from the new install. When the OS starts up it finds the 2FS file and asks to upgrade it if needed. That way I import all the penmount stuff and extra customizations - I like Opera instead of Seamonkey, etc.. All the customizations are in that 2FS so just copy that piece to the new installation and away you go.

That trick works with Quirky140, LUPU-528, wary-512, puppy-arcade-9, macpupe17 and a couple other puppy derivatives that I have tried. Makes it easy to try different versions quickly.

-Dave
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