'Puppy' Linux Corner.....

@ArtEze,

 

- Please describe here which Puppy version you are using (it may be important in order to know which tools are available).

 

- Why do you want to change the letters of the keyboard before starting X?

 

- Do you expect it to work also in graphics mode (when running X)?

 

- Which language are you using?

 

- Am I undestanding correctly that it is a custom modification that you want: to get W when pressing 1 and to get Q when pressing 2?

I'm using LxPupSc64 21.04 with kbd installed.

What happens is that I have the keyboard spoiled.  I need to use the lyrics of the first row, but I do not have them... The qwertyuiop, I do not know about those letters.... For this, use xmodmap, and works well.  But I would also like to run commands being inside the initrd, I can't save either, or open folder sessions.

I would like to know if it is possible, in addition, that those changes are maintained after starting X. ¿Key assignments are separated in X and console?

I'm using ash, /bin/sh is a symbolic link to Busybox:

#!/bin/sh

echo "keymaps 0-255
keycode  16=w               
keycode  17=q" > /mnt/sda2/b
loadkeys -v /mnt/sda2/b

Exactly, it is a custom modification... I find it easier to execute the script from X, then, as I already have the letters changed, the 1 is the Q, then, as I already have the letters changed, the 1 is the one W.

The good thing is that PuppyLinux, other systems require passwords as root, the R, O and the T do not work on my keyboard, I had to make symbolic links to the commands, 3ch9 for echo g43p for grep, and others.

What I want in the end is to correspond each number with the letters, 0 P... 1 Q... 2 W... 3 E... 4 R... 5 T... 6 Y... 7 U... 8 W... 9 O.

Edited by ArtEze, 27 November 2021 - 08:49 PM.

ArtEze:-

TBH, that's going about things the hard way.

I've had to use xmodmap before now, after spilling half a mug of cold coffee down the right-hand side of my ancient 2002 Dell laptop's keyboard several years ago. Mind you, that was before I discovered USB keyboards, and came to the conclusion that using a cheap, add-on keyboard was a darned sight simpler than messing about trying to re-map & reset individual keys.....

I can't for the life of me remember how I did it now, because I gave up on xmodmap & all the rest of it after discovering the easier option....

Had you considered a USB wireless keyboard?

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 29 November 2021 - 07:07 AM.

@Mike_Walsh

Then the only way until now is to change the keyboard... I also tried to install Debian loadkeys, but it did not work either.

Right now I'm using a wireless keyboard USB... The keyboard I bought it in a COTO supermarket, its brand is Top House.

@Mike_Walsh

 

Then the only way until now is to change the keyboard... I also tried to install Debian loadkeys, but it did not work either.

 

Right now I'm using a wireless keyboard USB... The keyboard I bought it in a COTO supermarket, its brand is Top House.

@ArtEze :-

Yep, I could have got hold of a replacement original for the Dell.....but they're rarer than hen's teeth now, and those that have them are asking truly staggering prices for them. In many people's eyes, the Dell should have been chucked in the trash 15 years ago.....but although I'm no green warrior, I'm not in the habit of throwing things out that still work 100%.

TBH, so long as your USB keyboard works and lets you do what you need to do, it doesn't matter what you spend on it. If I'm perfectly honest, I've lashed out on expensive keyboards AND cheap keyboards.....and to date have had more luck with those lower down the price spectrum.

Currently, the Dell is being used with this 'mini' one:-

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing-accessories/computer-accessories/mice-and-keyboards/keyboards/advent-akbmm15-wireless-keyboard-10100827-pdt.html

Around GBP £15.00, so, what's that at current rates.....a little over 2000 pesos, I believe?

And I've been using this one for a little over 3 years now.....and it still works perfectly:-

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing-accessories/computer-accessories/mice-and-keyboards/keyboards/advent-akbwlbl15-wireless-keyboard-blue-silver-10118514-pdt.html

They're clearing old stock out, now, but it WAS the same price as the above when I originally bought it. So far, in terms of time served, it's outlasted several far more expensive ones from reputable brand names.....and has one of the nicest key actions I've come across in years.

These things don't have to cost a fortune. There's only one thing you have to be aware of with these things.....and that is that not all of them are recognised prior to P.O.S.T. Makes it impossible to access the BIOS with some of them, because the key presses don't register. Again, price is irrelevant here, since I've discovered that many of the more expensive ones are just as 'guilty' in this respect!

Mike.

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 30 November 2021 - 07:52 PM.

@Mike_Walsh Yes, here in Argentina euros, they have to multiply by 100, then 1500 It is an approximate.

I will try to repair the loadkeys, if it can be... There is some error in the Bash script I put? I do not know what I can be failing, I do not know how to handle loadkeys.

Update - Re: Chrome-portable & Iron-portable 'updaters'
 
Now, then:-
 
Some of the previous discussion centred around the need for the 'ar' utility in order for the script to function correctly. Since it's just the 'ar' binary together with 2 small dependencies that are required, rather than messing around with the entire devX package every time, I've provided 4 tiny SFS packages in the tarball; these contain 'ar' + deps for the 4 most popular mainstream Puppies; Tahrpup64, Xenialpup64, Bionicpup64 and Fossapup64.
 
These are to be found inside the 'DATA' directory, inside their own folder. When you want to update, simply load the relevant SFS by clicking on it & following the instructions. Run the updater; wait till it tells you it's finished, then you unload the wee SFS again. 
 
Simples! (as Aleksandr Orlov would say...)
 
I'm working on automating this still further, but ATM it's a work in progress... Patience, mes amis.
 
Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 21 December 2021 - 09:59 AM.

Right; now then....

No need now to load/unload SFS packages to get the updater script for the Puppy-portable functional. Everything necessary is now built-in to the package; at update time, the script auto-detects which Puppy is running, and sym-links the relevant items into position before 'ar' is run. When the update is finished, those sym-links are then removed again.

Everything taken care of for you.....automatically. All you gotta do is click on the script to start the ball rolling.

Mike. 

Now then, guys'n'gals:-

I've added an updater script to the Zoom-portable app I package. I shan't be upgrading this again, since you can now take care of your own updates from this point in time.

It's an adaptation of the one in use in Chrome-portable and Iron-portable. This is only possible where an application's downloads always have the same name, but in this case I felt it was a good addition, given how frequently updates often come 'down the tubes'.

The version in the repo currently stands at v5.9.1, but it'll only take a minute or two to update it. Shut the app down completely - make certain to fully close it from the tray icon's right-click menu - then click on UpdateZoom! It's all automatic; just wait for the GTK-dialog splash box to come up and tell you it's finished, then you can launch it again into the new version.

Download is here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/fG4VSK4B#vR_SrcepAHcpwYFfyc3syg

Hope some of you find it useful. Enjoy.

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 13 January 2022 - 08:41 PM.

TRIM4SSD-noarch

'Kay, boys & girls. I have a new, built-from-scratch utility for those of you running SSDs as your storage instead of HDDs.

I decided to 'splurge' a week or so ago, and treated myself to a 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD as the primary drive for my relatively new HP Pavilion tower. Nowt wrong with the existing 1TB Toshiba HDD, but the Crucial was available for a reasonable price on Amazon, so I decided to grab one while they were still available...

As you're probably aware, SSDs need regular 'cleaning' - known as 'trimming' - or, in native parlance, 'garbage collection'. This is all due to the way in which SSDs, unlike the way that HDDs work, have to erase each data 'block' before anything new can be written to that block again. During this process, the controller also performs what's known as 'wear-levelling'.....moving the blocks of data around so that each block gets written to the same number of times. Etc, etc....

There's also what's called the 'rule of 10'. By this, I mean the general advice given to leave around 10% of an SSD unformatted; this makes the controller's job a lot easier, as it gives it an 'empty' area - unencumbered by filesystem overheads - in which to juggle the blocks around as they get erased, then marked as fit for re-use again.

There IS a Linux utility, known as fstrim, that will automate this 'cleanup' procedure. It's part of the 'util-linux' package that is available from the repos of every major distro out there (it's one of those universal packages available across the entire eco-system). Fstrim basically automates this entire cleanup process at one go. According to the 'fount of all Linux knowledge' - the Arch Linux wiki - this only needs performing once a week or so.

So....

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

Normally, this is performed as a regular cron-job by systemd. Puppies don't use systemd; it's one thing that's almost universally despised by Puppians, since for one thing it doesn't like letting the user run as root.....this being a defining characteristic of every Puppy ever built. Puppy has its own 'scheduler' - pSchedule - that will permit setting up regular cron-jobs - but I wanted something that would let the user run the 'trim' command manually, as & when desired.

So; I've built 'TRIM4SSD', both as a 'portable' application, and as a .pet package for those that prefer these.

A small YAD-powered GUI appears when launched.....like this:-

File-systems/partitions need to be mounted for this to work, and preferably should be trimmed 'off-line', i.e., from a Puppy on a different partition to the one that you wish to 'trim'. The "Mount" & "Unmount" buttons bring up drop-down selectors, permitting the mounting/unmounting of up to a dozen pre-set partitions. Mount before operation, unmount when finished.

When your partitions have been selected, hit the 'TRIM NOW' button. A wee rxvt terminal window will appear, showing the progress of the fstrim command's output; do be aware that if you haven't 'trimmed' the partition/drive in question for some time, it may take a while before a read-out appears.....this is perfectly normal, since fstrim only displays the finished result.

When the terminal window shows that the chosen partitions have been 'trimmed', you can close the window. Then, unmount your partitions, and finally, you can close the utility. Simples!

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

The 'portable' is in this instance a RoxApp - ROX-filer's native 'portable' format. Just click on the thing, and it immediately launches. The .pet package installs a modified version of the portable to /opt, along with a link to /usr/bin and a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications for a standard MenuEntry under Menu->System.

These are 'no-arch' packages - architecture-independent - since there's no binaries involved. Both are zipped, together with a 'ReadMe!' file, into a standard tarball. When unzipping, please read the ReadMe! file before doing anything else; it contains important information, without which the utility will not perform as intended. I can't supply the necessary 'util-linux' components, since these are different for every single Puppy, but they will be available from the PPM. It will work in 32-bit Pups as well as 64-bit Pups, since it's dependent on the 'util-linux' package from the repos.

As-is, it works OOTB for the Xenialups, the Bionicpups and the Fossapups. Further back, we run into issues; the fstrim binary for the Tahrpups was a very early implementation, missing some of the options needed for this to function; SSDs were in their early days back then, 7-8 years ago, and also somewhat fragile & temperemental, too.

Accordingly, I've built a 'compatibility' package for the Tahrs and also some older Puppies.....5/6-series Slackos, for instance. This uses a self-contained directory in /usr/lib, containing the fstrim binary & libmount dependency from Xenialpup, along with a launcher script in /sbin which calls the alternative fstrim's libmount dependency via an 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH' clause. It seems to work quite nicely. You may also need to update the YAD package in an older Puppy to a recent one, say 0.38.0 or 0.40.0, since older Puppies came with an ancient version of YAD by default. These usually update without issue, and don't generally create any problems.

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

You can find all components - portable, .pet, compatibility packages & updated YAD packages - at my MEGA.nz a/c, here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/TT43jSKA#9pLKABeqDDEYg3R5wWnl0A

Hope some of you will find these useful! Enjoy.

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 13 January 2022 - 08:38 PM.

DriveSpeed! - a portable, 'dd'-based drive speed tester
 
Well, now.....
 
Inspired by an image installer BK built for his series of EasyOS distros - which are his current 'project' - I came up with the concept for this thing in May last year. I was convinced I'd posted about it here, but it seems not...
 
Anyway...
 
'DD' is, as you know, that utility nicknamed the "Disk Destroyer". It can manipulate and do all sorts of things with file-systems, including completely shred them if you don't get your terminal commands just EXACTLY 'spot-on'! Amongst the many things it's capable of, especially in more recent versions, is to give a real-time progress read-out of what it's doing.....including the speed at which it's transferring data. Barry's built his image installer to give a "speed" read-out as the installation is taking place, thus giving you some idea of how slow - or fast! - EasyOS is likely to be on your chosen flash drive; this opens up in a wee rxvt terminal window, and displays the speed at which data is being transferred as it happens. I thought this was quite neat, and, given that many Puppians do indeed run Puppy in the way she was originally envisaged - from USB flash - a plan began to hatch......
 
I isolated the section of code responsible for the 'speed' read-out, studied how it worked, and did a fair chunk of research into just how 'dd' did what it did, including studying all the various 'man' pages on the thing.
 
-----------------------------------------
 
DriveSpeed! has been through several iterations since, with input from several members of the Puppy community. It creates a 'dummy' file, called - appropriately enough - 'testfile', writing raw, random data to it. You can select the size of 'testfile' you want to create.....either 1GB, 2GB or 4GB. Users of elderly, weaker hardware will find the 1 GB testfile takes quite long enough to create; those running capable, fast, modern hardware like I now do, will find that even the 4 GB testfile takes very little time to create, especially with an SSD. And the larger the test-file, the more consistent will your readings be.
 
You can select the block size you want to create the testfile with, and the block size with which you want to read it back. 
 
DriveSpeed! is designed to perform all its tests 'in-situ'. The envisaged operation is that you keep a copy in a safe place, drag a copy across to the root of whatever drive you wish to test the speed of, perform the tests, then simply delete the whole thing when you're finished with it.
 
The YAD-powered GUI looks like this:-
 
 

 
 
You'll notice that some of the buttons are numbered. This is to give an indication of the order in which they should be used; the test-file has to be created & written-to first, or else there's nothing for the read operation to work with! The first three operations are drop-downs; output is sent to wee text files in /tmp. At the appropriate point in the scripts, these are then 'grep' ed for the data they contain; these 3 items are all pre-selected before the write/read operations commence.
 
When running the actual tests, a small terminal window will appear, showing a 'progress' report in real-time as the test-file is created or read. This will be the information you'll be most interested in.. When you 'Quit', the 'testfile' is deleted, as are the small text files in /tmp.
 
MAKE SURE to run the operation from button no. 5 between the write & read tests; " ~~CLEAR BUFFERS ~~ ". This clears the drive's cache buffers, and ensures clean operation of subsequent tests. If you don't, then the later terminal readouts will make NO sense at all!
 
--------------------------------------------------
 
For any Puppians who may be interested in this utility, you can find it at my MediaFire a/c:-
 
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ja2lc02osptq8m7/DriveSpeed_v2.2-portable.tar.gz/file
 
Hope some of you may find it useful. Enjoy.
 
 
Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 16 January 2022 - 11:13 AM.

I just read this article and wondered how/if it affected Puppy users:

A bug lurking for 12 years gives attackers root on most major Linux distros

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/a-bug-lurking-for-12-years-gives-attackers-root-on-every-major-linux-distro/

Edited by JohnnyBeeGood, 27 January 2022 - 09:30 AM.

Hi, John.

I don't suppose it would affect Puppy to any greater extent than most of these other bugs that have showed up over the last few years. That's not to say you shouldn't continue to exercise common sense when surfing; same rules apply for anyone who spends a lot of time online, of course.

With Puppy, you've always got that ultimate weapon. Ditch the 'save' if it gets contaminated, and replace with a known good one. Or just start again from scratch, if you're so inclined. Nothing will ever touch the 'base' Puppy files, 'cos they're read-only.

That's why "Da Pup" is all but unbreakable..! 

Mike. 

Poor puppy...

Puppy was the first Linux distro I tried. My GateWay PC didn't come with a CD burner, but it had an Iomega 100MB Zip Drive.

I've still got a external Iomega USB Drive and 20-30 disks from back then but not that one.

I have my Gateway tower too, complete with Iomega Zip Drive and NSA back-doored Katmai 500MHz PIII:

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/

Kali got a polkit update yesterday. FreeBSD 13 isn't vulnerable.

Evening, kiddiwinks. Uncle Mike here....

Sorry for the delay, gang. Lotsa s*** going on this last few weeks, so I haven't been able to devote anywhere near as much time as I like to.

I have one item here that I think many of you WILL, however like. You may recall that I've added an updater to the Chrome-portable package.....though versions needed to be checked for manually on the Chrome blog.

One of our Puppy Forum members has made a discovery today. A reliable, easy means of checking for the newest version of Chrome.....so, between us we've re-written the scripts so that the first thing Chrome does is check for the newest version & compare it to the existing version. If they match, it launches as normal; if not, a wee GUI offers to install the update. If you accept, the updater runs, and upon completion of the update process the browser automatically re-launches itself into the newest version...

Neat, huh?

For anybody who wants the enhanced, self-maintaining Chrome-portable for Puppy, you'll find it here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/HDZElDQK#bbkJFR0QPA3q13JbEnAN6g

Enjoy!

Mike. 

Now then, gang. Busy, busy, busy; hardly a moment to call my own ATM.

Just a quick update, really. Chromium 'clone' portables are all up to date, with the exception of M$Edge.....this gets a look-in when I feel like it!

More portables have been added.

• LMMS-portable (Linux MultiMedia Studio - a DAW)
• Reaper-portable (needs no explanation - another DAW)
• Lightworks-portable (I finally figured out how to get this one functional as a portable application. Which I'm quite chuffed with!) Only works correctly on Bionicpup64 & newer, I'm afraid.

Best place to find info on all my portables is here:-

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5104

....which is kept up-to-date on where to find each item's thread (where you can read about the item, and find the download links).

That's it for now! Catch y'all later....

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 09 April 2022 - 09:19 AM.