Welcome to our website
To take full advantage of all features you need to login or register. Registration is completely free and takes only a few seconds.
Puppy version 0.9.6
Posted by Philipp Esselbach on: 10/21/2004 05:39 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]
Puppy Linux version 0.9.6 has been released
Puppy live-CD ISO file with Firefox is 52.8M, or with Opera is 49.9M.
Release notes:
* Xine-libs plugin backend and Gxine media player is now in Puppy, as well as a plugin for Firefox. Puppy has the full suite of Xine plugins, that support a wide range of audio and video formats as well as streaming audio and video, video DVDs and audio CDs.
* Puppy now has two very powerful vector graphics editor applications: Dia and Sodipodi. Dia is superb for organisational/hierarchical diagrams and Sodipodi is a SVG-native vector editor that can also be used for generic image creation.
* TkDVD and growisofs have been added to Puppy. TkDVD is a GUI frontend to the commandline program growisofs (which is in turn a frontend to cdrecord). TkDVD is for burning files to a DVD/RW or DVD/R. Note, I have not yet tested TkDVD as I don't have a DVD burner drive. Note also that Gcombust can burn to DVDs, however my understanding of this is that it is somewhat of an afterthought.
* I have put the ML tcl/tk-code editor back into Puppy. The reasons are that it is very small and has nice features for developing tcl/tk code, especially jump-to-procedures and syntax highlighting. So, Puppy now has Beaver, Leafpad, ML, MP and vi, each editor having different strong points.
* The Cgtkcalc complex-number calculator has been added. This rounds out a comprehensive selection of calculators in Puppy: Xcalc, Gtkgraph, Gbase, tkconvert and Cgtkcalc.
* Sylpheed has been updated to version 0.9.99. This fixes some bugs, in particular the clipboard sometimes didn't work, and moved messages sometimes got temporarily lost.
* The "Control Panel" menu in Puppy has the entry "GTK theme", which up to now applied a selection of themes to GTK 1.2 apps. I have now extended this so that the themes also work on GTK2 apps, such as Abiword (not Firefox, it gets its theme info from elsewhere). For the technically-minded, the script that does this is /usr/sbin/gtk-theme, and the theme files are in /etc/gtk/ and /etc/gtk-2.0/.
* Some audio/video applications have been removed from Puppy, in particular Gxanim, Xanim and Ogle, as they are superceeded by Xine/Gxine. However, the Snack audio library and support applications XS recorder/editor, play.tcl, Snack player, mixer.tcl remain.
* Upgrading from an earlier 0.9.x Puppy is automatic. For example, if booting from live-CD, the previous data/settings are all retained. To update usb or zip installations, just copy the new vmlinuz, image.gz and usr_cram.fs files, as explained in the relevant Puppy web pages.
* NTFS support is not there yet. So, if your PC has only got a single NTFS partition then Puppy will not be able to create a persistent home file for your data/settings -- the live-CD will still work, but nothing will be saved. Your PC needs a VFAT, MSDOS, EXT2/3 or REISERFS partition. However, I have added a fallback in v0.9.6: if Puppy cannot find a suitable IDE partition, he will ask if you want to use a USB memory device.
* Minimum system is a pentium I CPU. Puppy with Opera should work on a "586" class of CPU, but Firefox requires a "686" class of CPU. Version 0.9.4 of Puppy with Skipstone web browser was found to work on a PC with 48M RAM. Minimum RAM requirement not yet determined for version 0.9.5/6.
* I have fixed a bug with anti-aliased font support for GTK 1.2 applications. If anti-aliased fonts still do not display in Amaya or Dillo, please let me know.
* Other bug-fixes are to the hard-drive install script and using Quisp. Also, the lprshell script has been fixed, to use Abiword instead of Ted in commandline-mode to convert files to Postscript for printing. Firefox now works with Sylpheed. Abiword now works with all the raster image formats recognised by gdk-pixbuf (png, xpm, gif, jpeg, etc.)
* Please also scan through the release notes for puppy v0.9.5.
Puppy-watchers may be wondering how I managed to squeeze in Xine, Dia and Sodipodi, considering that the live-CD is hardly any bigger than the previous version. Xine-lib and Gxine together are over 6M uncompressed. Dia is 2.6M uncompressed, Sodipodi is 2.0M uncompressed. The total size after compression with cramfs of these three apps is about 6M. Well, it wasn't easy...
Note, Puppy has an Xine plugin for RealAudio, however the Xine website FAQ states that Xine will recognise and use the RealAudio codecs out of the RealAudio player. I notice that the Gxine Preferences has an entry in which the path to the RealAudio codecs can be entered.
If you are new to Puppy, after booting up the live-CD and having had a great time playing with everything, follow the simple instructions in the "HOWTO: Internet" page (via the "Help" menu) to get Puppy connected to the Internet, then look at the HOWTO section in the Puppy Discussion Forum, at www.goosee.com/puppy/sforum/ -- this has lots of useful information contributed by Puppy-enthusiasts, such as how to install the Flash and SVG plugins for Firefox, or any of the Firefox Extensions.
Release notes:
* Xine-libs plugin backend and Gxine media player is now in Puppy, as well as a plugin for Firefox. Puppy has the full suite of Xine plugins, that support a wide range of audio and video formats as well as streaming audio and video, video DVDs and audio CDs.
* Puppy now has two very powerful vector graphics editor applications: Dia and Sodipodi. Dia is superb for organisational/hierarchical diagrams and Sodipodi is a SVG-native vector editor that can also be used for generic image creation.
* TkDVD and growisofs have been added to Puppy. TkDVD is a GUI frontend to the commandline program growisofs (which is in turn a frontend to cdrecord). TkDVD is for burning files to a DVD/RW or DVD/R. Note, I have not yet tested TkDVD as I don't have a DVD burner drive. Note also that Gcombust can burn to DVDs, however my understanding of this is that it is somewhat of an afterthought.
* I have put the ML tcl/tk-code editor back into Puppy. The reasons are that it is very small and has nice features for developing tcl/tk code, especially jump-to-procedures and syntax highlighting. So, Puppy now has Beaver, Leafpad, ML, MP and vi, each editor having different strong points.
* The Cgtkcalc complex-number calculator has been added. This rounds out a comprehensive selection of calculators in Puppy: Xcalc, Gtkgraph, Gbase, tkconvert and Cgtkcalc.
* Sylpheed has been updated to version 0.9.99. This fixes some bugs, in particular the clipboard sometimes didn't work, and moved messages sometimes got temporarily lost.
* The "Control Panel" menu in Puppy has the entry "GTK theme", which up to now applied a selection of themes to GTK 1.2 apps. I have now extended this so that the themes also work on GTK2 apps, such as Abiword (not Firefox, it gets its theme info from elsewhere). For the technically-minded, the script that does this is /usr/sbin/gtk-theme, and the theme files are in /etc/gtk/ and /etc/gtk-2.0/.
* Some audio/video applications have been removed from Puppy, in particular Gxanim, Xanim and Ogle, as they are superceeded by Xine/Gxine. However, the Snack audio library and support applications XS recorder/editor, play.tcl, Snack player, mixer.tcl remain.
* Upgrading from an earlier 0.9.x Puppy is automatic. For example, if booting from live-CD, the previous data/settings are all retained. To update usb or zip installations, just copy the new vmlinuz, image.gz and usr_cram.fs files, as explained in the relevant Puppy web pages.
* NTFS support is not there yet. So, if your PC has only got a single NTFS partition then Puppy will not be able to create a persistent home file for your data/settings -- the live-CD will still work, but nothing will be saved. Your PC needs a VFAT, MSDOS, EXT2/3 or REISERFS partition. However, I have added a fallback in v0.9.6: if Puppy cannot find a suitable IDE partition, he will ask if you want to use a USB memory device.
* Minimum system is a pentium I CPU. Puppy with Opera should work on a "586" class of CPU, but Firefox requires a "686" class of CPU. Version 0.9.4 of Puppy with Skipstone web browser was found to work on a PC with 48M RAM. Minimum RAM requirement not yet determined for version 0.9.5/6.
* I have fixed a bug with anti-aliased font support for GTK 1.2 applications. If anti-aliased fonts still do not display in Amaya or Dillo, please let me know.
* Other bug-fixes are to the hard-drive install script and using Quisp. Also, the lprshell script has been fixed, to use Abiword instead of Ted in commandline-mode to convert files to Postscript for printing. Firefox now works with Sylpheed. Abiword now works with all the raster image formats recognised by gdk-pixbuf (png, xpm, gif, jpeg, etc.)
* Please also scan through the release notes for puppy v0.9.5.
Puppy-watchers may be wondering how I managed to squeeze in Xine, Dia and Sodipodi, considering that the live-CD is hardly any bigger than the previous version. Xine-lib and Gxine together are over 6M uncompressed. Dia is 2.6M uncompressed, Sodipodi is 2.0M uncompressed. The total size after compression with cramfs of these three apps is about 6M. Well, it wasn't easy...
Note, Puppy has an Xine plugin for RealAudio, however the Xine website FAQ states that Xine will recognise and use the RealAudio codecs out of the RealAudio player. I notice that the Gxine Preferences has an entry in which the path to the RealAudio codecs can be entered.
If you are new to Puppy, after booting up the live-CD and having had a great time playing with everything, follow the simple instructions in the "HOWTO: Internet" page (via the "Help" menu) to get Puppy connected to the Internet, then look at the HOWTO section in the Puppy Discussion Forum, at www.goosee.com/puppy/sforum/ -- this has lots of useful information contributed by Puppy-enthusiasts, such as how to install the Flash and SVG plugins for Firefox, or any of the Firefox Extensions.
Read more
