Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

bigpup wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 2:50 am

SFS packaged programs are programs packaged in the form of a SFS file.
Everything is in this one file.

In terms of overall learning/appreciation-of-how-things-work, I think it is important to understand that a program provided as an sfs (squashed filesystem) is not the same thing as a 'portable application'. An sfs version of a program may in fact NOT contain everything required to get that program to run; other parts of the program (some libs, for example) may still be expected to be provided by the underlying system. The term 'portable' is somewhat imprecise in that some so-called portable apps, provided in sfs form, may work on all or most recent Puppy systems, but perhaps not on other Linux distros (or on very old Pups) - i.e. it was designed specially for Puppy with knowledge of what most Puppy systems provide by default.

More general purpose 'portable apps' such as flatpack or snap packages or Appimages, tend to be much larger in size since they really do contain pretty much everything needed to get a package running so work pretty much on any distro capable of installing them - they also tend to be regularly updated to contain the latest versions of both the app and all its dependencies and so on. Disadvantage is that they therefore contain far more internally than a Puppy-destined-only 'portable sfs app' really requires, and again, there will always be trouble getting any modern app to also run on very old Linux systems.

An sfs can contain anything a person wants to add to a system (via the layering mechanism) - even just a single config file, for example. I can imagine it is quite difficult to make a Puppy portable app sfs file that works with recent Pups and also old Pups - one limiting factor is the age of the glibc on older Pups - whilst an sfs could be created to replace such major system components there is the problem of getting the new sfs to appear in higher layer (in order to overwrite the older libs) and also the issue that symlinks also sometimes need to be renamed such that other older apps still continue to work. Generally, however, these Pup-grown sfs apps are a great idea and very flexible and have been cleverly crafted to work on a wide range of Puppy systems.

Hi guys, long time no see! I run a live EasyPup 2.4.91 from a multisession DVD on my laptops and other old PCs, but I have run a frugal tahr64_6.0.6 for app. 1½ years on this old PC, as a replacement for my Lucid. It works very well. I installed screen to run NordVPN in the background. To use the latest version of NordVPN, I installed a later version of openvpn from http://www.smokey01.com/OscarTalks/open ... 4-tahr.pet. I have installed VMware to run a 66GB virtual Windows version of a Mercedes parts and workshop program, no hesitations from tahr64. For reading .pdf I use Xpdf. I have used PaleMoon all the time, and also used MikeWalsh's portable Vivaldi. A couple of months ago, I used https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/p ... noarch.pet to download the latest Vivaldi, because of all the great features not available in Mike's portable version. I find that I now use Vivaldi more than Palemoon, it is absolutely fabulous. Privacy is total, they store no data, sell no data, the privacy policy page fits in one short page, not 20, like some others, and it is very fast in tahr64. The tab mangement let you group and stack tabs, tile tabs all over your page, built-in notebook, screenshot and lots of other goodies. I have used PaleMoon for years, and I still do, but I highly recommend Vivaldi. To run as root, add --no-sandbox to the startup command. It is totally stable, unlike PaleMoon, which crashes at occasions.

bigpup wrote:

With newer Linux software (especially newer versions of browsers) you really need to use a newer Puppy version.
The needed versions of support software is not in Tahrpup.

Not totally true, the latest PaleMoon and the latest Vivaldi run in tahr64. I like tahr64, it is relatively compact compared to the later Puppys. With the latest browsers working perfectly as the main tools nowadays, I'll stick with tahr64 on this Linuxbox.

tallboy

You are using the two browsers, that are not constantly wanting to use the latest and greatest, support stuff, to run.
Well, so far anyway!

bigpup, I see no reason to use other browsers than the ones that actually work. Vivaldi has features that no other browser can meet, and it's rendering engine is based on the latest open-source Chrome code. And what does Firefox have that I potentially should miss? I could download Seamonkey for it's ablity to make wysiwyg web pages, but I make them just as easy in Geany. Are there any other browsers?

tallboy

I'd like to add that Firefox 78.6.1esr (64-bit) is working with no issues with my Tahr64 6.0.6 LiveCD as of now (very early June 2021). As a matter of fact, I am writing from it right now.

Carlos Albert "Disco Makberto"