Go PRO!

[ThruHammer]

Is what I see here a "copy and paste" from John's board? Not to be a nudge, but, why carry over poor punctuation?

Beginners Help ( Start Here) << Why the space btwn "(" and "S" while the next three sections include spaces before and after the parentheses? This is like placing a period with a space at the end of a sentence or no space after a comma or period as wording continues or a new sentence begins.

Having been around the board for several years, here's a suggestion for the opening four sections:

• Beginners Help
  New to Puppy and have questions? Start here.
• Users (or) Frequent Fliers
  Issues and / or general discussion relating to Puppy.
• Bug Reports
  Post here if you feel others can duplicate your so discovered "bug."
• Instructional HOW-TO's Section << *We all know how misleading the original wording is.
  Tutorials and recipes. NOT an area for general questions.

It would be nice to have a section for "Forum Related" talk and a "Test" section for users to get help and improve their posting skills.

Furthermore, in place of off-site, third party image hosting, I'm sure others would like to see an area where members could upload their images at reasonable sizes so they can be "locally" hot-linked, the implications of which should not need clarification to those in the know.

Now because I was unable to "space" my above points, maybe the site admin can look into the boards "list" attribute function?

No big deal, but, not what I'm accustomed to on other phpBB boards.

And "why, oh why" do I need JavaScript enabled? Please, for what?

IMO, this alone will keep most from migrating.

I suppose vBulletin's not an option?


Thank you for listening.
TH

[mikewalsh]

@ ThruHammer:-

Just one point:-

Re; your suggestion of a 'local' area for member's images, screenshots, etc. Fine in theory, but over time this could easily grow to be a sizeable 'drain' on server resources; although rockedge is no doubt using more up-to-date equipment than John was, resources are not infinite.....and once again, this is a private individual's equipment, not hardware sourced & maintained by a large organisation with its own income.

The beauty of using third-party image-hosting is that it places no demand on forum/server resources at all. All that is required is a link.....and most image-hosting services have multiple options in place for different ways to 'share'. Remember, too, that Puppy itself is very much a 'hands-on', DIY, 'dive in and get your hands dirty' type of OS; although it's far more up-to-date & modern in operation than it ever used to be - all credit to our tireless developers - why would you expect a glossy, ultra-professional looking forum that could easily lead interested parties to expect far more than is actually on offer?

Puppy is not trying to beat the "big boys" at their own game, many of whom are following MyCrudSoft's lead and optimizing everything for powerful, modern systems.....Canonical, of course, being at the forefront of this craze. Puppy was originally designed to appeal to those who can't afford powerful hardware, and are doing their very best to keep older equipment functional..!

I'd be interested to hear rockedge's response to this, TBH. He may decide to implement this request; we'll see, I guess. Ultimately, feature-sets & capabilities are down to the forum's "operator".....and it's their decision at the end of the day.

Ask, by all means.....but don't expect the earth!


Mike.

[cobaka]

Hello Mike (& others):

Puppy was originally designed to appeal to those who can't afford powerful hardware, and are doing their very best to keep older equipment functional!

I'm among those who use 'da Puppy' on vintage hardware. I'm typing this on a bulky Pentium M laptop running at 1.4GHz. When I boot uPupBB32 I must 'forcepae' or Puppy will say: use an older Puppy - one suited to hardware w/out PAE. Turning to the topic of 'apps' - Puppy's performance often fails because of deficiencies (or demands) by application software - not the Puppy OS itself. example: improper coding in Javascript results in browers that run scripts that don't terminate (and so on). The lesson? Don't write sloppy code!

BTW: While I run older hardware most of the time I do have a 64bit laptop and a 64bit desktop box in my study. You ask: "Why not migrate to the more powerful box?" Answer: Lazy software coding constantly asks for faster clock-speeds and wider-busses (remember when 16bits was 'all the go'). Even today the smaller size of the Linux OS comes from the economy of the first C coders (and their understanding of elegant coding). You like elegance? Then look at the bash terminal commands such as 'grep', 'awk' and 'find'. While we continue to use smaller boxes our coding will be tight and economical. That, after all, was the principal objective of Puppy. The Puppy was brave (Barry said) and was fearless, in spite of small size ... Got that? That's the essence of 'da Puppy'.

Again: do you need that faster CPU and bigger screen (or do you just want to impress your friends?). What about the photo of the woman from Bangladesh standing in flood-water, up to her waist, while carrying her child? She doesn't need a 64 bit buss. She needs a place out of the water, where she can be safe with her child. We shouldn't ask for more, more more while she makes do with nothing ...

One important point Mike didn't mention: Puppy Linux provides a means to develop an OS (and applications) and this has created a small pool of expertise that is probably not found anywhere else on this planet. That's quite an accomplishment, Barry! Where else can you learn the meaning of formatting a partition or how a boot-loader works? Hmmm? Where? How many people on this forum have assembled an OS? A small number - to be sure, but more (I will wager) than any other place you can name.

Yes - Puppy is functional but Puppy is also didactic.
Good on yer, Barry, but also good on yer, Mike!
We need some-one to remind us about the original design objective for 'da Puppy'
Small. Brave. Efficient.


Leslie

[mikeslr]

I was just going to post something not far removed from ThruHammer's considerations. Like others, I've been trying to track down viable links to applications. It's pretty hard --and pointless-- to discuss any application without a link to it; and --if you have to discuss modifying it-- links to the applications one needs to modify it.

By the way. Does anyone know of what size restrictions this Forum has for attachments?

Mike, you've found the Forum and were thoughtful enough to provide links to your google-drive and your mediafire files in your signature. My publications are on mediafire. I’ve provided a link to an application I’ve already posted about and will do the same regarding others. But puppusdogfellow is currently MIA. IIRC, the 30 Gigs of stuff he squirreled is on his google-drive. Anyone know how to contact him?

Senior devs apparently can publish on ibiblio (later mirrored elsewhere). With that exception, one might say that our method of publishing applications and datafiles (such as graphics) is to scatter them hither and yon. Ally, bless him, does an excellent job archiving. But Puppy Linux isn't the only object of interest to archive.org. And even pursuing that interest is hindered by Puppy's lack of organization.

Not all Puppy fans can upload to smokey's repo. On the Murgha forum some small applications -- such as bash scripts-- only existed within a post as a recipe or as an attachment. And over the course of time many fans, having created an application, have had to acquire cloud storage in order to publish it for Puppy Community's benefit. That is why I acquired the account at mediafire. [Mike, I guess I'm more paranoiac about Google than you. I just won't give them anything if there is an alternative].

John deMurgha's passing is a tragedy for his family and a hurdle for our community. Although the loss of his Forum is the major threat to continuity we have had to face, it is not the first. It will not be the last.

I grew up with a story my mother fondly told about her Uncle Simon: He rode the Empire State Building's elevators selling Life Insurance. I never met her uncle. He was only 42 when he died. From early on I appreciated that nothing is permanent. At least on this Plane dominated by energy transformations, only those things which we care enough about to make an effort to preserve stand any chance of being other than ephemeral. Entropy takes its toll even on information or, in any event, on the vessels that hold it.

Mediafire offers a Pro account with 1 Terabyte Storage for $3.75 per month. It’s supposed to be for one user. But, considering the infrequency of uploads, I doubt there would be serious objections if User “PuppyStuff” shared ‘his’ password with others.

I mention mediafire because I’ve had an account for a decade without any problem. AFAIK, it has a good reputation. Perhaps there are less expensive hosts, or those better suited to our needs.

Suggested: A contribution of $5.00 (€ 4.39 +/-) buys a 1 year membership except for rockedge and ally who will receive passwords gratis. Membership open only to those who are known to have been members on http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php for a year and those new to this forum after making a number of posts (number to be determined). Exceptions can be made. Someone would have to act as Treasurer: collect ‘dues’, send out reminders; and pay the webhost. And someone would have to act as Secretary: receiving requests, communicating with members, periodically changing the password and emailing members about that.

[wiak]

I'm among those who use 'da Puppy' on vintage hardware. I'm typing this on a bulky Pentium M laptop running at 1.4GHz. When I boot uPupBB32 I must 'forcepae' or Puppy will say: use an older Puppy - one suited to hardware w/out PAE. Turning to the topic of 'apps' - Puppy's performance often fails because of deficiencies (or demands) by application software - not the Puppy OS itself. example: improper coding in Javascript results in browers that run scripts that don't terminate (and so on). The lesson? Don't write sloppy code!

BTW: While I run older hardware most of the time I do have a 64bit laptop and a 64bit desktop box in my study. You ask: "Why not migrate to the more powerful box?" Answer: Lazy software coding constantly asks for faster clock-speeds and wider-busses (remember when 16bits was 'all the go'). Even today the smaller size of the Linux OS comes from the economy of the first C coders (and their understanding of elegant coding). You like elegance? Then look at the bash terminal commands such as 'grep', 'awk' and 'find'. While we continue to use smaller boxes our coding will be tight and economical. That, after all, was the principal objective of Puppy.

But since you have a powerful computer as well as a low-powered laptop, you can easily enjoy the abilities of both in your own home by using Puppy for low-resource apps/utility on the laptop but using the same laptop as a thin-client to your powerful computer when you suddenly need to run something resource-greedy such as latest browsers or graphics processing utilities or game apps. It is slightly technical to set up, but not much, surprisingly. Super-efficient working method is described in following HowTo. It really provides very good frame-rate performance (whereas vnc and similar tend to be terribly slow on there own - the solution in following HowTo suffers no such limitation):

https://weedoglinux.rockedge.org/viewto ... ?f=24&t=22

You should remember that it is not simply heavy Javascript and inefficient coding that is the problem. We live in a world where people rely on better graphics imaging (both processing/editing hi-res graphics in 2D and 3D, but also high frame rate fullscreen video). For that you need hardware with powerful graphics processing chips.

[mikewalsh]

@ Mike:-

Access to 'usable' software was actually one of the first things that came to mind, pretty much straight after accepting that we've got to make the best of rockedge's providentially-provided new forum for now, and probably the foreseeable future. That's why I made sure my signature was set-up the same way as the old one, containing links to both my 'cloud' a/cs. Puppians can browse them at their leisure, any time they feel the urge.

TBH, the 30 GB I have of free storage, split between Google and MediaFire, has up until now proved to be more than sufficient for my requirements.....still have nearly a dozen GB to spare. I do 'prune' regularly, especially where browser packages are concerned, since the majority of us wish to run the newest versions as a rule. (Google does the same as Windows itself; 'removal' doesn't actually remove as such, it sends it to 'Trash'.....which is still occupying space in your 'allowance'. Trash needs to be emptied manually, & on a regular basis.....! )

AFAIK, Puppus Dogfellow has registered here, just recently:-

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=1091

.....although, as you're doubtless aware, he's an infrequent poster at the best of times. Doesn't mean to say he won't look in fairly often; I'd suggest dropping him a PM. No doubt he'll get back to you sooner or later.


T'other Mike.

[wiak]

Yes, since most people registering are previous members from the old forum it is very useful to use same forum names as before and to provide links to whatever resources we personally hold (perhaps via our signatures). Most apps and utilities that were attached to old forum are still 'out there' somewhere (their authors usually have copies of them...). Losing the forum does not mean 'losing the apps' - but we need to locate them.

[ThruHammer]

Pardon me but, did I miss "why" we need JavaScript enabled to navigate this forum? I would love the response to come from rockedge himself.

[rockedge]

Yo ThruHammer...why is JavaScript enabled? Because the default theme Prosilver uses it. You don't want JavaScript in the navigation? Let me make this perfectly clear....If I find away to modify the phpBB code to do that, I'll do it....until then put your big boy pants on and turn off JavaScript in your browser.

otherwise the answer is "no particular reason" There's your response directly from me.

[ThruHammer]

All good, my Man. Thank you kindly for your timely response.

Assuming the hack is possible, and I do, we'll know soon enough.