Porteus-XCFE v1.2 rc2 i486 is ready for testing!

[Ahau]

Hi everyone,

Porteus-XFCE version 1.2 rc2 is here, featuring the newly minted XFCE version 4.10. This release includes all of the changes to the standard edition of Porteus (other than those in lxde/kde, kde-apps, etc). Here's the changelog for the xfce and xfce-apps modules:

- upgrade to XFCE version 4.10
- recompiled vamps to add patches (thanks bigbass!)
- wrote /opt/porteus-scripts/xorg/psu and modified relevant files in /usr/share/applications; submitted upstream
- added pxf-sound to autoconfigure retrovol to force Master Volume channel and show gtk-dialog notification for volume changes.
- updated pxf-sound to not steal focus; set option in window-manager tweaks to enable focus-stealing prevention. this keeps pxf-sound from minimizing full screen flashplayer movies
- compiled new versions for:
ristretto (0.6.0)
slock (1.0)
retrovol (0.12)
- fixed man page location for gnome-ppp (thanks rava)
- requested upstream to remove '--login' from xfce blob in 'activate' and 'deactivate' (thanks tonio for finding)
- switched medit for geany, added to launcher panel
- moved panel to top, added launcher panel w/autohide to bottom (thanks tonio for suggestion)
- changed background image
- removed exo-open items from background, they were duplicate entries and opened items in the back instead in front of existing apps
- added open thunar in super user mode desktop item (thanks Rava for suggestion)
- dropped catfish, as python was removed from 64-bit Standard Edition, pointed file search operations to 'pfilesearch' instead, which is included as a part of the 'pburn' package
- patched up xfce's xinitrc, which wasn't working with an old patch for 4.8, so guest user should have proper authority through consolekit when logging in via startx

Get it from here:
link

Please give this a spin and report any trouble or questions here. Many thanks!!

[mailmegx]

Thanks Ahau

Just finished downloading, I hope to get a chance to test soon but by the looks of things it will have to wait for the weekend :s...

Regards

GX

[Ahau]

Thanks, mailmegx no worries, you know where to find me once you've had a chance to look it over

I should mention that I've changed the layout of the panel(s) and the wallpaper, and I'm interested to know how folks like it -- my current thinking for 1.2 final is to eliminate the autohide panel at the bottom, move those icons back into the panel at the top, and find a wallpaper that's more Porteus-appropriate.

[francois]

Great work Ahau!!

I will try the thing as soon as I get back of Xian to see the Qin emperor tumb... ... and visiting some other part of China.
I am sure that you are red of envy

There are sometimes some advantages to have as a spouse a professor in a design falculty.
What do you think about that.

[mailmegx]

Hey Ahau

The standard version works well however when I tried with nvidia drivers I had issues with xorg

Porteus-XFCE rc1 + nvidia 295.20 <-- this is fine
Porteus-XFCE rc2 + nvidia 295.33 <-- dont work for me

hardware is Dell xps m1710 nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX

I will have to reboot to get the exact error but as far as I can remember it was "no screens found" even after running xconf. when changing xorg.conf device driver to vesa it x would start.

Anyone else have feedback with nvidia driver?

Update: After some more testing I removed my xorg.conf and used the default, the login manager starts but system freezes. i,e mouse does not move, ctrl+alt+backspace, ctrl+alt+del, ctrl+alt+f2 does nothing, nex test is with no nvidia.

Regards

GX

[francois]

@mailmegx:
Usually the nvidia driver works out of the box. Beny is the guy who makes the nvidia modules. I imagine he will come by. Maybe you should start a thread on the topic of nvidia driver.

[mailmegx]

issue resolved it was my extlinux that was at fault nothing to do with modules..
vmlinuz was taken from rc1 and initrd from rc2... grrrr

Hey Ahau

The standard version works well however when I tried with nvidia drivers I had issues with xorg

Porteus-XFCE rc1 + nvidia 295.20 <-- this is fine
Porteus-XFCE rc2 + nvidia 295.33 <-- dont work for me

hardware is Dell xps m1710 nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX

I will have to reboot to get the exact error but as far as I can remember it was "no screens found" even after running xconf. when changing xorg.conf device driver to vesa it x would start.

Anyone else have feedback with nvidia driver?

Update: After some more testing I removed my xorg.conf and used the default, the login manager starts but system freezes. i,e mouse does not move, ctrl+alt+backspace, ctrl+alt+del, ctrl+alt+f2 does nothing, nex test is with no nvidia.

Regards

GX

[Cyril]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the new RC. The XFCE edition is pretty cool. It supports the hardware of my Asus EEE PC 701 out of the box, which only such distros as Ubuntu and Mint could do! I wonder if it is the new kernel or what?

Still, I'd like to report quite a number of bugs. I'm using a live-USB install with GRUB Legacy. On the USB stick I have the folders "boot" and "porteus", and my menu entry for Porteus is the following:

title Porteus XFCE 1.2-rc2
kernel /boot/vmlinuz changes=/mnt/sdb1/porteus/porteussave.dat quiet kmap=us,ru nonetwork (hd32)
initrd /boot/initrd.xz

To begin with, all the bugs happen in both the fresh install and after I create a save file. And here they go:

1. On my netbook I have the SSD (sda1), the SD card (sdc1) and the USB stick I'm booting Porteus from (sdb1). After booting I can see only the SD card mounted - both on the desktop and in Thunar. If I go to /mnt, they are mounted and I can browse through them, but this is the only possible way to do that. And yes, I've checked all the settings in Thunar and in the settings manager concerning the automounting of devices. And also - the link of sdc1 on the desktop s blank at first, but when I move the cursor onto it, it changes to the icon of an SD card and only then remains so.

2. (Not a bug but a feature ) Is it possible to bring the main panel from top to bottom? So used to the Windows style...

3. The link in main menu --> System --> "Superuser mode - PCMan" is broken as there appears to be no pcmanfm installed.

4. The maximum volume in Gnome-MPlayer is lower than the one in Porteus 1.1. It is rather uncomfortable. The system volume is set to max as well.

5. The volume level itself isn't preserved between sessions. I have to manually set it every time.

That seems to be all for now. Thanks very much for your job. If you need any extra information, I'm eager to help.

[Ahau]

Hi Cyril,

Thank you so much for testing and for your report!

Yes, your hardware is likely supported well because of the newer kernel we use (fanthom's been working his magic, as usual).

In response to your bugs:

1) Only removable drives are shown in the shortcut area by default, this change happened with Xfce 4.8, probably when they dropped HAL and started using udisks instead. If you'd like a shortcut there, you can drag the folder (e.g. /mnt/sda1) from the right hand pane into the left hand pane and drop it, and a shortcut will be created for you there. Your flash drive isn't showing as a removable device because Porteus needs it to continue operating. If you boot with the "copy2ram" cheatcode, it will show up as a removable device in the shortcut pane. I'm not sure what to make of the sdcard icon issue, and I don't have a card reader on my laptop (I'll see if I can test this on my tablet). Would you please provide me with the output of 'cat /etc/fstab' and 'cat /etc/mtab'?

2) Yes, you can move the panel from the top to the bottom. Right click on the panel, choose panel->panel preferences (or go to the menu and select 'Settings -> Panel'), select your desired panel from the drop down list, then uncheck 'lock panel'. Handles will appear on the right and left ends of the panel, and you can drag the panel with them. Note that the second panel (autohides at the bottom) will probably be removed from 1.2 final, with those buttons merged back into the main panel, to make them easier to find and to make it easier to relocate the panel. If anyone's interested, I can also write a script to move the panel to the bottom, and users can run it as a cheatcode, e.g. "autostart=xfpanelbottom". That would make it easy for 'always fresh' users.

3) This desktop item should be moved to 003-lxde.xzm (currently it's in 002-xorg.xzm). I'll ask brokenman to move it for final, thank you!

4) Is this only related to Gnome-Mplayer, or is the sound low system wide? Also, what sound card do you have (can't seem to find it online)? I can think of a number of things that might be to blame (modified driver or firmware or perhaps I've messed something up with retrovol and pxf-sound). Is retrovol picking up and correctly modifying the master volume channel, and is that what you normally use? Perhaps the 'speaker', 'front' or some other channel needs to get turned up as well? Please provide me with the output of 'aplay -l' and 'amixer'.

5) This is normal behavior for Porteus. You can save your sound settings across reboots (with saved changes turned on) by running 'alsactl store' when you have it set how you like (and then it will boot with those settings until you run alsactl store again to change them). You can also boot with the "volume=" cheatcode, e.g. "volume=100%" to manually force it to boot with the sound all they way up.

Thanks again!

[Cyril]

Hi again and thanks for your help.

Here are the outputs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. fstab
# System mounts
aufs / aufs defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 # AutoUpdate

# Device partitions
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat auto,noatime,nodiratime,suid,dev,exec,quiet,umask=0,check=s,shortname=mixed 0 0 # AutoUpdate
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat auto,noatime,nodiratime,suid,dev,exec,quiet,umask=0,check=s,shortname=mixed 0 0 # AutoUpdate

2. mtab
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
aufs / aufs rw 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat rw,quiet,noatime,nodiratime,umask=0,check=s,shortname=mixed 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat rw,quiet,noatime,nodiratime,umask=0,check=s,shortname=mixed 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/guest/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=guest 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/CYRIL vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,,flush 0 0

3. amixer
Simple mixer control 'Master',0
Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined penum
Playback channels: Mono
Limits: Playback 0 - 64
Mono: Playback 64 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Headphone',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 64
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 52 [81%] [-12.00dB] [on]
Front Right: Playback 52 [81%] [-12.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Speaker',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 64
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 52 [81%] [-12.00dB] [on]
Front Right: Playback 52 [81%] [-12.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'PCM',0
Capabilities: pvolume penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 255
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 255 [100%] [0.00dB]
Front Right: Playback 255 [100%] [0.00dB]
Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 31
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost',0
Capabilities: volume penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: 0 - 3
Front Left: 0 [0%] [0.00dB]
Front Right: 0 [0%] [0.00dB]
Simple mixer control 'Beep',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 31
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
Capabilities: cvolume cswitch penum
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Capture 0 - 31
Front Left: Capture 17 [55%] [12.00dB] [on]
Front Right: Capture 17 [55%] [12.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Auto-Mute Mode',0
Capabilities: enum
Items: 'Disabled' 'Enabled'
Item0: 'Enabled'
Simple mixer control 'Internal Mic',0
Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: Playback 0 - 31
Mono:
Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Internal Mic Boost',0
Capabilities: volume penum
Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
Limits: 0 - 3
Front Left: 0 [0%] [0.00dB]
Front Right: 0 [0%] [0.00dB]

4. aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the sound - it is system-wide, I checked on an audio file: it is played at the same volume in both mplayer and audacious.

"Volume=100%" as a bootcode worked, while "alsactl store" didn't, because alsactl is not installed.

Your advice concerning the main panel and shortcuts also worked, thank you.

Some questions though:
1. How to remove some notifications in Thunar like "Device was mounted automatically" or "There is still data to be written..."?
2. Could you (or anyone) recompile mplayer and add libaa and libcaca as video outputs (just for fun)?

Still hope for the sound issue to be solved...

[Ahau]

Thanks Cyril!

RE: sdcard desktop icons -- this is an odd one. I'm able to recreate it with a usb and sdcard, but only if I plug the drive/card in in the middle of the Porteus boot process (just after linuxrc finishes searching devices, to keep it from getting setup in fstab). This doesn't occur in saved-changes mode and I've traced it to a particular file that keeps it from happening; the icons also display properly if you run 'xfdesktop --reload'. Since I'm kind of jury-rigging my testing, please verify that the icons appear properly in saved changes mode, if possible. If that works for you, please boot into xfce, logout, log back in, and then make a copy of /home/guest/.cache/sessions/xfce4-session-porteus* in rootcopy (e.g. /mnt/sdb2/porteus/rootcopy/home/guest/.cache/sessions/xfce4-session-porteus:0) and reboot into always fresh mode. This works for me, and if it works for you, I'll post a bug report on the xfce bug tracker to see if we can get this resolved upstream.

RE: Notifications -- There's probably a more elegant way to go about this, but you can disable the xfce notifications by removing the file /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.xfce4-notifyd.Notifications.service, log out and then back in to xfce (if running without saved changes, try placing an empty file with this name in your rootcopy, that should do it).

RE: volume -- The only thing I see about your sound config that might help is turning up your Speaker volume (shows as 81% in your amixer output). Try running 'alsamixer' in a console, and press tab to cycle through the available channels, and make sure everything looks maxed out. If you're still not getting enough volume, try some of the things suggested in these links:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... on-windows
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... rd-808126/
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/upgradi ... to-2-6-33/

Some folks have enabled some kind of 'preamplification' setting that allows them to boost the output, but I've not tried it yet.

It seems this is a pretty common issue with your sound card and alsa, but I'm not sure what would have changed between v1.1 and v1.2rc2 to cause this -- fanthom, do you have any input on this one?

alsactl requires root permissions, please try:

Code: Select all

su
toor
alsactl -store

but, as you found, 'volume=' should do the trick (but I don't think it modifies anything but the master channel, so alsactl may be best if you find other tweaks that do the job)

Fanthom maintains gnome-mplayer as well, so he's the one to ask about adding features. Fanthom, any word? We may not want to add more to the default image if it's huge, but perhaps we could work together on a build script and a HOWTO to accomplish some customization for users who want it.

Thanks again!

[fanthom]

@Cyril

all sound related settings persisted between porteus-1.1 and 1.2. only kernel would be to blame but i doubt this is the case.

please boot porteus 1.1 in always fresh mode and run 'amixer > amixer-1.1' then do the same for rc2 and upload both files to pastebin.com so we can compare them.

i would refuse adding extra libs just for mplayer (and just for fun) to the main ISO. here is the slackbuild and mplayer-vaapi + custom ffmpeg source:
link
please launch the slackbuild to get mplayer recompiled with extra features you want.

[Cyril]

The issue with the sound was solved! I only had to launch alsamixer and set "Speaker" to 100%, along with the Master volume. In the older version of Porteus there is no "Speaker" entry in alsamixer... Quite strange. Thanks Ahau!

Haven't tried other things yet, will report back as soon as I have.

And as for mplayer - adding just two libs wouldn't affect its size much, just some kilobytes.

[Seq_Res]

I have a question, RC2 XFCE does not activate <modules> automatically as in RC1;
I have to activate modules one by one; It always give error messages and fails if I try to do it batch-like.
how to do it ? thanks !

[brokenman]

As a workaround until fixed you can try:

Code: Select all

for a in /path/to/modules/*.xzm; do
  activate $a
done