Porteus 3.1rc feedback

New features which should be implemented in Porteus; suggestions are welcome. All questions or problems with testing releases (alpha, beta, or rc) should go in their relevant thread here, rather than the Bug Reports section.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#31 by brokenman » 01 Nov 2014, 17:40

Have added xfce4-cpufreq-plugin, xfce4-systemload-plugin and xfce4-cpugraph-plugin to next release although they are no longer maintained.

The weather plugin will be available as a separate download since it is rather large (all locations included). Thanks.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#32 by Bogomips » 01 Nov 2014, 18:58

Skype still doesn't work out-of-the-box. :( No audio on signing in, and thereafter. No sound for test call.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#33 by fanthom » 01 Nov 2014, 19:53

rc2 means userland freeze so will check skype against all four desktops once rc2 is out.

thanks
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#34 by biotec » 03 Nov 2014, 23:30

Hi,

here comes some (minor) feedback to rc1.

My main interest was focused on LXQt because it is meant to substitute LXDE.I have to say that I loved LXDE mainly because, having all necessary things, it is lightweight, as the name says, and so it runs well in all sort of PCs, including cheap netbooks that have low-end CPUs and little RAM.

So, I tested rc1 on a VBox using LXQt with the set of extra modules that I need (octave and all missing libs and external programs required by octave, such as GraphicsMagick, texinfo, tetex and ghostscript, plus compat32 libs). Good news is that I didn't need to rebuild neither of my modules and all test performed brillantly. I only had to reconfigure the desktop to my taste.

But bad news is that the "L" from LXQt does not honor its meaning: 'free' showed these memory usages with several DE:

lxqt 634644
xfce 595652
mate 628568

We can see LXQt is heavier than both XFCE and Mate. I also tried LXDE from Porteus 3.01, and it works out of the box under Porteus 3.1rc1. Memory usage with the same setup as before is:

lxde 516908

Therefore, using LXQt instead of LXDE requires >100M more RAM than its predecessor, and requires a little more RAM than its non-Qt alternatives. I think LXQt should rather be considered as a replacement to razor-qt, and keep LXDE as the DE for people with little RAM available. I believe that for a number of Porteus users low-memory usage may be relevant.

Another couple of LXQt shortcoming I found as compared to LXDE:

1) the panel bar cannot be set to hide :bad: ... or can it be but did I miss something? :wall:

2) lximage-qt is used for screenshots, but it lacks the ability to select parts of the screen. Besides, saving the screenshot from lximage-qt is a bit cumbersome. In other words, lximage-qt doesn't seem the best choice for fast and easy screenshots. Since I need to have GraphicsMagick anyway, I can use 'gm import'. I modified the gtk-scrot porteus script from the previous Porteus version to have a nice frontend for 'gm import', but this could not be useful for everybody. Other alternatives can be to install scrot with the gtk-scrot script, as in Porteus 3.01, or kde4-screenshooter and three missing libs.

Anayway, Porteus will continue to be my choice to distribute a ready-to-use Linux environment to my students to be run from either VirtualBox or from an USB. Thanks again for that work. :)

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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#35 by Bogomips » 04 Nov 2014, 15:44

Sleep normally ok. This time though black screen. Console font blurred, with extremely slow echo. Top showed X at almost 100% cpu, off and on.

After managing init 3, X still there. Caught glimpse of plugin-container as 2nd highest cpu user. Killed it eventually. Gave up and tried reboot, got as far as rc.local_shutdown, but no further. After waiting couple of minutes had to activate restart button.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#36 by Sagittarius » 04 Nov 2014, 19:34

I second biotec's comment about lxde memory usage: even in comparison to xfce I see a difference on an old pc.
@biotec, thanks for the comment about using lxde from Porteus 3.01 on 3.1rc1!

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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#37 by fanthom » 05 Nov 2014, 08:19

Please add [Solved] to your thread title if the solution was found.

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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#38 by Ed_P » 05 Nov 2014, 17:09

LXQt x86_64 Always Fresh mode

KPatience needs two additional modules to run in LXQt. libdbusmenu-qt-0.9.2-x86_64-2.xzm and qca-2.0.2-x86_64-1.xzm

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ kpat
kpat: error while loading shared libraries: libqca.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
guest@porteus:~$ kpat
kpat: error while loading shared libraries: libdbusmenu-qt.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
guest@porteus:~$ kpat
LxQtGuiPlatformPlugin constructed 
LxQtGuiPlatformPlugin::systemIconThemeName() is called 
LxQtGuiPlatformPlugin::platformHint() is called 
LxQtGuiPlatformPlugin::platformHint() is called 
kpat(5793)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:

guest@porteus:~$ ls -h /tmp/usm/*.xzm
/tmp/usm/libdbusmenu-qt-0.9.2-x86_64-2.xzm  /tmp/usm/qca-2.0.2-x86_64-1.xzm

guest@porteus:~$ ls -l /mnt/live/memory/images/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root  83 Dec 11  2013 000-kernel.xzm/
drwxrwxrwx 20 root root 305 Oct 17 18:45 001-core.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root 119 Oct 16 14:33 002-xorg.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root 130 Oct 16 11:24 003-lxqt.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  6 root root  61 Mar 23  2011 04-firefox.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  60 Sep 26 21:18 kpat-4.10.5-x86_64-bundle.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root  37 Nov  5 11:42 libdbusmenu-qt-0.9.2-x86_64-2.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  26 Nov  4 00:01 network.xzm/
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root  37 Nov  5 11:35 qca-2.0.2-x86_64-1.xzm/
guest@porteus:~$ 
Ed

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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#39 by Ed_P » 05 Nov 2014, 18:13

LXQt x86_64 Always Fresh mode

PCManFM

I do not like that setting the width of the menu column and minimizing the Devices menu doesn't carry over when closing down PCManFM and later reopening it. Not rebooting AF mode, simply closing PCManFM while doing other things and then coming back to it later and reopening it.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#40 by Ed_P » 05 Nov 2014, 18:23

LXQt x86_64 Always Fresh mode

04-firefox.xzm

If I Deactivate 04-firefox.xzm, to test a different version, the Taskbar at the bottom of the LXQt screen disappears. The only way to restart Porteus is to power off the netbook.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#41 by Bogomips » 05 Nov 2014, 23:26

Experienced taskbar disappearance on Mint. Got it back by bringing/dragging mouse to where taskbar should be and further. Worth a go perhaps, if not already tried.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#42 by Ed_P » 06 Nov 2014, 04:36

Bogomips wrote:Worth a go perhaps, if not already tried.
It seems like a reasonable thing to try and I may have but I don't remember. So I repeated the situation and it happened again and no dragging the mouse to where the taskbar should be and further, whether left button pushed or right button, did not help. Nor any key combination that I tried. Power off and on the only out.

Rc1/LXQt taskbar tied to x86_64 Firefox code, somehow.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#43 by jimwg » 06 Nov 2014, 10:52

Greetings!

I know this sounds naieve, but can't I just download a set of 3.1rc1 modules to replace my current ones rather than go through the CD burn route? I did it with previous versions and it seemed to work okay, though I had to retro to earlier XFCE versions to recover nice features omitted in more "advanced" ones.

Jim in NYC

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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#44 by fanthom » 06 Nov 2014, 10:59

@Ed_P
a) checked other distros (siduction, manjaro) which ships with lxqt and pcmanfm bug not remembering settings is also there so must be upstream.
b) will fix firefox deactivation bug for rc2

@jimwg
you can:
http://dl.porteus.org/x86_64/testing/Po ... 1/modules/
please be careful and make sure you know what you are doing.
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Re: Porteus 3.1rc1 feedback

Post#45 by brokenman » 06 Nov 2014, 12:49

I had to retro to earlier XFCE versions to recover nice features omitted in more "advanced" ones.
Feel free to share what the features are. I had to build xfce from scratch since the files used for the last version were not passed on to me.
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