Feedback for Porteus version 2.0 RC1

[saneks]

my feedback..

My computer just shut the power off while burning the second cd.. no other programs open. so clearly Heat problems. Acer TravelMate 5740G.
Right now with Linux Mint the fan is spinning as well without doing much work.. linux tends to run pretty hot on this and some other of my machines. But I never had sudden power-offs til now.

pBurn is a bit weird: copy a cd, so it reads the source, but when I insert a blank one to write on, another instance of pburn pops up asking me what to do with the cd. I dont know if it's your job to fix this, or if it's a feature of pburn (after all I might want to burn some files inbetween the copying job)

design wise, I think it's nice with xfce, but the tasbar is too densely filled. other decorations gives slightly more space between taskbuttons so you get more readability. but that is just cosmetics.. will go on testing.

[brokenman]

Your notebook has dual switchable graphics and when you boot to linux BOTH cards are turned on by default. This uses a lot of power and overheats very quickly. Open a console and do this:

Code: Select all

mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

This will turn off the card that isn't being used. Probably the discreet (high power) card.

[saneks]

^ Thanks brokenman for pointing this out!

and a little more feedback on rc1.. mainly simple settings and design choices, but it might save the user some time..

- firefox' download window is not associated with thunar by default

- please include a PDF viewer into the default apps

- some of the xfce appearances dont work with the package manager. windows are partly transparent and bring up white-on-white text

- the network shortcut on thunar does not find my server (wired connection).

- I know everyone can change these, but I always think it's important to look best possible out of the box:

- If you decide to stay with Evolve: I think the evolve theme with square tabs and buttons is incoherent with the evolve window-decoration. a slightly rounded like clearlooks or nodoka fit better with the evolve window-decoration.

- the huge colored flag symbols for keyboard can be set to text, which integrates better with the overall polished look.

- I like the replacement of the Thunar hammer icon with something more sensible. but somehow this new drawer icon looks weird with its light effects (yesterday I thoought of an beat-up robothead, lol) and it does not fit too well with the others.. also when I look at the box icon for the package manager, I always think this resembles more a folder icon than sth that is doing a central job and is a special and unique feature to the Porteus system -

- General issue: I used Porteus for a laptop without HD. so I created the save file there on the usb drive, which then was device sda obviously. Using the same key on another laptop with working HD brings my key to sdb, which wont find the porteussave anymore. - so i guess on a computer with more drives, usb-keys wont find their save files as well.
so my idea: can the installer somehow find & use the UUID of a USB key instead of sdX? does that make sense or a there problems?

edit> I just read it is possible to use a UUID, zet I have to find out how. right now I wonder how this happened anyway, if I have changes=&porteus/porteussave.dat it should point to the boot device, no matter if sda,sdb or whatever.. probably I had sth else on my last version - but I replaced it with 2.0, so I cant reproduce for now

have a happy new year everybody!

[Ahau]

Hi saneks, thank you for your feedback!

Regarding pburn opening a second instance, this was on my end. I created an association in thunar volman to open pburn when a blank disc is inserted, without thinking about what would happen if pburn was already open! I'll create an exception for RC2 so nothing will happen if pburn is already running.

Regarding the taskbar being too densely filled, which section are you referring to? The action buttons (desktop, Terminal, Firefox, etc) or the application buttons (buttons in the middle of the panel for each open application). I do see that some gtk themes have, for example, rounded buttons, which do give more visual separation between application buttons (is this what you mean?) I may change up the theme or try to tweak it a bit in the next release. Finding a theme that looks good everywhere has been difficult, so I think I'm going to have to learn more about customizing themes!

I'll also look into integrating the firefox window with thunar -- if you know how to do this already, please let me know and I'll get it into the config (this would save me the time to figure it out myself).

epdfviewer should have been included (in 002-xorg.xzm), I'll double check both 32 and 64-bit for this and make sure it is there for RC2, and I'll check out PPM as well -- I know brokenman is going to make some updates to it prior to final, so I'll keep an eye on this and change/modify the theme as necessary to keep it legible.

Is your server automatically available to the system (outside of thunar) when you boot up? I'm trying to localize this to see if Thunar is the problem or not. If it's a Samba share, I did not compile thunar and its components against Samba, perhaps I should do so and leave them unresolved in the ISO so folks can add samba and have built-in support without having to rebuild the packages.

For use of the save file, yes, using UUID would probably be your best way forward. If you don't have porteus inside a subfolder and the save.dat is on the same partition, changes=porteus/porteussave.dat should work, but I almost always have porteus in a subdirectory (since I have multiple installations per device), and UUID (per instructions in cheatcodes.txt) would solve that issue as well.

Thank you so much for all of the feedback, this is exactly the kind of comments I hope for, because I know what to work on to make it better! I'll play with your aestetic suggestions and see what I like (I probably agree with all of them).

[cttan]

Hi,

I have downloaded Porteus 2.0 RC1 2 days back and done some testing. I like it. Great job Porteus team.

After using Porteus 1.2 Final that is stable for a long time, feels reluctant to move on to another release that would involve a lot of testing.

[gnomic]

Referring back to my post earlier about losing touch with a USB connected mouse, at that time i thought this was connected with starting up a wifi connection. However I think that was a mistake on my part, incorrect association of events. But what does seem to be happening, if there are several devices connected via usb, and one is removed the usb bus seems to break, ie other devices are no longer usable. For example I had mouse, a hard drive connected via a usb/ide adapter, and a cellphone charging. On removing the cellphone, the mouse turned off and a d/l to the disk failed. Sorry if this seems to be too weird. This Toshiba laptop has its builtin trackpad and mouse buttons turned off in BIOS as one of the mouse buttons is broken and the trackpad is not much good. I replicated the situation with Linuxmint Xfce and did not encounter the problem. This was a live session so it's a bit difficult to gather data once the mouse has gone. However I was seeing some stuff in dmesg of this nature, won't be exact as I copied this from another forum, don't have the few notes I took while observing with me now.

USB 2/3 device descriptor read64, error -110 three times followed by

usb-2/3 device not accepting address 4, error -110
usb-2/3 device not accepting address 5, error -110
Maybe somebody else could check a similar scenario and see if anything of this nature shows up. I see there is a bit of stuff in various forums about error 110 which I am looking through. I will try another laptop. to see if it shows up there. As a cellphone is involved and I think possibly is being seen as a 3g modem/CD, maybe that could be part of the problem. This was all live with a CD by the way.

[francois]

XFCE 2.0 RC1

french keyboard is not there.... (french layout should be there)
I comment here with Porteus 2.0 rc1 in virtualbox....

Thanks, kadalka!

To jump in here a little bit, the french layout is still present, but it is not shown by default in the xkb switcher in the Xfce panel (it is limited to a maximum number of 4 layouts, and I chose the 4 that are present based on the countries that have the most visitors to porteus.org). You should be able to set the french keyboard with the "kmap=" cheatcode, or you can do it through Porteus Settings Centre, and here's how:

click on the application menu->System->Porteus Settings Centreleft
click on the second button from the left (at the top, "System Settings").
click on the keyboard settings button, click OK, click on the "layout" tab, uncheck "use system defaults"
Now, highlight the first keyboard layout on the list (probably still English(US), click on the "Edit" button near the bottom of that screen, and you get a listing of all keyboard layouts that are supported by X.org. Scroll down to French. You can click to highlight "French" for the default French layout or you can click on the dropdown arrow for a list of variants (there are about 15 for French).
Once you've selected your layout, click the "OK" Button and you should immediately be switched to typing with the French layout, and the French flag will appear on your panel.
Now, click the "close" button and wait a few seconds for Xfce to update its settings, and you can click the red button at the top of PSC to close it. If you're saving changes, the settings will be applied on reboot; if you're not saving your changes,PSC will prompt you to create a module with your new settings so that you'll have the french keyboard on future reboots.

You can customize which 4 will be visible in the skb switcher, their variants, etc. -- let us know if this doesn't sort out the problem for you.

Hope that helps! Thanks!

I have tested this method of Ahau to set a french keyboard. It works perfectly.

Though fixing the keyboard thru the panel > flag > remove one keyboard > add french keyboard, will not result in permanent changes.

Thanks a lot.

[Hamza]

@francois,

* No Quote pyramids.

[fanthom]

@cttan

After using Porteus 1.2 Final that is stable for a long time, feels reluctant to move on to another release that would involve a lot of testing.

yes but slackware-14.0 will be our base for another 12-18 months (Porteus-2.x line) so i think it's worth the hassle

@gnomic

I will try another laptop. to see if it shows up there.

any update on this?
i can't reproduce your issue on my PC.

[att]

Hello,

I'm writing this little report from Porteus v2.0 rc1 64bit - works awesome!
As you maybe remember, I have earlier reported a bug in Teamviewer with Porteus v1.2 ; Teamviewer would crash if the network has been configured manually.

Now, from Porteus v2.0 RC1 this bug is gone, which is awesome!

HOWEVER, my graphic card is still misaligned, at boot up, to a way too low resolution, i.e. 1024x768, UNLESS I go to the monitor settings and set it manually to 1680x1050.

My graphic card is a ATI Radeon 4850, one monitor is connected to DVI-0 , a "LG Flatron W2242T".
Another monitor is connected to DVI-1, but he is never been used, it is always turned off. That monitor is some old "Samsung Syncmaster 750p".

Here is all my data: http://pastebin.com/px46w0Dy

The strange thing is, when I open the "Monitor settings" dialog and click on the "identify monitor" button, both DVI-0 and DVI-1 are identified on the same monitor.
My wild guess is that the resolution is first detected correctly at 1680x1050, then, "DVI-1" is detected, which is the same as DVI-0, and then the system switches to 1024x768.

Here is a screenshot: http://666kb.com/i/caftsclsqkjhrm2sh.jpg

Any advice appreciated, in the meantime I can say: Great work!!

[francois]

Sorry to disturb anyone about that. Maybe I need some new glasses. Is there any md5sum for rc1 2.0 64bit?

[fanthom]

@att
i have 2 advices:
a) disconnect the unused monitor and check if that helps
b) if not then launch 'krandrtray' and set 'Primary output' to "LG Flatron W2242T" (which ever DVI it is). you could also try to disable second DVI completely by clicking on 'Size' and choosing 'Disabled'

@francois
added md5sum file for all files:
32bir
64bit
and to rc1 announcement.
thanks for reminding about it

[Seq_Res]

hi, ahau,
I tried XFCE 2.0RC1, but failed to start it on my laptop. Boot stopped at level 4, after showing something
like '...udev....', then the Display became black ( it's power light is off while main power is still on). Maybe I need
some driver ? v1.2 has no such a problem.

one more question, I have to use lilo to boot up other computers, can yuo give me a more detailed instruction to
get lilo work ? I tried to change the included dummy configuation file, but have no idea how to use it.

thank you very much.

[fanthom]

@Seq_Res

sounds like a GPU driver issuse.
please boot to 'text mode' -> login as root -> generate report with 'psinfo' utility (save it somewhere on hd or usb) -> save /var/log/meassages on hd/usb -> run startx command

if you get back to console (due to xorg failure) then please save /var/log/Xorg.0.log on hd/usb, reboot to porteus-1.2 and upload all 3 files to pastebin.com and link here for review.
if your PC hang just after 'statx' and never come back to terminal then please upload only 2 files saved previously: psinfo raport and /var/log/messages.

I tried to change the included dummy configuation file, but have no idea how to use it.

once you edit /boot/syslinux/lilo.conf with your own cheats/tweaks you must run 'Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com' as LILO has to reload it's configuration.

Cheers

[gnomic]

Had another look at the problem I experienced with Toshiba laptop and usb-attached mouse turning off - on further testing problem not seen. Maybe cosmic rays? Also tested 32-bit razor and KDE4 isos on a Compaq V6000 laptop with dual Turion TL-56 cpu and nvidia go6150 - no problems with booting and no problem with loading up the USB slots and removing devices.