Feedback for Porteus version 2.0 RC1

[Ahau]

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.

It's less likely to be cosmic rays and more likely to be something like your devices being added in a different order on boot-up and some weird conflict between drivers. Let us know if this reappears. You could get the info from psinfo without a mouse if you opened up a terminal and gave it focus first, then removed the USB device, then run 'psinfo' and copy the resulting file to a location on a real filesystem.

[Hamza]

Hey all,

I have just found that our dear Ahau forgotten to includes Vbox/GPU builders into his great XFCE edition. I have made a little module fix which allow us to run Vbox/GPU builders on XFCE until RC2.

Download Link: vbox-gpu_xfce.xzm
Size: 56K

Thanks!

[att]

Hi all,

As suggested, I disconnected the DVI monitor cable going to the second and unused monitor.
Now the resolution is correctly autoconfigured to 1680x1050 pixel!

However, isn't it just possible to have a non-powered second monitor without getting into any problems?
I always run unter WinXP or Win7 and it has never caused any problems there!

[saneks]

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'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).

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.

sorry, I dont know how to associate thunar with firefox download window.

How can I check for my server outside thunar? I'd like to check this incase this helps you.

yes, what I ment with too dense is the application buttons. the programicon is like 1px beside the left frame of the button. too close for my designer-eyes - changing theme to something rounded helps, but then the colors dont match - I removed the button frames in the settings (Show Flat Button), but the active window always is grey highlighted and framed, which also looks kind of bad with transparent taskbar, but I dont know how to to get rid of this in xfce. maybe I have to dive into some config file.

as for themeing, just with GUI settings and without installing anything or editing I did this:

- change flag symbol to letters, text size small
- removed the frame around the battery sound and wifi area and made these sligthly smaller
- moved the taskbar to the bottom (makes more sense in my opinion, I always confuse the windowlist with firefox tabs and close programs or switch windows accidentally)
- slightly smaller icons for app starters
- change firefox font to sans serif and removed the menu bar to have the chrome-like menu button to get more screen space
- I did not find out yet how to change the color of the desktop symbol names without changing to another theme. default is black, which is hard to read with a dark background. I think another config-file research here for me, I did not find it in the xfce settings.


some more feedback

- the keyboard settings keep changing back to US for each window, which is annoying. rightclick the button and set settings to: Change Layout Globally (as opposed to Per Window or Per Application, which is default) - would be nice if you changed that to Globally by default, cause in Always-Fresh-Mode I have to click around to get into settings everytime I boot up. please change that
- I love love love the default flashblock in firefox! Very cool for Always Fresh mode!
- the default background is the first one in ages that I did not change immediately

a bug I found:

when I plug in the powercable on my laptop, while the system is already running, the system freezes and wont come back to live. Had this three times already and I had to poweroff the computer. This way I seem to have corrupted something the last time it happened. now I can't boot into my persistent system anymore. It boots up like usual, but when switching from text to X, I get a black window. When I hit the powerbutton, it is back to textmode and shuts off. Laptop is HP Pavillon dv6700. Can't boot into persistent on other machines as well.

This brings me to the next question: how do I open my save.dat file to get my stuff out if I can boot only in Always Fresh or To Ram? - it is not that bad, cause I usually save big and important stuff outside the container and use it for passwords and settings mostly. Also since it is so easy to backup, I just made a copy just before it happened, but still I am interested how to open it.

else no problems here. I use Porteus almost daily on different machines I pass by. Great stuff.

[ncmprhnsbl]

hi porteus team, another great job!
currently using: Porteus-v2.0rc-1 64 ...openbox
quiet initrd=initrd.xz copy2ram vga_detect changes=EXIT:/dev/sda5/porteus2-rc1 BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz
took me couple of goes to figure out where to put the EXIT: ...silly me..
no major issues, tried some existing 1.2 modules, worked fine, so some backward compatibility is another plus
made a module from slackware current(through browser)... all good...
just one thing: seems to be no frequency scaling ootb(does in 1.2),so i tried:
root@porteus:/home/guest# modprobe powernow-k8
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'powernow_k8': No such device
powernow-k8.ko is there in: /lib/modules/3.7.1-porteus/kernel/drivers/cpufreq
its an AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 260 Processor...
also my corei7 laptop doesn't scale either..
??
also.. slackyd -u fails at the manifest part.. citing wget error...

[brokenman]

laptoptools handles all frequency scaling now. For slackyd please open /etc/slackyd/slackyd.conf and change the darkstar repos to: http://repository.slacky.eu/slackware-14.0/

[fanthom]

@ncmprhnsbl (and others interested with 'power saving' issue)
please study arch wiki for LMT:
link
then our /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf and all files in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d
i'm opened to all suggestions regarding our default settings.

btw: glad to see another 'changes=EXIT:' user, it took me good few hours to implement this feature.

[ncmprhnsbl]

@brokenman,, thanks for repo link... although for 64bit shouldn't it be http://repository.slacky.eu/slackware64-14.0/
suffice to say laptopmodetools isnt doing its job for me (yet) .... more archwikistudy for me ...curiously arch(bang) doesn't appear to use it(need to check my 12-12 install)not that its relevent now its full systemd..
um...porteus doesn't have etc/rc.conf?

[fanthom]

laptopmodetools isnt doing its job for me (yet)

ok - bit of explanation from my side:
'ondemand' governor is activated only when system is running on a battery (because we want porteus to be fast in the first place).
please run:

Code: Select all

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

then plug/unplug AC cable and run this command again (you should see governor changing between 'ondemand' and 'performance').
if you are running porteus on standalone PC then governor will always be set to 'performance'.
you can tweak this policy by changing /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/cpufreq.conf config.

there is still a small chance that acpi kernel driver doesn't work for your particular CPU.
ofc in that case tweaking of LMT settings wont help and we cant do much about it.

[brokenman]

Regarding slackyd fix yes for you it should be 64. Please put the address into a browser to see if if resolves. Also, laptop tools is included in Porteus v2.0rc1 so no need to download it.

[ncmprhnsbl]

@fanthom, thanks for the clarification..
i have two machines , one a desktop athlon, which requires powernow-k8 module to freq scale ..so cat /sys..blah... returns 'no such file' ...and i'm guessing i can't just plonk powernow-k8 into the autoloaded modules list in laptop-mode.conf tho i havn't tried it.... no big deal really ..just gotten used to having ondemand..no need for an idling box to be at full clock.. muo
also my laptops' (corei7) battery is defunct, so is on AC always , but i am under the impression that ondemand helps with temperature issues.. havn't tried messing with LM.conf on it yet ..but i will and report back.
@brokenman, sorry for any confusion, i was trying to resolve dependencies on some other package(another story for another thread)... but i can confirm that the repo works.. tested by downloading dmenu-xft..
i should probably wait for 2.0 release and PPM before trying to make modules...

[Seq_Res]

@fanthom, I tried and collected the 2 files 'messages' and 'psinfo.txt', but I dont know how to upload them.
or, email ok ?

[Hamza]

You can send it to bug at porteus dot org

[fanthom]

@ncmprhnsbl
please edit /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/cpufreq.conf file and change every 'CPU_GOVERNOR=performance' to 'CPU_GOVERNOR=ondemand'
should be ok now.
(btw - found a bug as default config has 'LM_AC_CPU_GOVERNOR=performance' twice while second one should be 'NOLM_AC_CPU_GOVERNOR=performance')

@Seq_Res
please go to pastebin.com and upload log files then post the URL here.
if still in troubles then please post on email mentioned by Hamza

[ncmprhnsbl]

please edit /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/cpufreq.conf file and change every 'CPU_GOVERNOR=performance' to 'CPU_GOVERNOR=ondemand'
should be ok now.
(btw - found a bug as default config has 'LM_AC_CPU_GOVERNOR=performance' twice while second one should be 'NOLM_AC_CPU_GOVERNOR=perfomance'

yes! success! at least on the asus corei7 laptop....didn't think it worked at first... but i forgot to restart..
i'll see what happens on the athlon.....