Christmas wishes for Porteus-3.0

[fanthom]

@cttan

Can include WIFI Direct hardware support?

please remind me about this - is it something to do with the kernel config?

@Slaxmax

Porteus Cluster - what about?

rather not as we are focusing on Desktop/Kiosk for now.

Tuxonice (hibernate kernel function)

i'm trying to avoid 3rd party patches for the sake of stability - sorry

@szybol

*QT5 (x86/x64) compatible with Q4
*multilib gcc for Porteus x64
*add src2pkg

first two are too big to be included but i can accept third one.
btw not sure if qt5 exist for slackware (may be too early for this) but multilib gcc can be obtained from alien's repo:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/

@wread

A Desktop Cube Animation in KDE4 working again

it has always worked - just raise the number of virtual desktops from two to four

@tome

Guest account (password: guest) on forum, everyone who want write something once a long time could do it without own account or without password remember.

discussed this with Hamza and dropped as would bring extra spam i'm afraid

How many files (size) of Porteus (base) is the same for both arch? 3% ? Maybe should be these files (icons, config files) in another module with noarch suffix.

000, 001, 002 modules are the same for every DE we support (only 003 differs)

Default guest account in Porteus without password (press Enter key).

i would rater stick to traditional (guest) password as it would be a tedious task to explain to everyone that we have no password for guest from now on

Mounting (mount and httpfs2) modules, iso images and dat containers without password (guest) if mount folder has correct permissions (or one folder that guest can mount in it) and mounting several files in folders that names are names of mounted files (eventually loop1, loop2 ...)

that would require digging into mount/httpfs code which i have no skills to do (and i'm not really convinced that it's a good idea, sounds like a breaking linux basic security rules)

Adding default action for iso images and dat containers in file mangers - mount.

will do for DE i'm maintaining (kde4)

Replace confirmation that something is mounted or unmounted with notification (1-2 seconds like for xactivate script)

will try to do that

Replace dd in make-changes and mkfileswap scripts with fallocate

will test and implement if ok

Move /usr/share/applications/filefinder.desktop from xfce module to xorg.

done

There is changes-exit.conf and can be used "!" for exceptions but maybe could be used also "~" for always saved folders or files (even if you shutdown and press any key).

dont want to make things too much complicated so maybe you could use /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown for this task (copy required folders from /mnt/live/memory/changes to your changes=EXIT: location on reboot/shutdown)

And maybe like changes-exit.conf should be changes.conf for omitting if changes= cheatcode is used without EXIT:.

this wont be possible as normal 'changes=' (without EXIT) writes in a real time

Add mc entry to porteus.cfg

rather not as i doubt many people would find this useful (and other people could ask for other entries like launching firefox, video player, etc )

New script for setup language that doesn't download translations for all languages but only for one.

please provide example where all translations are downloaded

New live folder "0" in /mnt/live/memory/images. Everything in this folder should be inserted to /.

not sure if i understand. is it like copying modules to '0' would automatically activate them (drag and drop)?
btw: activate supports activating of whole folders (and subfolders) already. example: activate /path/to_folder_with_xzm

Replacing Firefox from Slackware with newer package from mozilla site that can be updated (maybe esr version - less changes) and flashplayer in separate module.

never packages from mozilla site are optimized for i686 unfortunately so no go for them as we claim i486 compatibility. porteus-3.0 will switch to ESR (will follow Slackware). i believe that 99% of people are still using flash so i see no point for splitting.

@Axel

Support for multimedia plugins in Gecko browsers (SeaMonkey, Firefox, FirefoxESR...)
Gecko-Mediaplayer-1.0.8-i486-2alien.tgz

this requires gnome-mplayer and kde4/razor does not have this player included

Support for .7z and others (.ace, zipx, etc) compress files.

too big to my liking but will see what i can do about it

thanks a lot for your suggestions guys and apologize that i couldn't accept them all.

[tome]

000, 001, 002 modules are the same for every DE we support (only 003 differs)

They differs for i486 and x86_64. The same are 001-core_locales.xzm, 003-lxde-locales.xzm and so on.

sounds like a breaking linux basic security rules

spacefm allows mounting for guest but requires udev, if guest can create files in his folders why he can not do it by mounting in it?

please provide example where all translations are downloaded

for example 001-core_locales.xzm is downloaded - it contains all languages (big size) and after everything is downloaded then specified language is installed (probably because I did not finished this)

people are still using flash so i see no point for splitting

if someone uses firefox and opera then he has two copies of flash or maybe someone prefers to use firefox module and another flashplayer version - therefore flash should be in separate module

is it like copying modules to '0' would automatically activate them (drag and drop)?

copying content of new or extracted module to this place, if someone want change something in this prebuild module he can do it in this folder and immediately see how it works (~wysywig, changes in 0 folder are immediately in root tree, but not in reverse) - first test before packing everything to module and testing in fresh mode, maybe similar to your configuration (editable xzm folders instead of fixed modules). This method works fine with .dat.xzm modules activated during start (but dat has fixed size and live 0 folder is limited by ram and swap) - if I want change this module I go to live->images and do new default settings (this setting can't be in live-changes for seeing it in standard root tree) instead of build, activate, test, extract (if something is wrong), edit and again the same steps (build, activate and extract are useless in these 3 examples of handling with modules - folders, dat modules or "0")

[fanthom]

a) i have implemented mount/unmount action for iso but i'm having troubles with .dat as there is not mimetype for it (application/octet-stream matches many other files). any ideas?
b) found that fallocate works only with ext4 and xfs so rather wont be implementing this (people do not create savefiles too often and .dat is needed only on fat/ntfs which fallocate does not support)
c) good news - pulled stripped p7zip which is 160KB now but has only 7zr utility inside (and 7z linked to it). should be enough for 99% of users.

@tome
"They differs for i486 and x86_64"
yes but it's not a big issue really - everything is scripted here so i can recreate 001-core.xzm for both arch in about 2 minutes.

"spacefm allows mounting for guest but requires udev"
udisks2 based desktops have a bug which allows for this, only kde4 is prone as it uses udisk1. i really dont like the idea of guest mounting by default - admin should decide about it (mopt= cheatcode + 'users' mount flag).

"for example 001-core_locales.xzm is downloaded - it contains all languages (big size) and after everything is downloaded then specified language is installed"
that's true but unfortunately splitting 001-core_locales.xzm into 30+ smaller modules is too much of work i'm afraid

"if someone uses firefox and opera then he has two copies of flash"
we assume that user uses only one desktop and one browser. doubled flash brings additional 4MB only - not that much i would say. btw - other bundles has doubled libs as well (printing xzm has qt3 bundled ) as they must work in every possible combination. there is no perfect solution i'm afraid.

"or maybe someone prefers to use firefox module and another flashplayer version"
updating is quite easy - unpack 04 xzm and replace flashplayer.so

"copying content of new or extracted module to this place, if someone want change something in this prebuild module he can do it in this folder and immediately see how it works (~wysywig, changes in 0 folder are immediately in root tree, but not in reverse) - first test before packing everything to module and testing in fresh mode, maybe similar to your configuration (editable xzm folders instead of fixed modules)."
so we are back to the idea of being able to activate folders instead of modules. the problem appears when user create some_folder.xzm on non-posix filesystem which cause permissions/symlinking problems and we can't afford these.
i'm also worrying that users may delete content of the folder without deactivating it which may cause UDBA issues and aufs instability.
let's make a deal - i'll update activate/deactivate scripts to be able to activate folders but wont include them in official ISO but rather post in community effort.

[tome]

i have implemented mount/unmount action for iso but i'm having troubles with .dat as there is not mimetype for it (application/octet-stream matches many other files). any ideas?

Test: change extension from dat to txt or for txt file from txt to dat -> there must be specified action (with weight-priority) in /usr/share/mime so maybe should be new file dat.xml more:http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared ... #id2661973
I prefer use octet-stream because I think many users don't often open (rather execute) another octet-stream files (in spacefm for dat is application/executable instead of octet-stream)
if you add p7zip to official Iso then Iso can be opened with archive manager and can be also association for this in [Added Associations] section (without password prompt but mounting is quicker)
it will be nice if core would be the same for both arch

splitting 001-core_locales.xzm into 30+ smaller modules is too much of work i'm afraid

so maybe httpfs2?

[jimwg]

I concur everyone's suggestions on this topic on top of the time-stamp fix!

What is the ETA for 3.0 or the beta which I'd be happy to test?

Jim in NYC

[fanthom]

@tome
we have added .xzm to the freedesktop xml already so will probably have to do the same for .dat
the problem is that this extension is reserved already for VCD videos (if i'm not mistaken) and action for mounting video file obviously would not work. VCDs are not so popular so we could afford these errors i think. will see what i can do about it.

@jimwg
we are targeting 3.0-rc1 for 23rd of December as a Christmas gift to all users. to give you something now i can publish a list of package changes in core modules i'm maintaining:

Code: Select all

here are the package changes between 2.1 and 3.0:
001-core
a) removed:
mm                                    (not really needed by anything)
openssl-solibs                     (no need for this as we have full openssl package in 001)
sqlite                                  (moved to 002)
b) added:
iproute2                             (required for making openvpn connection)
libelf                                   (stripped from aaa_elflibs as prefer full package over plain libs - mostly due to headers)
libmnl                                 (deps of new iptables)
libnetfilter_conntrack         (deps of new iptables)
libnfnetlink                         (deps of new iptables)
libpcap                               (stripped from aaa_elflibs as prefer full package over plain libs - mostly due to headers)
mpfr                                   (moved from 05)
pcmciautils                        (required for initializing pcmcia cards)
readline                              (stripped from aaa_elflibs as prefer full package over plain libs - mostly due to headers)

002-xorg:
a) removed:
avidemux                            (dropped as has bundled ffmpeg and we have lighter ffmpeg frontends)
libidl                                    (not needed by anything)
poppler                               (moved to 003 as per qt deps which may be not demanded on xfce/lxde, please compile your own poppler version in 003 to strip qt from it if you want)
rgb                                     (not needed by anything)
xvba-driver                         (outdated and does not compile anymore, we have vdpau video accel in mesa now which covers this functionality)
b) added:
ffmpeg                                (which pulled additional deps: fribidi libaacplus libass libbluray libgsm libtheora opus rtmpdump speex twolame vo-aacenc vo-amrwbenc)
icu4c                                   (along witth harfbuzz are required by all gtk apps now and are most annoying deps which gives 7MB extra for nothing useful)
libmbim                              (deps of ModemManager-1.0)
libqmi                                 (deps of ModemManager-1.0)
nettle                                  (deps of xorg-server) 
opus-tools                           (small enough and we have opus in 002 anyway so asunder can now rip audio to opus files)
sqlite                                  (moved from 001)
xclip                                   (needed by checksum context menu)

05-devel:
a) removed:
mpfr                                 (moved to 001-core)
b) added:
src2pkg                             (small enough and looks promising)

04-firefox:
nothing changed

[francois]

As avidemux will be dropped, what is the equivalent frontend that will come with ffmpeg?

[fanthom]

@francois
i will be going with qwinff in kde4 but not sure what other guys will pick for their desktops (i'm fairly sure it wont be anything qt based in case of LXDE/XFCE).
ffmpeg comes very handy as kde4 will have ssr which is based on it and Mplayer will be recompiled with external ffmpeg instead of bundled one to save some space (3.0 will be about 10MB bigger anyway mainly due to icu4c library which brings 7MB extra weight and unfortunately is required now by all gtk based apps in slackware-14.1 world). as you know ffmpeg is required also by pburn to write audio CDs.

other kde4 goodies are: great-little-radio-player for playing radio over internet, smtube for playing/downloading youtube videos directly in mplayer (no more flash killing your CPU), support for mtp protocol in dolphin (so you can access your android phones easily), small but handy kepas utility (zeroconf KDE4 file transfer tool) and more

must say that i'm very happy with kde4 in 3.0 which has everything what average user would need - maybe except for office suite.

[tome]

instead of .dat can be .disk extension (like Ubuntu) or another that doesn't clash with other file-types

no more flash killing your CPU

there is also script or app for choosing threshold of cpu usage for run processes

[francois]

@fanthom:
Thanks for talking more in detail about the advantages of ffmpeg in respect to the other packages that will be coming with porteus 3.0. Browsing for video editors, I realised that kino could work with ffmpeg. Looking in PPM, there is kino as porteus module already. So I will still be happy, especially that you will incorporate ssr as a basic tool.

[tome]

no more flash killing your CPU

some apps uses much cpu, but doesn't require so much and works nice with cpulimit (flash, windows apps)

[wread]

@fanthom
this is what I get, when I configure for cube animation:



With four or with two desktops...

[cttan]

Hi fanthom,

Yes. Kernel config:-
CONFIG_IWLWIFI_P2P set to y?

Pls refer previous post in Hardware:-
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=2006

[Axel]

@Axel, Archive Manager can open this kind of files - use p7-zip module.

Thanks! for your suggestion tome but i don't like terminal to open .7z files, so i will use PeaZip 5.20-Portable

@Axel

Support for multimedia plugins in Gecko browsers (SeaMonkey, Firefox, FirefoxESR...)
Gecko-Mediaplayer-1.0.8-i486-2alien.tgz

this requires gnome-mplayer and kde4/razor does not have this player included

Yeah, i know it. I forgot to tell, that in this case, it was for xfce

Support for .7z and others (.ace, zipx, etc) compress files.

too big to my liking but will see what i can do about it

Ok, thanks!




Cheers!

[fanthom]

@tome
dont want to change .dat to something else as it would require massive doc update. i have added it to freedesktop.org.xml and from now on .dat containers will have the same icon as modules and users can mount them with right mouse click.

@wread
will check tomorrow - apologize for delay

@cttan
bad news - p2p was removed from iwlwifi driver in recent kernels:
click here