PCLinuxOS Openbox Bonsai 2011 for test

[melodie]

Hi,

I transferred the announcement about the last Bonsai (July 27th, with kernel 2.6.38.8.pclos3.bfs) into the first post. I hope the testers who first noticed the reboots will see it and say if now this is solved for them.

Taco.22 ? MrBill ?

I will also be waiting for the next addlocale and lomanager releases to be out (as pinoc says he has improvements to perform on them) before releasing the Openbox versions. In the meanwhile if all confirm that the systems don't reboot anymore after shutdown, I will update the Openbox full and Openbox Education to the same level.

Regards,
Mélodie

[jlf001]

Stay tuned, it's coming !

Downloading now,

Jeff

[melodie]

Stay tuned, it's coming !

Downloading now,

Jeff

I'll look forward to your feedbacks.

Regards,
Mélodie

[jlf001]

Stay tuned, it's coming !

Downloading now,

Jeff

I'll look forward to your feedbacks.

Regards,
Mélodie

Up and running in VirtualBox.  So far, no problems.  I'll be installing to my HP Slimline desktop, later tonight.

Jeff

[jlf001]

Hi Mélodie,

Your latest is up an running on my HP Slimline.  No reboots and shutdown works fine.  I've installed a few apps and have not seen an error.  I think you have your final!! 

Jeff

[melodie]

Hi Mélodie,

Your latest is up an running on my HP Slimline.  No reboots and shutdown works fine.  I've installed a few apps and have not seen an error.  I think you have your final!!  

Jeff

Jeff, if that is so, we should soon have 3 finals. I hope the other testers will also find it to work identically well on their machines !

Regards,
Mélodie

[gseaman]

Congrats, Mélodie!

I'll download this evening when I get home. I haven't had the problems others have had so I've been quiet. But, if something comes up with the latest, I'll let you know. 

Galen

[melodie]

Galen, thanks a lot !

Now... --->[]

;-)

[Yankee]

Melodie,

I found an error.

The gkrellm program produced the following error.   Doesn't do it with LXDE.
Changing themes is the action, one theme fails on Openbox.    Need more
info let me know.

Code: [Select]

[@localhost ~]$ gkrellm --sync
available 0The program 'gkrellm' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 39127 error_code 9 request_code 14 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

(gkrellm:2923): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_source_remove: assertion `tag > 0' failed
[@localhost ~]$

edit: it does do it on LXDE and Openbox when the desktop background is a solid color.   Probably
gkrellm's fault, just that one theme, "invisible".

[djohnston]

I haven't been able to test yet. I burned a CD this morning and installed to HD. After testing, I came back to the forum to find you had uploaded another one. I may have gotten the wrong image, anyway. I was getting APIC errors on bootup. (No, not acpi.) Anyway, I hope this is the last one to test. I have it downloaded and burned. Just need to install again.

[melodie]

Hi,

It was beginning to look messy there, this is why I had given the direct links to the iso and the md5sum file. I just put some order in the directory, so now you can see the files which are meant to be downloaded now: http://tyruiop.eu/~melodie/Downloads/ISOS/PCLinuxOS_cli_iso_and_children/

Regards,
Mélodie

[djohnston]

I have the latest installed to HD. Kernel is 2.6.38.8. Installation went smoothly. Shutdowns from live CD were normal. "Factory" time works like a charm. Haven't run Synaptic yet, except to uninstall LO and OO4Kids. This is on the older AMD with no net connection. I'm gonna fix that.

While digging around, looking for my other wireless card, I found some RAM to fit it. It's now gone from 320MB to 1152MB (2x512 and 1x128). Much better now. I'm gonna find that d*#% wireless card!

One thing. I'd be interested to know if anyone is using the ZRAM feature. I end up turning it off every time. What do you use it for, Melodie?

[melodie]

Hi,

I use it to be more comfortable with greedy applications. See I have the minimalist desktop, and use greedy apps. I have a laptop Nec 160 M with a Celeron that provides 1.46 Ghz, and has 1 Go memory. It's barely enough to run Virtualbox, but with zram as long as I don't try to start a kde4 there, it's ok. If I run a Kde4 there I close all other apps or almost. / and wait impatiently that it will have finished the boot and the display of the desktop...

In the new old machine I have, (refurbished T60 with dual-core and 2 Gb ram) I can have Kde4 in vbox, or I can have 2 vbox machines running if it's any else than Kde4. It does not last long, but allows to compare a few things during a short time. And I still can have Firefox and one or two more things running at same time, it won't lag or freeze.

I have zram enabled on all my machines. It's a good module which I had used before in Archlinux, and in Slitaz when I tested Slitaz on an old machine with a K6 cpu. :p
(at this time compcache had to be installed, the zram module was not yet in the kernel).

PS: zram can help a machine with 320 MB ram to feel much more comfortable ! It should be almost as if you had really 320+80 MB : 400 MB. With 1152, almost 25% more will give the equivalent of about 1440. Data compressed in ram is available faster than swap on hard drive...

[djohnston]

Are you saying you run the VMs in zram? When writing the article for the magazine, that was the only use I could think of. I realize that the data is compressed, once it goes into the zram block device, but it seems to me that for ordinary desktop use, it just takes away from available RAM. Especially if you have a large swap disk partition. And when my test PC only had 320MB to begin with, 25% of that was going to zram.

It's the same with my other older PC that has 512MB of RAM. I've been running the previous Bonsai on it for 2 or 3 months now, and it's super quick for the hardware specs. But, like I said, I disabled zram on that one, too.

[melodie]

Are you saying you run the VMs in zram? When writing the article for the magazine, that was the only use I could think of. I realize that the data is compressed, once it goes into the zram block device, but it seems to me that for ordinary desktop use, it just takes away from available RAM. Especially if you have a large swap disk partition. And when my test PC only had 320MB to begin with, 25% of that was going to zram.

It's the same with my other older PC that has 512MB of RAM. I've been running the previous Bonsai on it for 2 or 3 months now, and it's super quick for the hardware specs. But, like I said, I disabled zram on that one, too.

djohnston, it does not take ram away. You ram is still there. But 25% (with the actual configuration) is compressed under the shape of a block device. But for the user this is transparent, you don't see it, you don't feel it.

I don't use the vbox machines in ZRAM. I use the vbox machines in my PCLinuxOS Openbox system where zram is enabled.

Look at this scheme:

RAM
___1 GB_|__1 GB__
[------------|------------]

So above it represents 2 GB memory installed.

Now with ZRAM:

___1 GB_|__1 GB__-zram-
[------------|------------]--------]

the zram block device is compressed ram which is added to memory. *added*.

The 25% is a mathematical formula to calculate the size the block device will have. It is not retrieved from the total amount of RAM.

Let's say for an image, clothes that you just washed and which are full with water. You have them in a small bucket. But you have more washed clothes that you need to put in this bucket. Squeeze the clothes. Now they fit in. So you can have more clothes in the same bucket (more potential ram is available in the actual given memory space).

Next, I will try to add zram in a KDE4 machine in my system, to see if that works faster... In my Dell P4 with 1 GB ram, and cpu 2.8 Ghz, trying to use KDE4 is a real pain !

PS: you can have a large swap partition, which can be useful if you use hibernation. The datas stored in memory in ram, be it in zram will always be available faster than the datas stored in swap disk. This is a fact, when the swap partition starts to be used during a Xsession, all becomes slow in the screen, and you can wait for several seconds or more before a simple click to open a file, for example, brings the display of the given file.