I have just upgraded from Puppy Linux 4.12 to version 4.30. The steps for installing or upgrading Puppy linux have always been very simple, if you what to take advantage of its ability to install into an existing partition. This partition might have another operating system installed into it. This method is referred to as the 'frugal' install. See here for installing onto a hard disk or here for doing the same onto a USB disk.

The Puppy installation comprises the files shown in the graphic. These are compressed files. They are decompressed at boot time. The files to instal are:

• vmlinuz: the linux kernel;
• initrd.gz: the boot image file - contains a file system of linux startup directories and boot programs;
  
• pup-430.sfs: the Puppy system - a "squashed", ie compressed filesystem, mounted as a read-only union file system;
• (optional?) devx-430.sfs: another squashed filesystem, also mounted as a read-only union file system to give extra facilities for developers.
  

The steps to install are:

1. Download and mount the Puppy iso.
2. Copy the above files from the puppy iso into a new directory.
3. Set up options in your boot loader to boot it. I use grub. The entries for grub's 'menu.lst' file are shown in the graphic.
   

This achieves an 'instal'.

To "upgrade", copy over any pupsave* files from your old directory, ie from when you ran an old version of Puppy. They contain anything that you have added to the system, ie additional files and directories, and markers to anything deleted from the standard Puppy system. This includes software and your data: documents, config files etc. Some of these files, ie those that came with Puppy and that have been changed since installation, are upgraded from 4.12 to 4.30 automatically the first time you use them with Puppy 4.30. Typically, the changed files are switched out to /tmp so the new Puppy has reverts to its new version's default settings.

The upgrade that I ran, from 4.12 to 4.30 was not perfect. Desktop icons did not reappear. This might be due to not upgrading from the immediate predecessor, 4.20. Since I do not keep any key files inside my pupsave file, but instead store them on another hard disk partition mounted when running Puppy, I built a new pupsave and set up some basic configuration items afresh, ie

• display (X) config
• country, locale settings
  
• network connection
  
• desktop background
• automount to another linux partition to keep my data files outside of the pupsave* mechanism
  

It took much longer to write this blog entry than it did to do the upgrade.

I wrote a post as a separate page here, hoping to concisely document in one page how to get sound playback and also recording to work under Jaunty. However the Jaunty has taken sound support backwards with respect to recording. What worked with 8.10 Intrepid is now broken with 9.04 Jaunty. The post is currently incomplete, although is still fine for playback, at least hopefully for machines with similar hardware to mine (eg AMD CPU, nvidia chipset on Gigabyte motherboard).

This is a simple short movie that describes how to make simple short movies from your Ubuntu Linux PC. The original intention, as related in the movie, was that it is sufficiently short that it will fit up onto Youtube and fit within their size and time limits, which are

• 10 minutes in length, and
  
• 10mByte filesize.
  

I originally intended to put this onto Youtube, but Youtube's limitations are a bit, well, limiting :-). I make several attempts/takes back in September, then gave up getting it reduced sufficiently for Youtube. Then today I decided that I might just as well publish what I have got so far, else the exercise might never see the light of day at all. So this version is here at present, as the attachment. Just download the attachment and play it.

After several 'takes', this take, squashed into 7minute 12 seconds, fitted into an 'ogg' file of 10.6mbyte. This was the closest I got to the acceptable Youtube filesize limit. If I refined a script I could reduce the take by a few seconds more, and get down to the 10mByte limit. Further compression would be needed to screen size, frame rate, compression factor, and/or video format, to further reduce the file size and allow a full 10 minutes of video, which is the logical goal for publishing files onto Youtube. Then again, there is probably no real need to publish this sort of video onto Youtube. Perhaps your videos can be just as easily published onto your blogsite such as how this one is, as the file attachment to this blog post, which itself serves as the introduction and 'trailer notes' etc to the movie. In addition, a trailer with a link to it could be published onto Youtube. So in essence, perhaps the best solution all round is to not attempt to fit within Youtubes limits at all. One day I might replace this movie and blog by one that focusses on this solution right from the outset.

Note that currently the movie is in 'ogg' format. I do not know what software you need to play this on Microsoft Windows machines, but I am sure you can find something. If you are lucky you might even find free software for Windows. For Linux machines many software packages are available, and of course they are free. Most movie players installed automatically with most Linux distros will play ogg files.

Most computer screens look very nerdy when they start up. I don't think this is necessary in this day and age. As computers mature we do not need to know all about the operating system and what it is loading. That is why we now have boot splash screens. However the login screens still look unnecessarily formal. As long as a login and password entry box is there somewhere, the rest of the screen ought not look like a refugee from a military installation or penal institution.

So how to improve your 'experience' as Micro$oft likes to term it?

1. Run linux.
2. Set up a nicer login screen (or at home where security does not dictate it, skip it and have the machine boot straight into your account). I thought I would like a nicer login screen, so a few years back I looked into how GDM works. This screenshot shows how it typically looks on my machines these days.

When you start up most Linux-based computers the GDM (Graphical Display Manager) programs starts and controls your login. It presents the screen where you login from. I wrote a script that sets up for inclusion onto this screen whatever links to photos you like. The end result can look something like this, my current startup screen. Parts or all of the background and inset pictures could be controlled this way, and changed on a daily, weekly, monthly etc basis. It is a good way to have a corporate image, plus a 'message of the day' appear at startup time.

The screen shown here is built up of a background jpeg photo and several png images that have transparent backgrounds. Specifically:

• The entire screen background is the photo of the moon at night.
  
• Additional png files, composed via the gimp graphics editor, can be overlaid, eg (Fireball XL5). Save the png with the options set to preserve transparency. This could be set to change, eg daily. Conversely, I have lately imported all static graphics background component images as a series of layers into the gimp, as this is generally quicker to do. The master for this is saved as a .xcf (native gimp file) and the published variant is a .jpg comprising the merged layers.
  
• The inset photo anchored lower left changes, in my case, daily. This is achieved by a shell script that is autorun at machine startup.
  
• The screen is completed with the login box, and the status information and "Shutdown" etc buttons along the bottom.