SOHO-RC2.8 is out please leave feedback and bug reports here

[retired1af]

Moe? Question.... In the VL6 Standard installer, I did find the option to pass extra options (as in rootdelay=10) during the installation process. This wasn't in the SOHO installer. Is there a way to put that back in?

[toothandnail]

Yeah... Learn the keyboard layout codes

However, I must repeat - an installer that can't get something as basic as keyboard layout right is at the very best, questionable. There is NO other distribution that has problems getting  that much of basic locale settings correct.

If that can't be fixed, I repeat (yet again), the GUI is pretty well worthless. You have got to be able to get the basic install correct!

I can fix it easily enough. A newbie will be completely lost, and if the newbie is lost, the GUI install is a waste of time and effort. Time and effort that would much better have been spent getting the rest of the distro up to date, or working on the 64-bit version, both things that Vector needs urgently.

The old TUI install correctly set keyboard settings. The VL6.0 install got keyboard layout correct (though that may have been done with the final text mode section - don't remember).  Surely it can be done for the new all-singing-all-dancing installer. If it can't, IMHO, the GUI installer is fatally flawed.

Paul.

Let's not forget that you are the ONE guy that complains about this. It's nice to see that you know what areas the distro needs help on, and yet all I hear is complain, complain, complain...

  Oh, you don't like my response to a dismissive answer like "Yeah... Learn the keyboard layout codes "?

As to my 'complaining', I was under the impression that a beta test involved testing and reporting problems. Which I have done, for all the good it does me.

Why dont we try this?
submit a bug report to the installer project, telling us what you select for locale, keyboard model, and layout and also tell us what the end result is. After that, tell us what you change and where you changed it to get it right.

I will do so. I was not aware that the bug tracker was still working, given that almost all discussion of problems has been in this area of the forum. Maybe that will get something other than dismissal of legitimate problems!

You are more than welcome to use older versions with the text installer or fix the text installer yourself to make it right.

I'm also more than welcome to find a distribution where basic flaws are fixed. Maybe its time I did just that. I'm getting more than a little tired of spending a great deal of my limited free time attempting to improve a distro which is unwilling  or unable to fix basic install flaws.

Paul.

[M0E-lnx]

@retired1af, Not sure what you mean, but if that was a boot option, it's nothing I did. I dont recall coding anything like that into the installer code.

@toothandnail

I'm getting more than a little tired of spending a great deal of my limited free time attempting to improve a distro which is unwilling  or unable to fix basic install flaws.

So, you should understand exactly how I feel when someone does nothing but complain about things and dont actually help the repair process. You have no idea what it takes to write something like this, so a little help would be greatly appreciated.
The installer is a separate project with it's own bugtracker. Check earlier release announcements, we gave it a bug tracker for a reason. I made it clear long ago that I wont be keeping up with bug threads. My time is very limited between RL, work and other (programming) projects.
I dont want this to get personal, I apologize if my responses were out of line, but you must understand where I'm coming from.

[retired1af]

@retired1af, Not sure what you mean, but if that was a boot option, it's nothing I did. I dont recall coding anything like that into the installer code.

Hmmmmm. I'll see if I can get a screen shot of the installer later today. Another gorgeous day out today that's clamoring to get my "to-do" list finished. 

[caieng]

I am in.
success at last.

Here's what happened: 
My 16 year old monitor died, whether of natural causes or my own errors is unconfirmed, nevertheless, the monitor is gone, replaced with a brand new monitor.

With it, in the boneyard for old parts, is (finally!) the 17 year old CDROM drive, once a true queen, now a piece of junk.

Those two changes made all the difference. How Puppy Linux could install with those two relics is a mystery to me....

VL 6 SOHO RC 2.8 is installed, and WORKS.  Thank you.  Thanks especially to Vec and nightflier, for lots of patience and helpful advice.

I was able to download VLC, and Konqueror, which is the only browser I can configure to accept VLC, maybe the others also permit such configuration, but I have not been able to figure out how.....(Opera, SeaMonkey)

Here are the times:

Computer is C8, ASRock Dual-880 Pro chip set (via) PIV "D", (dual core) 3.0 GHz, 1.0 GByte RAM, SATA hard drive, benchmarks:  13 GIPS, 11 GFLOPS, 4.77 GB/sec memory bandwidth, Video controller:  Nvidea GeForce 4 MX 440 AGP 8x.

Installation:  2 hours (due to lots of fumbling around, if I had known what to do, could have taken half that amount of time)
boot up:  100 seconds (for comparison, Win XP requires 35 seconds)
Browser:  Konqueror, start up, 4 seconds, (Win XP with Sea Monkey needs 6 seconds)
Play Audio:  VLC (handles all three modes !!!!, aaC+, mp3, OGG) 4 seconds, (same for XP)
Shut down: 21 seconds, (XP requires 10 seconds)  Typing "halt" from a command prompt, i.e. what Linux calls a "terminal", causes shutdown in just 11 seconds.

Problems:  1.  I could only configure Konqueror to work as I wish, i.e. with VLC, the other browsers, FireFox, Opera, SeaMonkey, just laughed at me.

2.  Though I struggled, mightily to find a method to permit automatic login it was NOT EASY.  Having at LAST succeeded, I was then disappointed to encounter an error message during the boot up process, which claimed that
"your login shell is not listed in /etc/shells"
Whoopdi do.
Who cares?
Not me.  I just want automatic login.  I have no interest in what seashells contains, or for that matter, any other UNIX jargon nonsense.  So, no automatic login, no further interest.

If I click on "automatic login", then, POINT FINAL.  END OF STORY.  I don't expect to encounter any more irritating crap, from the bloody operating system.

What surprises me, is how SLOW this KDE business operates.  Those times are comparable to results obtained with a cpu that runs three times slower, with half as  much memory, operating at a bandwidth ten times slower than this computer, but, the access time to the internet, and the time to commence playing music IS THE SAME.

I am also surprised at how terribly primitive this KDE functions.  For example:  hardware detection.  click on it:  boom, NOTHING happens.  nothing at all.  ("hardinfo")  There is no hardware detection.  click on icon for cpu information, NOTHING, nada.  Zilch.  Zero.

Why are we paying for this huge KDE overhead?  What is it providing?  I can't even login automatically.  VASM is useless for addressing these concerns.  Since I still cannot login automatically, despite intense fooling around, this distro joins the rest of the coasters, now a six inch thick pile of plastic.

With other, more attractive distros, one simply inserts the cdrom, and half an hour later, one is listening to VLC producing music.  The automatic login feature, selected at installation time, works right out of the gate.  No fussing about later, fiddling here, fiddling there......

With VL 6 SOHO RC 2.8, the installation is still just cruising along after 30 minutes, even with a dual core 3 GHz cpu driving the ship.  Amazingly inefficient.  It takes just as much time to install on this "relatively new" computer, as it does on a cpu that runs one third as fast, with half as much memory, i.e. one that is ten years old.

CAI ENG

[MikeCindi]

kcm_useraccount.so looks for multiple libraries with version 2.0 but all of them are version 2.1. After creating all the symlinks then it works.

A few keys on my keyboard don't work once VL loads. They work in my bios and XP and worked with rc2.0 (both 'down arrow' keys and 'end' although it works on the number pad). I'm not sure what to make of this and why it's happening.

After trying to hibernate (which fails as per my previous post) then suspend does not work as it only locks the screen. Rebooting does not correct this (reloading VL does as this is the limitations of my ability and time).

EDIT: Keyboard keys are working again. Not sure why or what changed over the past 45 minutes or what caused it in the first place. I hope it's not a fault KB.

[retired1af]

I've run into the arrow key issue myself, usually within a browser (Opera).

[MikeCindi]

I keep having them work then not work. I haven't figured out what changes to cause it though. Right now they're not working.

[Daniel]

Caieng, have you tried using the auto-login configuration thing in the KDE control center? I think it's somewhere in "User Accounts" or something like that.

[caieng]

have you tried using the auto-login configuration thing in the KDE control center? I think it's somewhere in "User Accounts" or something like that.

Yes, thanks Daniel, sorry that my last post was too obscure.  Yes, I clicked on one of the control submenus, and found, after a lot of searching, the automatic login feature, and enabled it.

It was AFTER that invocation, and subsequent rebooting, that I encountered the irritating message, about my supposed failure to include my account in some mysterious file somewhere. 

Of course the user shouldn't be obliged to engage in all this silly business....
The user should be able to click once, on the option for automatic login, and then, that's it.  End of story.

But that's not how this distro works.

The best distro, for that feature, from my perspective, is Ubuntu, which asks the user DURING THE INSTALLATION, if they prefer automatic login, that is very easy, one click of the mouse, and finito.

I am still struggling to boot up VL 6 light live from last summer.  I have some hope for success, following nightflier's excellent recommendations on that thread, but as yet, nothing doing.

I am hoping that one of these days, maybe next summer, or next autumn, someone will release a VL distro that fulfills my two obligations:

a.  VLC media player already configured, ready to run out of the box, no user input required;
b.  automatic login, bypassing all the password stuff.

I seek to turn on the computer, and hear music from a streaming audio web site, with the fewest possible keystrokes required from the user.  Ideally, that would be a single stroke, following power on, the click of the mouse on the icon of choice:

http://www.listenlive.eu/classical.html

Some folks think that the best way to accomplish that goal is to DELETE significant portions of the OS, removing all of the many unnecessary processes.  Others recommend instead, creating a new distro, from scratch.

I am just amazed that with HUNDREDS of existing distros out there, NO ONE SEEMS to have noticed that there is no distro that fulfills those two simple requirements (automatic login, VLC integrated with the browser) for those lost souls who seek to employ older computers as FM radio receivers, from the 50's!!!

Well, I guess most folks working on Linux weren't listening to FM radio in the 50's!!!  Haha.

Of the existing distros, Puppy is very good, but, uses Aqualung, not VLC.  Aqualung requires two extra keystrokes from the user.  A real pain.

The best distro, at present, in my opinion, for accomplishing what I seek, with old computers (and I have a lot of them), is CrunchBang Alpha, released about a month ago.  Now that I have destroyed my old monitor, and purchased a new one, Crunchbang, Ubuntu, and Debian suddenly appear with the proper screen resolution!!!  haha.  There was never anything wrong with my computers, it was the MONITOR that was preventing those distros from displaying anything but 800 x 600.  Hmm.  I wonder why Puppy worked, and they did not.  Oh well, one of the mysteries of life.

Back to VL 6, and my struggle to get VLC working, on VL 6 light, and then, to be able to boot in, without having to start up using the CDROM every time. 
Still, you must admit, that image, Norwegian Fog, is absolutely the all time best desktop image.  I keep it on, running on one computer, day and night, just from the cdrom, because I can't get it installed!!! It looks terrific, especially on a 47 inch LED display.  What a great photograph....

CAI ENG

[GrannyGeek]

If you want to open Web media files with VLC in Opera, go to the Tools menu, Preferences, Advanced, Downloads. Highlight the file types you want to change, do Edit, then select Open with Other Application and type in vlc. When you want to listen or view one of those file types, VLC should open and play the file. I'm not aware of a plugin for VLC in the VectorLinux repos; I don't know if a VLC plugin is available at all. It may have problems if there is one, which would explain why you haven't found a Linux browser that uses VLC for multimedia on the Web.

I've never heard of anyone having XP start and stop times that are anywhere near what you're reporting. While the XP desktop appears pretty fast, it's nowhere near ready to do much (or any) work with, as there is too much going on and too much disk activity. Many people report two minutes before disk activity stops and real work can begin. In Linux when the desktop appears, you can start working right away. My startup times for all my VectorLinuxes on my slow 1.3 GHz Celeron are 40 to 45 seconds and I can work immediately. Shutdown on all VectorLinuxes is about 10 seconds.

HardInfo is missing in VL6 SOHO. Install it through Gslapt. This shouldn't be necessary and I don't know why HardInfo is missing in SOHO and it shouldn't be if VASMCC has an icon to start it. But...if you want it it's easy enough to get it.

Having a 6-inch file of rejected CDs should tell you something. ;-)
--GrannyGeek

[GrannyGeek]

I'm using Inkscape on SOHO RC2.8. The package is missing some python libraries needed in order to embed graphics in the document. These are pretty important libraries if you want to move documents among computers.

I installed a couple of python libraries through Gslapt but embedding is still not available. It works properly on my VL6 Light computer. I'm going to see what I have installed there and if I can spot what's missing in SOHO, I'll see if I can install them and get Inkscape working with embedding.

Running with XFce 4.6.1 as my desktop environment instead of KDE, I'm getting very good performance on this old 1.3 GHz Celeron. With KDE it is slower and less responsive.
--GrannyGeek

[caieng]

HardInfo is missing in VL6 SOHO. Install it through Gslapt.

Thanks, I will give it a try.  Strange how people work, eh?  Me, first thing I do, after a fresh install of Win xp, (something one must do quite frequently, I am sorry to write...) is to reinstall Sisoft Sandra.  I do that before anything else is configured.  I wouldn't know how to proceed without checking to make sure that all components are working correctly...  HardInfo is just an option here?  For my distribution, it would be an integral part of the OS, sitting right on the desktop post install.  I guess most Linux users are oriented to brand new gear, so they have no need to check out the functions of the older components.

Umm, is that also how you procured VLC, with "Gslapt"?  I must have missed it somehow, for when I looked, I could not find it.....

If you want to open Web media files with VLC in Opera, go to the Tools menu, Preferences, Advanced, Downloads. Highlight the file types you want to change, do Edit, then select Open with Other Application and type in vlc.

I was fooling around with the new Puppy 5 last night, and accidentally discovered this method, which you kindly outlined.  Thanks for your help.  Unfortunately, VLC is not available for that distro, either--though at least Puppy 5 installs effortlessly, and requires no silly passwords to commence working....

... which would explain why you haven't found a Linux browser that uses VLC for multimedia on the Web.

I think this is a misstatement on my part.  I should have clarified that it was VLC, not the browser, that holds my interest.  What I sought to convey was the notion that the user, upon clicking once on any icon from among the many choices at
http://www.listenlive.eu/classical.html
would hear music, at once, without delay.  Some browsers work faster than others, to accomplish that task, in my experience.
here's some data:
computer:  C8, PIV "D" 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Nvidea video controller:  boot time:  46 seconds
OS:  XP SPII, all tests using VLC 1.05
browser..................browser onset time (seconds)......hear music (seconds)
Sea Monkey 2.04  .................6..................................7
Opera 10.53..........................7.................................6
Chrome................................4..................................6
Safari 4................................7.................................12

VL 6 SOHO RC2.8.......  no music, zero, nothing

CrunchBang 10 alpha (Xfce)
IceWeasel 3.5.8 (FireFox)........4..................................4

Running with XFce 4.6.1 as my desktop environment instead of KDE, I'm getting very good performance on this old 1.3 GHz Celeron. With KDE it is slower and less responsive.

Here's the same CrunchBang distro data on two of my older, test computers
Trident PIII@1.4 GHz..............6...................................6
S3Savage4, PIII@1.1 GHz........6...................................6

I've never heard of anyone having XP start and stop times that are anywhere near what you're reporting.

My times start with pushing the reset button, or power on button, and cease upon observing the disappearance of the hour glass.  It is difficult to know, especially with KDE, when the actual boot up is completed.  Is it when we hear the nice chime?  Is it when the infamous "akonadi server", whatever that is, has completed its task of issuing dire warnings?  I generally wait until after all the icons appear along the bottom of the screen, so that I can click on something and see immediate response.  I do wait ten or fifteen seconds, before starting up the browser with XP, so feel free to add another dozen seconds to the boot time.  Stop times on the other hand, are quite definitive.  When the power goes off, there is both an audible clunk, and extinction of a light right on the computer case.  Halt times are more useful in comparing operating systems, because off is off, there is no controversy over when an action has completed.  The computer is still on, until that light is extinguished.

regards, CAI ENG

[prince]

  I'm having trouble booting into that pretty splash bootup that Dweeberkitty mentioned earlier.  I chose Vesa just like last time, however, upon boot up the screen blacks out then proceeds to a stricly text bootup with a black background, why? I missed the previous GUI/Text bootup. I'm falling asleep trying to find answers

[prince]

The whole system just goes through some kinda freeze panic, just before you can set up user account and password, during install on the Toshiba NB205 netbook.  I chose Vesa for the 10.1 in" screen, but it won't get to desktop.