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Release notes for LighthousePup version 3.01

Please see this thread on the Puppy Derivatives Forum for current release notes and user feedback.

Release notes for LighthousePup version 2.15

If you already have Puppy please reboot fully in RAM from the Puppy CD-Rom, typing at the boot menu 'puppy pfix=ram' and move or back up your pup_save file to another folder before booting LighthousePup. See hints and tips for further information.

The power, beauty and serenity of the ocean, the atmosphere and even earth itself has a profound impact on our lives and future. Though I live in the desert, I can take a deep breath and imagine myself on a beach, relaxing as the surf rolls in and then back out again. A lighthouse might be a symbol of our interaction with the sea.

With inspiration from images and memories of the coast, a grounding in Puppy Linux and the goal of an elegant, intuitive and efficient user interface LighthousePup was born. Many custom icons, graphics and themes were GIMPed or mtPainted with the abundant colors of the sea in mind. Lighthouse draws heavily on Mark Ulrich's Muppy Puplet as well as quite a few icons and influences of KDE without the full set of libraries and accompanying size and speed limitations of KDE in a typical Debian framework. SFS Expansion packs with more software--Lighthouse Mariner and Voyager--may follow. This is not an official Puppy release. It is a custom build based on Puppy v2.15CE, EZpup-1.29.05.07 with other updates, packages and customizations.

Desktop Icons and User Interface
Icewm 1.2.30 is the default window manager; JWM available also. Default browser - SeaMonkey w/Flash 9 (in Mariner .sfs - Firefox.) Default media player - Muppymplayer. Default text editor - Geany. Many new icons in menus and Rox-Filer 2.6 are 128x128 pixels from SuperGPLiconPak. Re-arranged and enlarged the start menu icons. Refresh menus (including fixmenus,) Restart IceWM, Restart X, and Switch to JWM in Window Manager Menu. (Fixmenus updates menu entries when new XDG compatible applications are installed.)
Recycle Bin
Added separate sound for delete; uses aplay, instead of play.tcl. New right-click option to view file size & contents, Normal Empty confirm displays file names and space to be freed by emptying the bin. New icons, tips and UI enhancements. Normal Empty now removes BOTH normal and hidden items; Quick Empty does NOT remove hidden items. File names with spaces still not supported. ToolTip on ROXapp suggests using '-' and '_', A-Z, a-z, 0-9 instead.

With the goal of reducing desktop clutter I linked several of the icons to ROXapp folders in /usr/local with special properties giving right-click menus and tool-tip descriptions for greater control and usefulness of each one. Make your own customizations easily. Just right-click and select 'Edit ToolTip or this Menu'. Use your imagination. For example, right click on AudioVideo and you can open Streamtuner or open and play XMMS. Right-click Documents and open related Editors/Office Applications or choose Open Default Text Editor, Default Word Processor, etc.

I found a colorful Conky configuration on their website and adapted it display stats and info I refer to most often. Conky is a system monitor, similar to Torsmo. Runs in a window, or right on the Desktop (root window) with transparency updated every 3 seconds or however often you wish. Very powerful allowing even shell script embedded in the config file /root/.conkyrc. Shows # of processes and procs sorted by top CPU usage% and top mem usage%, including Conky; current networking conns and torrents with IP addr, proc speed, uptime, ram, swap and file system useage. CPU and up & down network graphically displayed with rainbow colors.

Xonclock autoruns and displays analog clock with day and date at upper right corner of screen. Many settings and custom skins possible. See QuickLaunch | Advanced Settings | Edit Desk Clock Setup. Click on taskbar date to start and stop, also displays minixcal calendar.

XMMS Enhancements
I wrote the scripts to log current and recent song information so that this could be displayed on the desktop by Conky. Logs are erased at shutdown. My favorite skins, all plug-ins, effects and visualizations I could find are included; Streamtuner also. When XMMS is closed the current song details are replaced by a recently played list. XMMS often crashes when used with Streamtuner, so I made the wrapper close all instances whenever XMMS is opened or called by Streamtuner. Saves me a lot of hassle from going to the process list and closing those threads all the time.

This means that you should manually close XMMS after making any changes to the preferences them to be sure they are saved. Be sure to disable the Mad plug-in anytime XMMS is misbehaving (Preferences | Audio Plugins | MAD MPEG Decoder | Uncheck Enable plugin.) That one even seems to re-enable itself occasionally. I tried to removed it without success. XMMS config can be edited directly via QuickLaunch | Advanced Settings | Edit XMMS Config. Close XMMS first. If all else fails and XMMS won't even open, you can restore all settings to Lighthouse defaults by copying /root/.xmms/config_lighthouse to config.

Packages and Design Approach
PSI (Puppy-Software-Installer), Gslapt, PB-Debian-installer and hundreds of fixes, enhancements and pre-configurations are included. They may not work for everyone, but do for me and save a great deal of time each time I run Lighthouse or do a frugal install on another machine. I consciously and reluctantly decided to concentrate on making it all work within Lighthouse rather than releasing individual packages that may or may not work well with other Puppy versions. This may not be an ideal approach for Linux development but is a compromise based on my goals for Lighthouse and personal time constraints. I made an effort to comment and document within the configurations and scripts as much as possible.

Thank you!
I'm grateful and indebted to many talented developers, authors, testers, artists and users like you, whose work has contributed to the growth and strengths of Puppy and other Linux distributions. Without them Lighthouse wouldn't be the same. This free software comes with absolutely no warranty. For GPL, LGPL, other licenses and documentation see /usr/share/doc, www.fsf.org/licensing and www.puppylinux.com/faq.htm.

Sincerely,
TazOC

History. To get a better sense of how Puppy has evolved, it is helpful to read the release notes for earlier versions.
Puppy v2.15CE: http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy215ReleaseDetails
Puppy v2.14: http://www.puppyos.com/download/release-2.14.htm
Puppy v2.13: http://www.puppyos.com/download/release-2.13.htm
Puppy v2.12: http://www.puppyos.com/download/release-2.12.htm
Puppy v2.11: http://www.puppyos.com/download/release-2.11.htm
Earlier: http://www.puppyos.com/news.htm

Website
www.lhpup.org
www.puppylinux.org