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Author Topic: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far  (Read 3776 times)

Offline grandma

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Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« on: June 01, 2016, 07:51:26 PM »
1. Stuck with 3x for 6 years - stable - worked - firefox, tor, office tools reliable and
virus free - primary reason I finally dumped Win2000 in 2010. I tend to stick to
thie best releases.

2. 3x lacked modern HTTPS/SSL tools and many sites stopped loading. Some
worked using TOR but the list grew critically short.

3. Tried 6x - never could get that to boot and run.

4. 7X did - right out of the hole. I did this in 3x:

a) insert USB, find dev, do a dd if= zeros to /dev/sdb etc.

b) Ran grub4dos ver 3x and mkdosfs creating fat32 usb

c) mounted current release ISO as a drive and did
a cp -r to /mnt/sdb1 creating /mnt/sdb1/boot and
/mnt/sdb1/cde then added /mnt/sdb1/menu.lst and
/mnt/sdb1/grldr

Menu.lst uses the FIND vmlinuz option to set the root
then seemed to boot up 7x just fine. I did not use the
many options I had with the 3x menu.lst - bare bones.

This was done when  7x booted:

a) got leafpad working with a tce-load -wi This is a common
sticky point without wireless working and was solved years
ago by ELIMINATING WIFI ANTENNA DRIVER ISSUE from
TC environment. You get a universal wifi antenna, plug it
into your ETHERNET port and you don't have to worry if
TC has the wifi driver you need.

b) So next step was to grab Firefox - tried the getLatest
and other Firefox TCZs and rebooted 7x all of them BOMBED on
dbus-uuidgen missing.

c) tried downloading all the dbus tcz files.

STUCK. Any help would be appreciated._

OTHER QUESTION: in 3x I could set up a script called
onboot.sh in the .X.d folder and it would run that
on boot.

Any way to run a shell script on boot with 7x?

Thank you for the great adventure.

Grandma
~ Luv Grandma
"When children of all nations
play in the sandbox together
all morning-all day-all week, and
one fine sunny day; all year long ...
... then war will become an ancient memory
and Grandma can knit that sweater
you'll hold near to your heart
until long after you're my age.

Offline Rich

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Re: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2016, 09:07:32 PM »
Hi grandma
Quote
c) mounted current release ISO as a drive and did
a cp -r to /mnt/sdb1 creating /mnt/sdb1/boot and
/mnt/sdb1/cde then added /mnt/sdb1/menu.lst and
/mnt/sdb1/grldr
If you will be installing extensions, that should be  /mnt/sdb1/tce  not  /mnt/sdb1/cde.

There was a recent update to the Firefox getlatest that has not yet made it to the repo. It can be found here:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,17879.msg124287.html#msg124287

Quote
OTHER QUESTION: in 3x I could set up a script called
onboot.sh in the .X.d folder and it would run that
on boot.

Any way to run a shell script on boot with 7x?
Same as 3.X.

Offline grandma

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    • Back when a 10MB HD was $500 bucks
Re: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« Reply #2 on: June 01, 2016, 09:10:00 PM »
ONWARD:

Got
 ICECAT - the GNU Firefox - to load which is a bit better than DILLO.
Firefox still chokes in 7x.

Cannot get TOR to work with 7x (worked well in 3x until SSL issues -
above)

Cannot get ICECAT to open all sites - a somewhat crippled version of
Firefox, but better than Firefox that won't load at all.

Can't get JWM to load - chokes on librsvg - so I stole that from 6x
downloads - and now chokes on
libfribidi - so fonts and multi-tasking windows remain a bit crippled
without JWM.

Funniest thing - an issue I saw in 3x is still with us - when closing
some windows they never die and when moving some windows they put
TRACERS across the screen - which seem to disappear after a few ALT TABs
 to jump through windows.

~ Luv Grandma
"When children of all nations
play in the sandbox together
all morning-all day-all week, and
one fine sunny day; all year long ...
... then war will become an ancient memory
and Grandma can knit that sweater
you'll hold near to your heart
until long after you're my age.

Offline coreplayer2

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Re: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2016, 01:01:00 AM »
Good to see you again Grandma   

I always enjoyed reading your posts, but it's been a while..  ;D

Problem with latest firefox release is it now requires GTK3 like many other apps, extension has been updated and submitted.  Alas, new extension is not yet in the repo.  However did you try installing Firefox using the updated firefox_getLatest.sh script from the link below??  just asking because latest firefox works great with TC-7x though I've never tried to use it with TOR.

:)
« Last Edit: June 02, 2016, 01:05:06 AM by coreplayer2 »

Offline grandma

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Re: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« Reply #4 on: July 04, 2016, 03:54:11 AM »
had to bury the 6x/7x migration for the moment,
and as a result get to sign into email, banking,
whatever...with that pesky NO SHARED CRYPTO
message indicating I'm either in fake https land
with plain test transmissions or some other
crippled state. A lot of that may be issues
with email vendors and x.509 certs; as that
entire system is basically a corrupt, dysfunctional
train wreck anyway. As Snowden said; NSA
reads yer https in real time...indicating its
only a matter of time before teenagers
at Starbucks can too...pretty sure many
do already.

Read up on CDs and figured I'd try that route;
somehow get an ISO for 3x, then one for 4x
and work my way up to 6x slowly.

Problem (posted in other thread) is Cd's don't
seem to run extensions listed in onboot.lst
so mucking with that I tried the tce and cde
folder structures and bootlocal bootsync
all of that...no point describing it all here
as I just did there a second ago.

I did get one configuration to work once;
and it ran a script I used which then
checked for all extensions in onboot.lst
and loaded them - as they hadn't loaded
on the original boot - so I took care of
that after my bootsync.sh ran.

Problem was it made a mess of a lot of
other things; a persistent OPT folder
isn't a clean way of doing that - too many
programs want to use that area.

I also gave up on using the /opt/.tce_dir (3x)
and the etc (4x + ) methods for figuring
out where TCE is on the system and mapping
the optional folder.

Now on boot I scan everything in the /mnt folder
for any folder that has Xvesa.tcz in it - a rather
consistent indicator you're near the other
extensions - and then from there, the script
pokes around to find vmlinuz, bzImage, whatever,
and looks for onboot.lst and tries to RECONSTRUCT
the paths to tce and tce/optional and then
records those two folders for future calls
to tce-load or whatever...

That find works well...far more reliably than
the other .tce_dir method, which worked well
for years, but with the CD issues, now I get
a /tmp/tce in that file...when it should be
/mnt/sr0/tce/boot etc.

Lee suggested the CD is probably going
offline before TC has loaded or something;
so it gives up.

My scripts POUND the /mnt folder and
POUND the fdisk -l output and figure
out what devices MIGHT have the
boot files, extensions; whatever
and map it all up so I KNOW where
to find stuff later. No point skimping
on the "SYSTEM REGISTRY" if you wish
to use that term.

Anyway; with this inability of a CD
to load ANY extension at all, I am
still stuck in 3x land...happily though,
save the SSL problems...it is small,
tight, fast, ultra reliable and has served
me well for 6 frgin years.

I always said MSDOS 3.33 running on a 286
was the only reliable release Microsoft
ever put out...and to this day that remains
true.

Apparently TC 3.5x has a similar quality.

Something about VERSION 3X in the
development process equates to both
speed and reliability. I think that

Version 1x is naturally buggy
Version 2x fixed old bugs, but
new features added more and
often it runs slower
Version 3x is really a fine tune or
a blend of 1x and 2x and at this
moment in time, developers think
they actually have a little gold in
their invention and really polish it up.

Then 4x comes out - the bigger, better
faster, fatter release; with its bugs,
and 5x and 6x just keep getting bigger,
and buggier, and slower.

I will guess that given the same weak CPU,
like the Intel ATOM I have in one box I
often use, if I ran a huge sort with 3x vs 6x
3x would kick 6x to the curb for speed.

A client I had who processed medical records
took 5 hrs to run 2 weeks of data for 1 hospital.

The code I delivered after 45 days ran
6 months (26 weeks, or 13 2 week blocks)
of data for 2 hospitals in 5 hrs. It ran
on Tiny Core and was compiled with TinyC;
the tcc.tcz tiny thingy in the tce tiny
core combo I do love.

In other words I processed 26 times more
data in the same 5 hrs.

The code I delivered after 90 days ran
6 months of data for 2 hospitals in
72 seconds...again on the TCC TCE combo.

Their systems guy fell out of his chair;
the owner thinks it'd save hospitals
tens of millions A MONTH, so they
hired a lawyer to patent it all up.
I declined and walked away from
that project when the lawyers
started elbowing everyone around.

...I declined to deliver the source; heh heh.

Sometimes you bring a nuke to a gun fight;
and its better to just go to the saloon
for a cold beer and a game of cards,
than stand out on the street at high noon
and watch everyone get all hot and
excited.


~ Luv Grandma
"When children of all nations
play in the sandbox together
all morning-all day-all week, and
one fine sunny day; all year long ...
... then war will become an ancient memory
and Grandma can knit that sweater
you'll hold near to your heart
until long after you're my age.

Offline curaga

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Re: Grandma upgrade 3x to 7x - the report thus far
« Reply #5 on: July 04, 2016, 05:54:21 AM »
TCC's output is quite slow. It's common to have gcc's -O3 beat it by 2-4x, occasionally by 10x. So for final builds, you should consider building with gcc, and have them pick up their jaws from the basement instead ;)
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.