Linux Lubrication for the Brain

The Puppy Linux Answer To Bitmap Graphics: MtPaint

2011-08-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in previous posts about Puppy Linux, it's not just small, it's loaded with software to do the things most people want to do with their operating system. Many of the utilities are described in the Puppy Linux Review web page. The review there shows that Puppy has utilities to do word processing, spreadsheets, network browsing, file sharing, chat, and ... graphics.

Graphics programs can easily chew up resources, and Puppy Linux is designed to keep resource use under control. To do that and still offer some graphics tools for users, the developers of Puppy Linux provide two lean and mean graphics programs for users to enjoy. One, Inkscape lite, is a vector drawing program. It allows one to easily draw objects and if desired paint them in any color. Each item drawn is carried as a separate object, so moving objects around, resizing them, or rotating them is very easy. It's a fine tool for quick, scalable drawings that can be easily included into documents.

The other, MtPaint, is a bitmap painting program. It's more the flavor of Photoshop or Gimp. However, in keeping with Puppy Linux's emphasis on small and efficient, MtPaint is a light duty paint program. But, does that mean it's incapable of doing any real work?

I think not. While I admit that I usually reach for Gimp to create my t-shirt and poster designs, I recently worked with MtPaint to see if it had the muscle to let me make new creations for my POD work.

At left you see both a screen grab of MtPaint, and a design created with MtPaint that's currently featured in my Printfection Bowling Duds online store. The design features used were the oval drawing tool, the free hand and line drawing tools, the rotation tool, the paint tool, the gradient fill tool, and the text tool. The result is a design comparable to many popular designs I've created with Gimp.

Examining the screen grab, you can see many of the tools featured on the tool bars at the top of the illustration. Down the left side is a handy tool for selecting colors, though other color selection tools are also available, including a color picker tool that lets you set the paint color to some color already on the canvas. The color picker tool is especially useful for touching up photographs.

MtPaint Has Lots Of Paint Tools

To be sure, MtPaint has far fewer tools than its much fatter big brethren. But it has many of the tools most commonly used for digital image manipulation, and some interesting takes on tools that give it some very useful capabilities. Certainly it has, as shown on the tool bar, tools that let you free hand draw, draw independent or connected straight lines, smudge drawings for special effects, draw rectangles and ovals, and draw polygons or arbitrary shapes. As the image at left shows, it offers many different brush sizes and types.

MtPaint Does Color Gradients

Any outlined shape can be filled with a color or a simple fill from the center color gradient as shown at left. Rectangles and ovals can be outlined in the current color and brush width, or filled with a solid color or controlled gradient. By controlled gradient I mean a selectable gradient pattern, such as linear, bi-linear, radial, conical and others.

The above images illustrate the linear fill gradient. The left image shows the typical two color gradient, which goes from color A (the current paint color) to color B (used for gradients). But MtPaint can go a bit further. As the right image illustrates, you can use the custom gradient tools to create a gradient that spans many colors -- as many as you like in whatever order you like.

The gradients can also be created with repeating sequences of the selected gradient patterns. As near as I could determine, to use a selected gradient pattern in an arbitrary shape instead of just the fill from center default pattern, you must draw the desired gradient in a rectangle or oval and then use the polygon selection tool to cut out the shape you want from the gradient filled region.

For example, I used the circle fill gradient with an off-center radial pattern to fill the circle at upper left. It gave the circle a neat 3-D appearance. Then I used the polygon select tool to cut the arbitrary shape from the gradient in the circle and paste it to a new layer or location, like the image at upper right.

MtPaint Supports Layers

If you plan to make complicated or elaborate images with many objects that you may want to manipulate and position, then you need to use a graphics program that supports layers. Layers are separate canvases that can be stacked in any order. Fortunately, as the illustration at left shows, MtPaint does support layers. Shown is the layer tool.

The layer tool lets you create new layers to hold drawings, choose to view only the layer you're editing or all layers stacked upon one another (if all but the bottom one are transparent or have one color that's set to be transparent). You can duplicate a layer, and re-arrange layers. The re-arranging of layers lets you choose which layers hold foreground objects and which layers hold background objects. As you would expect, layers towards the bottom of the list are also at the bottom of the layer stack and thus in the background.

By creating specific objects each in their own layer, you have the ability to independently modify any object without affecting other objects in their own respective layers. You can resize a layer, rotate a layer, or skew a layer horizontally and/or vertically, among other things. Then, using the check boxes at the right of the tool, you can choose which layers in the stack are visible. You can save each layer, and use the layer menu save as option to create a txt file that can be loaded later for further work. Loading the txt file restores all of the saved layers in the original order. The layer menu has an option that lets you combine selected layers into a new composite layer, which can be saved as a completed painting.

There are many other features in the impressive but small MtPaint. For example you can create animations with MtPaint, which can be saved as animated gif files or converted to mpeg videos. You can load and save a large number of different file formats, the default being png. There are also three channels that you can use on each layer to add additional special effects. There's the alpha channel, the mask channel, and the selection channel. The alpha channel gives you some control over how transparency is handled, the mask channel lets you create masks to protect parts of an image as you modify other parts, and the selection channel lets you do things like use an arbitrary shape, or even text, as a cookie cutter to cut pieces from a drawing or photograph.

There's a pretty thorough html instruction manual that comes with MtPaint, and it spells out how to use all of the features. The only features I had difficulty understanding were the channels. But with very careful reading I was able to work my way through the examples. Depending upon your digital painting experience, you may have more or less trouble understanding channels than I did.

It's often stated that with MtPaint you can do the simple things like crop or rescale a digital photograph, and maybe adjust the contrast. I think it's much more capable than that. One could certainly produce art or drawings for documents, and even enter into the t-shirt or poster business with MtPaint. That's not to say it can do everything Gimp can do, but it can be used for far more than simply image cropping, scaling, or other basic operations.

I used MtPaint to make the comical Linux t-shirt and mug design at left. You can see the design on many available products at Laptop On Linux.

Find out more about MtPaint and how it stacks up by reading my full MtPaint Review.

The Puppy Linux Frugal Install

2011-08-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

If you like Puppy Linux, but would rather have a version installed on your hard drive than to keep using the CDROM or a USB flash drive, then you may want to consider a hard disc install of Puppy.

Puppy Linux, like most other versions of Linux, can be installed in full on an internal hard drive. In Puppy Linux nomenclature, this is called a Full Install. This is an option readily available through the Puppy Install utility, available through both the Puppy Linux menu system and an install icon, shown at left.

A full install of Puppy Linux is much like a full install of any other Linux operating system. The requirements are a Linux formatted disc partition of 2 GB or so. An ext2 or ext3 partition will do. The full install won't use up 2 GB, but at least that much space will be needed to give you some operating space.

Features Of A Puppy Linux Frugal Install

However, there is another way, a very clever way, to get Puppy Linux installed on a hard drive partition. It's called a Frugal Install. In Puppy-talk, that describes an install that simply copies about four files from the CDROM to a directory on a disc partition of your choice, then uses about 3 lines of text added to a bootloader that references the Puppy Frugal Install. The frugal install takes up less than 256MB of space on your disc.

Don't assume that with such a small amount of resource being use by Puppy that you have a very bare-bones system. It's quite the opposite. The frugal install of Puppy offers a full range of utilities to do everything from word processing to web design to graphics to multi-media. The incredibly small disc footprint is from a combination of factors, such as having carefully chosen utilities that give good function but are light on resource reqirement, and by having a compressed file that holds all of these utilities.

The frugal install option is also available once you click on the install icon and go through the procedures.

The frugal install of Puppy Linux is perhaps the most ingenious of the frugal installs I've encountered. With the Puppy Linux version, you'll first find that it's very easy to accomplish. You can get full details on the procedure at my Frugal Puppy web page.

The Puppy Linux version of frugal is designed around very efficient use of a thing called the unionfs file system, described in some detail at my Puppy Linux Review web page. The Puppy kernel is designed to load enough smarts to allow it to locate your frugal install, mount the compressed CDROM system file (obtained from the copy on your hard drive frugal install), and integrate it with the kernel files in an overlapping, seamless integrated directory structure via the unionfs file system.

To you the user it appears that you have a normal, standard install, with a normal directory structure that you can browse and work with. You can even make your own additional files in directories in the structure, or add your own additional directories.

How Do You Save Your Work?

When you exit your frugal install for the first time, Puppy Linux will offer you the chance to create a Save File. If you allow Puppy to make it (and you definitely should), Puppy will create a special file that is compatible with the unionfs file system. The file will be created in the same directory used to hold the frugal install files.

From then on, when you boot into Puppy Linux from your frugal install, Puppy will mount your save file and the unionfs compatible system file, and integrate them into the seamless, normal looking directory structure. All of your additional files and directories, and even additionally added software packages, will all appear where they were on your last boot.

Puppy shows the amount of space left on your save file with an icon at the lower right of the task bar. An example of some task bar icons is shown at the left. The green icon looking like a pile of green bars is the one for displaying the amount of free space still left on the save file. As the save file gets used up, less green bars are displayed. Clicking on the icon will bring up a small window that gives details of the save file space.

But fear not filling up your save file. At any time, you can simply go to the menu system (leftmost icon on task bar or right-click in unused screen margin) and select Utility. That will bring up a menu like that at left, where you can see the entry Resize personal storage file. Click on that, then choose an increment size. The next time you boot, Puppy Linux will up-size your save file by that amount.

How To Make The Most Of The Frugal Install

If you want to make serious use of Puppy Linux, I offer the following suggestions:

First, before you install, make a partition for Puppy Linux to occupy. You don't have to do this, but by doing so you can get as much performance out of Puppy as with any Linux system.

Second, follow the instructions at Frugal Puppy Install to make your installation.

Third, I suggest setting up a directory at the partition root level for housing your directory tree. You can get to the root level of the partition in Puppy by going to the /mnt/home directory. If you go there, you'll see the directory where your Puppy frugal install files and save file are stored. At the /mnt/home directory, make a directory to use for all of your future files. I made a directory named pup. Then in my user directory, which is /root in Puppy Linux, I made a soft link to my /mnt/home/pup directory, making it easier to navigate to. To make the soft link, I did the following instruction:

ln -s /mnt/home/pup /pup

This command created a link called /pup that when referenced, actually takes me to /mnt/home/pup. Under /pup, I make all of my future sub-directories, like doc for documents, bat for batch files, bin for executable files, and pics for pictures. Of course, you can make directories by any name that you wish. The point is to make a directory at the partition level that you use to build a directory structure for the files you make and use.

I try make all of my additional sub-directories within /pup so as not to have the /mnt/home partition level area too messy.

Why do this?

Because by making a directory at the partition level for the start of your directory tree, you avoid having all of your files placed in the save file. There's a few advantages to this.

One, you can make better use of the full partition by not being confined to a save file that you have to keep expanding. That way, the save file primarily has only the additional software you might install using the Puppy package manager.

Two, you don't have all of your eggs in one basket so to speak. If something goes wrong with your save file, you don't lose any of the files you created.

Three, the files in your out of save file directory tree are not involved in any Frugal Puppy Linux upgrades.

Conversly, there is one advantage of having everything in a save file, and that is you can make a copy of it to some other location as a backup. But you can just as easily do a tar zip of your directory tree and back that up instead.

This is just a suggestion, but one I've worked with for some time now. I have Puppy Linux installed on about 5 computers in my home, and it's the primary system on 4 of them. I've found that having my files in a partition level directory tree seems to be an efficient way to get the most use from Puppy.

For more details on the Puppy Linux Frugal Install, check out Frugal Puppy.

What's The Next Step In Using Puppy Linux?

2011-07-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

So now you've booted your Puppy Linux CD and found that you really like the system. You appreciate the compact design that can boot entirely into memory and run like gang busters. You see that rather than a gutted distribution, Puppy Linux is a carefully constructed, full featured version of Linux. You want to move to the next step.

What is the next step?

Make A Save File

The best next step depends greatly on what it is that you want to do. If you are primarily a Windows user and want only occasional use of Puppy, maybe the next step is to simply let Puppy create a save file on your Windows sytem when you shutdown. This save file will keep all the work you've done, and will automatically be reloaded when you next boot from your Puppy CD.

This save file can safely exist on your Windows partition in that it's nothing more than a cleverly constructed file. It can grow to as big as perhaps 4GB if you need that much, which is a vfat file size limit. If your Windows partition is in NTFS format, the save file can be many times bigger than that. So you could simply keep booting from the CD when you wish to use Puppy, and find all your work always automatically available, and always preserved when you shut down.

Even Better, Make A Save File On USB Flash

If you work on more than one computer, you may find that your next step is to direct Puppy Linux to create the save file on a USB flash drive instead of your hard disk. Most flash drives come in vfat format, and the save file can be non-destructively installed on a vfat flash drive. This lets you take your Operating system CD and all your flash disk data with you. You can then boot to your portable system on almost any computer, and have all your work conveniently at hand.

You can get detailed instructions of the Puppy flash drive install at my web page Installing Puppy Linux to Flash. There you'll find detailed instructions on creating a USB flash drive install of Lupu-Puppy.

Better Still, An O/S And Save File On A Flash

Taking that concept one step further, you could click on the Install icon and chose the Universal Installer option that can install Puppy Linux on a USB flash drive. That would give you a complete operating system that easily fits into your pocket. You can even direct Puppy Linux to put your save file on the same USB drive that holds the install. Now the operating system and data are on one ultra-convenient package.

Pitfalls?

So what are the pitfalls and constraints to all these options?

By booting from CD, can you still install additional software?

Yes, it will simply be saved to your save file along with your data, to be automatically available when you reboot.

Since it's possible to save data to a Windows formatted partition, can you also install Puppy non-destructively to a Windows partition?

Yes, you can. But you must use what's called a Frugal Install method, which installs a few necessary Puppy files to a directory you can name. Then you must install grub or some other boot loader so that you can boot to either your Puppy Linux system or your windows system. Detailed instructions for this process are available at How Not To Install Puppy Linux.

Puppy Linux also offers a Full Install option, in which it installs much like any other Linux distribution. With this kind of install, Puppy Linux does not entirely boot into memory using the compressed CDROM Puppy file, but instead becomes a more traditional disk-based system. You cannot do a full install non-destructively, and you cannot do a full install to other than a Linux formatted partition.

If you have room in your computer for another disk drive (it doesn't have to be big, 5GB or more would be functional), you could make that disk a Linux drive and put a full install of Puppy Linux there. Actually, if you go with that option you may want to create both an ext2 or ext3 partition to hold Puppy, and a few hundred megabyte Linux swap partition for Puppy to use.

Unless you have a very old computer that is both slow (a few hundred MHZ processor speed) or small (less than 256MB of memory), you gain little by doing a full install over a frugal install. The frugal install is also easier to maintain and is less apt to get corrupted. And you needn't be installing to a Windows system to make use of the clever frugal install. If your current system is a non-Puppy Linux system, you can also use the non-destructively Frugal install to a partition of your Linux system.

Can any computer that supports USB also boot from USB?

Sadly, no. Keep that in mind if you want to make the ultra-portable USB flash with Puppy install. A target computer has to have the option to boot from USB for you to make full use of your flash disk install.

Experiment with your CD boot and local disk save file a bit until you get a sense of what you really want to do. Then check back for how to follow up on some of the options discussed.

Puppy Linux And Windows In Harmony

2011-07-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you're aware that many distributions of Linux come packaged in live CD form. This means that the CDs are bootable, and bring up the respective operating systems for you to examine. Most of these live CD distros also offer the option to install to your hard drive if you like what you see.

It's a very nice concept in that it lets you get a sense of the flavor of the O/S, how easy it is to configure, and how easy or hard it is to use. It also lets you see what utilities come with the initial package. Some come with minimal utilities, maybe a browser and a word processor and little else. Some are packed with many utilities that span networking, word processing, office management, graphics, and multi-media.

The live CD also lets you see how an operating system matches up with your computer and associated hardware. You can discover if the packaged O/S can find and set up your network card, sound card, and video. If it fails in any of these areas, you may want to look at something else, since getting these issues worked out later can be quite difficult.

So you can learn a lot by testing out an operating system on a live CD. But in most cases, you can't really do more than that. Most live CD distros don't actually perform well from the live CD, at least not nearly as well as they would if installed to your hard drive.

That's where Puppy Linux is so incredibly different. It, like the others, lets you get a sense of feel of the O/S, what utilities are included (lots), and how well it detects and sets up your hardware. In most of the instances I've tried, Puppy Linux has done as well or better at setting up hardware as any other Linux distro. My only failure was with a relatively new HP Compaq laptop, where Puppy Linux had to default to a sub-optimal video resolution. Newer Puppy distributions have the right driver for my laptop.

But Puppy Linux, if you have 128MB or memory or better, will load the entire CD into memory and run entirely in RAM, allowing you to re-use the CD for another purpose. Since everything is already in memory, utilities load and run very fast, at no loss of performance. So the Puppy Linux live CD is not designed just so you can check it out, but so you can also use it effectively.

In fact, if you have a Windows system, you may find that running Puppy Linux from CD is not just a nice way to evaluate the system, but the only way to go. You can boot it up quickly (quicker than your Windows system in all likelihood) and operate effectively.

When you are ready to shut down Puppy Linux after your first boot, you'll be given the opportunity to create a save file. Don't worry, this save file can safely exist as a file on your Windows system. The file is a rather special file, in that internally it orders you data into a directory map that matches where you created the files while in Puppy. When you reboot later, Puppy Linux will load your save file and map it into the Puppy Linux file system so it seems as if you'd saved data directly to the live CD.

The display at left shows a portion of the Puppy Linux task bar. The green symbol shows you how much space is left in your save file. As the file is used up, the green bars change color.

The initial save file is something relatively small, about 256MB. As you install additional software with the Puppy Linux package manager and/or create additional data or document files, you'll see the task bar indicator show you what file space you have left. You can go to the menu system and click on the Utility then Resize personal storage file option, and bring up a dialog box that allows you to increase your save file size.

At left you see the dialog box for adding size to your save file. It lets you select the increment you want, from 16MB to 512MB. When you next boot, the system will inform you that it's resizing your save file. If you check on the internet, you'll find references that suggest that the save file can begin to get corrupted when it gets up to about 4GB. That turns out to be a Windows issue, not a Puppy Linux one. The FAT 16 and FAT 32 file systems have a maximum file size of just over 4GB. NTFS doesn't have that limitation. So keep that in mind if you're saving data on a Windows system.

As a convenient alternative to the CD boot, you can use the Puppy Linux install utility to install Puppy Linux onto a USB flash drive. You can then choose to put your save file on the same flash drive as the operating system, giving you an extremely convenient way of having your Puppy Linux O/S and data ready to use on any computer able to boot from a flash drive. Talk about convenience. Instead of carrying around a stick with you data, you carry around a stick with your data and your O/S.

Next time around, I'll discuss how to effectively us Puppy Linux in conjunction with another Linux operating system.

Lucid Puppy Grows Up

2011-07-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

The growth of Puppy Linux has been phenomenal as of late, both in terms of maturity and in terms of use. Since the introduction of Lucid Puppy things in the Linux community are heating up.

Puppy Linux, as described on the Puppy Linux web page and at Puppy at Wikipedia, was created by Barry Kauler, who seems to be somewhat of a visionary and master script writer. Puppy has always been its own thing, and not completely derived from any specific source. It's always been a small footprint version of Linux, packed with a full compliment of utilities for doing what most people want to do on a computer. So if you wanted to browse the web, create documents, burn CDs, listen to music, watch videos, write programs, or create graphics, Puppy Linux has had tools for you to work with.

The tools have always been chosen to do all of these things, but be small and efficient as well. Tools like Abiword for document processing, Gnumeric for spreadsheet work, and Mtpaint for creating graphics. Included with Puppy are also some cleverly designed products combined into useful utilities with well designed scripts, like the Pcurlftp utility for sharing files between Puppy systems.

But being its own thing came at a price that many potential users haven't wanted to pay. While the considerable effort by the creators of Puppy to provide a full complement of capable if light utilities is obvious enough, the repository for additional software has always been much less that offered by many other flavors of Linux. For this reason, the idea that Puppy Linux was mostly a rescue CD of the ilk of Damn Small Linux became a prominent description of this underrated product. It certainly does do the rescue job admirably, bit I think the current versions are well beyond that limited capability.

The new Lucid Puppy provides all the compactness and cleverness of previous versions, but connects its package manager to the Ubuntu archives. The Puppy Linux package manager can convert the Debian and Ubuntu DEB files to the Puppy standard PET file structure, and then install the packages. And while not all packages in the Ubuntu archives properly install, many do, and many more install but for a couple of missing libraries, which can be installed easily enough (more about that in a later post).

So Lucid Puppy seems to give nearly all that one might want, especially if computer resources are limited. To learn more about Lucid Puppy, I invite you to check out my Puppy Linux Review.

My next few blogs will give some Puppy Linux hints and tips, covering things like how to best use Puppy Linux as a supplement to either a windows or other Linux system. And how to setup Puppy Linux as a primary O/S. Also how to get Puppy Linux configured to use ssh, and work together with your other systems. There will also be tips on how to configure Puppy Linux so that upgrading it is a snap.

Puppy Linux Reaches Out

2010-09-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Behold, Lucid Puppy

If you've considered trying out Puppy Linux, but thought it was just too small a distribution to consider -- think again. The new Puppy Linux 5 series is out, and it is something to Woof about.

Seriously, Barry Kauler, originator of Puppy Linux, has been working feverishly on a new design product called Woof, which lets him and his team create new versions of Puppy Linux from different Linux archives. The current Lucid Puppy Linux is derived from Ubuntu Lucid.

Why is that important? Because it lets Puppy Linux in on the extensive software archives of Ubuntu, that's why. Previous versions of Puppy Linux suffered from having small collections of Puppy compatible software packages. I've been there, scouring the internet to find a favorite application that wasn't in a particular Puppy Linux distribution. Now, if there isn't a Puppy package for what I want, there's a good chance I can install from the Ubuntu or Debian archives.

So why not just use Debian or Ubuntu in the first place?

Well, I do in fact, on some of my computers. Each has it's place. But if you're primarily a computer user rather than a developer, Puppy Linux offers a lot, with a healthy dose of the Less is More philosophy. It does so with an easy to use design that will work well for existing Linux or Windows users.

First, there's the ease and low risk way of trying Puppy Linux. Download a copy of Puppy Linux and burn a CD. Then boot it up.

Yeah, I know, you're expecting a sluggish boot up and lousy experience trying to run off of a live CD. You're in for a very pleasant surprise. Puppy Linux isn't a tryout and optionally install CD distribution. It's a "run indefinitely from CD" distribution with an install option. It works great from CD.

Puppy Linux loads the entire CD contents into memory if you have 256MB or more. That means that unlike most live CDs, it runs fast -- really fast. That design concept also frees up the CD for other use while you're in Puppy.

If you're running on an older computer that doesn't have that much memory, don't despair. Puppy Linux will figure it out and work with the memory it has available.

When you do get Puppy Linux running, you'll notice a very presentable desktop, loaded with icons that launch a wide array of useful tools. Things like Abiword for creating documents, Gnumeric for creating spreadsheets, Mtpaint for creating graphics, Inkscape Lite for drawing, and the list goes on. Additionally, there's a pop up menu that offers many more useful products. A pretty incredible and eminently useful collection of tools.

So what happens to your documents, graphs, and downloads when you decide to shutdown Puppy Linux?

When you get to that point, Puppy Linux will offer you the chance to create a save file for keeping all of your work. That save file can exist on your existing Linux install, and even your existing Windows install. When you boot from the CD at a later time, your save file will automatically be found and loaded, and you'll be right back where you left off. Next time you shut down, the same save file will automatically be used to save your new work. That's pretty cool.

Puppy Linux can be installed to your hard disc, and the designers suggest you consider using what they call the Frugal Install. That's a clever install that basically copies the CD contents into a directory. Then you can set up a Grub boot manager that can access the Puppy CD copy as well as your previously installed systems. In this way, little disc space is used, and installation and upgrades are simple to implement. While then booting from a disc image, Puppy Linux continues to operate as it did when booted from CD.

You can even install Puppy Linux onto a USB stick, and have your save file put there also. This gives you a totally portable operating system that can be brought up on any modern computer with no impact on the computer's existing operating system. Incredible -- is it not?

I've been working with the new Puppy Linux, and have had good success on both an old Dell laptop and a modern Compaq laptop. The resources of the two computers are vastly different, but Puppy Linux works well on both. You can read more about my experiences with Lucid Puppy on my Puppy Linux Review page.