true story:

a friend of mine was working with his brother-in-law. "great guy," he says... hard worker- no patience. they're building a beautiful deck on this high-end house, with a complicated stairways design. they're having problems.

after an hour of SNAFUs, my friend makes a plea to his in-law "can we just put down out tools, pour over the prints and come up with a fix for this thing?" the maniacal reply: "WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO THINK. WE ONLY HAVE TIME TO WORK!"

as the community grows and our options widen, its going to be more difficult to keep puppy together. it almost has to be done slightly differently or not done at all.

however, no matter how many changes i go through in life, i'm still me, and retain the qualities that make me great. i hope we can find all of puppy's best qualities and preserve them. this page is dedicated to just that. of course, puppy is a very busy project. i hope that there will always be time to stop, look at the plans, and think.

public domain documentation blog∞ this is my personal answer to documentation. anyone can post to it, they don't need to login, i chose blogspot (rarsa uses it too which is reassuring) because it's easy for guests to post to it without signing up. even if i have to enable spam protection, it is still pretty amazingly easy for people to post.

the information here can be used in ANY of the many documentation projects that people organize for puppy users, that's the other special thing about doing it this way. you can help by commenting there, i fold the comments into the main post and put your name in the credits.

the part on puppybasic is a work in progress. it's based on my more extensive tutorial on qbasic, which i use in dosbox and dosemu/xdosemu (xdosemu is better for qbasic graphics programs than dosbox, you know.)

now a word on simplicity in design...

simplicity isn't simple. think of it like compression... it makes a file smaller but it takes a complex algorithm to make it compress. the more compression there is, the more sophisticated a process is (usually) required.

similarly, every time you make something more simple, you have to put more thinking into the process of making it simple for someone else.

so you could denote at least two levels of simplicity:
internal simplicity: the stuff under the hood that is working invisibly and "automagically"
external simplicity: the kind that is normally added to with future versions of a project... (optional wizards -even by default- are a good thing, but only when you put a lot of thought into their design)

it's worth considering that what drives most distros/foss software projects/commercial products into relative extinction are an imbalance of external and internal simplicity. for example: dotpup was very simple. dotpet is more complex. this can be okay (and it might be eventually.)

dotpet seeks to make things externally more simple. this is not a bad thing. but when the internal mechanisms are not designed in a simple way, they can become difficult or impossible (or impractical) to maintain and are soon abandoned for something "simply better."

while it's good to make things externally simple, if the constant effort to make things simple on the outside makes them more and more complex on the inside, eventually the internal complexity will start to show up as far as the user is concerned: it no longer "just works," and soon you find the project tangled in a complex array of fix-its which (in turn) don't reliably work:
1. too strong/careless a drive to make something simple for the user
-> 2. things slowly become too complex internally to maintain
-> 3. things start to become too complex for the user

in other words: making it more simple to use makes it more complex to use. that's the paradox, and the thing that the best devs go to great care (and employ great brilliance) to avoid. with luck, when things get unbalanced, they get rebalanced. when they don't get rebalanced, they simply stop being used.

puppytypes - the puppy zodiac∞ this is a half-serious post i wrote based on the zodiac. different kinds of people try to move puppy in different directions, and eventually the group of users becomes a size that puppy splits into more than one distro. this is not a bad thing, but for the sake of the community and for puppy, i firmly believe that a community edition or another puplet (a derivative) can move in a direction that balances this wide array of desires. i am most interested in looking for ways to demonstrate these differences, how they can be balanced, and how puppy can move in a direction that caters not just to the largest number of people but the largest variety. the puppytypes is my latest offering in explanation, but i'm not done yet.

incidentally, i can tell you the kind of puppy that each person here seems to be, and eventually perhaps even what that says about what puppy used to / does cater best to, and other things. "puppy" himself (the actual chihuahua that puppy linux was named for) was a scorpaw. personally, i seem to be a "housepet." barry kauler, who created puppy linux, i believe to be a wagitstailatus. it's important to note two things: one, is that just because you clash with a certain type of puppy doesn't mean they are a better or worse type, just that some types work better together. second, that it is generally more important what type a person personally *identitifies* with most that what he seems to be. if barry tells me he is a scorpaw, fine. he's a scorpaw.



http://adaworld.com/mennonite/zips/piki.pup∞ here's a program i made and got working in puppy. it was the first thing i "ported" from dos to puppy, my first real "linux" mini-app. i use it many times a day in windows, too.



"piki is a text reader and shell based on the wiki concept. it is neither an html browser or a substitute for online wikis- also, it is not a server or localserver like didiwiki."

* works with leafpad and mp editor for updating pages
* launches programs and scripts
* helps organize data and notes
* stores web bookmarks

important note: the start_puppy script for starting from the jwm menu... works on my install but could really use a ./ to make it start reliably. that will be fixed in the second version, but it's 'easy' to fix yourself.

if you like piki, i believe you will have a lot to look forward to for console-based wiki software. when i "ported" piki, nohup was not (afaik) part of puppy yet, but it is a key to making piki work the way it was intended. you use nohup this way: nohup put-the-rest-of-your-command-here

and then the business of closing-piki-closes-program-you-ran-from-piki should go away, as should that business of running programs spitting data into the console (and piki.) nohup is included in puppy... v2.12 and later i think, puppy 1 users can download the .pup for it.



links: (just documentation for now)

http://puppydocblognode1.blogspot.com∞
help create public domain content that can be used by all projects!

klh's puppymanual∞

english puppymanual by oli∞
deutsches puppyhandbuch durch oli∞
manual en español por puppy de oli y caka∞
manuale en italiano per puppy di oli e antonio∞
puppy manuel dans français par oli et gw∞

also if you are reading this from puppy you have offline help by clicking "help"
or typing puppyhelp & in rxvt, or here: file:///usr/share/doc/index.html

---

CategoryUsers