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http://thehamsters.synthasite.com/downloads.php

http://hamster-linux.blogspot.com/

Take a look at those beautiful distros! They worth it!

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DejaVu has full support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, which is amazing for a Free and Open-Source font. The Unicode standard defines a quarter of a million of characters (glyphs), so you will be able to find fonts that do not provide full Unicode coverage; you need to install fonts for the missing Unicode blocks.

On my blog I have written an entry in Coptic; the script they use to represent the ancient Egyptian language and it is currently used in religious documents of the Coptic Church in Egypt and elsewhere. The Coptic script is derived from the Greek script and it reminds the writing on icons of the Byzantine era.

Coptic is a new script in Unicode, so only a few fonts have support for it. If you read the previous blog entry to the one with the funny letters, you will have a full picture of the Coptic script and where to get fonts from. The blog entry that you cannot read at all is written in Greek, using the Coptic script, meaning that if you install the proper font you will be able to read Greek! The post actually has a secret message in it…

In linguistic terms it is really bad to describe as Chinese some text that is not easy to read, as Chinese is a well-described language and definetely has nothing to do with encoding problems. If you use Linux, you should be seeing boxes with four hex numbers in them. If you put the numbers in a sequence, you get the Unicode codepoint of the missing character.

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Switching to Ubuntu is something I wouldn’t do since I can
do developing easily with Gentoo and FreeBSD. I liked the
Puppy idea because benchmarks proved it to be faster than
Gentoo 1% to 5% depending on the application. Not to mention
how fast each application loads. There are some issues though
which make my life harder. The correspondence with the developers
takes time and I am really running out of time. As for the power
management I think you have to compiler your own kernel from scratch.

What is missing is a HowTo explaining step by step the construnction
of a custom-puppy distro. Then you can do it once burn it and have everything
you really need really compact and nice. We have to convince somehow the
developers to write such a HowTo. I know that some puppy from scratch do
exist but they are really limited to a semi-automatic way. I am talking
about doing everything manually. Download source code and compile yourself.

I have installed DejaVu fonts and they work fine. There are some webpages
though including your own (not the current one but the blog one) where
I see “Chinese” instead of Greek. Is there something missing? I have
installed dejavu-ttf-2.6.tar.gz. Do I need to install al the other packages
as well? Please let me know.

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If you would like to do development, I would recommend you to try out Ubuntu Linux 6.06. It has out-of-the-box support for Greek and also allows easily to setup a build environment using a GUI tool. Most new hardware are supported out of the box. There is a version of Ubuntu called Xubuntu, which uses the XFCE window manager, which is ok for small systems. I do not know the level of localisation on Xubuntu; I guess the Ubuntu is the best you can get at this time.

Puppy has some small issues here and there; they are easy to fix but then it’s important to contact the developers so that the fixes are added in the new version. Although this sounds natural, it’s sadly common that small fixes do not make it in the distribution and people get used to manually fixing between versions. This issue has been happening with the Greek font support in distributions; users where told to install the Microsoft fonts as the first task when they install a distribution, while there are Greek fonts of acceptable quality already available.

I cannot help you with the development specifics of Puppy; I had an issue myself when trying to install Puppy 2.0 on a USB stick where the default paths of the files was wrong. I do not understand yet the process of duplication of Puppy to other devices to fix the issue.

Also, in Puppy 2.0, the power management kernel modules for my laptop are not available, therefore the fan works all the time; that’s something I do not want to have. How do I find the kernel modules?

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What one should do to install it is boot with puppy 2.0 CD then
reboot immediately and when you are asked whther or not you want
to save the pup_200.3fs you say yes and you choose where you want
to save that file(some FAT32 or ext3 partition will do fine).
Then you reboot and place the devx_200.sfs file in the same partition
pup_200.3fs was saved. You reboot once more and if you open a terminal
you can see that all developing tools (make, gcc, g e.t.c.) work fine.

What happens if you want after all that to install puppy to some hard-disk
partition? You follow the script but … after rebooting you frick out
because the developing tools are not there \”command not found\”. This
issue didn\’t show up with older versions of puppy like the pizza.iso.
Everything worked fine as it worked from the live CD when I use the
pizza.iso live CD. Do you know why?

Moreover is it possible to install emacs in Puppy? I have searched
all the packages and the corresponding files but there was nowhere
I could find emacs compiled for Puppy.

Anyway I like puppy too much because it is small and compact and
it provides a very user friendly interface for setting up network
(specially wireless). Other Linux Distros (Gentoo blablabla) are not
so user friendly as it concerns a lot of stuff. The problem with
Puppy is that it doesn\’t provide a port system like Gentoo or FreeBSD.
I would like to be able to compile my own kernel and compile and download
ports as easily as I can with Gentoo or FreeBSD.

What do you think?

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I am not aware of an existing tutorial that describes the issues of adding Greek support to Puppy Linux. I believe that such tutorials should exist for languages such as French, German, Spanish, etc.

Regarding fonts, you can add Greek support by simply adding the DejaVu fonts, found at
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/
in the directory ~/.fonts/
The DejaVu fonts provide adequate support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, so you can safely use as the default system fonts.
I hope the Puppy Linux project use the DejaVu fonts as the default fonts, bringing a uniform desktop for all latin/greek/cyrillic-based languages.

Regarding writing support, it is an issue of having the xkeyboard-config (google this) package available with the X server.
I checked the previous version of Puppy (before 2.0) and I noticed that all keyboard configuration files from XFree86 where not installed. Puppy 2.0 includes Xorg which is really good. I do not know if xkeyboard-config is there; if it is, you simply need to run

$ setxkbmap -layout \’us+gr\’ -model pc105 -option \’grp:alt_shift_toggle\’

If \”gr\” does not work, try \”el\”.

I am not aware of a keyboard indicator applet that shows what is the current language, in the windows manager that Puppy Linux provides.

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If such a tutorial doesn’t exist out there then could you please
address those issues?

Cheers!
Simeon.

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Cheers from the Puppy Linux enthusiasts! ( http://puppylinux.org )

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