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  1. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
  2. <html><head>
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  4. <title>PPM Help</title>
  5. <link href="../../share/doc/manual.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
  6. </head>
  7. <body>
  8. <div id="container">
  9. <div id="main">
  10. <br>
  11. <table style="text-align: left; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
  12. <tbody>
  13. <tr>
  14. <td style="vertical-align: top;">
  15. <h1>Puppy Package Manager (PPM)</h1>
  16. A "package" is Linux terminology for an application. These are held in
  17. online repositories, and you can download and install any package.<br>
  18. <h2>How to install a package<br>
  19. </h2>
  20. You click a radio-button along the top to choose the desired repository
  21. -- usually the left-most one is the one most suitable for your current
  22. version of Puppy.<br>
  23. <br>
  24. The radio-buttons aligned vertically on the left enable you to narrow
  25. the display to a specific category (these notes are for the 'Classic'
  26. user interface, 'Ziggy' UI has slightly different layout).<br>
  27. <br>
  28. Notice the checkboxes labeled EXE, DEV, DOC and NLS. Many Puppy PET packages are split into smaller packages, as follows:<br>
  29. <br>
  30. EXE: This is the actual application, you definitely want this.<br>
  31. DEV: This contains development files, only of interest to those into compiling source code.<br>
  32. DOC: This contains the documentation files of the package<br>
  33. NLS: This contains the international language files of the package.<br>
  34. <br>
  35. Note that all packages (if you only install the main "EXE" package)
  36. support English. The NLS package will add support for other languages,
  37. but this varies considerably from package to package. Some packages do
  38. not have any non-English support.<br>
  39. <br>
  40. Note that PET packages follow a naming convention, like this:<br>
  41. <br>
  42. <div style="margin-left: 40px;">
  43. abiword-1.2.3.pet ("EXE" package)<br>
  44. abiword_DEV-1.2.3.pet<br>
  45. abiword_DOC-1.2.3.pet<br>
  46. abiword_NLS-1.2.3.pet<br>
  47. </div>
  48. <br>
  49. Also note that not all authors of PET packages follow the practice of
  50. splitting PET packages into these component parts. In some cases there
  51. may be, for example, 'abiword-1.2.3.pet' which has everything in it. The
  52. reason that the splitting is usually done is to reduce the size of the
  53. main EXE package.<br>
  54. <br>
  55. As from late May 2012, the PPM is enhanced to support EXE,DEV,DOC,NLS
  56. filtering of Debian and Ubuntu DEB packages and Mageia RPM packages. For example,
  57. 'abiword-doc_1.2.3-3build1_all.deb' is recognised as a documentation
  58. package.<br>
  59. <br>
  60. When you click on one of the packages displayed in the big window,
  61. another window pops up asking if you really want to install the
  62. package, and also offers further information about the package -- so
  63. you can learn more about it before deciding whether to install it.<br>
  64. <h2>How to uninstall a package<br>
  65. </h2>
  66. When a package is installed, it appears in the window bottom-right.<br>
  67. To uninstall a package, simply click on it. There will be another window asking you to confirm deletion.<br>
  68. <h2>Package repositories</h2>
  69. There are various PET repositories. PETs are the Puppy format for packages, an acronym that we humourously say stands for <span style="font-style: italic;">Puppy Extra Treats</span>. Those on offer will depend on which
  70. Puppy you are using, but usually there will be these available at least:<br>
  71. <br>
  72. <div style="margin-left: 40px;">
  73. puppy-2: The very old Puppy 2.x series<br>
  74. puppy-3: Puppy 3.x series<br>
  75. puppy-4: Puppy 4.x series<br>
  76. puppy-5: Puppy 5.x series<br>
  77. puppy-noarch: These have no compiled executables and work in any Puppy (and any CPU)<br>
  78. puppy-common: These have compiled executables and are intended to work in any Puppy<br>
  79. </div>
  80. <br>
  81. A note about those last two: "noarch" packages do not have any compiled
  82. executables, so they will work regardless of CPU -- x86, ARM, whatever.
  83. "common" have compiled executables, and are a collection of packages
  84. used in most builds of Puppy.<br>
  85. <br>
  86. For your Puppy, you may also have others, such as 'puppy-quirky',
  87. 'puppy-wary5', or 'puppy-lucid'. One of these will be a collection of
  88. packages created specifically for your particular Puppy. For example,
  89. Precise Puppy is built from Ubuntu Precise Pangolin binary packages, and
  90. PET repo 'puppy-precise' has PET packages created explicitly for this
  91. pup.<br>
  92. <br>
  93. Generally, use those that seem most appropriate to your version of
  94. Puppy. The older ones have packages that may or may not work in your
  95. Puppy -- the older the repository, the more likely this may be the
  96. case. <br>
  97. <br>
  98. We mostly keep the old repositories available, as sometimes there is
  99. some old package that you really want to use. But as a general
  100. principle, look in the more recent repositories first.<br>
  101. <br>
  102. Your Puppy may be built from the packages of one of the other major
  103. Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware. In that case,
  104. PPM will offer those repositories. They are going to be the most
  105. compatible and the ones that you should look in first. For example,
  106. Precise Puppy, built from Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, will have the
  107. 'ubuntu-precise-main', 'ubuntu-precise-universe' and
  108. 'ubuntu-precise-multiverse' repositories.<br>
  109. <br>
  110. Of course, the packages of other distributions are not going to be PET
  111. packages. PETs have ".pet" on the end of the filename (file extension).<br>
  112. Debian and Ubuntu have DEB packages, with ".deb" on the end of the filename.<br>
  113. Slackware packages have ".tgz" or ".txz" file extension.<br>
  114. Mageia has RPM packages, with ".rpm" file extension.<br>
  115. Whatever the type of package, PPM is capable of installing it.<br>
  116. <h2>
  117. Searching</h2>
  118. The "Find:" box enables you to search for any package.<br>
  119. <br>
  120. You can type in a partial name, but a match is only found from the
  121. left. For example, if you do a search for "pan" you might find this:<br>
  122. <br>
  123. <div style="margin-left: 40px;">pango-1.28.1-w5 Library for layout and rendering of internationalized text<br>
  124. pango_DOC-1.28.1-w5 Library for layout and rendering of internationalized text<br>
  125. pangomm-2.26.2-w5 oo wrapper for pango library<br>
  126. pangomm_DOC-2.26.2-w5 oo wrapper for pango library<br>
  127. panoramixproto-1.1-w5 Panoramix extension headers<br>
  128. </div>
  129. <br>
  130. But doing a search on "mm" yields nothing, as there are no package names starting with "mm".<br>
  131. <br>
  132. However, the Find box will accept '*' wildcards, what is referred to as
  133. "glob wildcards". So, type in "*mm" will find all packages with "mm" in
  134. their names.<br>
  135. <br>
  136. You can even have multiple wildcards, for example "p*mix*to", which will find the 'panoramixproto' package.<br>
  137. <br>
  138. The search is case-insensitive, so a search for "PAN" will give the same results as shown above.<br>
  139. <br>
  140. As from May 2012, PPM also supports searching for multiple keywords. Also,
  141. the Description field is searched as well as the package name. For
  142. example, it you type into the search-box, "abiword plugins", it
  143. will find packages with these two words, either in the package name or
  144. the description.<br>
  145. <br>
  146. Also from May 2012, you can choose to search just the current repository
  147. or all repositories. Previously, it was restricted to current repo
  148. only.<br>
  149. <br>
  150. One thing to note about the search is that it searches the entire
  151. repository (or repositories), and ignores the vertical Category radiobuttons on the left
  152. side.<br>
  153. <h2>Installing without the PPM GUI</h2>
  154. You can actually download any package, from anywhere, and install it.
  155. All that you have to do is click on the package in the file-manager
  156. window, and the package-installer component of PPM will run and install
  157. the package. This works for many types of packages, including PETs,
  158. Ubuntu/Debian DEBs, Slackware, and Arch packages.<br>
  159. <br>
  160. Note however, if you install an individual package in this way, without
  161. going through the PPM GUI interface, any dependencies are not
  162. installed, and you will have to take care of that yourself.<br>
  163. <br>
  164. One good thing, a package installed in this way will show up in the PPM
  165. GUI installed-packages-window and it can thus be uninstalled.<br>
  166. <h2>How to update Puppy to next version</h2>
  167. A little while ago, someone criticised PPM, stating that it did not
  168. allow a complete upgrade of Puppy to the next version. The package
  169. managers in some distributions allow you to install all packages
  170. required to completely upgrade to the latest version of the distro.<br>
  171. <br>
  172. PPM does not offer that, because Puppy does not work that way. It is
  173. outside the ambit, or we could say the "contract" of what PPM is
  174. required to do. A new version of Puppy is provided as just three or four
  175. files. Say for example you have a "frugal" installation of Puppy on
  176. hard drive, it will consist of just three files, vmlinuz, initrd.gz and
  177. the main Puppy filesystem (for example precise-5.3.sfs). There is also a
  178. fourth file known as the "devx" (for example devx_precise_5.3.sfs). To
  179. upgrade, all you do is replace those files. It is a totally different
  180. system to a package-by-package upgrade. This page has more details: <a href="http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm">http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm</a> <br>
  181. <br>
  182. Regards,<br>
  183. Barry Kauler, May 2012<br>
  184. </td>
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