Goodbye to a friend - John de Murga
John de Murga (aka John Murga) was the owner of the official Puppy Linux forum, formerly located in http://murga-linux.com/puppy/index.phpIf you use Fatdog64, you will know that we hosted our support threads on the same forum.
But my involvement with the Puppy Linux forum dates back well before then. I started browsing the forum when I was still a Windows user back in 2006; and joined in 2007 when I was converted into Puppy Linux user - and had been a regular on the forum ever since. Until the forum went down in early July 2020.
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But in all my years being John's forum, I don't really know John Murga. Not personally. Never met him. Never spoke with him. Not even knowing how he looked like - well, not until a few days before I wrote this. Not through my fault though, I only know bits and pieces that he himself chose to share, for he himself claimed to be 'the man of mystery'.
He and his work, however, left an indelible mark on my life. It was such a simple work. Setting up an online forum. What was so difficult about it? Get a web-hosting site. Click a button, and you've got a forum and up running. Easy. Everyone can do it, right?
No. Not every one can do what John did.
The forum he set up was the forum where I spent lots of my past life on. Where I got help when I started and when I stumbled. Where I, eventually, helped others as I became proficient enough. Where I, unexpectedly, met and became friends with people in the real world.
All of these because he had the tenacity to keep the forum going for 15+ years; and let the forum to govern itself instead of strict policing found in many others. He even had the magnanimity to allow people to post links of competing projects and forums. This was one of the factors why so many people stayed on and the forum grew to become the melting pot of folks from all walks of life, sharing the same interest - Puppy Linux, and Linux in general.
So it was great shock and sadness that I learn of his passing recently in May 2020. I was even more stunned to know that he had left a young family - a daughter and twins who were born shortly after his passing. I have young children myself, I could not even begin to contemplate how it must have felt, to be left so soon, and so suddenly.
Nevertheless, I would like offer a prayer of hope for whom that John's family, that John had left a legacy that not many people could manage to do: to change the life of thousands, if not then ten thousands. John had left many friends that he himself probably didn't know. I was one of them, one among the thousands. For us, he is a hero. In every sense of the word.
Goodbye, John, and all blessings in your next journey.
You will be missed, but not forgotten.
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Eulogy from 01micko, the current steward of Puppy Linux
Eulogy from Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux
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Fatdog64 updates - behind the scenes
Fatdog64 was last released on 23 Jan. And although we have been quiet, it doesn't mean that things stopped. Things are still going in the background, bug fixing, adding features, etc.Here are a few major things that has been going on, in no particular order.
1. Puppy Linux forum user ICPUG has indicated possible issues with Fatdog savefile residing on an NTFS partition, especially partition shared with Windows. This is due to the way Fatdog uses ntfs-3g: it runs with full permission control enabled. It makes NTFS behaves like POSIX filesystem and we can use it for save directory (not only save file), but on the other hand it makes Windows complain about not-granted access each time the partition needs to be accessed from Windows.
Based on this feedback, we have added "ntfsnoperm" boot parameter to disable that permission control. When this parameter is used, ntfs-3g is run without permission: it would behave just like FAT filesystem (all files and directories are owned by a given uid/gid specified at mount time). It would not be possible to use a save directory on NTFS, but at least the permission wouldn't be touched and Windows will stop complaining.
2. The same ICPUG also found an old bug related to the above: where the user "spot" would be unable to access a Downloads folder that has been relocated to a save partition if the save partition is NTFS. This has been fixed.
3. Fatdog has long supported btrfs. The kernel is built to support btrfs and we have the complete btrfs-progs included; and nominally we support having save directory on btrfs. But this does not actually work; because "aufs" - the unifying filesystem layer that we use to make the magic happen, does not support btrfs the way it supports other filesystem. For the techie: the problem is that aufs cannot have its xino file inside btrfs. It has to be somewhere else.
Thanks for our team member SFR (his Puppy Forum name), this was brought to attention and he shared a fix too. The fix was tested, worked on, and finally merged: now, save directory will work seamlessly on btrfs-formatted partition.
4. The original motivation for doing (3) above was actually to attempt to use a compressed filesystem. This has been a particular interest for me for years. The last time I explored this (a couple of years ago), btrfs wasn't mature enough and there was no other native writable filesystem with compression support. Sure, there were native filesystem with compression support - but they were all readonly (squashfs being the most popular one). Sure, a couple of FUSE filesystems support compression too (in fact it's their number one feature), but they were not actively maintained and being done in userspace, it was slow. I never got enough motivation to implement them properly with Fatdog.
Btrfs finally changed this equation. By now it should be considered mature enough (although probably not as hyped as before), and it supports compression as well. In fact, it supports three different compression algorithms: lzo, lz4 and zstd.
So as we fixed btrfs save directory support, we grafted compression support too. If the kernel parameter "btrfscompress" is specified, the compres