puppy wiki updated

I spent a bit of time updating the puppy wiki at http://puppy.sf.net

New users and particularly users with limited or no Linux experience, should now be able to follow fairly detailed steps, showing them how to achieve a number of tasks. These tasks range from simple things, such as changing security permissions on files, to enabling large file support, mounting networked drives, enabling secure shell and even simple scripting for doing batch uploads of .tgd files containing EPG data.

Even if you have been using the NSLU2 with puppy for a while now, I would suggest having a look at the wiki, just in case there is some new information.

As always, user contributions are welcome and encouraged. Just click the edit button present at the top/bottom of each page and add your bit. If unsure, feel free to discuss the matter at the Topfield Australia Forums in this thread.

Performance tuning.

I spent a bit of time on optimising puppy to improve performance on the NSLU2. The main issue with the Topfield USB protocol is that it is very sensitive to latency.

I adopted an aggressive optimisation strategy for the main codepath used in the get operation. The resulting changes improve the peak performance from 9.54 Mbits/s to a reasonably good 16.39 Mbits/s. That's approximately a 170% speed improvement and brings the performance of puppy on NSLU2 within the ballpark of Altair on a PC.

I will need to do more testing before unleashing a new version on the public, but the initial results look promising.

puppy 1.5

A new release of puppy made it out last night. Version 1.5 adds the ability to create directories on the NSLU2. This will help in the long run as part of a fully automated EPG transfer solution.