I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really tempts me), or the Kensington Slimblade Trackball USB 2.0 for PC and Mac, (this one is sexy as hell!!!), but they each have their flaws. The Orbit is awesome and seems to work in Linux, but it only has 2 buttons. The Expert has 4 totally programmable buttons, and I think it has a physical scroll ring, but I’ve read that the new model is really bad on your wrist due to the elevated angle. And the Slimblade Trackball looks just amazing, but from what I read, the scrolling is done by twisting the trackball and that’s done completely in software, which of course Kensington hasn’t provided for Linux.

However, I did find one suggestion that got me to a 95% working solution by reading Google’s cached copy of the second page of this expired Logitech forum post. (UGH!) Specifically, Another_User says this:

I found one that works pretty good using a combination of Smart Scroll and ControllerMate.

In controllermate “trackball button 4″ box is connected directly to a “toggle” box which is connected to a “button output” box. Properties of the “button output” box are: “when turned on : button down”, “when turned off: button up:, “with mouse button: button #7″

Smartcontrol actived grabscroll with button#7, check wihtout moving cursors and reversed axis.

So I gave this a shot and got it working! Actually, you don’t need ControllerMate. I got this to work by using Logitech’s Control Center for OS X, configuring the two small buttons (button 5 and button 4) to report themselves as buttons 7 and 8 by using “Advanced Click”, and then I used SmartScroll to pick up on button 7 to do the grabscrolling.

This seems to work really well in OS X applications, like Chrome, etc., but the scrolling doesn’t translate well in X apps like NX Client or VNC even. But it’s better than it was before, so I’m definitely happier than I was previously.

I’d still love to get the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball working in Linux though. Anyone out there have success getting scrolling with the trackball to work?

1. The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store files that are bigger than 4 GB on it, and the whole lack of permissions and filename length limitations thing just really sticks in my craw, so this isn’t a viable option for me.
2. The newer and even more proprietary NTFS filesystem. Come on, seriously? Why would anybody pick NTFS, which is native to only one proprietary operating system in the world (hint: not Linux and not OS X) and try to use it in Linux and OS X? Insanity, I say. Moving on.
3. ext2/ext3. Thanks to FUSE and fuse-ext2, the native-to-Linux ext2 and ext3 filesystem can be accessed in OS X. Of course, it works perfectly in Linux. However, in testing, it feels like trying to navigate through the ext2 partition in OS X’s finder is REALLY slow and choppy. I’m not sure what’s going on, and it doesn’t seem like the CPU is getting pegged or anything. But it felt slow enough that I don’t think I want to put all my data on it and hope it works right.
4. hfsplus. Now this one actually works (or seems to thus far) really well. Reading up on it a bit after having been using it makes me a smidge nervous, since it would seem that it’s extremely unloved from the Linux kernel devs and currently unmaintained. Yay! But if you set up an unjournaled hfsplus partition from OS X, Linux can very happily read/write it and it seems to be very stable and fast in both Linux and OS X.

Great. So why am I blogging about this? Well, like I said, hfsplus access in Linux is working almost perfectly. Except for VLC. Apparently, hfsplus has some nasty problems and isn’t actually POSIX compliant when it comes to opening directories. Due to how VLC handles “files” that it is asked to play (it accepts both directories and files as playlist arguments and VLC chooses to try to open the playlist element as a directory first, and this doesn’t fail with hfsplus the way it should in POSIX-compliant filesystems) VLC is unable to play anything that’s on an hfsplus partition. This is quite a bummer for me and others who use hfsplus as a filesystem and also like to use VLC.

Enter this bug report and Tobias’s awesome little patch for VLC. After using his patch and applying it over the top of my 1.0.3 VLC here in Kubuntu Karmic, I am now able to watch movies and listen to music stored on my hfsplus shared partition again from Linux, using VLC. Huzzah! Maybe this’ll help someone else out there struggling with this (or just generate a lot of “you suck, why would you use proprietary Apple hardware or OS X?!?!” comments).

Oh, and while this is a hfsplus filesystem problem at the root, because of how Kaffeine or KDE’s own Dragon Player open files, they are not affected by this bug. Only VLC is. So…. yeah.

I am curious, though… I know I’m not the only KDE hacker out there who’s using a MacBook or MBP, and who *gasp* also has OS X and Linux sharing the hard drive. What do you guys use for a shared partition between Linux and OS X?

1. Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Linux, but I do not think this is limited to only one proprietary application.
2. A shiny new MacBook Pro in my possession and an epiphany of “this is what we’ve been working for, guys and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade and we’re still not there yet, why?”  And I’m not talking about the pretty UI or shiny buttons. You can argue all you want about OS X being the best in the UI/shiny/usability categories. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the increasingly growing market share of OS X and the (generally speaking) more polished and well-thought-out and 3rd-party-developed/supported applications. Being able to go to Flickr, for example, and download an actual client for OS X is pretty darned cool. Sure would be nice if Linux had the same mind/market share.

Now, having spent a week with my MacBook Pro in both Linux and OS X, I have a few more thoughts to add to the fire. Some of these have been results of discussions had as a result from my earlier post on this subject and others are more related to time spent with said shiny new laptop. But I think these are more constructive and less inflammatory. =:)

1. The MacBook Pro is truly a nice laptop and Linux, for the most part, runs really well on it. The Karmic wiki page got me 95% of the way there. Unfortunately, rEFIT doesn’t understand GRUB2 at all, it seems, so to just get Kubuntu Karmic to boot, I installed the old GRUB 0.97 instead (sudo apt-get install grub). Getting sound to work requires alsa-driver-snapshot, so that’s a little painful but not too bad. More painful was the hour I spent yesterday trying to figure out why sound stopped working (and this time it wasn’t pulseaudio’s fault, but rather something weird with the ALSA driver that plugging headphones in and removing them seemed to fix). Getting click+drag to work on the MacBook Pro 5,5 (since there’s no physical buttons anymore, but just one big touchpad (WHICH IS REALLY NICE!!)) requires a custom bcm5974-dkms driver. I’m using an unjournaled hfsplus partition to share data between OS X and Linux. And “setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin” (or setting the same checkbox in KDE4′s System Settings) lets me use the command/apple/squiggly key next to the space bar as my Alt key (for alt+tabbing, etc.). All in all, I’m REALLY happy with Linux on this MacBook Pro. It seems to work every bit as nicely as Linux does on my work Thinkpad T61.
2. There is something core to my nature that must tweak and hack, and Linux is most conducive to that. Take something simple, like wanting to change the font and font size that OS X uses for window titles, system menus, etc. Apparently you just can’t do it? That kind of stuff bothers me (and this is just one example in OS X that comes to mind). I truly do love Desktop Linux, and especially KDE for this reason. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive in OS X, and I still enjoy it and its apps. And if I have problems with things I need to do (audio/video conferencing comes immediately to mind), I have no hesitation booting into OS X to just get things done. And no, sorry, I just can’t stomach the thought of using Windows because I have to get things done. OS X may not be free, but at least I don’t vomit from just the thought of using it. But if for nothing other than the challenge of trying to figure out how to get things working to my liking, I feel compelled to run Linux on this little wee beastie. And maybe after I get things working to my liking, I’ll even find a couple of itches to scratch again and start being productive again. =:)
3. We’re (Desktop Linux) not there (3rd party developer interest, compared to OS X and Windows) yet, but I think we’re getting closer, and even so, we may just never get there and that’s not our fault, I don’t think. My original line of thinking was that we’re not there yet because we keep changing core system components that prevent 3rd party developers, etc, from taking our platform seriously. And I think that as much as possible, we should really try to stop changing/breaking stuff so that this is not the reason we don’t get there. However, we have other core values and tendencies in Desktop Linux that are most definitely contributing to us not getting there and some of them we cannot change. Let’s take an important one: Freedom. Both parts of freedom matter: both gratis (for zero price) and libre (free to do whatever I want to it). The first part means that 3rd party developers can expect to sell nowhere near as much of their software in Linux as they can on OS X or Windows. The second part means that 3rd party developers can expect to meet resistance to their very existence. I personally side with the former more than the latter on this, since I’m cheap by nature and like to not spend money whenever possible. Also, being that I have to work for a living and support myself and my family, I do not, for a second, fault companies for existing and needing to have me pay for things so they can exist. But I think I’m in the minority on this point in Desktop Linux. Lastly, we’re not a money-making machine like Apple and Microsoft, and we never will be. And that’s both good and bad. It’s bad in that we do not have a big budget to spend on advertising and cute commercials, etc. It’s good in that we’re not going to go out of business just because we’re not “profitable” or growing as fast as OS X in market share. We have and can and will outlast other OS’s and desktop environments that must be profitable to exist (OS/2, Amiga, BeOS, etc., etc.). And maybe that’s why we’ll finally succeed in continuing to gain market share. Or maybe we’ll get there by being stable and good enough for most users and having applications which live on the  Internet being more important than applications that are written for Linux (Google OS, perhaps?). And maybe we’ll still not get there for another decade. Or longer. But that’s not the point, really, is it? I mean, it would be REALLY nice to never hear “oh, we’re just not even going to bother doing XXX on Linux, but that’s okay because Linux doesn’t matter… heck, it’s only .05% of our sales anyway!” again. But we’re here because we like what we have and we like where we’re going and we like controlling our destiny. I totally get that. And maybe that’s good enough.
4. OS X really does have some nice apps that Linux has no counterparts for, but for me, there are not that many (Tweetie comes to mind) and the good news is that we (Desktop Linux) can fix that ourselves (and we are). One of the big things that people point to in this whole OS discussion is that OS X has more polished apps than Linux. And I must agree with this. But I think the reason is less because of OS superiority and more the nature of apps on OS X. Developers actually make money selling software on OS X *shock*, so they have a vested interest in polish and user experience, and spend a lot more time on it than Linux projects typically do. Heck, they even pay people to help make their apps polished and highly usable. The good news is that we’re in control of our own destiny here and can do (and are doing) better.
5. We’ve come a long way (baybee), and I think we’re on the right track. It’s pretty amazing to think how far we’ve come in the last decade. It seems only yesterday that Blackbox and Bbkeys were the coolest thing in the world to me, and that the big Linux Desktop Environment projects just were nowhere as fun, exciting, or good-looking. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve always preferred KDE to GNOME, but both DE’s have made HUGE improvements–both to the core Desktop Linux technologies that we share and to UI and polish and usability on top of those technologies. KDE4 has not even been out for 2 years already and the difference between what we have now compared to what we had 2 years ago is phenomenal. I absolutely agree with the sentiment that Desktop Linux is now, more than ever, ready for the world to use and ready for 3rd party developers to start writing for. I think this should drive us to be even that much more cautious as we push out new distributions and make sure we don’t break stuff just because we want something new and shiny.
6. I haven’t left, nor do I plan to, Desktop Linux (I know, who cares), but I think it’s important to think about what might be broken in our development model and figure out how to fix it, else we’re shooting ourselves in the collective foot and preventing all our hard work from reaching beyond our little geekly communities into more mainstream adoption, and that would be truly sad.
7. This MacBook Pro still has problems with Linux and that sucks, but also not our fault… sorta. And I’ll figure out how to work around all of them and so can you. As an example, as I’ve been typing this blog post, I have brushed the touchpad about 10 million times accidentally and ended up clicking somewhere entirely else, and in general disrupting my work by having to keep undoing the garbage that just happened. And yes, I’ve added a HAL fdi file to enable SHMConfig and tweaked syndaemon and synclient and yes, I know I need to still do more. But here’s the point: this does not happen in OS X. It just works. It would sure be swell if we could figure out how to make this work out of the box for Linux users. Similarly, suspend seems to work just fine, but I’ve had several issues with X/keyboard/mouse stability upon resuming. Not surprising, being that Apple hasn’t tried to make sure that its hardware works well with Linux. But annoying all the same.

Anyway, life is good, and I have a new puzzle to figure out (this MacBook Pro). =:)

So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do anything that involves money quickly or lightly, so kicking down a big wad o’ cash for a laptop is not something that I can just do whenever I feel like it. For the last few months, I’ve been agonizing over what I should get and researching and pricing and comparing. I knew that I wanted something that stood out and looked good and felt good and was well-built. I’ve been using ThinkPads as my main laptop for the last decade or so, since it’s what my employers have provided me, and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy.

I also knew that I wanted some nice features that Apple provides stock that most of the other guys do not. Such as a backlit laptop keyboard. I was playing around with the idea of getting a Dell E6500, but 1) not horribly sexy and 2) that requires me to get a 15″ screen. Which is another thing I wanted… to not feel like I’m lugging around an Encyclopedia every time I take my laptop with me somewhere. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA netbook for this reason and while I absolutely loved the battery life on the little guy and the portability, the absolutely diminutive screen size is what finally did me in. Well, that and the horribly slow CPU. And the horribly slow GPU. And the really small keyboard size. And the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive. And the crappy ath9k wifi drivers that keep disconnecting.

So I bought a Mac. Spent a bunch of time before then reading up on whether the MacBook Pros can play nicely with Linux (model 5,5 is what I ended up getting), and felt pretty comfortable that a MBP could be a really nice Linux machine. After waffling and being generally unsure of which one I wanted to get, I finally decided on a 13″ 2.26 Ghz MBP. I knew I wanted a smaller screen size than my previous PowerBook of 15″ and my current work laptop which also has a 15″ screen. So 13″ fits the bill nicely. I was really unsure about the CPU and was really hesitant to get a 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP, thinking that it’d be not all that much faster than the T7500  @ 2.20GHz Core 2 Duo I have in my work Thinkpad, but as it turns out, the 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP is really nice and fast–feels faster than the Thinkpad. Also, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB and I left the 160 GB drive in, planning on replacing it with a 250 GB 7200 HDD that I already have or maybe even a SSD if they ever get cheap enough.

I spent probably 6 hours or so on Sunday night getting Linux installed onto my shiny new MBP. Installing Linux was the easy part. Getting rEFIT to recognize it and boot into it was something completely else. Turns out that rEFIT does not play nicely at ALL with Grub2 (which is what Ubuntu Karmic comes with), so one of the things I did at the end that got it to work nicely was to boot off the live CD, install Karmic, chroot into my newly installed Karmic partition, uninstall Grub2, install Grub 0.97, and that seemed to do the trick nicely. The other hiccups I had were around getting the MBP’s drive partitioned in a way that OS X and rEFIT could deal with. I ended up resizing the main OS X partition and creating MS-DOS partitions from inside OS X’s disk utility and then just formatted them from the Ubuntu Karmic install process. But now I have a really nicely working OS X and Ubuntu Karmic dual-boot MacBook Pro. I realize my details are pretty sketchy here, so if you’re interested in more details, let me know and I’ll provide more info.

Since my day job allows me to write code for Linux (and don’t get me wrong, this is the best job I have EVER had and have never been happier), I occasionally need to use Skype to teleconference into meetings. And at least five times over the last 2 days, right in the middle of a Skype meeting from my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux laptop, things totally stop working. Sometimes the audio stops working entirely and I can’t hear the people on the other end anymore. Sometimes the video freezes. Sometimes Skype totally locks up the USB webcam and I have to kill -9 it and unplug/replug the webcam. Sometimes I can’t even see video on it at all and all I can see is a black box. Sometimes, it even works as it should and I don’t have problems (but those times are rather few and far between).

So, here’s my rant. I’m sick and tired of this crap in Linux. I have been a VERY vocal proponent of Linux everywhere for more than a decade. I’ve pushed it in every company I’ve worked for. I’ve insisted on using it everywhere personally. I have been searching for a job that would let me actually program on and for Linux for a long time and I now have one (YAY!). But I am absolutely exhausted of things that work on other platforms being unreliable, crappy, non-performant, crash-prone, and in general totally second rate or worse in Linux. In this particular instance, I unplugged my USB webcam from my Linux Thinkpad, plugged it into my new MacBook Pro, installed Skype and was up and running in no time. Skype did not crash, hang, hiccup, freeze, mutilate, spindle, or in any other way be anything other than an awesome application in OS X. And, as an aside, just looking through the preferences section for Skype showed that it was obviously given more love and care than the Linux version. And ya know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of even having to think about it. I’m tired of having to apologize for stupid stuff like this, get to a shell and killall -9 it. Or try to figure out what stupidity is causing it to happen. Or try to find workarounds so that PulseAudio can not screw things up for me. Or have to check my xorg.conf to see if I might have enabled something that is causing the bizarre Xv errors Skype spews every once in a while. I’m just tired of it.

Now, the focus of my frustration in this case is Skype. And I know that without even a moment’s hesitation, 90% of you are going to say “oh well, see, that’s what you get when you used a closed-source application! just use Open Source and everything will be better!” And to that I say: bollocks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Open Source advocate than me. But that’s not the point here. And that’s not the true issue at hand here. Open Source is great. Open Source is cool. Open Source is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Open Source is the answer to a whole lot of problems! But of this I am absolutely certain: it is not the answer to this problem. In this particular instance, and in millions more like it, all across the world, every day, people are going to need to run software that IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. You can try all you want to create the best, most awesome Open Source project to meet a given need, but you will never 100% fill every closed-source software solution need. You might get close. You might even have something that is “good enough”. But the bottom line is that there’s always going to be some piece of software that you have to run that you don’t have the source for. At least, this is true in the world that I’ve lived in for the last decade+.

Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo. We even have some better applications from commercial companies. Heck, we even had the awesome World of Goo game (which I actually paid money for and LOVE)! We have much more feature-rich FOSS applications and desktop environments than we’ve ever had before. But what we don’t have is a stable platform that companies can count on being able to invest into and reap monetary rewards from. Yeah, like it or not, this is the real world and companies have to make money to stay in business.

We are a bunch of hackers. We love to tinker, to fiddle, to break compatibility in a heartbeat just for the outside chance that it might be better, to change quickly, and to do whatever we feel like. And that’s all fantastic stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re our own worst enemies. What makes Desktop Linux so awesome and fun and cool and quickly evolving is the same thing that keeps companies from investing in us–and even when they do, we end up breaking their stuff and causing Linux Desktop users grief. And we show absolutely zero possibility that this is going to improve any time soon. PulseAudio? Really? I’m so glad it’s the new hotness and is technically awesome. Your new hotness just broke an app I absolutely have to rely on. Guess how much I give a crap about your new hotness now, hm?

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that I’m really liking my MacBook Pro, and I’m really liking OS X. Is it free? No. Is it Open Source? No. But does it just stinking work? Yeah, it really does. And it is such a drastic and refreshing change from the world of Desktop Linux that I am seriously wondering if I’m going to ever end up using that Ubuntu Karmic install I just slapped on the other partitions of this drive. I don’t think I’m yet ready to send out a jwz-like dissertation and farewell address, but I totally get it now. OS X is beautiful, and it just works. And I don’t think I’ll ridicule anyone for getting an Apple computer and actually using OS X on it ever again. Windows is still another story, but even there I can see what the allure is. You know… you get a computer to do stuff, and you want it to work. You don’t care what it has to do so that it works. You just want it to stinking work. Wouldn’t it be nice if Desktop Linux was like that?

[ UPDATE - 2009-11-20 ] – I’ve received a lot of really great comments on this post, but my initial intent at 1) venting/ranting, 2) comparing Desktop Linux to OS X, and 3) raising issues that I think we need to take a hard look at as a worldwide community were taken in a very different slant than I intended. FWIW, after having spent a week with my shiny little MacBook Pro, I am happily running Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on it and have blogged again in an attempt to clear up some of the muddiness around this first post. To this end, I’m going to change the title from “I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux” to something less vitriolic for future viewers. And hopefully this won’t cause aggregators/planets to re-publish this. =:/

I will never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never buy a proprietary (read: non Open Source) computer ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again, no matter how attractive the packaging is.

I don’t know what from the bowels of hell itself possessed me to buy a Powerbook, but it was quite possibly one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.  It has been nothing but trouble from the day I got it (though it was a nice little mental exercise and challenge for a while in getting Linux to run on it).

I have given up on it for my own personal use. I’m back to using my work laptop for all things at work and home.

But I thought that at least I could let my darling bride use it for her personal stuff. You know… it’s OS X… what could possibly go wrong?

So, 8 hours ago this evening, I started trying to get OS X (freshly upgraded to 10.4.9, don’tcha know) to allow my darling bride to edit OpenOffice files that are stored on an NFS server downstairs. Nope. Cannot do it. Everything comes up read-only. And yes, I did play (for hours) with all possible permutations of setting/unsetting SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING in soffice. I even tried the new version of NeoOffice (it’s the only one you can download, by the way, which is also teh suck), the new version of OpenOffice, and version 2.0.4 out of desperation. SUCK! I don’t know what the flippin’ problem is, but it’s sucked 8 hours too much out of my life, thank you very much.

Pissed off in general and getting no sleep again…

Love,

Me

BLEH!

Blockbuster has sweetened their deal by allowing in-store trade-ins of online-rented movies. This, to me, blows NetFlix out of the water, since NetFlix does not yet have a brick-and-mortar presence anywhere (?). And, because we signed up with Blockbuster a while ago, we still get to keep our 2 free movie-or-game rental coupons per month too. Pretty cool! As a result, we’ve been watching tons of movies as of late, including the Indiana Jones trilogy (forgot how good they were!!).

I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last few weeks, OSS-code-wise, anyway. Adriaan and I have whipped kpilot into shape proper-like, it seems. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time twice now and merged our codeyard.net svn repository into kde’s svn (it’s in kdepim-3.5.5+ branch now, but will be merged into branches/KDE/3.5/kdepim before 3.5.6 is release, iirc) using this spiffy little shell fu that I created for the purpose of merging code from one svn repository into another. Also, Sune from the debian packaging team has been a tremendous help in motivating us to get the critical data loss bugs fixed and backported (that’s my pain) into kde’s svn. It’s been really refreshing and fun hacking on kpilot again. I’m reaching a point, though, where we either need to architect kpilot to be more like opensync or I bite the bullet and start helping kdepim use opensync working towards kde4. That’s assuming my current time-to-spend-on-OSS holds up, which is a big assumption. Ohh–also, bbroeksema has helped bring cmake into kpilot, and I must say that I REALLY like it. Adriaan and I have pitched in and we now have a fully-functional build system (bye bye AAP) that I can fully grok. I’ve even written a custom configure script that helps bridge the gap. Sweet! Oh, and if you’re a kpilot user who cares about malconduit (syncing with Avantgo) or docconduit (creating palm docs), your help is required. Since none of the current kpilot maintainers/developers use these conduits, and there’s a decent amount of bit-rot in them, they are going to be disabled for the next release of kpilot/kde, unless you step up and help us with them. Help, please?

Thanksgiving was really, really fun. I need to put up some of our latest pics, but we had a wonderful time just staying home with our little family. I cannot tell you how stress-free our holidays are, not having to pack up and hobble off to a not-short list of relatives’ homes every holiday. Although it was a completely unintentional side-effect of moving cross-country, I really think that this is how it should be. For the first time ever, we have been able to establish our own traditions and have some really neat bonding time as a family that you just miss out on rushing to various relatives’ houses. Plus, my wifey is a really great cook and I get to cut turkey, so it’s enjoyable all around. =:)

Work goeth on. It’s looking to be a stressful year ahead of me with my current employer, and I’m not so sure how I feel about it at this point, other than to hang on for the ride and see what God provides

My darling bride allowed me to play The Matrix – Path of Neo for a few days (and I really appreciate it hon! =:)). I can honestly say that it’s a dissapointing game. First, the graphics are very poor and at least on my “last-year’s-model” Xbox, the characters and artwork are choppy, blocky, and bad. Second, the combat system is horrible. For the most part, you get through the game pressing “Y” repeatedly. Call me an old-school fogey, but coming from a Street Fighter and Killer Instinct background where you have learnable, predictable, more-than-one-button-mashing combos, the fights in this game are really sad. And the camera system is absolutely atrocious. I’ve noticed that there are several games that follow this model–where you are allowed to change your camera perspective, but you don’t have complete control since as soon as you start to move, the game takes over your camera again. Yuck! Make me puke on my jammies! Learn from Splinter Cell, folks, please.

Music-wise, I’ve been really taken by Skillet’s new CD (Comatose), Orbital’s Blue Album, Everything But The Girl, Aaron Shust (Anything Worth Saying is excellent!!), and most recently (don’t laugh) Dean Martin’s Baby It’s Cold Outside duet that played a really cute scene in Will Farrell’s Elf movie.

We’ve had our good friends The Wallers come up and visit us recently, and our family had a wonderful time with them. Sarah was gracious enough to stay with us for almost 2 weeks and we had an absolute ball. I was able to be “one of the girls” a little bit, which I really, really miss from our Bible Quiz days. *sniffle* I also was reminded of how cool my son is, and how much he is like me, with all of his Lego Star Wars 2 kung fu. =:)

And my beautiful daughter, A (name withheld to protect the innocent), is really into her NeoPets thing. What impresses me the most, though, is that she’s walking herself through some basic HTML tutorials and writing some content for her NeoPets pages. Cool!! The hacker spirit lives on in my children, vahoo!! =:) She is an amazingly talented, artistic hacker, though, and I need to start working with her on web designs so she can get exposed to that early on as a modern art form.

Laptop wise, I’ve bounced from Kubuntu Dapper to SUSE 10.1 to Fedora Core 6 to Kubuntu Edgy and back to Fedora Core 6 again for my powerbook. I’m settling on FC6 for the time being. Unfortunately, NONE of these distros work acceptably with my powerbook and NetworkManager. My goal was to be able to use NetworkManager solely as I do on my x86 SUSE 10.1 laptop at work, which is why I kept bouncing between distros. But since none of them do, and I really like what the Fedora boys have done with Core 6, and my powerbook runs pretty darned stable with it, I’ll keep using it. Oh–one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the keyboard backlighting working with FC6. I had it working with SUSE 10.1-ppc, iirc, and it does not work out of the box with FC6.

Lastly, I’ve been using vortexhost.com as my web hosting solution for the last 2 years. They have been really, really stable and been a good home for a good price (250 megs for $55/year). However, my little family has outgrown 250 megs and now I need to figure out what to do in the next 2 weeks. I’ve been looking around at some of the bigger-space-for-slightly-more-money players and some of the hosts I’m looking at are:

I’ve researched them at webhostingjury.com and webhostingtalk.com, and from what it looks like, hostgator would be the best in terms of decent price, decent disk space, good customer service, and good reputation. However, I’m really hesitant to fork over $83.40 for 1 year of web hosting. Yeah, I know, it’s only $30 more than I was spending before, but still… $83.40 is a decent chunk of change for a personal/family web site. So I’ve been looking at Google’s accounts for domains stuff and I might poke into it a little more, but still, I need to so something because we’re out of space right now and my contract with vortexhost.com is up in 2 weeks.

One thing I’d like to look at as part of this adventure is using Google as a spam filter. I use spamassassin with some custom training fu right now, but it still lets spam through every once in a while. And I really want to be able to provide my kiddos with some web space so they can have some room to play and learn. So, all in all, I still don’t know what I’m going to do. One side of my brain is saying that I could host our domain on a PC at the house, but I’ve already been down that road and it’s just painful (especially considering that my always-on box at home is a PII-200 laptop with zero disk space) and I’d like to not have to deal with that headache again. And I want something rock-solid and reliable for our e-mail solution, which is why GMail would be nice. The downside to GMail, though, and this is probably the ONLY reason I’m not going to use them yet is that they don’t support IMAP. *sigh* Any helpful suggestions, solutions, watch-out-fors, etc., would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, well, I think that touches every category I have defined, so with that (and the fact that it’s midnight, *grrr*), I guess I’ll hit the “publish” button and call it a night. G’night, Gracie…

For starters, things sort of worked out of the box on my 15″ Powerbook with SUSE 10.1. You DO have to be VERY careful during the disk partitioning steps of the installation. For some unexplainably silly reason, by default, SUSE’s installation wanted to format my OS X partition. So watch out for that and make sure you don’t let it (unless you do, in fact, want to lose all of your OS X data).

Secondly, SUSE 10.1 doesn’t know how to deal with my Powerbook’s display. It came up in 800×600 mode or something silly. I still can’t get YaST2 to configure my display. I saved my xorg.conf file from ubuntu and used it, for the most part. I do still have weird video problems (spots here and there cropping up, especially in konsole). But it’s tolerable now.

Next issue: network. SUSE 10.1 comes with kernel 2.6.16.something. Unfortunately, the broadcom (bcm43xx) and softmac drivers that are necessary for the powerbook’s built-in wireless card don’t come in 2.6.16.something. They are in 2.6.17.something. I downloaded 2.6.18.1, since it was the latest. And WOW. 2.6.18.1 works REALLY well as far as the wireless goes. It even works perfectly with NetworkManager and the KDE network manager interface. Excellent work to all involved here!! =:) I did have an old snapshot of bcm43xx and softmac on my hard drive, so my first attempt that consumed a few hours of my life was in trying to compile and install those into SUSE’s 2.6.16.something kernel, but I could not for the life of me get it to work. I kept getting undefined symbol errors or some-such. I gave up and went after the 2.6.18.1 kernel instead.

Along with the new 2.6.18.1 kernel (and pbbuttonsd, I guess), for the first time ever, the backlit keys on my keyboard work!! Woot!! =:)

Next up: sound. This was a bloody nightmare. Apparently somewhere between 2.6.17.13′s alsa and 2.6.18.1, the ALSA boys decided to stop using snd-powermac and start using snd-aoa. Now, I challenge you to try to find ANY information on how to get that to work!!! Bloody heck, folks!! I still don’t know if I’m doing it right, but I have hacked things enough to get sound working. First, I downloaded all of the alsa-* stuff from the ALSA project page. At time of writing, it’s 1.0.13. I reconfigured the kernel and enabled ONLY the base sound section and did not enable ALSA or OSS. I then compiled alsa-driver-1.0.13 with ” ./configure –with-cards=aoa,aoa-fabric-layout,aoa-tas,aoa-soundbus,aoa-soundbus-i2s” and then “sudo make install”. I built and installed all of the other alsa-*1.0.13 into /usr, over the top of the existing alsa packages, which I never, ever do, but after 3 days of beating my head against the wall, I was at wit’s end. I’m sure there’s a better way, but I’m past caring. Oh, and yes, I did try installing everything into /usr/local/alsa-1.0.13 first, but that didn’t seem to work, so I gave it one more shot at installing into /usr. Incidentally, you don’t have to do this–it was what I did below that got things working, not installing into /usr.

Anyway, give up all hope of getting YAST to help you configure your soundcard. Seriously. It does not know about ALSA 1.0.13 and will insist on trying to using snd-powermac, even though it doesn’t exist as a kernel module (I compiled alsa-driver 1.0.13 without snd-powermac).

So, instead, add this to /etc/modprobe.conf.local: “alias snd-powermac snd-aoa”. And then, change /etc/modprobe.d/sound to this:

#options snd-powermac index=0
# zWvw.ITz6G5CcwPB:Integrated Sound (awacs)
#alias snd-card-0 snd-powermac
options snd-aoa index=0
alias snd-card-0 snd-aoa

install snd-aoa /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install snd-aoa; { /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install -a snd-aoa-soundbus snd-aoa-i2sbus snd-aoa-fabric-layout snd_mixer_oss snd-pcm-oss snd-seq-oss ; }

remove snd-aoa { /sbin/modprobe -r –ignore-remove snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_seq snd-aoa-codec-tas snd-aoa-i2sbus snd-aoa-fabric-layout snd-aoa-soundbus; } /sbin/modprobe -r –ignore-remove snd-aoa;

This is most probably not the right way to do this, I know. But it seems to work. After doing this, if I do /etc/init.d/alsasound stop/start, I see this in /proc/asound/cards:

0 [SoundByLayout ]: AppleOnbdAudio – SoundByLayout
SoundByLayout

Note–this is on a Powerbook, reported as “motherboard : PowerBook5,6 MacRISC3 Power Macintosh” in /proc/cpuinfo. Your mileage may vary….

So, having doing all this, I can get kmix to work and aplay works with a wav file. I’ve found lame and other essential packages for SUSE 10.1 ppc from this site (THANKS SO MUCH!!) (set up smart like this:

sudo smart channel –add pmppc101 type=rpm-md name=”PackMan SUSE Linux 10.1 PPC” baseurl=”ftp://spike.fa.gau.hu/pub/pmppc101/”

), and I’m working on getting amarok and such working now. Hm. Just got gkrellm-volume working too (have to do “enable_alsa=1 make”). Cool.

Next up: latest KDE packages. SUSE 10.1 comes with KDE 3.5.1 and 3.5.5 has been out for a while now. I run SUSE 10.1 on my x86 laptop at work, so I was assuming that I could use the KDE:Backports repository and just upgrade everything to the latest like I could at work. WRONG! I also thought that I could take advantage of all of the cool SUSE support repositories, like suser-guru, etc. WRONG again. These are only compiled for x86 and 64-bit x86 architectures. Those of us with PPC (powerpc) chips are out of luck entirely. =:( This, seriously, is lousy, and I sure hope that the SUSErs remedy this poste haste.

All in all, it feels good to have solved some of the problems that SUSE 10.1 was having with my powerbook. I absolutely love SUSE as a distro on my x86 laptops and desktops. It would appear, however, that it’s just not completely there for the PPC platform. While I’ve been fighting with SUSE these last few days, I’ve been looking at alternatives. There’s Kubuntu Edgy, of course, and that would be the upgrade to the Dapper I’ve been using on my powerbook for the last year or so. But there’s also Fedora Core 6 that’s just recently been released. I’ve not played with Fedora in a long, long time. I’m download the ppc dvd iso right now. I think I might give that a shot next if I can’t figure out these annoying video problems.

HTH! =:)

Update: After several reboots and failed boots (apparently you have to use 24 bpp for X on the powerbook??), and in general bad and unstable things happening on my powerbook with SUSE 10.1, I’m now burning my Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy DVDs and will install FC6 and if that doesn’t work out of the box, I’ll go back to Ubuntu with Edgy (instead of Dapper, which I had been running). It’s a bloody shame that SUSE 10.1 is acting so wonky. I really do prefer it, and I’m just getting the hang of smart. *sigh* But these weird video problems are killing me and I’m sincerely becoming concerned that they’re going to do permanent damage to my powerbook screen.

• Getting two problems (ABS light and Airbag light were both stuck on) with our new-to-us 2005 Town & Country fixed only to find another problem (2 radiator fans refused to turn off when car was turned off). Had to disconnect battery overnight to turn off fans and prevent battery drainage. Took said vehicle back into the dealer who promptly and courteously fixed it. Again.
• Finding out that the family dog (who just yesterday started limping–refusing to set any weight on her left, front paw) has Lyme disease. $200+ later and doggie is now feeling much better, apparently.
• Beating head repeatedly against same problem at work for a week now is still not yielding any noticeable results, other than in softness of head.
• Compiled 2.6.17-rc4 kernel from kernel.org in an attempt to prove that same palm-pilot-related kernel crash existed in upstream kernel. After several iterations of fun and frivolity and make-kpkg’s and reboots, discovered that it does not seem to after all, which means that the problem must lie somewhere in either 2.6.15 or in the patches that ubuntu has made to it. Yay! This is, I think, the last major show-stopper from me being able to run Linux on my powerbook. About the only large annoyance now is the lack of Flash. Oh–I’ve decided that manually downloading QIF files and importing them into MoneyDance whenever I need to balance the checkbook is not such a horrible thing (refer to earlier post about MoneyDance, IBM’s PowerPC Java, and the inability to do OFX transactions).
• Started listening to Switchfoot’s Nothing is Sound CD. It’s pretty good. I think my favorite song thus far is the simultaneously deep and also infectiously make-you-want-to-scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-too track, “Stars”. I will say this, though, and I mean no disrespect to Switchfoot, nor do I know anything of their contractual obligations or personal lives…. But this CD seems on an initial listen to be less hope/God-focused than their previous CD, The Beautiful Letdown, which was REALLY, REALLY good. I’ll not say much more because I’ve honestly not listened too closely, nor have I dug up the lyrics from the new CD yet. But I do hope that the Switchfoot guys are still as focused and passionate about God as they were in previous years. I also sincerely hope that their record label hasn’t pressured them into producing a more commercially-palpable product for the sake of being more commercially-palpable. It is a good CD, though, and I do like it. Here’s to you, Switchfoot, my home (town) boys. =:)
• Finally watched Jet Li’s latest film, Unleashed, and I was REALLY impressed! It was very artfully done, all around. I mean, it had the bad language that my TV-G couldn’t seem to filter out (no closed captioning on the DVD??), but other than that, I think it was a pretty good movie. It was certainly the best all-around martial arts movie I think I’ve ever seen. Morgan Freeman was (as always) excellent in it. His father figure role provided stability, peace, and focus for the entire film. Without him, I don’t think the film could have gone the distance. And Jet Li took some very brave steps in this film to try to grow in his abilities as an actor, and he pulled it off fairly well! I swear, Jet Li is the best martial artist that I have ever seen on film. I know I’m committing heresy here, but I would put my money on him over Bruce Lee (duck), Jackie Chan (sorry Jackie baybee!!!), Steven Segal (pfaw, yeah, like that’s even a challenge), Jean-Claude van Damme in his prime (*twitch*), and anyone else I’ve ever seen (hmmmm, David Carradine???). So, go put the kids to bed early, rent Unleashed, and enjoy some kick-butt fight scenes, a really touching story, some seriously M.Night-esque tense scenes (Victoria taking off his collar, anyone??), and the absolutely best close-combat fight sequence that I’ve ever seen.

*sniffle*

And then one fine day, Beethovina got a crack in her display. I cannot tell you how distraught I was. Ohhhh, I was nigh unconsolable.  Not to mention the fact that a 2-gig iPod shuffle sucks mightily, especially when what you really want is to be able to see the thingeys that you can’t see on the display.
*sniffle*

But I must tell you, dear reader, that this story has a happy ending. Today, I loaded Beethovina up into her original packaging and packed her (and my darling, patient bride and three wonderful children) into the Queen Family Truckster (“Now, I owe it to myself to tell you, Mr. Griswold, that if you are thinking of taking the tribe cross country, this is your automobile. The Wagon Queen Family Truckster. You think you hate it now, but wait till you drive it. “) and drove the required hour to the nearest Apple store… where, much to my surprise, the resident Apple Genius cheerfully replaced the little darling for me for free!!! I was SOOOOO impressed! I’ve never experienced such excellent customer service with anything computer-related in all my days. Wow.

Absolutely excellent service, Apple!!! Way to go, seriously.

And, coming back to my testey little post from days previous…. I suppose that my qualms with Apple aren’t really so much their fault. They are, all things told, a hardware company. And they do a most excellent job with it, truly. That was proved tenfold-over to me today, as I was so taken aback by the excellent customer service from the local Apple store that I luxuriously meandered through all the cool Appley stuff that they had like a kid with a sweet tooth and no money in a candy store.

Now, here’s another interesting piece of information that I didn’t know until just now: apparently, Apple has taken the high road in recent days and has admitted that there is a problem with certain iPod nano devices and has vowed to replace them for their customers:

Display screens crack easily on a small number of iPod nano digital music players, Apple Computer Inc. acknowledged Wednesday, saying it would replace flawed units.

Apple was responding to a flurry of complaints posted to online forums and community sites about faulty screens on the iPod nano, the tiny music player the company launched earlier this month to much fanfare. Most of the complaints revolved around screen scratches that made the displays difficult to read.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Apple had received few complaints and the only real problem was cracked screens, which would be replaced.

So perhaps, just maybe, there was more at work in today’s enthralling replacement of my cracked iPod nano than just excellent customer service by the Apple Genius who was helping me, but still… they really do a very nice job with serving their customers, and the loyalty that they gain as a result is something well-deserved. Way to go, Apple! And, Microsoft, perhaps you should take notice (um, in case you haven’t been paying attention, Microsoft will only provide drive encryption technology called BitLocker with Enterprise-level licensing for Windows Vista)????

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’ve named my new iPod nano Paganini-nina. *hug* Now… anyone have any recommendations for a really cute, bullet-proof nano case?