SUSE 10.1 On A Powerbook

October 31, 2006    Category: Apples, KDE, Linux   No Comments »

So, no, it’s not nearly as easy as it should be; it’s not nearly as easy as it is in kubuntu; and it has consumed the last few days of my life. But I’ve gotten things working for the most part and since I’ve been utterly unable to find any help on ye olde ‘net about the problems I faced, I’ll post some of my pain and learnings here…

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.

I have had the pleasure(?) of living through the following:

  • 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.

Well, I had to make up for my blah-stricken previous post full of my woes and travails. So, anyway, I once had a nifty little iPod nano. I loved her like a cat and gave her a name and talked in soothing tones to her. Oh, little Beethovina and me were inseparable, yes we were.

*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?

Well, at least it is for me. And it’s taken me $1500 to figure it out the hard way.

How much is it to ask for to be able to {alt,command}-tab through ALL bloody open windows in OS X? You know… ALL of them. Like, ALL of them–including the X11 windows that all get bunched up underneath one stinking X icon. Or the 2 Firefox windows. Not just one of them. ALL of them. And yes, I do know about Witch. And no, it doesn’t work with X11 windows. And why would I want to use X11 to begin with? Because sometimes Free applications are much, much better than the ones you have to pay for. For example, kontact is MUCH much better an integrated mail/PIM environment than Mail.app could ever dream of being.
I realize that some people (mostly Mac-only people) don’t bother their pretty little heads about such things. OS X is pretty, after all, and it’s sooooo much better than OS 9, etc. And if you stay in the Apple box, it truly is a really nice and functional and pretty environment.
Blah.

I now realize that what I have is a really pretty, sexy, sleek, expensive computer (again, they all suck) that is completely incompatible with me. I’m not saying it’s not compatible with others–obviously that’s not the case, and I wish them all the best of luck. But it sucks for me.

I realize this, but it comes down to what you’re used to and what you can be most-productive with. And for me, I’m used to working the way that I’m used to working for the last 10+ years on Linux, and be it “better”, “worse”, “ugly”, or “whatever”, it’s what I’m comfortable with and what I’m most-productive with.

As I’ve blogged about previously, I cannot just use Linux on the powerbook (Linux works absolutely great, persay, but the proprietary applications that I need to run on it I cannot since they’re not made for Linux-PPC, but only Linux-x86). Let this be a lesson to all those who come behind…. Yes, Linux (the Kernel and distribution) works wonderfully on the PPC platform. But do the apps you need? Realize up front that you cannot use Flash (like 50+% of the websites on the WWW use these days?!?), Moneydance (forget OFX because Moneydance is proprietary, as is Java, and the only “complete” JVM you can use decently is IBM’s JDK, which doesn’t work with Moneydance’s SSL layer or something… blah), Win32-based multimedia codecs (.mov, .avi, .asf, etc…. any of the codecs that work in Linux-x86 that are based on windows32 will NOT work in Linux PPC), and others you may not realize you really need to have until you’re stuck with a powerbook running Linux and can’t have them.

I also cannot just use OS X. This is partly because of comfort/what-I’m-used-to, as well as some practical things, like having to jump through some really screwy hoops to be able to develop for the KDE environment.
And how bloody difficult is it to have the “end” key mean “End of Line” to OS X????? Or the “Home” key mean “beginning of Line”, not “top of page”????
And why not put the to-the-rest-of-the-world standard keys (ever heard of insert? single-key delete/page down/page up/home/end?????) as single keys on the Mac keyboard, Steve???

Bloody BLAH.

So I’m a little disgruntled right now.  I’ve rebooted back into OS X and I’ll likely stay here for a while.  As it turns out, the show-stopper for me to be able to run Linux (which I’d much prefer) on this powerbook is not anything to do with Linux itself, but rather with the commercial/proprietary software that I find myself needing to run.  I need to be able to use Moneydance to do my family’s financial account management and bill paying.  Moneydance runs on Java.  Apparently, the only full version of Java for Linux PPC is IBM’s JRE.  That’s right, Sun doesn’t provide Linux-PPC users a JRE, how nice of them.  And yes, I did spend a couple of hours trying to get cacao, sablevm, and kaffe working with Moneydance and they didn’t work at all.  IBM’s JRE does actually get the program started and working up to a point.  It poops all over itself, however, when it tries to download online bank transaction information:

There was an error communicating with your financial institution. The details of this error are below.
A communication or parsing error occurred. This could be the result of a network problem, a proxy error, or misconfigured server.
Error Description: java.io.IOException: java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: Class com.ibm.jsse2.cc configured for SSLContext not a SSLContext

Oh joy.  I’ve opened a bug report with the Moneydance folks, but have not heard back from them yet.

And, of course, I can’t get any of the non-open stuff to work in Linux PPC.  This includes Flash, win32 codecs (can’t play .mov, .avi, .wma), etc., etc.  So, I need to figure out how to either replace Moneydance with something better that will work in Linux PPC (GNUcash maybe??) and live with the stuff that doesn’t work, or I need to figure out how to start being able to be productive and code for KDE in OS X.

Crap.  Again… what the heck did I do to myself???

[Update] Oh, I almost forgot… The other really big reason I had to sound the retreat is that I kept getting kernel panics whenever I’d go to hotsync my Palm device (Treo 650).  I’ve opened a bug with the ubuntu folks, and haven’t heard back on it yet.  My guess would be something related to the appletouch driver, since it’s a sort-of-usb device thingey, but I’ve not had time (nor will I most probably) to look into it further. Blech!

Yet another small blip from the life and times of a powerbook owner and Linux glutton-for-pain… I think this issue has been fixed in the Alsa 1.0.11-rc4 snd-powermac modules, but since I haven’t taken the time to recompile the kernel yet and since Ubuntu Dapper Drake still only comes with 1.0.10, I’m stuck with a workaround for a time being.

So, I have a 15″ 1.5G powerbook, and I just bought some really nice Altec Lansing speakers from the local Target and would like to use them with my powerbook in Linux. Sounds simple enough of a request, no? Well, believe it or not, it doesn’t work out of the box. I plug my headphones/external speakers in and sound still comes out of my powerbook’s internal speakers. I’m using kmix here (KDE > * =;) ), so what I’ve found is that I have to manually go into kmix’s full mixer window (right-click on the tray icon and click “Show Mixer Window”. Go to the “Switches” tab. Note that “PC Speaker” is selected. “Headphone” may or may not be selected also if you have your external speaker/headphones plugged in, but no sound is coming out of your headphones/external speakers–that is the problem, after all. Also, “Auto Mute” is selected by default on mine (probably should do exactly what I need it to do by default, but methinks it’s broken). So, anyway, unselect “Auto Mute”, then click “Headhpone”. Beautiful. Music now comes out of all 4 of my speakers. =:) Flippin’ sweet!! At first, I had to keep playing with the “Headphone” and “PC Speaker” selections–turning one off, then the other, etc., but now it seems to be working perfectly well.

HTH some other glutton-for-pain Linux powerbook user…. =:)

Kubuntu On A Powerbook

April 12, 2006    Category: Apples, KDE, Linux   12 Comments »

So, in an attempt to get back to hacking/programming again (since I’m definitely not getting it at work), I’ve installed Linux on my Powerbook. Actually, I’d installed SuSE 10 on it the day after I bought the powerbook 5+ months ago, but I’d never really done anything with it–partly because I really wanted to see what OS X was really like (it is REALLY, REALLY cool, but not conducive to feeling like I can start improving things/hacking/programming) and partly because neither the trackpad nor the wireless ethernet worked. But recently, the folks at the Broadcom 43xx Linux Driver project have made GREAT strides in getting the proprietary Broadcom wireless network card working in Linux. And, the kind folks with the kubuntuproject (probably also the core ubuntu project as well, but I much prefer KDE…) have made almost everything work out of the box for Linux running on the Powerbook.

There are a few things that I had to do to get things working as well as I wanted them to. This, then, is some notes on what I’ve done….

First, the trackpad. By default, the latest kubuntu (Dapper Drake, at time of writing) comes with the driver for the apple trackpad. The kernel module for this is “appletouch.” To get it to play nicely with X, I’ve replaced kubuntu’s default section for the Synaptics mouse in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “LeftEdge” “0”
Option “RightEdge” “850”
Option “TopEdge” “0”
Option “BottomEdge” “645”
Option “MinSpeed” “0.4”
Option “MaxSpeed” “1”
Option “AccelFactor” “0.04”
Option “FingerLow” “0”
Option “FingerHigh” “30”
Option “MaxTapMove” “20”
Option “MaxTapTime” “100”
Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0”
Option “VertScrollDelta” “30”
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
EndSection

And to be honest, after getting used to the Synaptics driver, I really do like the vertical and horizontal scrolling it can do, as well as the right-click and middle-click you can do by tapping with two or three fingers. I do really miss OS X’s two-finger scrolling feature, but I think I can get used to this and do just fine. The one thing I still need to spend a little time tweaking is the sensitivity. It seems that I have to tap a little bit harder than I do in OS X to initiate a scroll or a mouse move.

One more mouse-related thing… By default, kubuntu/ubuntu comes with 3 lines in /etc/sysctl.conf that cause the F11 and F12 keys to fire middle/right mouse clicks. I am used to using F11 and F12 for other keybindings, so I’ve commented these out as such:

# Emulate the middle mouse button with F11 and the right with F12.
#dev/mac_hid/mouse_button_emulation = 1
#dev/mac_hid/mouse_button2_keycode = 87
#dev/mac_hid/mouse_button3_keycode = 88

Secondly, those crazy apple keyboards on the powermacs aren’t exactly what you’re used to if you’ve been using x86 Linux for the last 12+ years as I have. It goes “control, alt/option, command (open apple)” on the left side of the space bar. My fingers want to naturally go to the button immediately to the left of the space bar for the “alt” key, and as mentioned, on the apple keyboard, this is the “command” or “open apple” key. So, to map things the way I’m used to working, I have this in a file I’ve called ~/.xmodmap-powermac:

keycode 115 = Meta_L
keycode 116 = Meta_R
clear mod4
clear mod1
add mod1 = Alt_L Meta_L Alt_R Meta_R

I then call “xmodmap ~/.xmodmap-powermac” from either KDE’s Autostart directory or ~/.xsession . This causes both the “alt/option” key and the “open apple/command” key to be treated as the “alt” key in X. Happiness.

Now, on to the wireless network… As stated above, kubuntu nicely comes with the kernel drivers for this to work. But there is a little bit of work that is left for the user, because of legal reasons. In short, you need to use the bcm43xx-fwcutter utility from the broadcom 43xx project page to extract the firmware from Apple’s drivers. Having done this (read that page for the specifics) copy all resultant bcm43xx*.fw files to /lib/firmware. You’ll then need to either reboot (simplest) or reload the bcm43xx kernel module. This will allow the driver to actually use the wireless card.

From there, there’s a little bit of a timing issue around getting the card to associate with an AP and subsequently get connected and DHCP’d onto a wireless LAN. But to sum it up, I’ve added eth0 (the wireless card) to /etc/network/interfaces as so:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
pre-up /home/me/bin/eth0-wireless-pre-up.sh

That tells debian/kubuntu to start the wireless card automatically and how to load it (man interfaces) by running my custom eth0-wireless-pre-up.sh script, which is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 up
iwconfig eth0 channel 6
iwconfig eth0 rate 11M
iwconfig eth0 essid MYESSID
sleep 2
iwconfig eth0 key MYKEY
sleep 2

As you can see, the tricks are that you need to limit the rate for the card to 11M, give it your SID, wait for it to associate to your AP, then give it your key (if you have one), and then after that all works, kubuntu will automatically kick off dhcp (dhclient3, to be precise).

So, that gets my wireless card working at boot. But what about suspending/resuming? Well, there’s probably more official ways, but here’s what I’ve done…. I’ve created a file called /etc/apm/scripts.d/vR-apm and symlinked it into the /etc/apm/resume.d/ and /etc/apm/suspend.d/ directories. That file is as follows:

#!/bin/sh -x
#
# apmd proxy script for vR–custom stuffies
# — from apmd_proxy…
# Here are the possible arguments:
#
# start – APM daemon has started
# stop – APM daemon is shutting down
# suspend critical – APM system indicates critical suspend (++)
# suspend system – APM system has requested suspend mode
# suspend user – User has requested suspend mode
# standby system – APM system has requested standby mode
# standby user – User has requested standby mode
# resume suspend – System has resumed from suspend mode
# resume standby – System has resumed from standby mode
# resume critical – System has resumed from critical suspend
# change battery – APM system reported low battery
# change power – APM system reported AC/battery change
# change time – APM system reported time change (*)
# change capability – APM system reported config. change (+)
#
# (*) – APM daemon may be configured to not call these sequences
# (+) – Available if APM kernel supports it.
# (++) – “suspend critical” is never passed to apmd from the kernel,
# so we will never see it here. Scripts that process “resume
# critical” events need to take this into account.

echo “`date`: got here, 1->$1< -, 2->$2< -" >> /tmp/apm-debug.log

case “${1},${2}” in
(suspend,*)
echo “`date`: doing suspend stuff” >> /tmp/apm-debug.log
ifdown eth0
;;
(resume,suspend)
echo “`date`: doing resume stuff” >> /tmp/apm-debug.log
modprobe -r appletouch
modprobe appletouch
ifup eth0
;;
esac

And with that, my Linux powerbook correctly restarts the wireless network whenever I suspend and resume (which works perfectly well out of the box too, by the way).

Okay, bye.

I’ve long-been wanting a nice WYSIWYG editor for my WordPress blog. And, let me just say… there’s not one that I could find for Linux, which both sucks and is honestly quite a surprise. And yeah, I know there’s a partial resource in kdepim 3.5, and I had it on my TODO list to look at helping to finish it/get it working, but that’s obviously not happened yet. Oooh! Maybe that can be the itch that I need to scratch! But anyway, I’m sure I missed this killer app in my searches and there is, in fact, one out there, but I sure as heck couldn’t find it.

So, it occurred to me that I now have one of those… how do you say… commercial operating systems (that being the lovely and talented OS X Tiger), and that there just might be some neato little blog editors for said lady. And indeed, there are. I’ve found Ecto and have decided to give it a spin.

It’s nice!

Although, I can’t imagine myself ever in the place in life where I’d joyfully fork over money for the pleasure of using it, it is a well-done little application, and it does indeed do WYSIWYG blog editing. I think that the length of time that I’ll use it is directly related to how long I can use it without having to pay money. Which brings me to the point of Open Source development on OS X. It doesn’t seem to have caught on nearly as well as I would have thought. I mean, the idea of developing software just because you love doing it and are fine with sharing your source code and applications with the world without feeling obligated to charge people for the privilege doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent on OS X as it is on BSD/Linux/etc. Bummer, that!

Also, there are a couple of pet peeves I have with iTunes.

  1. First, it doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Amarok of watching the directories that it’s supposed to be. If I add songs to my directories outside of iTunes, it doesn’t know about them until I restart iTunes. And there’s no “rescan collection” that I can find, unlike the one that is readily available in Amarok.
  2. Second, it doesn’t have a cover manager like Amarok does, from what I can find. This plainly sucks. It looks like Apple actually wants you to manually put in the cover art for each album?? No thanks. I can go get a pet rock if I want that boring of a hobby. Or maybe this is intentional–Apple wanting to make it as easy to get all this working if you use only the iTunes store, and as difficult to do it any other way?
  3. This is a third bullet item, having nothing to do with iTunes at the moment. It may at some point, but it doesn’t right now. Actually, there’s something odd that Ecto does with ordered lists, like the WYSIWYG and code get out of sync or something. Ick.
  4. Oh, I know–Lyrics. iTunes doesn’t do Lyrics?? Amarok does, and does it really smoothly.

Blah! So, I spent some time last week and got Amarok up and running through Fink in OS X. And it really, really, really works well!! Really really! I was expecting the same level of weirdness that one sees in Linux when trying to get Windows-ish things to work, but it all just worked flawlessly. Sound works fine, although it seems that amarok only wants to use esdsink for its engine, which seems odd, but multiple apps can still access the sound card, which is important (and problematic in Linux on most cheap sound cards) so there’s nothing wrong here. Maybe I’m just more comfortable with that which I’m used to, but I find Amarok a nicer interface to work with. So, seriously, two thumbs waaaay, way up, Amarok guys and gals!! =;)

And lastly, I’ve been jonesing for some Pink Floyd lately. Out here in Rhode Island, I’m without all of my CD’s, etc., so I went and found some songs from my favorite Floyd CD, Delicate Sound of Thunder. I am always amazed at how intricate, emotional, ahead-of-their-time, smooth, and experiential Pink Floyd songs are. I surely hope this isn’t one of those signs of me getting old, but I am still drawn to their songs, lyrics, arrangements, and musicality as much as I was 10 years ago+. My favorites from this CD are definitely:

  1. Learning to Fly
  2. The Dogs of War
  3. On the Turning Away
  4. One of These Days
  5. Comfortably Numb
  6. Run Like Hell

Awesome, awesome music. Makes me wish I could have seen them live myself. =:) Oooh–also, One Slip from A Momentary Lapse of Reason is awesome!! =:)

And with that, I bid you, fare reader, adieu.

The world may now end

November 13, 2005    Category: Apples, Life in General   4 Comments »

Holy freakin’ crap, Batman.

This just in:

I’ve finally done it and went and bought a new (well, refurbished) Powerbook. 15″ beautiful widescreen. 1.5G processor. 1G of RAM. 80G of 5400-rpm hard drive sweetness. Superdrive (DVD burner, etc.). All for the unbelievable price of $1499 (plus $59 for the second 512 megs of RAM).

This thing rocks my world in amazing ways.

I believe that this has always been one of the signs that the world will soon be ending. You know… Jason buys a powerbook, cats and dogs living together… MASS hysteria.

WOOOOT!! I love this machine!

I’ve just spend the entire evening repartitioning the hard drive to give Mac OS X 45 gigs and Linux the rest, as well as re-installing OS X and then installing SuSE 10 PPC onto the hard drive. The Linux install was a little bit more painful than I thought it would be. And for some reason, the built-in ethernet (yes, I know–not the Airport card–the old-fashioned RJ-45 port) card won’t get a DHCP address.

But I am tickled pink by this. I am absolutely loving OS X.

Watch this space for more details of my new life as a Mac user, as well as my upside-down, turned-all-crazy life as a moving-to-Rhode-Island CVS IS Architect.

iChat Superiority

October 16, 2005    Category: Apples, Linux   6 Comments »

iChat SuperiorityA wise man once said, “Never take a knife to a gunfight.” I have made that mistake. You can here see my attempt to challenge my friend’s chat client manliness. I thought this funny enough to share. =:)

On the left, you can see the challenger, kopete, with its iChat style. And on the right, you can see Mike, using the real iChat, on a real Mac, laughing at me.

Dangit I want a Powerbook!


(psst! iChat Superiority was uploadd by: vanRijn).

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