moving parts of the kasper clan

Repeat after me:

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!

My most favoritest headphones just died on me recently.  They were cheapo Jensen behind-the-head headphones, but they had amazingly good sound and fit me perfectly (like comfortable, broken-in shoes).  I used them with my iPod, and everything else.  *sniffle*  But alas, one side of the stereo headphone has stopped working entirely (which sort of defeats the purpose of “stereo”, doesn’t it?) and the faithful Jensen headphones now reside in a landfill in MA somewhere.  So I was getting all ready to go on a conquest for new headphones.  Then I realized that my iPod nano came with Apple-sanctioned mini-headphones that I’d never even opened.  I tried them out today and was once again impressed with Apple’s attention to detail and quality.  The headphones actually do have good sound, and has really cool little details that make it stand out.  Awesome.

Warning: a brain dump followeth:

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…

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…. =:)

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.