peter.makholm.net

I took some days off-line so the iBook story hasn’t progressed very much. On the other hand I’ve spent some time with my family and finaly finished Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

Sound

Had some problems with the internal soundcard. I’m not quite sure what the porblem was, but the right module is snd_powermac and not anything like snd_aoa. Probaly did something else wrong along the way too.

The fun part would be playing music throug AirTunes. raop-play claims to solve this problem. They got debian packages for i386 and a nice debian/ in the source tar-ball. The build-deps is missing fluid and libglib2.0-dev but other than that it builds nicely — but no sound…

Nearly giving up I looked at the alsapcm module not part of the debian package, just to see how it worked in theory. And suddenly I could play music with mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 music.ogg. Problem is that raop-play isn’t endian safe, but the alsapcm module forces use of little endian somewhere before the real raop-play.

Afterward I’ve tested raop-play on amd64 where it works nicely.

Java

Java seems to be a problem. None of the packages of ibm-jre packages I’m seem to be able to find is supported by java-package. My Bank uses java, so that is kind of a show stopper, but I havn’t really looked into it yet.

Flash, Youtube and the like

Flash isn’t really a showstopper, but it would be nice to be able to see all the funny video clips people are refering to. None of the free flash plugins seems to work (swfdec, libfalsh-mozplugin), but youtube-dl and mplayer do the job.

Futher work…

Java is a major show stopper. I can’t switch for real without java support in my browser. The other problems is something I can live with. I migth even prefer to use AirTunes from my amd64 server instead of my laptop so I will probally ITP raop-play soon.

Some people have asked why I want to switch away from wonderfull OS X. I’ll try to wirte something up one of the days - and no it’s is not anything personal against mac fans.

My previous post generated a lot of useful comments. Some of them was about using the synaptics trackpad driver. Unfortunately it only works, as Itai Seggev says, on post July 2005 iBooks and my iBook seems to be from August 2004 (this fact took me a long time to realize).

I found an adbsyn howto wich seems to have an solution. Using a kernel patch and a patch for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics you can get the ADB Trackpad to simulate a synaptics trackpad. So for the first time i a very long time I get to compile a kernel…

After a very long time I get to reboot into my new patched kernel and, lo and behold, synaptics works. In the beginning i didn’t seem to work, I had a very low acceleration set but with some fiddling I got it ajusted to something useable. So for enabling synaptics on older ibooks, see: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~bigoi/howto.htm

In the meantime I got glxgears turning smoothly. Now I can start compiz and see a wobly effect when I move windows around, but then compiz freezes the display. Most of the times I seem to be able to terminate the xserver, but i’ve reboted once.

Steps to get OpenGL working:

• change Driver "fbdev" to Driver "radeon" in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• apt-get install libgl-mesa-dri

Hey, nu er det over et år siden jeg begyndte at blogge og jeg er ikke blevet ex-blogger endnu.

Første indlæg var helt klart inspireret af en muse og et par af de følgende også. Men ellers har det mere været Vreden, Gudinde! besyng, som greb Peleiden Achilleus end Musa! fortæl mig om Manden, den vidtbefarne, som flakked Meget omkring.

Muser, vis mig verden! Giv mig inspiration.

/me vandrer slukøret tilbage og ser om google romance ikke er blevet virkelighed

About two years ago I bought a new laptop. I wanted a unix without messing around with drivers for graphics and wireless, so I choose a Apple iBook with OS X. I havn’t regretted but the inflexibilities of Apples user interface is a burden. So I’m playing with installing Debian on a Firewire-drive.

The installation (etch debian-installer RC2) worked fine until the installation of yaboot (the lilo and grub equivalent on powerpc). Google knew the solution: http://howtoforge.org/boot_debian_from_external_firewire (not really, Google found the same howto somewhere else). Problem number two was network: My wireless uses WPA-PSK and I don’t have a free cabled connection. More googling: wpa_supplicant was the solution but it wasn’t on the netinstall cd. Boot into OS X and download wpa_supplicant and some other usefull packages. Problem solved.

So now I have a firewire-drive with a pretty basic Debian install with X11 running. But I actually used 2 Apple applications (Safari and iTunes) and 2 other pieces of Apple hardware (iPod and Airport Express).

Safari is a minor problem, I just have to convince myself that my banking is just as (un)suportted with Firefox as it is with Safari. More interesting is the iTunes/iPod/Airport Express problems. iTunes is easily replaced by xmms but I really likes playing music through AirTunes and I need to keep my iPod updated. So it will porbally take some nore evenings to get completely rid of OS X.

And the I need two more mouse buttons…

Update 2007-04-16: Changed link to boborosso’s howto as requested in the comments.