I knew there was a reason I don’t like Flash. I can’t create a South Park version of me in Linux on PowerPC without using MacOnLinux to emulate OSX. Macromedia still refuses to take one PowerPC machine that they develop their OSX plugin on and install Linux so they can compile the Flash player/plugin for Linux for all of us PowerPC Linux users. This just goes to show that we really need a truly free (as in freedom) Flash player/plugin.
I tried out polypaudio a couple of days ago because Ubuntu is aparently switching to it. In general, it seems like a great concept, and I’ve heard great things about it, but I have this one problem: it dies with an assertion on ppc. It only seems to happen on PPC (x86 and amd64 both work fine) and I can’t seem to find a bug reporting tool for the project, so I don’t know where to file bugs upstream. I’d be more than happy to try this sound server out (anything is better than ESD 
, but I’m afraid I can’t. Please, if this is going to be a replacement for ESD, it has to be programmed with cross-platform use in mind.
Benjamin Herrenschmidt is the man. The week, he posted some patches to the debian-powerpc list for sleep on the Aluminum Powerbooks and iBook G4’s (basically, the new laptops with ATI cards). After 4 patches and relentless testing from eager users, I think he has it. There are only two flaws that I see: after resuming, sound is quieter than it was before sleep; and I woke my laptop up this morning and the screen had lines all over the place. The second one sounds like a sync issue on my lcd, but the sound issue is probably an ALSA issue. But the great thing is that my laptop now sleeps in Linux! Thanks Ben!
UPDATE: I think I figured out the LCD problem. I had my iBook on AC when I slept it, and when I resumed it, it was on battery power. I’ll talk to Ben this afternoon about it to see if that would affect it.
Yes, I’ve made a breakthrough on Coaster this week. I started getting frustrated with libburn because I found out that libisofs doesn’t write Joliet extensions to iso images; this won’t do. I also ran into some issues where images in memory (not yet written to disk) write wrong on PPC. So I talked to Bastien Nocera and switched the backend of Coaster to use libnautilus-burn from nautilus-cd-burn. DISCLAIMER: I’m not dropping support for libburn, but in order to get a release out, I have to have a working backend.
Yesterday, I got Coaster burning CD’s successfully (albeit, slow because of my hard drive troubles) which gives me new hope. Maybe we can get a pre-release out next week (only a few months late on the pre-release). MAYBE. 
Yes, I caught the fever spreading like wildfire… I downloaded and installed Ubuntu. It’s a pretty darn sweet distro with only a few quirks:
1) It comes with pbbuttonsd as the default power manager. I tried it for a few days and found that pmud does a way better job with power management (I got almost 4 hours of battery with pmud and only around 2.5 with pbbuttonsd).
2) Evolution spawns a new spamd process even with the -L parameter given to spamd. This means it take almost a half hour and the processor chugging along to download all the mail I had stored up over the weekend (108 new mails). This makes no sense to me.
3) There are no bakery2.3 or libxml++-2.6 packages which means I had to compile and install them to work on Coaster. Not too big of a deal.
One cool thing I found is that there are Prism2 modules in the kernel Ubuntu provides. Maybe they have been merged in the kernel for a long time and I never noticed them, but that makes me happy. No more compiling linux-wlan-ng each time I get a new kernel. Now, I wonder which version of the prism2 drivers got merged… I hope it’s something pre21 or later.
All in all, this is a pretty slick distro. I put the CD in, hit enter a couple of times and that was it (besides repartitioning my hard drive, which I needed to do for myself… it detected my partitions flawlessly). Good job guys! I can’t wait to see what you have in store for the next release.
Ever since I bought my iBook, I have loved it. Of course, the first day I got it, I put Linux on it, but I left OSX on it as well. It was a good thing, because Linux didn’t work so well on such a new platform (the iBook G4 was extremely new when I bought it), but I was willing to wait. A few weeks later, a guide was posted online (don’t ask me where it was, I have no clue) about how to get the new iBooks to work with Linux and X and I quickly tried it. After compiling a new kernel and a new X (4.3.99), I had Gnome working on my iBook! There was only one big problem: when it was on battery power and the lid was closed for more than 5 minutes, the machine shut off. I tried every setting in Linux and OSX, but to no avail. Several others have reported the same behavior on the new Powerbook G4’s as well; at least I wasn’t alone. I asked about this problem to some ppc kernel developers, and Ben Herrenschmidt (benh) told me he was waiting for some specs from ATI on the video cards in the iBook G4’s. So, I waited…
But tonight, I signed onto IRC and asked benh if he had heard anything from ATI; he hadn’t, but he had something for me to try. I copied some special files from OSX over to Linux and ran a binary he emailed me (after stopping X) and a gray screen popped up for a second and the program exited fine. Success!!! This means we’re very close (hopefully) to getting the iBook to sleep. I’m so excited, it’s going to be hard to sleep….. zzzzzzz….
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