Tag powerpc

May 3, 2005

Flash sucks

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.

February 17, 2005

Polypaudio? Please, not yet…

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.

November 23, 2004

You’re getting very sleepy

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.

October 5, 2004

Coaster breakthrough

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.

September 20, 2004

Ubuntu

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: 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). Evolution spawns a new spamd process even with the -L parameter given to spamd.

March 28, 2004

benh is my hero

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.