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In a copy of Linux Format magazine, they had an article by Richard Smedley called “What on Earth is…PEARPC”. After reading it, and lots of experience with emulators and simulators over the years, it peaked my interest. With just a little effort, I was able to run Mac OS X on my Linux host. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a big admirer of the Mac’s attention to detail in the user interface. I’ve even had conversations with Elana and friends about switching over to a PowerBook sometime soon.

So trying out PearPC was sure enticing. The pearpc.sourceforge.net site has a plethora of goodies for you, including some nice easy instructions on how to do it. Interestingly, they talk about using Darwin to partition a disk image (not a physical drive) for the installation. I tried a few times, but it kept freezing after the line

Warning: AppleMacIO self test fails

However the ideas posed on the blog at Designspace (I can’t find a person’s name for attribution) suggested that this was a little too much and the Disk Utility available inside the installer itself would be enough. The fact that others also offered ways to do all of this without first using a Darwin boot CD gave me some hope. There was some mention of getting a preformatted hard drive image out of pearpc.net though I didn’t actually use this.

I had to use the CVS version of PearPC instead of 0.3.1, the last release sent out in September 2004. The CVS tree is able to boot off the ISO image of the CD, while 0.3.1 doesn’t even show it as existing. My ppccfg file pointed at the ISO image I created from Elana’s first CD for installing Panther (Mac OS X v10.3). I changed prom_bootmethod to have the value select so I could pick the CD image by hand just in case. I created my disk image with

dd if=/dev/zero of=myharddisk.img bs=516096 seek=12482 count=0

and pointed the ppc program to it with the line

pci_ide0_master_image = "/osx/myharddisk.img"

in my ppccfg. I also changed the line

pci_ide0_slave_image = "/osx/osx-3.iso"

to be the image I created of the OS X install disk 1 CD. I created that image with the command

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=osx-3.iso


So when I got it to boot and run the installer, and it was asking me what device to install it on (but showed no choices), I used Open Disk Utility from the Installer pull-down menu, clicked on the disk image (not the CD), on the Partition pull-down selected “1 Partition” , and then chose Partition. It did well, but when I quit out of that, the Installer said “you cannot install Mac OS X on this volume”. Almost gave up, but tried again—and it worked! I didn’t note the URLs, but I found a couple of places explaining how they got around this same problem just by quitting the Installer and running it again. Voila, that did the trick.

The install went great, and I was able to run src/ppc ppccfg and see OS X boot up in the window. How cool.

The part to still solve: I can’t get networking to behave well yet. I first had to make sure to do

chown root /osx/pearpc-cvs/scripts/ifppc_up
chmod g-w /osx/pearpc-cvs/scripts/ifppc_up

as root to make PearPC be willing to actually use the script. First enabling pci_3c90x_installed in my ppccfg, it never showed the device when I looked in System Preferences. Then I switched to enable pci_rtl8139_installed; that was a lot better, and even showed the device during the messages of the boot sequence. I also had to run ppc as root with

sudo src/ppc ppccfg &

in order to make lots of permissions problems not come up related to changes to the network device.

Choosing Network under the System Preferences made a window pop up announcing that it saw the device. But after that, I wasn’t able to get it to show me that it had successfully used DHCP. Hmm, writing this now I realized that I never made my system enable IP forwarding. Hmmm.

Anyway, now that I’m trying it again with networking enabled, I see

ppc0: error fetching interface information: Device not found
...
UID=0
/osx/pearpc-cvs/scripts/ifppc_up: line 16: brctl: command not found
/osx/pearpc-cvs/scripts/ifppc_up: line 17: brctl: command not found
/osx/pearpc-cvs/scripts/ifppc_up: line 18: brctl: command not found
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
br1: unknown interface: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device
br1: unknown interface: No such device
SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable
program terminated with exit code 7
main() caught exception: error executing ifconfig.


Gahh. Back to pearpc 0.3.1, which does much better. It has pci_rtl8139_installed in its ppccfg. But it still freezes at

Warning: AppleMacIO self test fails


When I can get the CVS version of pearpc to boot, if I move the mouse while it’s booting I get

[IO/CUDA] Event processing timed out. Event dropped.

appearing a few times until I’m kind enough to stop moving the mouse any more. And attempts to boot with

pci_ide0_slave_image = "/dev/cdrom"

always gets me the error

[IO/IDE] /dev/cdrom: could not open file (No medium found)

and it exits. So I stick a random CD in the drive, and it gets past that—and back to the AppleMacIO warning. I wonder what I did last night to get it to boot successfully (albeit without networking), but now whether I use PearPC 0.3.1 or the CVS version, it’s hanging at the same place. Even if I change ppccfg to use (or not) the CD image. Or either options for networking or not. Or if I try with a new untouched system disk image or not. Gahh. Trying an strace shows it looping with

futex(0x810a4d8, FUTEX_WAKE, 1) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, {1113159672, 863922000}) = 0
clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, {1113159672, 864070000}) = 0
futex(0x810a4f4, FUTEX_WAIT, 5831, {0, 9852000}) = -1 ETIMEDOUT (Connection timed out)

after that warning message. I wonder why its connection is timing out?

Darn, I was hoping what I’d be writing was a description of how I got it to work for me. Not just yet.

More later. 🙂

About a week ago we were able to display live TV thru the box, but the remote didn’t work and we couldn’t move through channels. It’s much happier now. Problems that still need to be fixed:

• Sound for non-AVI video files is out of sync
• The X display is bigger than the TV screen
• I have to switch the audio output between the Shuttle’s L/R audio out for video files and the audio out of the PVR-350 for live and recorded TV.
• I need a way to make MythTV be able to change channels on the NTL Pace 4001NC box, which reportedly uses RC-5 protocol for the remote. Given that, we can also record everything coming from NTL Digital Cable. There is one cool serial hack that on its main page seems to clearly indicate it will work with my box, which after some clarification is confirmed to work with it. So we’re ordering one now and will share the results once we’ve got it.
• Sometimes after a reboot the live TV doesn’t work for more than a few seconds, and more notably the name of the tuner and the current time don’t appear at the top of the screen. After only a minute or two, it goes back to the menu. If I restart mythbackend, it’s then all happy and can keep going.
• The PVR-350 can accept the FM antenna; can MythTV record radio shows too into mp3 format? A google for “MythRadio” has a few hits for recent conversation. But anything I’d try for this has to wait til everything else works. 🙂

What we’ve got now is pretty usable for day-to-day stuff, with the one physical hurdle of having to use an audio switch box to change which of the two audio sources actually gets emitted. There must be a system/MythTV fix, or we could just get some sort of an RCA jack Y-joiner/junction thing to accept output from either one…Hmm….

Some details on how we got it working:

1. The remote problem was because /etc/lircd.conf defines particular names for each button like

   
CH+ 0X00000000000017E0
CH- 0X00000000000017E1
VOL+ 0X00000000000017D0


   The entries in ~/.mythtv/lircrc need to match those names in some fashion. I just had to change
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = chanup
repeat = 5
config = Up
end

   to instead have
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = CH+
repeat = 5
config = Up
end


   This helped improve watching live TV or shows recorded by the box. But we were stuck when watching a video file like an MPG (which has its own problems anyway) or AVI file; you couldn’t get it to return to the menu after starting to watch it.

2. I came across Adam Rubin’s description of how he made the remote more usable with MythTV. So I just needed to give ~/.mythtv/lircrc a few entries like
   
begin
remote = hauppauge_pvr
button = Pause
prog = mplayer
repeat = 3
config = Pause
end

   to help improve things.
3. The file ~/.mythtv/NTL Basic Cable.xmltv contains the final list of channels I’m using. It omits the pay channels.
4. I had to make /etc/rc.d/rc.local do modprobe ivtv so the driver, and its ivtv_fb framebuffer driver, are all loaded up before anything else. I also added the lines
   
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset -dpms
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset s off

   to make it stop having a blank screen until I hit a key on the (tucked away) keyboard.
5. My final /etc/X11/xorg.conf file makes everything show up on the TV from the PVR-350’s S-Video feed, but the X display is still just slightly larger than the TV screen. When I’m going through the MythTV setup menus it’s impossible to see the selection boxes along the left side.
6. Playing AVI files using the default mplayer now works by giving it the options
   -ao oss -vo x11 -nocache
   However, playing MPG files doesn’t work quite as well. I found others talking about this and how audio seems to come out directly via the sound port, but the video is going through the MPG decoder first. I did find some bits in the MythTV Digital Sound HOWTO and put them into my ~/.asoundrc. But I’ve not spent enough time looking at it to remember how to make MythTV use that, as opposed to the default /dev/dsp device.

So far so good; much more productive than the efforts with KnoppMyth, seemingly just because the version of the mythtv stuff is much more up-to-date.

I finally got Java plugins to behave properly in Konqueror. (Needed for the calendar feature for some webmail applications. ..cough..) I had a copy of Sun’s Java 2 Runtime Environment (J2RE) version 1.4.2 which I downloaded from Sun back in mid-2003; haven’t gotten anything newer (they somehow have jumped right up to version 5.0, hmm) because I don’t do java apps a lot.

Anyway, in Konqueror I used Settings -> Configure Konqueror... -> Plugins, clicked on New, and gave it the path to where I’d put J2RE: /usr/local/j2re1.4.2/plugin/i386/ns4. I selected the new entry in the list of them and clicked Down until it was at the bottom. I clicked Scan for New Plugins, and then selected the Plugins tab—and there it was! /usr/local/j2re1.4.2/plugin/i386/ns4/libjavaplugin.so in all its glory.

Up until now I’d been trying the other version of the plugin in ns610 and also ns610-gcc32, neither of which have worked. Only today did it occur to me to try ns4—and it works! Now when I select “Calendar” on that webmail app, the right side of the screen finally shows me the two calendars and the ability to click on specific day.

Whew.

(As an aside, even though Firefox has always worked for this page, I’m using Konqueror because a memory leak keeps happening with Firefox that eventually makes all of my swap space vanish. I’m using version 1.0.1, and have had friends telling me about other problems with 1.0.2 suggesting I wait for the 1.1 release due March 2005 according to the Firefox site…crap, it’s now April. Hopefully soon. The good news is the memory leak is supposed to be fixed in the code that’ll become Firefox 1.1.)

I gave a shot at the Fedora Core 3 approach as written out at Fedora Myth(TV)ology after replacing my CDROM (the old one was making a lot of bad noises) and burned the four Fedora CDs to just install directly instead of my repeated failed attempts to install over the network. Now things are going much much better. Last night I did my first successful test of watching current TV on the screen, and there was The Matrix being shown perfectly, with sound! How ironic.

Over at NTL I found a list of the basic cable frequencies for the channels. I was able to use them to find the right frequency codes as listed in /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/Video/Frequencies.pm and a channel.sql file from someone else (it’s late, I’m not sure who) with the XMLTV IDs for each channel (which are now their domain names) and end up with this sort of list:

Discovery Chan = 48 MHz = A1= discoveryeurope.com
Channel 4 = 56 MHz = A3= channel4.com
E4 = 64 MHz = A5= e4.channel4.com
RTE2 = 176 MHz = A7= rte-2.rte.ie (This used to be n2.rte.ie)
TV3 = 184 MHz = A9= tv3.ie
RTE 1 = 192 MHz = A11= rte-1.rte.ie
UTV = 200 MHz = A13= utvlive.com
TG4 = 208 MHz = A15= tg4.ie
BBC 1 = 216 MHz = A17= northern-ireland.bbc1.bbc.co.uk
BBC 2 = 224 MHz = A18= ireland.bbc2.bbc.co.uk
Sky One = 232 MHz = A19= sky-one.sky.com
Nickelodeon/Link/Euronews = 248 MHz = A20= nickelodeon.co.uk
MTV = 256 MHz = A21= mtv.co.uk
Sky Sports 1 = 264 MHz = A22= 1.sports.sky.com
Sky Premier = 272 MHz = A23= premier.sky.com
Sky News = 280 MHz = A24= sky-news.sky.com
CNBC / Pay Per View = 408 MHz = A32= europe.cnbc.com
Sky Sports 2 = 304 MHz = A27= 2.sports.sky.com
Sky Sports 3 = 312 MHz = A28= 3.sports.sky.com
Sky Movie Max = 312 MHz = A28= moviemax.sky.com (Note this is the same frequency, bug at NTL site?)
Pay-Per-View = 352 MHz = A31= ??

(Update: If you’re getting “NO DATA” when you visit the listings for a channel in MythWeb, but you know you’ve got it correct in the Channel Editor, you’ve got channels missing for the Video Source you created earlier. Channels like “Channel 4” and “UTV” weren’t being accepted in the terminal window when I was setting up the video source at first. But I just put “channel channel4.com” and “channel utvlive.com” in ~/.mythtv/NTL Basic Cable.xmltv and that fixed it—a rerun of mythfilldatabase and now they’ve got their shows listed properly. I wonder why it wasn’t liking the channels?)

Oh, we don’t get any of the pay channels so I skipped adding those, but they’re here in the interest of completion. And I wonder why SO many broadcast frequencies are unused by NTL?

I ran mythtvsetup and used its Channel Editor to add all of them, setting the values for each (using RTE1 as an example) like this:

• Channel number: 6
• Callsign: RTE1
• Name: RTE-1
• XMLTVID: rte-1.rte.ie
• Frequency ID: A11 (They only one on the 2nd screen that I changed.)

Anyway, MythTV is looking great and even easier to use. I can only guess the KnoppMyth stuff I was using before was just a bit old. No stresses about XMLTV getting the right info, no problems making MythWeather show Dublin including a Weather Channel satellite image, the works. Anyway, I’ll make an effort to share the bits I did that divirge from the instructions I was following (and send them to Jarod Wilson for consideration in his instructions at the same time).

After restarting mythfrondend I’m able to move between channels (with right-arrow and left-arrow on the keyboard) and also jump back in shows (up-arrow and down-arrow). The text at the bottom is still too big even after following some steps to fix them.

And the biggest continuing problem: I’ve got X set up to do 720×576, and I ran “/usr/bin/ivtvctl -f width=720,height=576 “, and still things are missing around the edges. At first login the menu/task bar at the bottom is half-missing. With mythfrontend running I change a channel I see the text at the bottom describing the show, but parts to the left, right, and bottom are off the screen.

What’s the fix? I’ve got a Sony RV-25X5L television which in theory should display things correctly, right?

The other catch: the remote isn’t working yet, though I can run irw and it reports events when I press a button on the (Hauppauge new grey with black back) remote. Unsure why the mythfrontend isn’t getting them yet. The remote worked when I was doing the KnoppMyth approach. More later.

Every damn coffee house around the River Liffey in central Dublin seems to close promptly at 5pm. Does no one in this damn town work late? Don’t they ever want a latte to get some energy?

Intuit is forcing people to buy new copies of their software, even though the existing copies work just fine. You won’t be able to download your statements from your bank, and you won’t be able to get the price history of various equities or bonds.

Lame.

Significant changes are being made to your Quicken software. Please read this to find out what to do.

What you can do to maintain Online Services.
To continue using Online Services—and to regain access to live technical support from Intuit representatives—you will need to purchase Quicken 2005. …and here’s how to give us more money… —B

Dublin’s commuter rail, the DART, runs between Greystones south of Dublin up to Malahide north of the city. A few days ago I was riding the DART and listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast. The route stays uncovered, but often cuts its way through hills and sometimes just beneath street level. The train had just left the Blackrock station and I watched the scenery change out the window.

As we started to work up some speed (this isn’t the TGV), I looked across the other set of tracks and saw someone up on the grass at the top edge of the wall. He had a blue long-sleeve shirt and didn’t look much older than thirty. He was in a crouch position, his feet and hands on the grass with his knees bent. He kept leaning over enough so he could see ahead on the track—to where a train would be coming in the opposite direction. He sure didn’t look like he was there to watch it go by. Then in a blink we’d passed him.

I was hit with an awful dread of seeing a mash of green siding and passengers the image of ghosts go rushing by. Luckily nothing appeared on the other track and we made it to the next station. I was able to get out and run up to the front car, where the conductor’s head was leaning out of the window, watching for the last person to board the train. I told the him what I’d seen, and he said someone jumped on his route only a few weeks ago. Random thoughts ran through my head: I wonder what sort of counseling employees get when someone pulls such a stunt? What did he see when it happened?

He thanked me for the information and said he’d call it in. Did I know exactly where it was? Not really, but I could give a rough description of its position relative to the Blackrock station.

I got back on board and sat down; we started to move again. A couple of minutes later, there was an intermittent blaring of the horn and a train headed in the other direction slowly came to a stop alongside us. I was relieved to see its conductor lean out of his window to talk to the driver of my train for at least a couple of minutes. They said some closing comments, and both trains continued on their way. And maybe my hunch was wrong.

But I don’t think so. I do know my hesitation reporting what I’d seen weirded me out—all I kept thinking of was hearing of disruption (again) on the DART line because someone had committed suicide on the tracks. Seeing clear as day in my mind the person it would have involved. I hope they got to him—even more than hoping he changed his mind and disappeared; it would leave open the chance he’d give it another try.

And there wouldn’t be such a time gap between passing trains.

The January 2005 of Linux Format magazine included a DVD with a full copy of the Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution on it. (And Ubuntu Linux, which I’m going to check out separately for something else.) Today I figured I’d try using it to take a shot at Jarod Wilson’s great HOWTO on how to use MythTV under Fedora. However, after four different tries, I was never able to do a network install. (The DVD drive is on my desktop system, and I have a CD I burned a while ago with the first CD image.) After the first attempt failed, I worked my way through the candidates…the wireless bridge used to network it, then the wireless access point it talked to, then rule out wireless completely. Nothing. It just stalls during a random download. I go to the other virtual terminal (Ctl-Alt-F2) and I can ping the system involved, or even wget the very file it’s hung downloading before. Hmm.

I’m now using the Distros/FedoraCore/mkiso script to create the four CD images; it did them in less than five minutes. Instead of actually burning anything, I’ll put those on my external drive and see if I’m able to successfully use it via firewire or USB as the “local disk” for the various images used to install it.

The inclusion of mkiso and every little piece you need for a proper install of Core 3 is really cool. Kudos to the folks at Linux Format for another great DVD to avoid wasting broadband bandwidth. 🙂

Watching a random episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we saw what Elana says they’ve done before. At the end, they all get together to watch their style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man try to apply all of their advice. The guys sit down with a nice glass of wine and offer commentary that always reminds me of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Anyway, this time they all grab a glass of wine and set the bottle down on the table—where it’s positioned so the camera can focus on the wine’s label, advertising for the viewer what choice they (their producer) made to enjoy this time around.

Gahhhh. After seeing “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” in the US do ridiculous product placement for AT&T, this was nauseating. What will really happen when the American public is able to realize, for real, just how much time is wasted programming them to buy products from specific companies? Too many commercials, and even during the shows you get Coke placed in front of the judges of “American Idol”. Google it a bit and you’ll really see what’s being pushed down everyone’s throats.

In Ireland, if we go to see a movie what started as one blatant commercial before the (more interesting) movie (commercial) previews has grown to be nearly 15 minutes of nothing but ads. Make a point of arriving about 15-20 minutes late for the start of your movie, and you’ll in fact be there just before the film actually begins.

Nearly four years ago, we got a bunch of stuff from someone who was moving from Ireland back to the US. Part of it was a Cambridge Sound Works DTT3500 speaker system, but it’s sat untouched ever since.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, a national (“bank”) holiday in Ireland. We took advantage of the gorgeous weather to do tons of stuff in the back yard, and I spent some time hooking up the speakers. The cables aren’t actually long enough for the rear surround speakers, but that’s okay—our livingroom isn’t arranged in a way that we could put the speakers behind us anyway. All of the speakers are hooked up, the DVD player’s optical feed is plugged in, and I was able to hook the cable TV up as well. (I used a SCART splitter to take the audio signal from the NTL digital cable TV box and feed it into the DTT3500’s audio inputs; I chose Analog Front, whatever that means.)

The end result sounds great! Fellowship of the Ring on DVD sounds amazing. An episode of The Outer Limits on the SciFi channel sounded really cool and well distributed around the room. Music from the various radio stations carried as part of the digital cable package also sounded great. Granted, it’s not a multiple-$$$ Bose system or the like, nor do we (yet) have a good receiver to handle multiple audio inputs really intelligently. We also need to get some longer cables and secure and paint all of them so they’re less obvious.

But I’m certainly happy for something that took about half an hour from start to finish and was originally purchased second-hand in 2001. 🙂