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I wish to plug an audio device into my G5 running Tiger and listen to the audio out the speakers. I can rip the audio to a sound file so I know it’s working but I just want to listen. To do this on my Linux box the audio does not even leave the sound card. Any help?

I really hope I’m missing something stupid.

I’ve been using Tiger at work for almost a month now. My list of pet peeves has grown, but realize that most of them are because I’m just not used to it, and I think I will get over most of them. For now…

• Remote X11. On my Mac OS 10.4.1 (now 10.4.2, but I haven’t tried this since the upgrade) I launch X11, then ssh -X to another system and launch emacs, it pops up for ten seconds and then dies. I actually think this is a Mac OS version problem, as most systems around here are younger then Tiger, but it still bothers me. Thank you Ange ftp, or whatever came with GNU Emacs’ CVS.
• Click to focus. I know many X11 window managers have this option, but I always turn it off. Now I’m exiting out of the wrong application. I have the mouse over the web browser, using it to help me read some small text some place, I finish. Time to close the web browser, up to the pull down menu and away goes my terminals. I’m happy most applications ask before exiting.
• Tabs. This has got to be the biggie. In the dark ages of window managers, a couple of years ago, I was always overlapping my windows just a little. This was so they would take up almost the same screen real estate, but leave leave enough space on the side to click on. Then there was Ion. Even for a mouse potato like me, Ion2 is configurable enough to do most things with the mouse with only a couple of hours of configuration, worth it for the keystrokes saved. Now I’m overlapping my windows again. I’d be happy with PWM type tabs.
• Hot keys. The Mac has too many hot keys. I have enough carpel problem typing code and using remote systems. I don’t want them to control my window system. Sometimes typing errors do the strangest things. (This is actually worse part about the default Ion window managers configuration too.) I turned most of the hot keys off in the control pannel, but the few I tried to keep on don’t seem to work. Sigh. I’m not even sure how to ask about them. I type the Swedish historal site marker-ski jumper in mid air-[ to zoom out but nothing. I’m sure there are Unicode entries for these symbols, but I can’t find them in the Character Palette. Maybe I don’t know what “zoom out” means.
• Ogg files. The summary is you can’t play them. Well, you can, but it seems ogg123 dose not build, though I haven’t tried. iTunes don’t play them. The QT plugin I donwloaded crashed QT, and all the GUI players I found where part of some global audio/video solution for the Mac. I just want a simple player, GUI or not, that will load lists of *.ogg files and play thim. I’m a simple man, with simple wants.

Does anybody know it the Intel Mac will be 32bit or 64bit?

While I haven’t spent a lot of time looking, I have spend a little time with no luck. Maybe I just don’t know how to look for Mac informaiton. According to the June 11 User Friendly strip: “AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!! APPLE IS MOVING TO X86 ARCHITECTURE!!”, but I’m not sure if that is a valid information source.

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. 🙂

Hacking on a Cube a little bit, I came up with this list of things you can do when it’s booting. What’s missing? Is there a definitive list anywhere?

At the prompt, type
• boot enet:0,yaboot — boot over the network requesting yaboot, the package I was using to do a network boot of the Cube
• boot cdrom
• boot cdrom:0
• boot hd:0
• load
• bye
• mac-boot
• eject cd
• dir hd:\
• reset-nvram
• reset-all

While booting, hold down:
• Opt-Apple-O-F — boot from firmware
• c — boot from cdrom
• t — don’t remember
• x — don’t remember
• n — boot from network

A straw poll of sorts today, first day back in school, suggested that about 60% of the kiddies got a pink or silver mini i-pod for Christmas. A number of them could not send an email before the Christmas break but they are now all about the torrents and the folders and the iTunes and differences between MP3s and AAC and the best firewall software. Scary stuff. To be encouraged.

A very cool project, even though I am still on my Christmas holidays: in late January, apparently, we will be setting up video conferencing between five Dublin schools http://www.global-leap.com/ and through this we will be running peer-to-peer teaching in things like web design, desk top publishing and programming. Sounds purdy cool.

Also, next September, about half the kiddies and all the staff get iBooks (except me ; I get a PowerBook next week ‘cos I’m special) and some Apple dudes are coming in over the summer to set up wireless access points in all of the classrooms and public areas.

Blogging With AquaMinds NoteTaker

This is great. A great way of using OPML. And decent explainations on what it is. NoteTaker has a free 30 day trial, I just downloaded it. And after I find my mouse (cause my right arm feels like it’s going to drop off from too much trackpadding), I’m gonna play with it.