zen.org Communal Weblog

Out of suspicion, I tried putting our ISP’s nameservers at the top of my /etc/resolv.conf. Then I repeated some steps I’d just done—checking for new mail, visiting a particular site—and they were much much faster. This means I either misconfigured my Zaurus when I set it up to take over nameservice for our network, or something about it just makes it be slow responding.

I’ll be hopeful and review how I configured maradns; perhaps it just needs a tweak?

Today I followed some great instructions on how to put OpenZaurus on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It worked like a charm! The Opie GUI is pretty slick, fast, and easy. And the initial image gives you a console window you can use to actually have a command prompt. 🙂

The plan is to try to make it take over DHCP & DNS services, at least, for our home network. Heh.

Update: So far so good. DHCP is working just fine, and maradns, the OpenZaurus choice instead of BIND, is nice and fast and slim for all DNS, including recursive lookups of random domains (i.e., Web traffic is behaving fine). Yippee! The little Zaurus is on my desk, doing most of the work of the 265MHz old box humming away in the corner. You could put hundreds of the Zaurus (Zauri?) in the space taken by the old server. And we’ll talk later about the power consumption dropping to 5 watts/2 amps, compared to the PC’s 230W power supply with spinning disks, whirring fans, and far more live motherboard circuits…

It’s hard to believe, but I left Widener University 13 years ago. (Gasp.) The first edition of “Zen and the Art of the Internet” was created there (well, partly at the campus and a good portion at Sven’s house over Christmas break). It still has my brendan@cs.widener.edu address in it. However, realistically speaking, I don’t think I remember getting a Zen-related email to that address for at least 3 or 4 years, if not longer. Instead, I’ve just gotten a fair amount of spam for it—approaching 40-50% of all of the spam I get, in fact. It’s time I accept the loss of my Widener address, and save a lot of wasted bandwidth.

I asked the postmaster in the CS department there to please finally remove the alias. Big change for me, but one that needed to happen. At home tonight we’re enjoying some wine in tribute to the experiences of college and some life-long friends I made while I was there. (Well, all right, more the friends and getting to hack in the CS lab all night long, day after day. And we’re just having wine cuz we really like wine. But you get the idea.)

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. 🙂

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.)

Seems Rerun’s UPS went belly up last night. It’s plugged into the wall for now.

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

Last night I was sleeping when the baby monitor started beeping, it does that when it receives no signal. I turned it off and was about to go check on Zoë, then I noiced the LED clock, no time. So far one thunder storm in 2005 and one power out, not a good record. Less then a minute later the power was back on. Back to sleep went I.

Brendan noticed it first this morning, Rerun (aka zen.org) was down. The circuit breaker on the UPS turned off, never happened before. I guess there was a power surge too. What hurts is than Rerun was less then a month from being up for a year! I was already planning my blog entry in my mind, but no, no paper anniversary this year. I can only hope for next March.

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. 🙂

I reformatted my Seagate 200Gb external disk to use reiserfs. Don’t remember why, but it hasn’t really mattered. Recently I had a situation where I needed to copy multiple gigabytes from the disk onto a system running Windows XP. Try as I might, the Windows system was saying it saw my USB Storage Device, but it never actually showed up anywhere on the system. No drive to be seen. Then I remembered my move from NTFS to reiserfs. Fudge!

The answer to the seemingly impossible task was to use rfstool, a really cool hack by Gerson Kurz. His page includes some docs on the first steps you take to find the correct device, and then explain how I could copy an entire tree from the external drive onto the local system with the single command

rfstool cp /src d:\work\src

That was so quick and easy! And much, much faster than my first attempt: plug it into my Linux laptop, mount the disk, set up Samba to share it, and then make the Windows machine copy it all over the (really slow for reasons you’ll never want to know) network using Samba. Bleah.

Thanks, Gerson!