Recently in OS X Category

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

Run the operating system and accompanying application software that ...

• Works best on your hardware
• That you feel personally/technically competent about (or want to get there)
• That includes the applications you want and need to use
• Which has an acceptable term of support from the project/vendor for your needs
• Which has an acceptable distance from (or to) the cutting-edge of software for your needs

I've been contemplating an installation of Mac's OS X operating system on my old Power Macintosh G4/466 (466 MHz PowerPC CPU, currently 384 MB of RAM but a maximum of 1.5 GB on the motherboard).

That circa 2000/01 machine has been very happily running the PowerPC build of Debian Etch Linux for quite awhile now. But to truly be a work machine for what I do, I need to have Flash capability, and that's something that just isn't easy to do (and do well) on a PowerPC system not running OS X.

It's the tyranny of Flash as the predominant video format over the Internet. Flash is a proprietary system that is wholly controlled by Adobe, and both the apps that make Flash as well as those that display it are tightly controlled by this single company.

And while Adobe appears happy to code Flash players for Intel-based Linux, it is not so happy to do the same for other architectures in Linux (including PowerPC) as well as for other Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD (which uses the Linux version to some degree of success, as does OpenBSD, but in both cases on i386 only and not on PowerPC, which is what I'm aiming for).

I'm already running OS X on our iBook G4 laptop, and I figured that a "backup" OS X machine wouldn't be a bad idea all the way around.

I left the Debian Etch drives in the G4 (there is space for three drives on the bottom of the box, and I have one Debian "root" drive and another devoted to backups) but unplugged them and added a 40 GB IDE hard drive I pulled from a dying Compaq desktop a while back.

Once I figured out with the help of my Mac guru (and fellow LADN online worker) Tom Gapen that the OS X installer wouldn't even recognize my new/old hard drive until I used Apple's Disk Utility to put an OS X-recognized volume on it, I was able to continue beyond the first few screens of the install process.

Even then, I had to create the HFS+ volume in the Disk Utility and reboot before the installer would allow me to actually begin the installation.

Since this Mac is so comparatively old, it doesn't have an internal DVD drive. Being CD only, I used my OS X 10.3 discs to install the system. I figure I'd try later to hook up a Firewire DVD drive and upgrade to 10.4.

Once I had the disk-volume issue out of the way, I just let the installer run. The first thing it does is painstakingly check the first of two CDs for errors. Probably not a bad thing, but time-consuming.

I just let the installer run as I did other things, changed discs when needed, and then entered the barest of personal information when the system asked for it to make the first user account.

So I now have a relatively old Macintosh G4 with a single 466 MHz processor (we still have a few dual-500 MHz G4s in service at the Daily News; they run well with OS X 10.4) probably not quite enough memory at 384 MB, but a spare 256 MB module that I'll stuff in there as soon as I can (and the hope that I can scare up one or more 512 MB PC100 or PC133 modules to build it out).

I don't have the box connected to the Internet yet, and I'll have to load some software — especially the Firefox Web browser — in addition to first patching the OS X 10.3 installation and then upgrading to 10.4 and patching that ...

And if I can get networking into the box (I'm thinking either powerline networking or stringing some CAT5e from the home network to the box, which is far away from said home network), I will hopefully have a somewhat serviceable OS X machine on which to do work at home.

And if it doesn't work out, I can just unplug the OS X drive, replug in the Debian drives, update the Etch installation to Lenny and return to all the goodness that Linux has brought to this box in the recent past.

Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users.

Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had.

It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

Apple has it easy because it controls the hardware and the software and hence has an easier time making all the bits work together.

In my experience, Ubuntu generally performs well, and its developers seem genuinely worried about whether or not hardware will work with the distribution's constant stream of releases.

In both Linux and OpenBSD, for instance, wireless support has only gotten better over time.

I wish I could say the same for sound and video. PulseAudio has been somewhat of a disaster over the past year or more. It just wasn't ready for the average user, and the above-average user is demanding Jack and real-time kernels to do sophisticated audio work.

Now PulseAudio seems to be getting better.

For me, my Intel video hardware on a couple of laptops (Gateway Solo 1450 and Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) has been causing problems beginning with Debian Lenny's time in testing. Whenever you need xorg.conf hacks just to make video work, and those hacks aren't crystal clear and easy to find, there will be problems. People will try Linux and run away from it as fast as they can if they can't get the basics (sound and video) to work.

And for my particular Toshiba laptop, the use of Kernel Mode Setting killed X in my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. Once I figured out how to turn KMS off (with a new line in GRUB), I could run X without an xorg.conf for the first time since Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. That's a nice change.

But to get there — to get basic functionality — I had to bring my 2 years of FOSS knowledge to bear in order to solve the problem.

Then just about every ancillary GNOME app (Brasero, Rhythmbox, Empathy and the non-GNOME Pidgin) stopped working after the upgrade. A quick search determined that my previous installation (in 9.04) of KDEnlive brought in a plugin that kept the other four apps from working. I saw lots of chatter on the problem, but none of the solutions worked for me. I had to remove the offending plugin and then reinstall three opencv libraries to clear things up (you can see all the details in the previous entries on this blog).

Many will say that I should've stuck with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (with the initials standing for "long-term support"), which performed well for me but wasn't as stable on my particular hardware as 9.10 (for which I had to do some hackery to get NetworkManager to manage my network).

And both Ubuntu 8.04 (I'm still using it on the Gateway laptop, where it's very solid) and Debian Lenny (now stable and running very well for me on two other machines) are viable options, but for my main laptop I want newer packages, especially Firefox 3.5, and I've been more inclined to upgrade the distro itself rather than use backports or PPAs to bring newer apps to older distributions.

Maybe I've got that wrong (or maybe not).

I've been meaning to move all of my user files to a Debian Lenny machine and see how well that performs with my regular abuse of the hardware and software. And there's always Fedora (and Mandriva ... and PCLinuxOS ... Mepis ... and dozens of others).

But despite all my grumbling, I do have a functioning Ubuntu 9.10 system. I even ditched my own "blue" theme and wallpaper and brought in the "human" theme and wallpaper that shipped with the upgrade. I'm back to Ubuntu s**t brown and orange, and I'm liking it. The new GNOME icons are cool. And we all have the next Ubuntu release — and 10.04 will be the next LTS — to look forward to with hope that many bugs will be squashed in the service of a stable desktop that will have the customary 3 years of desktop support.

In a nutshell: Ubuntu's under the hot lights. People expect more from it than they do from any other FOSS operating system. And it generally delivers more than any other, if not as much as people are counting on in their lofty expectations.

I use Ubuntu for many reasons: It seems to have the right balance between total "freedom" and the ability to play most multimedia, its developers are focused more on the desktop and less on the server (although Ubuntu is making a big play there), and its vast user base means that when there are problems, the community (including me in this blog) can often solve problems that benefit all users.

We're all looking for the time when Ubuntu (or some other distro, or some other OS entirely) can be easily handled by the average computer owner. That time really isn't here yet. With a Windows preload, the manufacture of the hardware generally makes sure there are drivers for all the hardware. Linux preloads — a few of which do exist — generally do the same. But in the wild and wooly world of geeks burning ISOs and installing Unix-like operating systems on all manner of hardware, a foolproof experience just isn't in the cards. Yet.

Will we ever get there? I hope so. I also have at least a little bit of hope for more preloads of Ubuntu and other Linux distros and maybe even a BSD.

There has been a whole lot of progress over the past few years on the Linux desktop. It's hard to predict where the state of FOSS will be five years from now.

In the near future I'll settle for Xorg and Intel playing well together, mass adoption of a free and open video standard and a move away from proprietary document formats since we barely need to print anything anyway.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

Scrolling through this week's Distrowatch, I came across an interesting new distribution in the "waiting list" of projects that will eventually be tracked by Distrowatch, should they survive long enough to ...get through the waiting list.

Lin-X aims to follow the Ubuntu distribution on which it's based but look as much like Apple's OS X as possible.

While I'm a user of OS X as well as Ubuntu (and Windows and OpenBSD ...) and I do like many things about the OS X user interface — the chief of which is the ability to keep an application running but NOT have a window of that application open at the time if I choose not to — I'm not one of those people who think OS X has it all over GNOME, KDE or even Windows XP.

But others might feel differently, and the ability to create a distro such as Lin-X from the parts provided by Ubuntu (and before that by Debian, and before that the Linux kernel, GNU userland, Xorg, GNOME and the many thousands of applications and utilities that go into many Linux distributions) ... that ability is something to be celebrated, since it gives us, the users, more choice and more freedom.

Anyhow ... while the OS X look of Lin-X is somewhat intriguing, what's even more intriguing about the distro is its revenue model.

Revenue model?

Yep, it has one. Aside from donations (which enter you in a drawing for a free Macintosh, there's an offer of e-mail support at $15 a year.

While it's not free, it's extremely cheap. Desktop support from the likes of Canonical, Red Hat or what have you will cost much, much more.

I won't get into why people who want to run an OS X-looking Ubuntu/Linux-acting OS on their PC hardware would be overly interested in winning some free Macintosh hardware — OK, maybe it's not as incongruous as it seems to me — but if this support is worth anything at all, it could be an extremely good deal for a business or individual who wants to run Ubuntu on the desktop, especially a Ubuntu designed to look as much as possible like OS X.

If you have any interest in Lin-X, download it here via Torrent, direct link via Adrive or Megaupload (the latter two of which I've never heard of ... but they appear to be legitimate ways of getting the ISO).

The only "stopper" here is that I can't find the name of the person or persons behind Lin-X, also known as probably the guy who wants your $15 and is promising you the chance at a free Macintosh in order to get it. Neither the About page nor the FAQ mention a single name.

That makes me a little squirrely about the whole endeavor, but then again, if you download Lin-X, run it and like it, $15 isn't much to part with even if you don't expect any support in return. So if you expect little, you probably won't be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I have neither download nor run Lin-X; I'm basing all of this on my reading of the Distrowatch article and the Lin-X Web site. My interest in running Ubuntu-derived distributions is limited to those that offer scads of audio-, graphic- and especially video-editing software; if it includes Cinelerra or whatever Cinelerra is morphing into by default, or anything aspiring to be the next Final Cut for FOSS, I'm there. In that aspect, I'll probably need a Mac eventually, but I'd much rather edit video in an all-FOSS environment, and that remains my goal.

I've been writing updates in my print column of the things I've bought/used/discarded/loved/hated over the past year, and that got me thinking: I got started with Linux in early 2007 and used many a distro on the machines available to me.

But for the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this:

1) I've found stuff that works

2) see 1)

OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Anyhow, the other reason I've kept the same operating systems on my half-dozen or so active computers is that I need them to run — and run well. And they do.

Here's the rundown:

On my main laptop, the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 for nearly six months. The only "sticking" point is not having Flash 9 or 10. Flash 7 works for YouTube but not much else. I have a few things that I do that need more up-to-date Flash, but otherwise the OS and applications in packages and ports have been extremely stable. I just upgraded it from Firefox 2 to 3, and tonight I added Mplayer and successfully played a Quicktime video. (Too bad the sound chip on the Toshiba is broken; the video itself looked great.)

If OpenBSD weren't so good, I'd use the Flash situation as a excuse to run back to Linux. But I've enjoyed using OpenBSD and learned so much over these months that for now I'm going to stick with it.

I have an identical Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It, too, is performing very well, although I seldom use it since I have all of my data on the OpenBSD laptop. I have few complaints about Ubuntu 8.04, and before it came out I vowed to stick with the LTS for at least a year, maybe longer. I could be persuaded to upgrade if I needed to get a newer wireless adapter to work, but so far I haven't needed to do that. Ubuntu remains very solid, and with better Flash support than OpenBSD it's nice to have it as a backup.

Our daughter has what used to be known as the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450. The Gateway could never comfortably run OpenBSD because of its noisy CPU fan, which Linux can manage most of the time (with a simple shell script). FreeBSD managed the fan even better, but only during the first boot after the install. After that, it all went to hell.

Our girl has all her educational games on the Gateway, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04. I still think that the Debian Project packages Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint just that much better than Ubuntu, but all the problems I had with Debian Lenny and X on both the Gateway and later the Toshiba had me running back to Ubuntu and OpenBSD — both of which run X perfectly on both laptops with no xorg.conf file needed.

I'll concede that installing, customizing and maintaining just about any Linux distro is easier than doing the same in OpenBSD, but as I say above, I'm grateful for the learning experience and most of the time can figure out how to do what needs to be done in OpenBSD.

My Self-Reliant Thin Client, the first test machine that I began running Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, ZenWalk, Puppy, DSL and other distros on in 2007 has been running Debian Etch on a bootable 8 GB CF card for quite a few months now. I don't have it networked at the moment, so I can't upgrade to Lenny. I'm keeping the converted thin client powered on these days in another informal long-term test, and I hope to have networking hooked up to it soon. With 128 MB of RAM and less-than-great video and sound hardware, it's not the greatest machine, but I love having something with no moving parts and minimal power consumption.

I have the Mac G4/466, aka the Debian Mac, running Debian Etch, which I continue to think is the best non-OS X operating system for this particular hunk of hardware. I managed to get 640 MB of RAM into it, and it's a great machine. Since it's a PowerPC box, there's no Flash Player in any OS that isn't OS X. I'm considering an OS X 10.4 install to see how that runs. We have dual-500 MHz G4s in the office that run OS X really, really well. I wonder how this single-CPU 466 MHz box will measure up. We could use a Mac OS backup machine in the house.

Earlier this week, I pulled out the $15 Laptop, a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz CPU and 144 MB RAM and fixed what was ailing it: It wouldn't run X in OpenBSD 4.2 in my user account, but would in root. That's because when it comes to screwing around with X, I don't know what I'm doing some of the time. I had created an .xinitrc file with a single line reading "xset b off" to silence the system bell in X, and that was enough to keep the Fvwm window manager from loading. I killed .xinitrc and all was well with the Compaq. I'll probably do a reinstall of OpenBSD, since upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 to ... is just too much work. Yep, after a long search for the right OS, the Compaq has run OpenBSD for a long, long time.

The real workhorse of our stable is the iBook G4 1 GHz laptop. In the past year I've replaced the hard drive, pumped 1 GB of memory into it and upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4. We needed 10.4 in order to run Firefox 3 and Flash 10. Yep, that's when I upgrade — only when absolutely necessary.

To make a long story short, until I have a burning desire to watch Web video all the time, or until I need to edit and process video into Flash, I just might stick with OpenBSD on my i386 hardware. Otherwise I'll probably move back to Ubuntu or Debian, the latter only if those nagging video problems somehow go away. (I've had similar issues with Slackware ...).

My next "challenge" will be to run OpenBSD -current instead of -release. Since I already hate waiting for things to compile, I don't know how I'll react to keeping a -current installation up to date. There's only one way to find out.

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I happen to have a Mac — a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive — and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

I've been reading an O'Reilly book on the subject, and here are two places that seem essential for bringing free, open-source apps to the Mac:

• The MacPorts Project
• The Fink Project

If anything, the relative uniformity of hardware in the Macintosh world, and the tight integration between OS X and the machines on which it runs, makes a lot of the Linux/BSD problems we have in terms of hardware compatibility go away.

What I can't get with, though, is the high cost of Mac hardware and software (and yes, you are paying for both when you buy an Apple machine).

Still, this does bear thinking about. And so I will.

Why this could work for my company: While there are a great many image-editing programs in the free, open-source software world, the work we do here, fortunately or not, depends on features that only Adobe Photoshop offers. Yes, I've been learning to use Photoshop because for some of the things I need to do, there's no alternative.

And then there's Flash. I don't like technologies for which the development tools are not free and open. But there's Adobe again, with Flash development nestled in its Creative Suite.

And then there's the print publishing system that our company only supports on Windows.

And I still want to run the free, open-source applications I've grown to depend on, including OpenOffice (which is coming to Mac natively in version 3 anyway), the lightweight image editors that I still can use (MtPaint!!) for some tasks, excellent text editors (Geany, the HTML-focused Bluefish) and even full desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

If costs be damned, the Mac with Adobe CS, Windows and X11 with all the Unix apps I want just might be the ideal platform.

But I'm not throwing Linux over the side of the boat just yet. There's the part about Apple's hardware and software being closely guarded and ... closed source. Then there's the cost. More to start with, and more continually for operating-system upgrades and proprietary software upgrades as well.

In the corporate world, where money is supposed to flow like so much water, this Mac solution very well could work.

But in the real world, who can afford it?

For many, the solution remains free, open-source operating systems with greater stability, longer support, better hardware detection and configuration, full power management and better applications that can do all the things we need to get done.

And as Linux in general, and distributions like Ubuntu in specific, gain(s) traction, hardware makers just might start paying attention to drivers that make their equipment work seamlessly with Linux without making the user dive head-first into geekery. That would level the playing field considerably, but the issue of mixing proprietary software with FOSS still looms over the discussion. (And yes, I'm not mentioning WINE on purpose, though maybe I should.)

Google didn't get where it is today by charging end users for software and charging them again and again for endless upgrades.

Back in the early Macintosh days (i.e. the mid- to late '80s), Apple used the OS to sell hardware. Upgrades were free.

Today, Apple sells music at 99 cents a track, but what they're really selling is iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and any other damn thing they can slap an "i" in front of. And while the music is available in 99-cent increments, the iTunes software -- which runs in Windows and OS X -- has always been free. iPods would've never gotten to be such a huge business in any other way.

It's no different for the OS.

With that in mind, Apple wins on the desktop -- and crushes Microsoft -- in one way:

Make OS X free -- or very cheap. And make it run on Windows-compatible PCs.

Everybody wants that new MacBook Air. They'll still want it, even if they can also run OS X on a crappy PC. While not getting $129 for each OS X upgrade, Apple would get market share, still move a whole lot of hardaware. And they would gain that all-important "mindshare."

Most people have heard of Linux, but few have seen it on the desktop, even though they "use" it every day when they browse the Web. Most have seen OS X, a significant portion have used it a bit, and a few are rabid fans.

And while I'd like to see OS X go free and open-source, I won't hold my breath on that one. As I said above, I'd prefer -- at a minimum -- that Apple port OS X to Windows PCs, i.e. make a native version that installs from CD and runs on non-Apple hardware.

But even making new versions of OS X free for Apple hardware would prompt more users to upgrade the software. When running the latest and greatest gets slow, they'd be more inclined to buy new hardware, most likely from Apple.

Right now I'm still running my 2003-era iBook on OS X 10.3. I saved $129 twice by not upgrading to 10.4 and 10.5. I can't even use Apple's newest Safari browser because it doesn't run on 10.3. Firefox does, so that's what I use. As a result, Apple misses out on any browser-generated ad revenue. Would 10.5 run well on my laptop? Who knows? I sure don't want to spend $129 to find out.

By flooding the market with a free or very cheap OS X, Apple could blunt the effects of Microsoft Windows, which customers pay for but don't really feel they're paying for because the cost is bundled into just about every PC sold.

Even if a free OS wouldn't fly at Apple HQ, if the company still ported OS X to Windows-compatible PCs, they could -- and should -- compete with Microsoft when it comes to pre-installed operating systems on non-Apple hardware.

Imagine if you could order a PC from Dell with Windows, Linux or OS X ... there would be real competition for the hearts and minds of computer users everywhere from the home to the enterprise.

And since Apple's hardware is so ultra-cool (and ultra-pricey), they'd probably sell even more of it if OS X had a much larger of the overall worldwide OS pie.