People tell me things...
Via reader Ed, a new version of OpenBSD is out with improved PowerPC and G5 stability and performance. I don't know much about OpenBSD, but don't let that stop you ;)
Also, Hack 5190 at MacRumors' PowerPC Forum dropped news of a new version of the Flash hack that has the old 10.1 plugin spoof itself as the latest v19. This should be useful to those of you using Cameron Kaiser's SandboxSafari.
In case you missed it, the PowerPC Hub just celebrated its fourth birthday with a video.
At the Ubuntu forums, I saw this Radeon UMS thread for users who need to disable KMS and can't get acceleration because the Radeon driver dropped UMS support. The new UMS-enabled debs are for Ubuntu 14.04, but just for giggles I tested them on Debian and they worked! I just had to install libgcrypt11 1.5.3 in addition to the debs provided--the libgcrypt11 in Debian was too old.
Finally, Apple's ruse to release El Capitan as x86 only to reveal it was PowerPC all along is up:
Spotify 1.0.8 on El Capitan detected as a PowerPC app
Nice try, Apple. If it weren't for those meddling kids!
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Ghost in My Machine
From the CRT days you've probably heard about screen burn-in, but there's sort of an LCD equivalent, what's known as image persistance. Nothing's technically burned in, but the pixels on the display can appear to be ghosting an image that's been displayed an inordinate amount of time.
I bring this up because this has been happening with my Powerbook display. Tiger's great and all (efficient, gets out of the way, Classic support, etc., etc.), but its one problem is its blindingly bright menubar. It's leaving a ghost on my display when I switch to fullscreen apps, and so does TenFourFox's address bar and back button, which are displayed probably more often than is healthy (Oh, look! Another cat gif!). I haven't seen this on any of my other displays, so maybe my Powerbook's is uniquely bad, but if this is a problem for you here are a couple of things that fixed it for me.
First I tried what Apple recommends, which is to switch your screensaver to an all white background and run it with your screen brightness turned almost all the way down overnight. After a couple of nights, I maybe noticed a little change but it wasn't satisfactory, and then I remembered a munubar utility called MenuShade and installed that.
MenuShade creates a shaded band across the top of your screen where the menubar is, giving the illusion that the menubar brightness is turned down. This obviously is a problem when switching to a fullscreen app--the shaded band is still there. However you can exclude these apps in MenuShade's preferences, though for some reason it doesn't work with VLC (UPDATE: you have to label it "VLC media player", i.e. the process name as it appears in Activity Monitor). Shrug, I use Mplayer anyway.
Before:
After:
So I've been running with MenuShade dimming the menubar, and I've also started using TenFourFox in fullscreen mode to change up the placement of the address bar, and after a few days of normal use I saw a big difference, and now after about five days the ghosting is almost completely gone.
There's another utility to deal with Tiger's menubar called MagicMenu, which autohides the menubar, but it causes a lot of bugginess and misbehavior in certain applications. Not recommended unless you like slamming fist to keyboard.
Do any of your 'Books or iMacs have this ghosting problem?
I bring this up because this has been happening with my Powerbook display. Tiger's great and all (efficient, gets out of the way, Classic support, etc., etc.), but its one problem is its blindingly bright menubar. It's leaving a ghost on my display when I switch to fullscreen apps, and so does TenFourFox's address bar and back button, which are displayed probably more often than is healthy (Oh, look! Another cat gif!). I haven't seen this on any of my other displays, so maybe my Powerbook's is uniquely bad, but if this is a problem for you here are a couple of things that fixed it for me.
First I tried what Apple recommends, which is to switch your screensaver to an all white background and run it with your screen brightness turned almost all the way down overnight. After a couple of nights, I maybe noticed a little change but it wasn't satisfactory, and then I remembered a munubar utility called MenuShade and installed that.
MenuShade creates a shaded band across the top of your screen where the menubar is, giving the illusion that the menubar brightness is turned down. This obviously is a problem when switching to a fullscreen app--the shaded band is still there. However you can exclude these apps in MenuShade's preferences, though for some reason it doesn't work with VLC (UPDATE: you have to label it "VLC media player", i.e. the process name as it appears in Activity Monitor). Shrug, I use Mplayer anyway.
Before:
After:
So I've been running with MenuShade dimming the menubar, and I've also started using TenFourFox in fullscreen mode to change up the placement of the address bar, and after a few days of normal use I saw a big difference, and now after about five days the ghosting is almost completely gone.
There's another utility to deal with Tiger's menubar called MagicMenu, which autohides the menubar, but it causes a lot of bugginess and misbehavior in certain applications. Not recommended unless you like slamming fist to keyboard.
Do any of your 'Books or iMacs have this ghosting problem?
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Updated Transmission
A little birdie in comments tells me there's a new version of Transmission for Tiger that I previously wrote about. This new version is 2.84 and is available at this link new updated link, so try it out. I did and it's much nicer!
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Debian Kernel With Sound Fix
(UPDATE: The original version of this post had typos in the symlinks below. They have been corrected.)
Following up on my last post where I mentioned compiling a custom kernel to test sound patches, I can report the patches worked and those of you who have been suffering from that nasty soundcard detection failure will have restored sound in, I believe, the 4.2 kernel. However, if you don't want to wait that long, I'm making available the patched Jessie kernel I compiled on my Sawtooth (download link at bottom).
Actually, the first kernel I compiled was on my G3 iBook, but I compiled it without Altivec instructions, so that would be kind of useless to G4 owners. So I compiled another one on the Sawtooth (I didn't want to risk melting my iBook again), and it works fine on all three systems I've tried it on (G3 iBook, G4 Sawtooth, and G4 Powerbook). It's compiled with all the stock options; the only modifications are the two patches, this one applied on top of this one, that fix the sound bug.
So after you download it, open a terminal and use the
Then install the kernel with:
Then to set it as your default kernel, create these two symlinks:
Then edit /etc/yaboot.conf, adding this kernel entry on top of the others:
Now using this very unofficial kernel brings up thorny security issues: how can you trust it, how do you know it doesn't have malicious code, etc. However, in the years I've written this blog, I think I've established that
a) I'm reasonably trustworthy.
b) I totally lack the skills to pull something like that off.
So install with no worries :)
Here's the download and sha256 fingerprint:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/cj8h2h4dybg2otm/linux-image-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix_1.0_powerpc.deb
sha256: f489a9d2c617fa803bbe44c7913a4540b1705ab3e6da6b149559bddcb3b508ff
Following up on my last post where I mentioned compiling a custom kernel to test sound patches, I can report the patches worked and those of you who have been suffering from that nasty soundcard detection failure will have restored sound in, I believe, the 4.2 kernel. However, if you don't want to wait that long, I'm making available the patched Jessie kernel I compiled on my Sawtooth (download link at bottom).
Actually, the first kernel I compiled was on my G3 iBook, but I compiled it without Altivec instructions, so that would be kind of useless to G4 owners. So I compiled another one on the Sawtooth (I didn't want to risk melting my iBook again), and it works fine on all three systems I've tried it on (G3 iBook, G4 Sawtooth, and G4 Powerbook). It's compiled with all the stock options; the only modifications are the two patches, this one applied on top of this one, that fix the sound bug.
So after you download it, open a terminal and use the
cd command to change to your downloads directory:cd ~/DownloadsThen install the kernel with:
sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix_1.0_powerpc.debThen to set it as your default kernel, create these two symlinks:
sudo ln -s /boot/initrd.img-linux-image-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix /boot/initrd.img.soundfix
sudo ln -s /boot/initrd.img-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix /boot/initrd.img.soundfixsudo ln -s /boot/vmlinux-linux-image-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix /boot/vmlinux.soundfix
sudo ln -s /boot/vmlinux-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix /boot/vmlinux.soundfixThen edit /etc/yaboot.conf, adding this kernel entry on top of the others:
image=/boot/vmlinux.soundfix
label=soundfix
read-only
initrd=/boot/initrd.img.soundfixsudo ybin -v to update the configuration.Now using this very unofficial kernel brings up thorny security issues: how can you trust it, how do you know it doesn't have malicious code, etc. However, in the years I've written this blog, I think I've established that
a) I'm reasonably trustworthy.
b) I totally lack the skills to pull something like that off.
So install with no worries :)
Here's the download and sha256 fingerprint:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/cj8h2h4dybg2otm/linux-image-3.16.7-ckt11-soundfix_1.0_powerpc.deb
sha256: f489a9d2c617fa803bbe44c7913a4540b1705ab3e6da6b149559bddcb3b508ff
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Compile a Custom Kernel on Debian
This post is mostly a note to myself in case I ever have to do this again, but if you can make use of it, please feel free!
So you'd like to compile your own kernel in Debian. There are at least a few valid reasons why. First, the reason I did it, is to test kernel patches. Second, you may want to configure your kernel to work around driver bugs. For example, see this Debian-PPC-mailing-list thread about compiling your kernel to get the Nouveau driver working on G5 Power Macs (long thread, but very interesting information). And third, you may want to test newer kernels from upstream to get a head start on bug squashing. In any event, here are the exact steps I took to compile my own kernel in Debian Linux:
So there you have it! It should automatically make your new kernel the default, but if it doesn't you can add a new kernel section to /etc/yaboot.conf, placing it at the top above the "Linux" and "old" sections. Conclude of course by running "sudo ybin -v".
The actual compiling took eight hours on my G3 iBook, and not wanting to burn out my iBook compiling a kernel, I set up a desk fan to blow across the keyboard to keep temperatures sane. Here's a time saver, though: If you want to apply subsequent patches, you can go straight to the "fakeroot make-kpkg" step and this will only recompile the modules you're patching rather than the whole kernel. So that's nice.
Finally, if you want to test new development kernels, obviously you'd download the source from upstream rather than Debian's repository.
Debian kernel compiling reference link (h/t rican-linux).
So you'd like to compile your own kernel in Debian. There are at least a few valid reasons why. First, the reason I did it, is to test kernel patches. Second, you may want to configure your kernel to work around driver bugs. For example, see this Debian-PPC-mailing-list thread about compiling your kernel to get the Nouveau driver working on G5 Power Macs (long thread, but very interesting information). And third, you may want to test newer kernels from upstream to get a head start on bug squashing. In any event, here are the exact steps I took to compile my own kernel in Debian Linux:
sudo aptitude install fakeroot kernel-package libncurses5-dev #installs the development packages (about a gigabyte).
sudo aptitude install linux-source-3.16 #installs the source into /usr/src.
cd ~/Development #change directory into the "Development" folder in my home folder.
tar -Jxf /usr/src/linux-source-3.16.tar.xz #unpacks the source into current directory.
cd ~/Development/linux-source-3.16 #change to linux-source-3.16 directory; if you're applying patches, this is the stage to do it.
make menuconfig #configure your kernel options.
make-kpkg clean #clean stuff?
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=1.0 --append-to-version=-custom1 kernel_image #compiles the kernel; the "--revision" and "--append-to-version" options may be redundant, but I just did them both; notice the "-custom1" begins with a leading "-".
sudo dpkg -i ../linux-image-3.16.7-ckt9-custom1_1.0_powerpc.deb #installs the kernel.So there you have it! It should automatically make your new kernel the default, but if it doesn't you can add a new kernel section to /etc/yaboot.conf, placing it at the top above the "Linux" and "old" sections. Conclude of course by running "sudo ybin -v".
The actual compiling took eight hours on my G3 iBook, and not wanting to burn out my iBook compiling a kernel, I set up a desk fan to blow across the keyboard to keep temperatures sane. Here's a time saver, though: If you want to apply subsequent patches, you can go straight to the "fakeroot make-kpkg" step and this will only recompile the modules you're patching rather than the whole kernel. So that's nice.
Finally, if you want to test new development kernels, obviously you'd download the source from upstream rather than Debian's repository.
Debian kernel compiling reference link (h/t rican-linux).
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Sunday, June 28, 2015
MintPPC and iLinux Back Up
In case you missed it, the MintPPC and iLinux sites were hacked. Also, in case you missed it, they're now back up!
The sites were compromised for several weeks because their owner, linuxopjemac, didn't own the server. As explained in a forum thread, he finally gained contact with the server administrator to regain access and was able to repair the damage. This is great news as there were a lot of useful files on those sites (xorg.conf, anyone?) and the MintPPC forums have always been one of the best resources available.
Also on the topic of service disruptions, Sevan's pkgsrc PowerPC server at http://sevan.mit.edu/ is currently down for repairs. In the meantime, you can use http://pkgsrc.geeklan.co.uk/
The sites were compromised for several weeks because their owner, linuxopjemac, didn't own the server. As explained in a forum thread, he finally gained contact with the server administrator to regain access and was able to repair the damage. This is great news as there were a lot of useful files on those sites (xorg.conf, anyone?) and the MintPPC forums have always been one of the best resources available.
Also on the topic of service disruptions, Sevan's pkgsrc PowerPC server at http://sevan.mit.edu/ is currently down for repairs. In the meantime, you can use http://pkgsrc.geeklan.co.uk/
Monday, June 8, 2015
Three Questions About El Capitan
1. Is it faster than Yosemite?
2. Is it still spyware like Yosemite?
3. Do I have to worry about my parachute failing to unfurl?
2. Is it still spyware like Yosemite?
3. Do I have to worry about my parachute failing to unfurl?
Friday, June 5, 2015
iOS 9 is not OS 9
If you plan on scanning the tech headlines in the next several months, make sure you don't misread iOS 9 as "OS 9." You will be bitterly disappointed. You will be especially aghast at reports of new features such as multi-user support. In 2015.
For OS's that support PowerPC, we'll have to make due with what we got. Handily, TCH put a list together compiling every OS that ran on PowerPC through the present-day, so pay a visit to OS for PPC and go explore.
For OS's that support PowerPC, we'll have to make due with what we got. Handily, TCH put a list together compiling every OS that ran on PowerPC through the present-day, so pay a visit to OS for PPC and go explore.
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