Monday, 14 January 2002
Nice day today. Nice day to get my research proposal done and off for comment!
2:32 PMSunday, 13 January 2002
So, I woke up in the morning, went to boot 8.6 on MOL, and it didn't work. Spent another hour before I realized it was the “Mac OS ROM” problem in reverse, except it didn't manifest itself the same way—the screen turned black halfway through booting, so I diagnosed it originally as a monitor resolution issue. And audio sort of works on 8.6, as long as I don't touch the volume control. I got networking to work, too, after some slogging through the MOL mailing list. The SBP2 driver is kind of flaky; when I inserted 'insmod ieee1394; insmod ohci1394; insmod sbp2' into a MOL setup script, my FireWire hard drive wasn't recognized until I stuck in a 'sleep 1' before the sbp2 line.
I'm now seriously thinking of getting a new iMac or iBook for home. Losing an entire weekend to struggling with flaky software on obsolete hardware isn't my idea of fun, especially when I am behind with my research.
Audio works now, under 9.1 at least. The problem was that I had my stereo set to play the radio, but at very low volume. I thought I had it set to play the computer output.
Definitely a sign it's time for bed. Now I finally have a working computer at home, I can do real work when I wake up.
Booting 9.1 under MOL didn't work, time after time, because I didn't upgrade the “Mac OS ROM” file that MOL uses. I got the standard “please upgrade your Mac OS using the Installer” alert at startup, and I just didn't recognize it for what it was.
Tried upgrading to XFree86 4.1, which was mostly functional, and it gave me my arrow keys back, but the display was messed up when I used Debian's X configurator, and XFree86 -configure crashes. So it's back to XFree86 3.3.6 with the broken arrow keys for now.
Let's see, what else… the Linux-1394 CVS code worked perfectly, I now have my FireWire drive mounted in Linux, and even bridged through into Mac OS thanks to MOL. Networking works with MOL once I actually decided to read the error message it gave me, though I haven't tried masquerading my PPP connection yet. Audio is still a problem: 9.1 behaves the same way 8.6 did, so I'm guessing something is wrong on the MOL side. I'll check their mailing list and post if needed.
I still haven't gone through sagas like this with Mac OS X, so I figure there's still a reason to keep using it. :-)
Saturday, 12 January 2002
Well, there are still some bleeding-edge areas of Linux to contend
with, even if wireless, USB, and USB audio all worked perfectly the
first time. I've spent the last few hours trying to get more stuff to
work. Mac-on-Linux is up and running in the 2.4.17 kernel, now.
FireWire doesn't work properly, I'm trying the latest code from Linux-1394 and praying.
USB audio works fine in Linux, but I can't get Mac-on-Linux to play
nice. I'm going to try with Mac OS 9.1, after I reboot with a new
kernel to try out these FireWire drivers.
All this, of course, is totally secondary to the work I need
to be doing this weekend.
(Posted from home, using Radio's remote-access feature.)
