Since I want to share /home between OS X and Linux, I chose to use HFS+ as the filesystem. Kernel 2.6 supports HFS, although journaling is not supported yet. I’ve been using it for quite a while and it looks generally OK. Apple has the system utilities and they can be used on Linux with patches from gentoo. Here is a nice howto from gentoo (I almost miss gentoo now :))

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_hfsplus

I got a binary package of ghc from Wolfgang yesterday. But I haven’t had luck with bootstrapping ghc yet. I will give it another try. But meanwhile, I have downloaded alex 2.01 and happy 1.15 and compiled with some minor changes. I had to add the platform to the configure.ac and regenerate configure script. The rest just goes smoothly.

case $HostPlatform in
...
i[[3456]]86-*-darwin*)    
    HostPlatform=i386-apple-darwin    
    TargetPlatform=i386-apple-darwin #hack
    BuildPlatform=i386-apple-darwin #hack
        HostPlatform_CPP='i386_apple_darwin'
        HostArch_CPP='powerpc'
        HostVendor_CPP='apple'
        HostOS_CPP='darwin'
        ;;

Emacs: pulled the source code from CVS. Built a Carbon version. Works fine.

ESP Ghostscript: downloaded source code (and libjpeg) compiled and installed. It does not include the gs fonts though. Got the PPC version of 7.07 and extracted the font package and installed.

Hugs: works out of box. Not surprising.

GHC: downloaded Wolfgang Thaller’s package and it runs over Rosetta fine, although slow.

I finally made the sound card work under OS X86 for two PCs. First one is a PowerEdge 400SC. South bridge is Intel ICH5 chipset. The sound card is SoundMax AD1980. It was not working just because of the codec kext. These are the steps I took:

• Download EVEREST from http://www.lavalys.hu/index.php, which is a windows software for checking the Codec ID. I don’t know, but there should be some Linux equivalent out there, I guess. If you are reading this and happen to know, please let me know, thanks. Installing Windows just because of this is not worth.
• Edit “/System/Library/Extensions/AppleAC97Audio.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAC97CodecAD198x.kext/Contents/Info.plist”, add “ADS70 in the Vendor ID list:

  <dict>
      <key>AD198x</key>
      <dict>
          <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
          <string>com.apple.driver.AppleAC97CodecAD198x</string>
          <key>IOClass</key>
          <string>AppleAC97CodecAD198x</string>
          <key>IOProbeScore</key>
          <integer>10000</integer>
          <key>IOProviderClass</key>
          <string>IOAC97CodecDevice</string>
          <key>PNPVendorID</key>
          <string>ADS70 ADS75 ADS74 ADS73 ADS72</string>
      </dict>
  </dict>
  

• Reboot and it works fine. My PCI ID is 8086:24D5

The other one is ridiculous. It’s an ECS 848P-A motherboard. South bridge chipset is also Intel ICH5, with Realtek ALC655 (somehow “lspci” on linux doesn’t list it, but I figured it out by looking up the manual of the mobo). It was not working when I first attempted just because the jack was bad, or at least it now appears so. I used the jack on the front panel and now it’s working. I tried both Windows and Linux and it’s always the same case so I assume the jack is bad, not os x. I bought this board refurbished when my old 865 board went bad. The sound card probably never worked properly but I never struggled coz I had a couple of extra SB Live PCI cards.

Tiger 10.4.5 with Maxxuss patches. I don’t have a DVD drive on any of my PCs but I managed to get it installed on another PC and bring the HD back. Application wise, I have these stuffs working natively so far: emacs, tetex, espgs, firefox, mplayer, iterm.

Hardwares are causing a little more problems. I thought the SB Live sound card was working but unfortunately the sound becomes crumbled and chipped after playing for about 5 minutes. I tried two cards, the same result. The onboard card is an ICH5, I believe, at least the PCI ID says so: 8086:24D5. OS X didn’t report any problem, but there is just no audio. This card does not work on Linux either, same symptons. I am installing a Windows to see if I can figure something out.

Video card has a mouse tearing problem, which is a little annoying. I have read about complaints from other users but haven’t found a perfect solution yet.

Anyway, there seems to be a long way to go before I can totally count on an OSX86.

Bumped into this DVI/PDF previewer today. I have always been complaining about the performance of MacGhostView, which is unbearable. I almost pulled out the source code of GV and compiled an X11 version. This TeXniscope thing seems pretty fast, even if it converts PS to PDF using an external distiller. I don’t have anything against PDF, but I just use PSTricks, so that I have to rely on PS.

It’s been bothering me for a while. I can’t seem to associate GhostView with ps files on OS X 10.4. I came across this post today but haven’t tried it yet.

I prefer setting the background color of my terminal to black. The problem is, blue is hard to read on black. The default color setting of ls happens to output normal directories in blue. The solution is TerminalColors , a patch for Terminal.app that enables you set the ansi colors. Nice!

I looked into MPD and decided that it is not exactly what I am looking for. I am expecting something better integrated with mt-daapd. It’s now tempting to write one myself. The basic idea is having a daemon running background. The daemon can make use of gstreamer to play the music. The web server is used to communicate with the client. The client requests a song list (as well as a list of playlists, I guess) and present them in a browser. When a song is clicked on, it sends a command to the server and the http server controls the daemon. I dug into mt-daapd source code a little bit and found out that it is actually running one webserver for both administration task and daapd. The server determines which handler to use based on the URL. One can easily add another handler for controlling the playing daemon. Now I just need to arm myself with some knowledge in gstreamer and daap. I found a good spec about daap on the web. Not sure how much changes since iTunes 4.01, but it’d be a good start.

(more…)

Played it on NetBSD and FreeBSD, not totally satisfied. There is a daapd and a mt-daapd, the latter of which seems to be a multi-threaded version and more active in development. It has not made its way into NetBSD 2.02 pkgsrc yet and I don’t want to compile from source (since I don’t want to install a compiler). I then tried FreeBSD 5.4 and its mt-daapd is too out-dated so that it does not work with iTunes 5.

I guess the developer is working with Debian sarge, so I will give it a try. Time to download netinstall CD again Seems that this is something that needs to be updated very often due to the changes to iTunes, It’s a safe bet to install whatever the developer is working on.