assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

So I’ve been running Gentoo on my shiny new iMac Core Duo the last two days and I already have several issues biting me.

The ATI Radeon X1600 is completely unsupported under Linux right now, which means you need to run your X11 using fbdev and the framebuffer hack the xbox-linux.org guys have come up with. Even the  current proprietary ATI drivers (from the manufacturer itself, for chrissakes!) do not support Radeons with a R500/R600 chipset. This sucks. Hard. fbdev is working, but it’s slow. Also, I the scroll-ball of the Mighty Mouse does not trigger any events in xev at all, which means you have a regular 3-button mouse without scrolling functionality. I reckon Apple is using its own protocol here.

Another major pain is the Broadcom BCM4310. Neither can I find appropriate Windows drivers for the PCI device 14e4:4312 to be run under ndiswrapper, nor have my attempts at getting the free bcm43xx drivers to work with this chipset been successful. All I’ve been able to extract after some quick-and-dirty patching of the driver was to find out that the BCM4310 seems to be using 4 cores, all of which have Core IDs and revisions that are currently not known to the bcm43xx driver. This was after several OOPSen and reboots. Sigh. Gotta contact the mailing list, I guess.

The infrared receiver and the iSight are hanging of a USB bus. This means that the Linux Firewire iSight drivers need to be adapted as well. I haven’t toyed with the IR receiver yet, so I don’t know yet how hard it is to get that one working.

Oh, and yes. Everything else seems to be running fine. Even Windows XP in a VMware in full-screen mode (with both cores, whoot!) 

Of course, some of you might argue that I’ve been lucky to get that much of Linux running on this machine at all. To this I counter that I bought this machine for exactly the purpose of being able to dual-boot x86 Linux and OSX and that I have great faith that we will get driver support for all of the components eventually.

Because all sites mention the installation on an external USB HDD: My installation is on a partition of the internal hard drive and dual-boots just with with OSX.

Update: I do have the Broadcom working with ndiswrapper now. Try the Broadcom 802.11a/b/g drivers supplied by Hewlett-Packard for the tc4200 tablet PC. They work just fine, even with WPA-PSK.

technorati tags: imac | core duo | gentoo | mactel

I usually have no problems with jet lag at all. Yesterday however it dawned on me that the lack of sleep on the flight would probably require a serious afternoon nap with me awakening at 5am the next morning.

So rather than giving in to the temptation I scoured the web for some local band to go to and settled for Condor/Elephone/Boyskout. Being able to listen in to some mp3s of Boyskout on their web site really helped making that decision. Although Groove Rider was playing the same night I figured that if I really want to see him spinning records I can probably do that anytime I am in the U.K. again.

Three hours of sleep later and one hour late for the show I hauled a cab to the Bottom of the Hill. I missed some band called Condor, but the next two bands, Elephone and Boyskout were pretty good. I actually liked Boyskout a LOT, but I frigging forgot buying one of their CDs. The guy manning the merchandise counter didn’t really know how much to charge for it and started picking a random number out of his nose so I told him I’d wait till his buddy selling the Boyskout merch would come back and then buy from him; which I unfortunately forgot. Sigh. Whatever. So I ran into this guy Carey who invited me to a party on Saturday where he’d be spinning records. Let’s see what that’s about.

Later on I headed to some dive called the Delirium in the Mission district. Not bad, but man… Why the hell do they have to shut all places down on 2am on a Thursday night???

Just having finished my coffee I’ll now head out to StudioZ. According to their website it’s next door to the Paradise Lounge; so I should know where that is. Pics of yesterday should be up on flickr soonish… if they’re any good, I haven’t really checked them yet.

I’m currently on my way to CodeCon 2006 in San Francisco. I’m pretty impressed by the WLAN connection provided by Boeing Connexion on some Lufthansa flights. There were some initial connection problems, but now everything seems to be working dandy… Except for the fact that my laptop battery is running low now and no charging options are in sight in economy. The connection is running over an OpenVPN tunnel to my University and I’m still able to locate my hotel through Google Earth. Neat.