assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

Dear Lazyweb,

in order to set up full-disk encryption, I want to boot my trusty ol’ Powerbook off a USB stick. This is a PB G4 FW800, 1.25GHz with a Powerbook5,2 4.7.1f1BootROM. This is the latest Open Firmware release for this model, according to The List. If I choose to believe a macosxhints article I found, someone managed to do it for a 12″ Powerbook with 1.3GHz (what’s that anyway? a rounding error?). Alas, it doesn’t work for me. No ud device to be seen in Open Firmware. Any ideas, or am I simply out of luck?

I’ve been having major Mail.app problems on my Powerbook the last couple of days. I’m running Mail.app version 2.1 (752/752.2) on MacOS X 10.4.8. Having my primary work IMAP account enabled resulted in 100% CPU usage, eventually forcing me to kill Mail.app. Disabling the account allowed me to use Mail.app normally. Nothing seemed to be able to cure this problem, not even deleting the account and setting up a new one with the same parameters.

Solution: I had to delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index and ~Library/Mail/Envelope Index.journal. These are the SQLite3 databases that Mail.app uses for storing message properties such as header information.

The brand new Acer Core Duo laptop of a co-worker of mine refused to wake up from hibernation this morning. After rebooting, his Windows installation refused to boot up due to his computer allegedly missing ACPI support. His machine being a Windows box, this caused nothing more than a smirk and childish sniggering noises from my side when he told me. Interesed I got when he came back after having re-installed with the same media on a blank new hard drive and the same error reappeared. My colleague threw a Knoppix CD at him and off he went again. Later, eating Pizza at lunch I asked him to show me the output of dmesg. Now my eyebrows really curled: The Linux ACPI layer was complaining about a corrupt checksum on his ACPI tables! The real kicker however came when he called the Acer support hotline: “Yeah yeah”, the guy on the phone said. “Simply set the time ahead by a day and it’ll work again”. And indeed it did. Now, the thing I’m wondering about: Why on earth would some part of the BIOS initialization such as the decompression of the ACPI tables from the ROM chip where the BIOS is contained into RAM depend on the time of day??? Some disgruntled employee that decided to plant a logic bomb in the BIOS code that goes of on August, 30th 2006? Apparently Acer got caught by surprise as well since my co-worker was told that “[they] are in the process of [cobbling together] a firmware update for the issue”.

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.

All this rambling about not being able to boot WinXP on the new is beginning to really get onto my nerves.

I think it might actually be much easier to get other OS’s booting on the box not by relying on EFI but rather making use of OSX. After all, porting kexec from Linux to Darwin shouldn’t be too hard if I see things clearly enough. We can even do that without having the 10.4.4 source code for Intel (only the ppc tree is out, no new Intel specific bits have been released to this date): Device drivers have power management functions that get invoked when the system is put to sleep, shutdown or rebooted.

I am definitely planning to get a new 20″ iMac once I return from California in late February - however, I first want to see one in real life first. The plan is to visit the Apple Store in San Francisco on February 9th - before CodeCon. If nobody has made any progress on EFI till then I shall commence hacking on a kext to make my idea reality. Stay tuned.

I sooooooo want to see this band live! Rock on! Hopefully they’ll be touring Germany, otherwise I’ll have to catch a flight to Sweden sometime soon.

technorati tags: music

One of the biggest gripes I had concerning WordPress when I looked into migrating to it from blosxom half a year ago was that it required me to use a MySQL database. Using a fully blow SQL database for maintaining a blog is just pure overkill in my opinion. Databases of course have their place, but c’mon… Using them to store a couple of posts and comments is using a sledge hammer to drive a nail into a 2mm thick piece of balsa wood.

This has now turned into a real problem. The database performance of my web hoster just isn’t up to par. For some reason the WordPress people seem to have ignored a patch allowing for database abstraction; this would allow me to replace MySQL with SQLite. Hopefully it isn’t too hard to port this patch to WordPress 2.0…

Catching up with the mailing lists i’m subscribed to, I came across the following absolutely hilarious commentary by Peter Gutmann; a postscript to the endless discussions on the brokenness of the trust model of X.509 certificates.

From: Peter Gutmann
Date: December 31, 2005 1:49:21 AM GMT+01:00
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com, perry@xxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: Re: ADMIN: end of latest SSL discussion

Peter.