Posted on 28/5/2005, 1:27 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Groan. The 20050526 rawhide PPC tree is misbehaving. iBook g3 doesn’t seem to want to get installed – parted keeps on whinging at me (#159047). Which really seems to have been the 2nd time such an issue appeared – dkl encountered one about two weeks back too. On the Mac mini, I’m faced with the screen just going blank a little after yaboot gets kernel parameters (#159050. Coming so close to release time, I’m worried… Paul’s taken a stab at the inclusion for PPC release notes – all looking good.
So, Trinity College dumped Debian for a bunch of G5’s and Tiger. And the part that saddens me is that they won’t be using OpenOffice.org on OS X.
I have taken an affinity to financial software, and Linux offerings. Xinvest will not compile with GCC4 (it could do with some cleanups). Currency_Converter is a useful shell script, that needs to be patched to remove annoying IRC relation, and it becomes a nice console app afterward. Couldn’t get getquotes to work as Finance::YahooQuote seemed to fail a test with my rawhide snapshot. phpfin and essential budget seem like candidates for review; next up is mastering GNUCash.
Posted on 26/5/2005, 9:19 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
So here’s my dilemma. I’m downloaded the DVD image for OS X Tiger (because my mailing still hasn’t arrived). I do not have a DVD burner. Anywhere. Now, how can I install this over the network? Target disk mode will not be useful for me, but NetRestore might help, except I need a generic OS X installation around somewhere (it seems to suggest 10.4, Tiger, which I don’t have!). If this was Fedora, I could just burn the boot.iso, and loopback mount the image! Any Mac heads know a solution? I don’t mind an ugly OF based solution either; except I can’t boot the dmg via tftpboot? Update: The mailing arrived. Of course, I decided to do a nice clean reinstallation, so I repartitioned. Guess what? No sight of 10.3 on disk means 10.4 won’t install. Urgh, nowhere on the DVD does it say “upgrade”.
Looked at some Extras failures, after Jeremy kicked off a rebuild. Most of the PPC related ones have attached logs to them now, and some made it to a post-it note as “solving hopefuls”. Low hanging fruit might best be ExclusiveArch’ed. Also noticing a lot of PPC related inquiries going to fedora-test-list, rather than fedora-ppc list – this needs to change! In other news, I’m playing around with the wiki for Supported Power PCs – i.e. whatever we support well, or we don’t support, should be listed here on a colloborative wiki page.
Was looking into buying a PDA – either a Tungsten E2 or some other offering from Palm. Now it looks like I’ll just wait, save up, and buy the Nokia 770, and get on with maemo. Its so nice to make sure you have something that always “just works” – not to say that Familiar isn’t just working at the moment (the upgrade from 0.72 was so welcome).
Bought a firewire cable today – the iBook G3 got Tiger installed via Firewire target disk mode. X11 can get installed that way too, but XCode2 wouldn’t. Weirdness. Got nice e-mail from the asiasource folk, and there’s the AsiaSource booklet, written by Frederick Noronha thats a worthy read as well.