Colin Charles Agenda

A while back, I built some PPC64 (powerpc 64-bit) packages for MySQL. They were built on a POWER5 box, running Fedora Core 6, with glibc 2.5, using a Bitkeeper snapshot (public bkbits, 5.0.45 tag). All tests pass on ppc64, for what its worth. I’ll do periodic builds for Linux/PPC64 as and when its required (i.e. someone pings me or I need them for some reason).

Grab them from: ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/people/byte/mysql/

Hat tip to dwmw2 (for power5, bombadil) and Bryce (for ftp.linux.org.uk).

Technorati Tags: power, power5, mysql, linuxppc, ppc64

Dear Interweb,

A tiny issue plagues me. With everyone’s favourite Linux distribution of choice, Ubuntu. I’m looking at the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta and for the life of me, can’t decide which to install on a Core 2 Duo machine (this was no better with Ubuntu 6.10 - and I’ve got both the amd64 and i386 ISOs sitting here). Its not AMD64, and its not 32-bit, so what are my choices? Referencing a post with regards to System76 support, it looks like I might have to go with a 32-bit install disc?

If I do have to go with the 32-bit install disc, why is that so? I mean, with Fedora, I’m quite happily running x86_64.

Kudos to the wiki documentation on Core 2 Duo Support, though maybe its a little dated. This is a very important question to answer, because I can imagine a lot of new laptops are actually, Core 2 Duo based (as probably are a lot of new desktops).

Also, a little bit of disappointment, but Ubuntu 7.04 has support for SPARC and not PowerPC. In a time when it might be opportune for third-world countries to start having Ubuntu-running Macs on their desktop…

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, core 2 duo, feisty fawn, edgy eft, powerpc

Update: I have concluded that the 64-bit Feisty Fawn is good for a Core 2 Duo. Read, Today I am a virgin and see how I solve my 32-bit application requirement problems, in Skype on 64-bit Ubuntu Feisty Fawn via i386 chroot (and Gizmo Project too).

Caught Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Not my kind of show. I did see Episode 9 of The Ghost Whisperer and there was a Fedora Core (GNOME-based) desktop, and a spreadsheet was open in her antique store. Fedora in the movies!

Now, Skype is still one of the only packages that I use that isn’t available for Linux/PPC. I can use Gizmo’s voip features thru Ekiga, and that works a charm. It would seem that there are quite a lot of users looking for Skype for Linux/PPC. Of course now that Apple has bowed out of the PPC market, I really do wonder if the folk at Skype see more reason to do this; however, keep in mind that a lot of the PPC-based Macs will be around for a long time to come.

The current line run Linux just fine, even if Leopard wouldn’t (i.e. Linux will run perfectly on your G3, Leopard by the looks of it, won’t).

Then I notice that Google and Skype are in a deal. Does this mean that on my 770, I can actually use SkypeOut? Does this mean that I can use Tapioca to do GTalk or Skype via my Linux/PPC box?

Technorati Tags: fedora, gtalk, linux, linuxppc, movies, reviews, skype, voip

Caught Alex and Emma, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Hawking. Then in the cinema, Memoirs of a Geisha - good show, I highly recommend it (even though cinemas probably stopped playing it all world round!). On the plane ride back, I caught Corpse Bride (amazing, great stop motion animation with regular digicams). I saw most bits of In Her Shoes but it sure didn’t keep me awake. There, movies I saw last last month. Thats surprisingly little. Last month, caught Date Movie and Big Momma’s House 2. And then the ever funny Pink Panther (go watch it!). And thats it. I think somethings wrong in the “life” department.

Blast from the past:
drwxr-xr-x 16 byte byte 4096 Jun 21 2004 linux-2.4-benh/

Thats me trying to clean up space in ~/, on my desktop. My last FC-2 box (the desktop) needs to move to FC-5 soon.

Apple’s Knowledge Base says: PowerBook G4 (Double-Layer SD) audio stutters or skips. When playing music in iTunes, it tends to skip. Out of the blue, like a stuck CD. Its highly annoying, and I never noticed this before on previous Macs.

Adam Curry (podcaster extraordinaire) poked at the issue by mentioning it repeatedly on The Daily Sourcecode, and Apple finally came up with an interesting solution: “To avoid this, run only one audio application at a time.”

What the heck?!? Rebooting the same Powerbook into Fedora, and playing music in both Rhythmbox or XMMS doesn’t exhibit this “skipping” aura. Both with MP3s or OGGs.

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me 4528@sip.mysql.com or via the MySQL phone number at that extension. On OS X and Linux, I’m using X-Lite. I haven’t tried linphone/kphone yet, because last time I fiddled with it on PPC, it had some endianness issues.
• I’m actively reading the PHP Manual; its very cogent.
• Those mysterious Powerbook vibrations of the screen. I’ve seen them. They really do exist. I wonder if Apple’s gonna fix them, or if my screen dies, I have to take it in. This ultimately, isn’t good.
• Caught Ditesh & Dinesh last-last night for food, then hit Backyard. Was trying to use their wireless to no avail. Ow’s bachelor party dinner thing was last night… small crowd, but fun nonetheless.

Our friend/fellow OSS supporter jiyuu0/Chua Wen Kiat, is sick. He’s from the famed fedoraguide.org, and the definitely more popular ubuntuguide.org. He also ran (or runs?) MyOSC, an open source outreach program to colleges and universities in Malaysia. Let’s hope he gets better.

Caught The Wedding Date. Its actually quite nice, one of those feel good pick me up movies. I think its to balance my heavy pizza diet, where delivery boys rush to send food my way, to get their daily dose of tipping (well, you see, most of the parlors are about a five minute drive away from my house, I’m just a lazy sod). Along the lines, I also caught Finding Neverland (not bad), and I Heart Huckabees (silly, waste of time).

So everyone’s jumping that the iTunes Music Store launched in Australia? A farce I tell you. Songs at AUD$1.69, thats USD$1.27. Why am I paying USD$0.28 more? Besides, I can’t download buy Desperate Housewives, because thats only available to the US store, right? And welcome to Australia, the land of fast Internet, with quotas. Movies quickly add up to the download quota.

Over the weekend, got productive and installed a Fedora snapshot. I give you Nerd Porn! Folk will notice the installer got a lot simpler, because a lot of the functionality moved over to firstboot. Partitioning is a lot simpler now, and comes on early during the install.

I finally got Firefox Deer Park Alpha 2 building on PPC. Need to disable visibility pragmas for it to actually build (on both FC-4 or Rawhide).

Yay, yay, I’ll be getting the new 15″ Powerbook. I have to apparently wait around 3-4 weeks, I sincerely hope its going to be a lot shorter than that. As in the 3 week cap, but hey, I’m still excited nonetheless.

I’m massively pissed off at the way Apple is handling their iBook’s with a lot of RAM. Like most people that bought one recently, and decided to go get 1.5GB of RAM in total, they’re all facing similar issues with the Airport Extreme. I got my 1GB stick from the Apple Store, for what it’s worth, so no 3rd party goo.

What happens? After a little bit of network traffic (even minimal at times), or some significant uptime (think, 2-3 hours), the Airport dies. It just stops detecting networks, and the only way to fix this is via a reboot. It seems that the card overheats, and it shuts down. However, it rapidly cools, and there’s no good way to start the card back up again. Firmware bug? Software bug (seeing the kernel_task get really high)? Jumpy cursors?

Rebooting 3-4 times during my typical workday is annoying. It doesn’t help that I’ve been spending time away from my home, and don’t have the luxury of a 100mbps connection. WiFi whoring is the way to go. But not if I have to constantly reboot. Think restarting Firefox, my numerous SSH connections to the Linux machines I need to use, irc, and what not.

For fun reading, visit: Airport quits, restart necessary on the Apple forums, and 2005 iBooks losing Airport under network load. MacFixIt has an article too, bt they require some silly subscription. No, you don’t even need to be running BitTorrent. Trying to upload a 4MB photo to Flickr, with my crappy 128kbps upload speed is enough to heat this card up.

Its a design flaw. And it affects us consumers. I don’t see it being any better under Linux (except that Airport Extreme doesn’t work). I have hope with the bcm43xx project (though on irc, dwmw2 confirmed it doesn’t work yet). So if you picked up one of these babies and are running Linux on it, not certain you have broken hardware, I suggest you give OS X a try, and give your local Apple support center a hard time.