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Macbook Pro Wifi
MadWifi introduced experimental support for the built-in WiFi card of the newer Macbook Pros. To get the juice a little
svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/branches/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10
cd madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10
make
make install
should do the job. WEP/WPA and power management doesn’t seem to work, though. So you can only use your shiny built-in WiFi card with your neighbour’s insecure wireless, but that of course would be WRONG. More information may be found in the two related trouble tickets.
Easterhegg 2007 1
As you need to do something during events like the Easterhegg, I updated the debian repository. The repository contains my valuekonverter (to be updated soon such that the bitfield doesn’t totally suck), kopete-silc, and kopete-otr as source and AMD64 packages. As I am way too lazy to properly maintain such a repository it will probably be outdated soon. Let me know if anything fails, though.
Thu, 15. Mar 2007Suspend To RAM (The Road to Success)
I got suspend to RAM working on my Debian/Etch x86_64 (“AMD64”) Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with a custom kernel 2.6.19. First, you will need the latest ATI graphics driver (at least 34.8) which also fixes the XVideo crash. Then, if you are like me and customized the stock Debian AMD64 kernel config you will need to make sure that:
- CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU is set and
- CONFIG_NUMA is not set (or you need to patch your kernel to fix bug in __drain_pages()).
Also, if you choose the Intel EM64T processor family in your config you might want to pass notsc as a boot parameter. Oh, and for some reason my kernel was optimized for size instead of O2.
Mon, 01. Jan 2007Macbook Pro
I have got myself a new shiny Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro. I installed Debian Etch.rc1 for AMD64 on it as OSX is just not my kind of OS. The situation for Linux on Macbooks has improved a little since Willaim Stein wrote his summary on how to get Linux running on his Macbook Pro. Basically, you will want to follow one of of the many wiki pages on that matter or - better - several as the information is a bit scattered.
However, there is stuff that doesn’t work, some of which is pretty annoying:
- Wireless, if you are running a 64-bit system there is nothing you can do right now but wait. If you go for a 32-bit system you may use ndiswrapper which loads and interfaces with the Windows driver for you. As it is a scary idea to have a blob as a network driver you might hesitate. But the situation won’t be much better once the madwifi driver comes out as it relies on a blob as well.
- Suspend-to-RAM. Opposed to many peoples experience my Macbook Pro doesn’t suspend and resume properly. Instead it suspends and reboots on lid open. I haven’t tested out all s2ram combinations yet, though.
- Long battery runtime. My old notebook gave me 4-6 hours of battery time with the extended battery I used to attached. My new Macbook Pro lasts two hours max with a the CPU scaling and dimming in effect. This seems to be a Linux issue as OSX does have better power management: up to four hours.
Stuff that works, includes:
- The other hardware as far as I have tested it. You propably want to have a linux kernel 2.6.19, use the stock Debian config as a starting point and modularize everything (e.g. appleir didn’t work built-in but works as a module for me)
- If you go for the 64-bit version some things don’t work as expected, mostly proprietary stuff, but most stuff works: For a Flash plugin use the nspluginwrapper, for a Java plugin use the JRE 1.4 by blackdown, ATI’s driver supports 64-bit, VMWare needs the any-any patches and some ia32 libs.
- Apparently, you can run the instance of Windows XP you triple-boot on your notebook in VMWare under Linux.
- Graphics performance is quite good, e.g. I played the Quake 4 demo. If you have the full version of that game then make sure you use Version 1.0.5 which adds support for SMP and will run noticeably faster.
- Number crunching is also impressively fast. I get a gmpbench score of 6728. However, Jason Martin’s Core 2 Duo GMP patches don’t affect the performance. Maybe this is because of the different “microarchitecture” used in notebooks compared to desktop variants of the Core 2 Duo? I don’t know.
Btw.: SAGE builds out of the box in 64-bit mode if you export SAGE64=”yes” before you type make.
Thu, 14. Dec 2006apt-get update
There is some buzz going on about Vista being the last operating system (by Microsoft) of its kind. One of the new features the Gartner Group predicts is a subscription based operating system where non-critical parts may be updated more frequently than critical parts. One could say, this is like the Web 2.0 of operating systems, as “traditional” release cycles are no more.
However, don’t drink the Kool Aid: Debian has been doing this for years. Every Debian based Linux distribution (so as most RPM bases distributions, and all BSDs) offers the possibility to upgrade and install applications conveniently with one single command. So, if you want to be a real Tim O’Reilly switch to Debian. Actually, I never really got why people complain about the time between two Debian releases: If you stick to the testing distribution you are pretty much always up to date without a single re-install. Who needs releases, anyway?
Elsewhere:The interior secret agency of Germany is called “Verfassungsschutz” and its responsibilities and rights are regulated through “Verfassungsschutz” laws in each state. In the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen this law is about to be updated. Besides the fact that secret agencies are always somewhat scary this new law has something special to it: It is considered that the “Verfassungsschutz” may break into your computer remotely to gather information. One way, this is discussed to be accomplished is by injecting malware into your operating system update. So you press a “check for security updates” button and a very powerful adversary installs a Trojan on your computer. Most linux distributions offer a way around this, though. See for example http://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt. Is there any way for Windows or OSX users to verify system updates?
Thu, 14. Sep 2006New Debian Etch Repository
The Debian repository for ValueKonverter and libdisasm is back online. However, it’s Etch only. If anybody wants support for Sarge drop me a note and I’ll see what I can do. Point your /etc/apt/sources.list to:
deb http://dobbertin.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb/debian/etch ./
deb-src http://dobbertin.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb/debian/etch ./
.
During this update I also updated libdisam to the most recent upstream release and thus the register-access-not-shown-correctly-bug is gone. Also I updated ValueKonverter to 0.1.4: I made some tiny changes so it compiles with GCC 4.1 and copied the admin subdirectory from the kile-1.9.2 deb package so that ValueKonverter builds with autoconf 2.6 as the admin.tar.gz templates of Kdevelop as shipped with Debian Etch didn’t work.
Sat, 01. Apr 2006SILC debs
I’ve added libsilc and kopete-silc-plugin debian packages for Etch to the repository.These are essentially rebuilds of the packages found at brokenpipe.de. The kopete-silc-plugin (despite the same version number) is newer than the one found at brokenpipe.de. So my versioning scheme of the kopete-silc-plugin is in no good shape and I guess I need to agree with stesie on a better one like 0.1cvs20060401.
Fri, 24. Mar 2006Packages for Debian Etch
Add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb/binary/debian-etch/pool/ ./
deb-src http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb/binary/debian-etch/source/ ./
No more Sarge packages to be found here
As I’m not running any Sarge machine anymore and my build host has been banned from the network by the university for now (note to self: Prevent the local nameserver that noone needs anyway from going crazy) there won’t be any Sarge packages anymore.
But I wil upload some packages for Etch soon. These will include
- libdisasm
- ValueKonverter, which is kinda unmaintained for now
- yersinia, OSI layer 2 networking tool
- kio-apt
- kpkgmanager
Mon, 31. Oct 2005
Webspace and backports.org
Those nice admins at Uni-Bremen increased my webspace for my backport stuff. Furthermore backported packages get the string “malb” added to their version number now by using a backports.org script.
Sun, 23. Oct 2005Added GpgME 1.1.0 from Sid to repository
as libgpgme11-dev and libgpgme11 in Sid allow alteration of
the GnuPG config directory:
2005-10-01 Marcus Brinkmann <marcus@g10code.de>
* engine.h (_gpgme_set_engine_info): Add prototype.
…
Repositories split
There is now a Debian Sarge repository so as a repository for Debian Sarge running a backported KDE 3.4.
Tue, 18. Oct 2005amaroK “backport”
You may find an amarok 1.3.3 backport to sarge here. You’ll need the libpq packages found there aswell as amaroK requires a newer version than found in sarge. Furthermore I added a yammi 1.2.2 package and fixed some bugs in the valuekonverter but didn’t release that one yet.
