tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26269639914766243152024-03-13T05:48:11.643-07:00Power of PowerPCB-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-73174918303073893852017-01-27T17:17:00.000-08:002017-01-27T17:17:17.073-08:00Pimp My Quicksilver: Graphics Card TeaserLook at those 2 large gorgeous 1920x1080 27" HP Monitors hooked up to my nVidia GeForce 7800GS card on my G4 Quicksilver still running Debian Jessie. Posts on graphics card upgrade and migration to SSDs coming soon...<br />
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<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-58915805910594222252016-05-24T19:09:00.000-07:002016-05-24T19:09:20.659-07:00Pimp My Quicksilver: Part VI: PCI FireWireA heads up: this post is going to be pretty boring as well, but probably even more so than the PCI USB one due to the fact that I do not currently have any Firewire devices to test with at the moment. Not even an older Firewire iPod. That should change in the future as I plan on purchasing and using external storage devices via Firewire. For now, it is just nice to know that I have the availability.<br />
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I purchased a Sonnet Tempo from Amazon for $54.98. I wanted the card due to the fact that it has 2 Firewire 800 ports (and one 400).<br />
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As before, I also used the <code>lspci -v</code> command in Debian to make sure the card showed up and was available and active. Sure enough we are good to go with the card using the firewire_ohci kernel driver.<br />
<code>0001:10:13.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])<br />
Subsystem: Device 0ee4:3884<br />
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 16, IRQ 53<br />
Memory at 80083000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]<br />
Memory at 80088000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]<br />
Capabilities: <access denied><br />
Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci</code>
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This is not to be confused with the onboard firewire device of which shows up as using an LSI Corporation controller and chipset versus the TI one this card utilizes as seen above.<br />
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Great. A quick check using System Report in OS X Leopard shows the card successfully appears there as well.<br />
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So there you have it. Additional Firewire 400 and 800 connectivity. Yay. Up next, is the much more exciting transition to Ultra ATA connected SSDs. From there, we will move straight to a SATA controller and SATA SSDs (Specifically used for the boot drives of each respective OS. I will store my precious data on more reliable drives both internally and externally).<br />
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P.S. With each of these upgrades, I have grown more fond of the G4 QS. I will keep this baby going as long as I possibly can. Also, I am pumped at having Core Player installed as it plays back even higher quality 720p video (Mr. Robot Season 1) on my current measly ATI Radeon card that came as the stock graphics card for these systems flawlessly. Impressive!B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-49375162862993443202016-04-10T11:22:00.000-07:002016-04-11T09:11:31.155-07:00Pimp My Quicksilver: Part V: PCI USB 2.0With the CPU upgrade out of the way, I decided to step back and tackle a smaller upgrade. I purchased a Syba SD-NECU2-5E1I 6-Port USB 2.0 PCI Card with NEC chipset, which as many of you may know are known to generally work really well with G4 and G5 PowerMacs running OS X. It cost me a whopping $6.29. <br />
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My particular 2002 Quicksilver only comes with 2 available USB 1.1 ports which happen to be on the backside. These 2 ports are about enough for just a keyboard and mouse. (Aside: Apple claims these were dual channel USB ports and with the 2 ports available on the included keyboard gave you a total of 4). Of course you could probably connect an externally powered hub, but not only would you still be limited to the slow speeds (which would in fact be slower if all devices on the hub saturated the available bandwidth which had a theoretical maximum of 12 Mbits/s), but you would then likely end up dealing with other power-related connection issues from using a hub.<br />
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So for a couple of dollars I decided to make the jump to add some additional USB ports that were 2.0 to add additional connectivity choices in the future for such devices as flash drives, USB Bluetooth, external hard drives, charging my mobile devices, etc. As I mentioned, the card I purchased had a total of 6 USB ports. There are 5 ports available on the outside and one port only available internally. More on that in a moment. If 6 ports is too much for you, there are also 2 and 5 port variations available as well.<br />
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Installation was simple enough and a quick check from within both Debian and OS X gave me signs that the new card was recognized properly (I was not too worried).<br />
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Running <code>lspci -v | grep NEC</code> shows us the card is available and working in Debian.<br />
<code>0001:10:12.2 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD72010x USB 2.0 Controller (rev 04) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])<br />
Subsystem: NEC Corporation uPD72010x USB 2.0 Controller<br />
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 16, IRQ 52<br />
Memory at 80080000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]<br />
Capabilities: <access denied><br />
Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci</code>
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Currently, the only 2 devices I have planned to plug into these newly available USB ports are a D-Link Bluetooth 2.0 USB adapter and a 1 TB Seagate External HD for backups. Here is a shot of the installed card.<br />
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As you can see from the photo, the 5th outside USB port on the end is nearly cut off from being accessible, but I am able to safely plug in most cables and devices without any issues. Honestly, I would not have been too upset if I could not, as again, there would have still been 5 other USB ports available. I tested the ports out with an external HD, flash drive, keyboard, and mouse without any issues in either Debian or OS X Leopard. My plan is to install the bluetooth adapter in the internal port as it is not a device i would need to be add/remove on a regularly frequent basis.<br />
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Wells that is all I am going to cover with this one. Kind of boring, but definitely a useful and worthwhile upgrade for any G4 PowerMac in my opinion. If you would like to know about anything else regarding this upgrade, feel free to drop me a comment or shoot me an email. On a side note, each of the 4 PCI slots on this QS has a dedicated bus
bandwidth of 33 MHz and is 64-bit, so I still have 3 left to fill at this
point!<br />
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On the upgrade purchasing front, I have picked up a 430W Thermaltake TW2 Power Supply (may go higher Wattage in the future), a 20-24 pin Startech ATX adapter for the upgraded power supply connectivity, a couple of shorter 18mm blue SATA cables, a NF-F12 120mm Noctua Fan (read great things about these all over the web), and a Sonnet Tempo PCI Firewire card, which I will be covering next. I contacted the <b><a href="http://atxg4.com/" target="_blank">individual</a></b> who used to make the QS ATX adapters, but he no longer has any available and is not interested in making any more unfortunately. That means I will be using the instructions on <b><a href="http://atxg4.com/quicksilver.html" target="_blank">this page</a></b> to try and create one myself. No small feat, but I will try to make the most of it and use it as a needed learning opportunity.<br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-17353276455530610102016-03-06T19:48:00.001-08:002016-03-06T19:48:04.834-08:00Pimp My Quicksilver - Part IV:C CPUFinally. The last post of this 3 part sub-series on upgrading the CPU on the G4 Quicksilver (QS). This post mostly consists of a numbers comparison between the old and new processors to see how much of a performance gain we obtained via various benchmarking tools and performance tests. I decided this route as I think its pretty obvious that there were some significant improvements all around and I was curious to read up more on some of the benchmarks I ran within Debian. <br />
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However, before we start to play the numbers game, let us take a look at and compare the specifications of each CPU, so we have an idea of the difference in terms of hardware. I wanted to display this information in a table-like format using screenshots of the System Information section of the Geekbench results as I believe displaying it in this way it much more helpful for the reader to process and understand. I will go over some of the different specifications in a little more detail below.<br />
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Not only is the number of processors doubled, but the the clock rate/frequency has increased by 333.25% (((1332 x 2) / 800) * 100). Not only that, but the upgraded processor also includes 2 MB of L3 cache per CPU whereas the stock lacked a level 3 cache at all. Having a decent sized level 3 cache should lead to less <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache" target="_blank">cache-misses</a></b>, which leads to fewer fetches of required data from system memory. Of course this can be variable depending on the software/workload the system is under, but either way, there should be some big improvements in that department as well. One other aspect not covered by the above screenshot is for Altivec support, of which, both support, but at the moment we do not really care.<br />
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Onto the testing methodologies and tools. For actual software benchmarking tools I have decided to again use Geekbench as well as the CPU benchmarking tools within the hardinfo software (a.k.a System Information tool) available in the Debian repos. I ran Geekbench v2.2.7 (download <b><a href="http://support.primatelabs.com/discussions/geekbench/645/r?go=aHR0cDovL2dlZWtiZW5jaC5zMy5hbWF6b25hd3MuY29tL0dlZWtiZW5jaC0yLjIuNy1NYWMuemlw" target="_blank">here</a></b>), the last to support OS X PowerPC, both before the CPU upgrade and after. Here are screenshots of summary results for each:<br />
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Again, the results are easy to decipher with results showing double the performance in both the integer and floating point section and even a slight increase in memory (?). You will notice the stream summary has actually dipped 20 points. Why is that? I read through <b><a href="http://support.primatelabs.com/kb/geekbench/geekbench-2-benchmarks" target="_blank">Geekbench 2's documentation</a></b> on the different stream tests, but am still having a tough time wrapping my head around the drop. Stream tests try to test performance of work done between just the processor and memory (no file I/O). My theory is that somehow the level 3 cache affects this in some manner due to it caching data instead of needing to pass it back to system memory. If anybody else could clarify I would appreciate it thoroughly.<br />
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Great, so what about on the Debian/Linux side of the coin? Let me first give an overview of handful of tests I could and did perform on each CPU. I will briefly cover what each is or does. I found a bit of concrete documentation of most of these in the package's <a href="https://github.com/lpereira/hardinfo/tree/master/modules/benchmark" target="_blank"><b>code on GitHub</b></a>, but some additional research and knowledge retrieval from my Computer Science degree helped to fill in most of the remaining gaps. So here are the benchmarks I ran:<br />
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<u>CPU Blowfish</u> - Lower is better. My conclusion is that this is running a stress test on the CPU using the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_(cipher)" target="_blank"><b>blowfish encryption cipher</b></a>. Interestingly, this particular cipher has no known cryptanalysis of it to date.<br />
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<u>CPU CryptoHash</u> - Lower is better. Another CPU stress test utilizing a cryptographic hashing function to measure performance.<br />
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<u>CPU Fibonacci</u> - Lower is better. A test of the <a href="http://users.telenet.be/nicvroom/Fibonacci.htm" target="_blank"><b>Fibonacci function</b></a> using recursive programming and parallel processing.<br />
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<u>CPU N-Queens</u> - Lower is better. A <a href="http://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/queens/queens.html" target="_blank"><b>mathemical puzzle/computer science problem</b></a> of trying to place N number of Queens on an NxN chess board in such a manner that no two queens attack each other. <br />
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<u>FPU FFT</u> - Lower is better. According to the documentation in the code, "a number crunching benchmark using LUP-decomposition to solve a large linear equation."<br />
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<u>FPU Raytracing</u> - Lower is better. According to almighty and faithful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)" target="_blank"><b>Wikipedia</b></a>, "... a technique for generating an image by tracking the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. As you may have noted it tests out the CPU's floating point performance." I find that interesting that it deals with graphics although I know many operations for graphics are still executed on the CPU, especially on these older systems with older graphics cards.<br />
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Here are the results:<br />
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With double the performance results we saw earlier with Geekbench, I was not surprised to see a similar outcome here. <br />
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Now onto every day tasks. For this I decided to execute the following tasks and timed each of their executions until completion with all of them only being completed while booting up or booted within Debian. For the 3 tasks, I am going to 1) Open Ice Weasel and browse to DuckDuckGo (an excellent replacement for Google's search engine) and have the page start displaying input 2) Boot the system to Debian and type the first character at the login screen and 3) Run apt-get update. A nice array of different tasks that most users will encounter on an almost if not daily basis. Here are the results across the 2 different CPUs.<br />
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Not a surprise here either. Basically, double the performance for the first 2 tasks. The Debian boot up task is more I/O bound so nothing to look at there for performance gains, but I will refer back to these numbers when I start upgrading the hard drives.<br />
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I am a bit glad the CPU portion is over, but I am a bit sad as well as we all know CPU upgrades can offer the biggest performance benefits as can clearly be seen from my results above. However, I still have the move to SSD IDE drives, the move to SATA HDs, and then SATA SSDS, so there is still some performance gains to be had there. Plus, I have not covered graphics upgrades as well, which will mostly depend on whether it will support 2D and 3D acceleration, which as most of know can be quite a headache on our Big Endian machines, but the march of progress continues on that front as well. If you have not heard yet, as of Mesa 11.0.3, 3D acceleration is working with the nouveau driver although not quite at the performance it could be. I have tested this on my PowerMac G5 and plan to test it out on my QS by upgrading to Stretch (which is already using a later version of Mesa for that matter) after first making a backup clone onto an SSD before making the jump to the SSD.<br />
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Before I sign off here, I want to note that I have recently installed 3 royal blue RAM heat sinks on each of the 3 sticks of RAM for even perhaps a small minute drop in temperature and small minute increase in performance due to the lower temperatures, but I have no concrete evidence to support that wild claim and will not discuss it any further than that. Here are a few photos of the QS's internals so far with the few upgrades I completed.<br />
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I also picked up an ATI FirePro XL3 graphics card with 256 MB of VRAM. Hailed as the second fastest GPU upgrade for a G4 PowerMac right behind the NVIDIA 7800 GeForce GS, which I also happen to own. More on that when I cover the graphics portion of this series.<br />
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Next up is a 6-port USB PCI card upgrade.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-9874547590730584112015-12-29T13:42:00.000-08:002015-12-29T13:42:03.240-08:00Update on 1400CSJust a short update on the 1400CS restoration project. As of the <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2015/01/new-old-powerbook-teardown-resurrection.html"><b>last post</b></a> from long ago, I had successfully swapped out the broken trackpad but started to have issues with certain keyboard keys not working. I ended up disassembling the PowerBook one more time and cleaning out the keyboard slot on the laptop's motherboard. I used a little bit rubbing alcohol and a soft lint cloth to clean out the slot as well as sprayed it with a can of compressed air for good measure. Either way, those two things seemed to have done the trick! All keys are functional and I am officially stoked.<br />
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Once I was able to restore all functionality to the keyboard I started to research what kinds of PCMCIA Ethernet cards would work with the PowerBook. To make a long story short, I eventually learned about a particular card and adapter that would work with the 1400CS PowerBook. I purchased an <a href="http://www.welovemacs.com/fn10ta.html" target="_blank">Asante FriendlyNet Ethernet PCMCIA/Cardbus Adapter</a> for PC and Mac on eBay for a measly $7.00. The immediate mark of compatibility on the included box brought my hopes up. I read through the included documentation, ran through the included installer and installed the necessary extension into my system's Extensions folder, but still no go, even after a reboot. Honestly, I have no idea of what I am doing as this is my first real go with an older version of Mac OS. I have also purchased a <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0DF-001C-00002" target="_blank">Transcend PCMCIA ATA Adapter</a> that should convert a CompactFlash CF Card to work in the other PCMCIA slot. We will see though.<br />
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Anyways, the previous owner of this old gem did not bother wiping the hard drive, so it is still running an old version of Mac OS 8 and includes software such as Photoshop, an ancient version of Microsoft Office for Mac, and VirtualPC to name a few. When I started up VirtualPC it booted a Windows 95 VM and quite quickly for that matter. Not bad for this old beast of a laptop. <br />
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Lastly, and sadly, there is another reoccurring issue with the laptop that has been more than a little frustrating and unusual. My current theory is a bad PRAM battery and why would it not be considering the PowerBook's age. Here is what happens. I will be happily computing away (and by computing I mean trying to learn Mac OS 8) and the machine will completely lock up on me. I am unable to power off the laptop in any way, shape, or form other than to pull the charging cable and battery out at which point the unit still seems to have some form of power and current flowing through it as the green light on the lower right-hand side of the display is still illuminated. Only for a couple of minutes though. At this point, I usually leave it to sit for a couple of hours and then it works again for awhile.<br />
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On that same note, I am still searching for a working internal CD drive to use to install a Linux OS, but if nothing else, I will search for and use an external one somehow. I see WeLoveMacs have some <a href="http://www.welovemacs.com/appocddr.html" target="_blank">in stock</a> still, but its hard to justify paying $150 for one. The PowerBook already has a floppy drive installed, so I suppose I could utilize that for a Linux OS install although the complexity increases tenfold when going that route and I do not exactly have a huge handful of floppy disk lying around to make it happen.<br />
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Thoughts, ideas, comments, suggestions on these issues? I would welcome any and all.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-78701516617920301022015-10-20T11:01:00.000-07:002015-10-20T11:14:14.892-07:00Useful Twerks, I mean Tweaks<br />
I know. Another long hiatus of no posts. Life has been a whirlwind with my second daughter being born pre-mature as well as me preparing myself for graduate school come this spring 2016. Regardless, I want to keep posting here as often as I can. So today, I thought I would write up a small post with a couple of updates on what I have been working on and cover a couple of useful tweaks I have discovered I could make on my Debian systems to improve useability and productivity.<br />
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The first tweak is targeted at just the iBook and PowerBook owners. Out of the box, the scroll direction feels unnatural and counterintuitive. Luckily, I was able to discover what trackpad settings could be used to reverse the scroll direction. Once in place, you should be able to pull down on the page and have the browser scroll up and vice versa. To put this configuration in effect, open up your synaptics.conf file and add the following lines:<br />
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<code>Option "VertScrollDelta" "-111"<br />
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-111" </code><br />
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Once those two options have been added, reboot and enjoyed reversed scrolling.<br />
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The other tweaks I thought would be useful to share is the ability to spice up and add a bit of <b><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/BashColors">color to your bash shell</a></b>. Add the following lines to either your <code>~/.bashrc</code> file or <code>/etc/bashrc.bash</code> file.<br />
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<code>export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto'<br />
eval "`dircolors`"<br />
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'</code><br />
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To apply the changes, run the following command (assuming you edited the file in your home directory):<br />
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<code>source ~/.bashrc</code><br />
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Why stop there though? If you are a heavy user of vim like myself, you have the ability to add highlighted syntax to your text editor. Browse to <code>/etc/vim/vimrc</code> and uncomment the line below. You will need to make the edit as the root user if you do not already have root privileges.<br />
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<code>syntax on</code><br />
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Yep. That is it. The change is immediate. <br />
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These two colorful tweaks add a great amount of readibility within the terminal, especially the colored syntax highlights. Such a configuration makes it easy to spot typos within configuration files and code as well as pick out certain kinds of items with much more speed and agility.<br />
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In terms of new hardware, I have scored an ATI FireGL X3 graphics card with 256 MB of VRAM. This particular card is <a href="http://barefeats.com/g4up3.html"><b>documented</b></a> as being the second fastest graphics card available for G4 Quicksilvers. The fastest graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce 7800 GS, I also already own! Speaking of the Nvidia card, I have been able to get 2D acceleration working with the Nvidia Card as well using the procedure I <b><a href="http://powerpcliberation.blogspot.com/2015/10/g5-and-g4-nouveau-modesetting-bug-and.html">explained in detail</a></b> over at PowerPC Liberation, so hopefully I can post on that soon too. Before that though, I want to test the latest Rage 128 patch mentioned <b><a href="https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91358">here</a></b> to see what kind of performance I can manage with a nearly 15 year old card.<br />
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Speaking of graphics, a university also provided me with a couple of spare G4 towers and an older <span id="goog_1708844142"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><b>17" Apple Studio Display<span id="goog_1708844143"></span></b></a> with an ADC connector. When hooked up to my G4 Quicksilver project machine, it looks magnificent with its 1280x1024 resolution. The Apple Display Connector is a real bugger though as finder adapters for other display outputs is not as feasible and the Apple branded adapter costs well over $100.<br />
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Lastly, I also purchased some <a href="http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Desktop-Aluminum-Heatsink-RAMCOOLERBL/dp/B000HVHCCG"><b>royal blue heatsinks</b></a> for the QS's RAM and they look fantastic, but in terms of performance and temperature difference, I am not sure how they fare. Not only that, but I also scored a Sonnet Serial ATA PCI card for the G4 upgrade project. With that in mind, my next post should get us back on track with the <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2015/03/pimp-my-quicksilver-g4-part-i.html"><b>Pimp My G4 Quicksilver project</b></a> where I wrap things up with the CPU upgrade for the time being. B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-52254943546662182172015-07-29T14:20:00.001-07:002015-12-29T13:37:45.239-08:00Pimp My Quicksilver - Part IV:B CPUAs promised, this particular post will be short and sweet. First off, I have had to drop the upgraded CPU clock speed back down to 1.33 GHz as so far it seems to be offering the most stability with both operating systems. Research in that department continues.<br />
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However, I was still allowed to move forward with the jump to a 32-bit SMP kernel within Debian. What follows is basically the 2 steps I had to take in order to do so. Even then it is nothing outrageous.<br />
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1. Run the following command to search for the most current and appropriate 32-bit SMP PPC kernel within the Debian repositories.<br />
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<code>sudo apt-cache search linux-image</code><br />
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This should return a list of about 3 different kernel image packages as well as the corresponding meta-packages and headers for each of them. Look for the SMP image called <code>linux-image-[insert version here]-powerpc-smp</code>. You do NOT want the powerpc64 version as no G4 PowerMac or CPU upgrade for it was ever 64-bit capable. I have left the kernel image version out as it may vary over time.<br />
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2. Install the SMP linux image. Right now the current version on my Debian Jessie install is 3.16.0-4.<br />
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<code>sudo apt-get install linux-image-3.16.0-4-powerpc-smp</code><br />
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After installing this image, I had no need to manually update my yaboot.conf file as that was done so automatically. Would not hurt to double check though to make sure the default kernel is now your SMP one.<br />
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3. Reboot<br />
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Reboot your machine to allow it to boot using the newly installed multiprocessor capable kernel. Once you are logged in, there are multiple ways you can verify your system is now taking advantage of multiple CPUs, but I will cover the ones I am more familiar with. The first command you can run will help you verify that your system is seeing both CPUs.<br />
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<code>cat /proc/cpuinfo</code>.<br />
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Here are the results of mine:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qjtQB1ifjYY/VbUiiaKF1TI/AAAAAAAAAYA/HZ9-RtHL-5s/s1600/MultipleCPUs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qjtQB1ifjYY/VbUiiaKF1TI/AAAAAAAAAYA/HZ9-RtHL-5s/s320/MultipleCPUs.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Okay. Both CPUs are recognized, but are both being utilized by the running system? This is where the command line tool <code>top</code> can come in and provide this information. In a terminal, simply type <code>top</code> and you should see a great deal of information and usage statistics about your running system. You can type the 'h' key for help on different options you have at your disposal for arranging the layout of the information provided by top as well as what information is displayed. We want to hit the '1' key to provide usage statistics on separate CPUs as can be seen from this screenshot:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--mnIT8OgzWU/VbhCuYm_0yI/AAAAAAAAAYY/Hm9gUwGIt_M/s1600/TopWithCPUs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="76" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--mnIT8OgzWU/VbhCuYm_0yI/AAAAAAAAAYY/Hm9gUwGIt_M/s320/TopWithCPUs.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Since both CPUs appear here with a % of use, we can be assured that both CPUs are being fully utilized by Debian. Great. How about we take it even one step further by looking at which CPU a particular process is running on? That would provide even more assurance and give us an idea of how and what work is divided up amongst the two CPUs. To do this, will need to use the <code>ps</code> command line tool. This tool basically provides a snapshot of your system's running processes. Again, while in a terminal, type the following and hit Enter:<br />
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<code>ps -eF</code><br />
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Look for the PSR column, which stands for processor. In our case, the resulting number will either be a 0 or a 1 since we only have 2 CPUs and numbering always starts at 0 in computer science. Here is a screenshot hightlighting the command running on the QS.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VDkCjJz2WH0/VbhJbegF33I/AAAAAAAAAYs/wG2mC0uls9c/s1600/PSWithPSR.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="138" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VDkCjJz2WH0/VbhJbegF33I/AAAAAAAAAYs/wG2mC0uls9c/s320/PSWithPSR.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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If you are curious, the <code>-e</code> flag tells the system to include all processes and the <code>-F</code> flag stands for full format, which adds in some additional information to each listed process including the aforementioned PSR column.<br />
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That is it for this post. I barely scratched the surface of what the <code>ps</code> and <code>top</code> tools are capable of, so I would encourage to explore them further. All sorts of neat things are possible. The next (and last) post on the CPU upgrade will take a more in depth look at performance improvements in the system with more everyday tasks put to the test and some CPU spec comparisons.<br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-84019562510144622572015-07-21T19:33:00.002-07:002015-08-01T19:31:05.867-07:00Pimp My Quicksilver - Part IV:A CPUWelcome to part IV of the series on upgrading a G4 Quicksilver (QS). If you have stuck around this long, I think you will find that we will start to see some more substantial improvements in terms of overall performance with some of these next few upgrades. For this particular post, I will be focusing on upgrading the CPU. In fact, I will be breaking it down even further than that due to the fact that this particular upgrade has become quite a bit more work than I had originally anticipated. Needless to say, I have learned quite a bit along the way about jumpers, dip switches, voltage, etc.<br />
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I was excited about this upgrade as I knew it would do wonders for the QS and upfront I will state I was not disappointed, but more on that in a later post. The stock 7447 G4 Motorola CPU running at 800 MHz was just not cutting it even for tasks as simple as installing updates via apt-get in Debian. As I stated in an earlier post, I was lucky enough to locate a dual 1.4 GHz Giga Designs 7457 CPU upgrade on eBay for quite cheap. In fact, I have been tracking a large number of single and dual CPU upgrades for G4 PowerMacs on eBay these past couple of months, so if you are on the hunt for one, definitely take advantage of this fact as they can sometimes sell quick! Not only that, but these upgrade gems are becoming harder and harder to come by.<br />
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Consider this post the first of 3 regarding the upgrade and the processes and procedures it involved. Part IV:A will cover that actual hardware side of the upgrade including the steps taken to swap out the CPU and the different voltages/jumper and dip switch settings I needed to set. Part IV:B will cover the upgrades needed to jump from a single CPU PowerPC kernel to a 32-bit SMP PowerPC kernel within Debian and how to verify it was successful afterwards. And finally, Part IV:C will cover some basic benchmarks from OS X and Debian both to provide a bit of an idea of just how much faster the machine has become.<br />
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So onto the upgrade. The easiest part of this whole process was the steps to take out the old stock CPU and swap in the M5D-1214U Giga Designs dual 1.4 GHz 7457 CPU, which happened to be the first thing I did not really knowing what I was up against. I followed the steps from iFixit's website for swapping out the CPU <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repairing+Power+Mac+G4+Quicksilver+Central+Processing+Unit/2026"><b>here</b></a>. The new dual processor CPU also has the luxury of having dual fans built on top of it for cooling, so I was able to permanently remove the small 60mm fan that resided behind the old CPU. I would be able to leave it there with the new one, but I will closely monitor temperatures with and without it. This particular upgrade does not require all 4 of the screws you removed from the old CPU, but only 2 of them, but keep the other ones handy just in case. Once I successfully swapped out the CPU and plugged in power to its fans, I closed the G4 up and tried to boot the machine. Sadly, nothing. No boot up chime, bong, whatever you want to call it. I probably pushed the power button 6 or 7 times just hoping it would take off, but that would be too easy.<br />
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Long story short, my system needed a particular firmware upgrade that would add support for the 7457 CPU series. Finding this particular upgrade version proved to be incredibly difficult to find as well figuring out which particular version I needed. I first posted to Apple's <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7077380"><b>discussion forums</b></a> asking anybody if they had any version of the installer laying around they could email me. A user did respond with a link to the <a href="https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/macdrivers/info"><b>Mac Driver Museum</b></a> that is hosted over at Yahoo that held a few different Giga Designs pieces of software and upgrades under the folder appropriately named CPU Upgrades. You will need a Yahoo account to access these files, which is a bit of a pain in my mind, but I ponied up and created an account. At the time, the only firmware updater version available was 2.0.1. Looking back on things now I see the description says it adds support for 7447A CPUs, which was not was I was upgrading to, but that small tidbit did not click with me at the time.<br />
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I downloaded the disk image, extracted it, and copied the files to a separate folder for safe keeping. The firmware update utility, Giga Designs 7447A Updater, was straightforward enough. Here is a screenshot of the main screen you will see during the upgrade.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QAKNrV8JtUo/Vap5AJ-oMPI/AAAAAAAAAV8/iDIFgooBFo8/s1600/2.0.1_FirmwareUpdater.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QAKNrV8JtUo/Vap5AJ-oMPI/AAAAAAAAAV8/iDIFgooBFo8/s320/2.0.1_FirmwareUpdater.png" width="308" /></a></div>
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The default selection of "Install 7447A Firmware Update" is what you would want if you were actually needing this particular upgrade. When you are ready, hit the Continue button and let the software do its magic as I did.<br />
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After running this firmware upgrade and rebooting, I again swapped out the CPU, but still no sign of any life. I did some more research online and decided it might be because I needed firmware installer version 3.0.1. I mentioned this in the same Apple Support community discussion I had already started and the same individual who commented previously pointed me to a <a href="https://www.macgurus.com/forums/showthread.php?24781-Giga-Designs-1-6GHz-processor-software"><b>discussion thread at MacGurus.com</b></a> where somebody asked for version 3.0.1 as well, which I learned added support for the 7457 CPU upgrades. Bingo!<br />
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I responded to the thread asking if anybody would be able to provide me with the same firmware update and within 48 hours I received a personal email from one of the moderators with the update utility included as an attachment. Before I did anything with this version of the updater, I uploaded this piece of software to the Mac Driver Museum file repository for anybody else ever needing it in the future.<br />
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To run this particular upgrade, you can simply extract the files from the .sit archive and run the lone Giga Designs Updater 3.0.1 package. Here is a quick screenshot of the installer. As straightforward as can be, so I will not cover it step-by-step.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rzd16PirCP8/Vav833FisyI/AAAAAAAAAWo/bAgC_yHjckg/s1600/3.0.1_FirmwareUpdater.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rzd16PirCP8/Vav833FisyI/AAAAAAAAAWo/bAgC_yHjckg/s320/3.0.1_FirmwareUpdater.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Unfortunately, and frustratingly, still no signs of life after booting up the machine with the Giga Designs CPU in place and freshly installed firmware update. However, I remembered reading a bit more from that same MacGurus thread about different voltage settings you could set on the CPU. Here is a table summarizing those different voltages and how to obtain them.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SSoRTn6bPcc/VavDl4U-mcI/AAAAAAAAAWU/j0aLfbQg_sw/s1600/GigaDesignsVoltagesTable.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="99" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SSoRTn6bPcc/VavDl4U-mcI/AAAAAAAAAWU/j0aLfbQg_sw/s320/GigaDesignsVoltagesTable.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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I thought perhaps the voltage was not set correctly and sure enough, the current setup I had for J6 - J10 was not in the table above. I decided to start with a voltage of 1.55 as 1.6 and 1.65 seemed a bit extreme for a noob like myself. This is where I realized and learned there are also dip switches for J1 - J5 that controlled the CPU's clock frequency. So this meant I would have to also play around with those as well to see which combination of the 5 would give me 1.4 GHz. After scouring the web for some time, I gave up the search for any sort of table showing possible combinations and resulting frequencies. If anybody reading this has this information available, please (I cannot say it enough) share!<br />
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Since I was not able to obtain this information, I decided to starting building a list of tables with this information myself. There are still many missing results and a lot of unanswered questions I have, but it is a worthy start. Knowing that each of the 5 dip switches had 2 possible states (either on or off) I could easily calculate the total number of possibilities as 2^5 or 32. Yes, that is basically binary numbers and mathematics at its finest. And with 7 different voltages to work with, I could theoretically have up to 224 possible combinations of states between J1 - J10 that could provide me with a working system and CPU. For now, I have only included my results for 1.55v, but eventually, I will link to a PDF showing results for all voltages along with notes regarding missing values, etc. I I have read that some frequency results may not be readable by OS X, but require an additional program called GigaMeter, which is available at the Mac Driver Museum as well, to show you what your CPU's clock speed is. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BL9Zb0ywjcM/Va7-YXFNlBI/AAAAAAAAAXk/opR-RczG3wY/s1600/1.55v.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BL9Zb0ywjcM/Va7-YXFNlBI/AAAAAAAAAXk/opR-RczG3wY/s320/1.55v.png" width="242" /></a></div>
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As you can see from the table above I have figured out what combination provides the full 1.4 GHz, but this was one of the results that required the GigaMeter KEXT to be installed otherwise the speed was reported as 0 MHz in OS X. On the other hand, Debian still reports 0 for clock speed, but neither OS has crashed on me yet so the stability is there. I will see if I can find anything online on to correct it within Linux. Some results produced kernel panics with both OS X and Debian and these are marked with an asterisk. Also marked with an asterisk are combinations that successfully produced a start-up chime but would not boot any further. And finally, as you probably have guessed, the blanks are combinations that produced nothing at all (i.e. no startup chime, boot up, etc).<br />
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Part of me wonders if I even needed the firmware upgrade for my QS, which was also mentioned by a moderator in the MacGuru's thread linked above. Either way, the CPU is still in place and running wonderfully at least on OS X Leopard. This conclusion will bring us to my next post in this series where I upgrade my Debian install to use a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) kernel so it takes advantage of both CPUs for even better performance. Do not fret, this next post will be a hell of a lot shorter. :)<br />
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P.S. If you have any other additional info you can provide regarding the Giga Designs upgrades, feel free to leave comments below or shoot me a private email and I can add it to this post. I would love to make this process much simpler for those in the future. The Giga Designs company is now defunct, their website is gone, and the Way Back Machine could not help me locate the information I needed most as the necessary information used to be hosted in PDF form on their site.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-19727532186230901012015-06-28T13:32:00.000-07:002015-08-01T19:30:43.528-07:00PPC Linux Backups: Part ISo I've again taken an opportunity to step away from the G4 upgrades project as I have again become frustrated, this time with trying to make the upgraded CPU work. More on that when the post is completed and published.<br />
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I decided it would be more than worth it to put together a three part series on backing up your PPC Linux machines. I myself use of combination of PowerPC machines, including a G4 PowerBook, G4 PowerMac QS, dual core G5 PowerMac, and a G4 iBook. Much of the configurations between the 4 are quite similar, but different enough that I'd like the peace of mind knowing that these configurations and other valuable data are backed up and backed up on a scheduled basis. Part I will cover creating bootable hard drive clones; Part II will cover available software that could automate backups to an external drive or a storage location out on the network; Part III will cover how to create more of a DIY solution using custom scripts and automation tools. I'm going to refrain from using any cloud/offsite backup solutions as they usually cost money and require my personal information.<br />
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So onto Part I covering the process involved in creating an exact bootable clone of your existing hard drive. We are going to use the well-known and trusted command line tool <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)"><b>dd</b></a> to complete this task. This is quite the powerful tool that at its basic core simply reads and writes files. With this in mind, this tool should allow us to either make a copy of the entire drive or a single partition if we would like.<br />
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As an example, I am going to be cloning my 40 GB Maxtor HD in the G4 PowerMac GS containing my Debian install. I'm going to clone the entire drive instead of just specific partitions, so in essence, it should be an exact bootable clone. I would like to use a drive of the same vendor and capacity, but I do not exactly have many spare 3.5" IDE drives laying around, so for this task I am going to clone the existing drive to a 40 GB Western Digital (WD400JB/WD Cavier SE) HD. The QS has the ability to mount two IDE drives, but I already have both occupied, so I turned to my <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002"><b>IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 adapter kit</b> </a>to attach the backup drive.<br />
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Below is a screenshot of my current Debian disk and its existing partitions and partition layout. After the cloning operation, which should expect to see the exact same layout on the hard drive clone.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HX6jdlzFkKI/VZBRXINZ7eI/AAAAAAAAAU0/sQkpmf2Jtzo/s1600/DDDebianPartitions.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="279" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HX6jdlzFkKI/VZBRXINZ7eI/AAAAAAAAAU0/sQkpmf2Jtzo/s320/DDDebianPartitions.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Once your external drive is attached and recognized by your system, you will want to figure out its file name in <code>/dev</code>. From my reading of the Debian installation guide, all disks detected by the system start with <code>sd</code> (I'm assuming this stands for SCSI device or something similar?) and the first drive is detected as <code>a</code>, the second <code>b</code>, third <code>c</code>, and so on. So for my setup, the external drive happens to be the third attached disk, so its filename is <code>/dev/sdc</code>.<br />
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Now it is time to run the disk cloning command:<br />
<code>sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc</code><br />
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As you will notice, this command requires root privileges. The 'if" part stands for input file and if you are catching on, "of" stands for output file. We are not reading or writing just files, but technically a drive itself is a file (e.g. <code>/dev/sda</code>) within the EXT4 file system. Hopefully that makes sense. Your input and output files will vary depending on your system setup. If you need help identifying this information or if you are just wanting to copy certain partitions, leave me a comment below.<br />
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The amount of time it takes to clone the drive or partition depends on both the size and speed of the drive, but expect it to take quite a bit of time. For this 40 GB drive clone, it took between 4-5 hours total (I did not time it, although I should for comparisons in drive read/write performance when upgrading to an SSD).<br />
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Here are the results from my cloning process:<br />
<code>dd: writing to ‘/dev/sdc’: No space left on device</code><br />
<code>78165361+0 records in</code><br />
<code>78165360+0 records out</code><br />
<code>40020664320 bytes (40 GB) copied, 8500.46 s, 4.7 MB/s</code><br />
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As you can see there are no error messages, but simply a warning that the destination file ran out of space. This is because my Debian system sees the Maxtor as having 41 GB and the Western Digital as having a 40 GB capacity. Either way, there is no harm in this case. Here is a screenshot of the Western Digital HD after the clone.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kZfl-N8DHmY/VZBTe5jQdiI/AAAAAAAAAVA/cVx6RugBJ_M/s1600/DDDebianPartitionsAfter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kZfl-N8DHmY/VZBTe5jQdiI/AAAAAAAAAVA/cVx6RugBJ_M/s320/DDDebianPartitionsAfter.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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I shutdown my system and pulled the live Debian HD and replaced it with the cloned Western Digital HD to test out the backup. Here is my last screenshot of this post showing us with WD drive booted and located at /dev/sda.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zgn9nzVJ6qk/VZBYRPs6srI/AAAAAAAAAVY/y6ZafuZwkHo/s1600/MountedCloneHD.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zgn9nzVJ6qk/VZBYRPs6srI/AAAAAAAAAVY/y6ZafuZwkHo/s320/MountedCloneHD.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
So a definite success. Now that I have this cloning process down, I will do the same with the other PPC machines and schedule it to be done on a periodic basis.<br />
<br />
Of course, you'll want to tag team this backup approach with another such as backing up with a piece of backup software or writing shell scripts to do the backups for you, which again happens to be part II and part III of this series respectively. As I learned early on in computing, a smart man backups up his data, but a wise man makes backups for his backups.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-70114478805839912442015-06-12T20:38:00.000-07:002015-08-01T19:29:40.849-07:00Updates, Aliases, and Network No-NosLong time no post (at least it feels like that). My work on the graphics card upgrade was moving along quite nicely, but I've hit a brick wall after compiling the latest nouveau drivers/modules, libdrm, and mesa libraries. On the G5, I simply get an error regarding a GPU lockup, and a botched graphics glitch on the G4 with the updated kernel. Because of that, I've decided two things: 1) I'm going to work on the CPU upgrade next on the G4 and 2) I'm going to table the nouveau drivers project for just a bit and go with a Radeon 9800 Pro for an upgraded graphics card.<br />
<br />
Right now, I feel like I'll have a better chance of getting 3D acceleration working with the nVidia Quadro card on the G5, so look for updates on that over on the <a href="http://powerpcliberation.blogspot.com/"><b>PowerPCLiberation blog</b></a>.<br />
<br />
On an unrelated note, I want to take a few minutes to discuss command aliases you can setup for your bash shell environment. I've been meaning to do this on my Debian installs for some time as I've set them up on all the Linux machines at my full-time job. Basically you can create aliases to make shortened versions of longer commands you run on a regular basis. For example instead of typing the following:<br />
<code>sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade</code><br />
<br />
You can shorten this command to simply the word <code>update</code>, which when ran will actually run the command above. To get started with aliases, you'll want to change directories into your home directory. Create/open a new file you'll call <code>.bash_aliases</code>. The syntax for setting up a new alias is as follows:<br />
<code>alias [alias_name]='[full command you are aliasing]'</code><br />
<br />
So for the example I provided above, I would set it up like so:<br />
<code>alias update='sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade</code><br />
<br />
Upon saving the changes, you should immediately be able to make use of the new alias. To test it out type <code>update</code> and watch as this short one word command runs both the update and upgrade commands!<br />
<br />
Here are just a couple of others I usually implement on each of my installs.<br />
<code>alias cdh='cd /home/[username]'</code><br />
<code>alias cde='cd /etc'</code><br />
<code>alias cdv='cd /var'</code><br />
<code>alias ls='ls -alh'</code><br />
<br />
They may not do a whole lot, but the small amount of time these aliases can save does add up over time in the same way the utility kupfer does. I'd encourage you to come up with your own. Feel free to share them in the comments below as they may be helpful for the rest of us.<br />
<br />
Also, if you happen to run a really long command and say forgot to add sudo to the beginning of it or need to move towards the beginning of the command to retype or add additional commands, simply hit <code>Command</code> + <code>a</code> (or <code>Control</code> + <code>a</code> if you haven't swapped out the Command and Control keys). This moves your cursor to the beginning of the command. I happen to use this quite a bit.<br />
<br />
One last thing I've learned recently when working with Debian I thought might be helpful to share. If you are using the well-known <a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/NetworkManager"><b>NetworkManager</b></a>, don't manually edit the <code>/etc/network/interfaces</code> file with network interface configurations or vice versa. The two separate configurations will conflict with each other and produce unusual, unpredictable, and unusable results. For some time now, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't just plug in an ethernet cable to any of my PPC machines and receive an IP via DHCP without restarting network services or rebooting with the cable already plugged into the machine. Such a simple concept, but it took me awhile to figure out.<br />
<br />
Oh yeah, and if you'd like to use the GUI wrapper for NetworkManager, simply type <code>nm-connection-editor</code>. That right there might be an excellent candidate for creating an alias in order to shorten it up. Of course you can also tab to auto-complete the command, but the choice is yours.<br />
<br />
So nothing too exciting. Just a few helpful tips for growing and expanding your Linux experience and expertise. Look for the CPU upgrade soon! I'm also running into issues with that as well, but I'm more hopeful I'll be able to resolve those quicker than the nouveau drivers. Not only that, the CPU is such a sloth, that an upgrade should help move the rest of my posts on the upgrades along much faster. B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-63099065014651428172015-05-12T20:35:00.001-07:002015-08-01T19:29:24.172-07:00Pimp My Quicksilver - Part III: CD/DVD DriveWelcome to Part II of the Pimp my Quicksilver series where I will be upgrading the CD/DVD drive. Again, this particular component may not be the most exciting or even often used, but I felt it necessary to include.<br />
<br />
Here is a System Profile screenshot with the old drive:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fzUqXmuE6a4/VVKSBt_8K3I/AAAAAAAAATY/bD-cCkoD978/s1600/PreDiskBurning.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="111" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fzUqXmuE6a4/VVKSBt_8K3I/AAAAAAAAATY/bD-cCkoD978/s320/PreDiskBurning.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
As you can see, the drive is not capable of reading or writing DVDs, but does support the reading and writing of CDs. This is the stock Superdrive that shipped with the Quicksilver (QS). Apple reported that this drive is capable of reading CDs at 32X while being able to write to CD-Rs at 24X, which is what I will be using for testing.<br />
<br />
Here is a System Profile screenshot of the newly installed drive.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zmur04Ssfus/VVK5lcr1m-I/AAAAAAAAATo/ZzDS_Pf3Jv4/s1600/PostDiskBurning.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="123" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zmur04Ssfus/VVK5lcr1m-I/AAAAAAAAATo/ZzDS_Pf3Jv4/s320/PostDiskBurning.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The new drive from MCE, which they had to custom build as it is now an older model, is capable of burnings CDs at 48X. So we should see a decent sized chunk of time cut out when burning files and ISOs to CD. Of course, this MCE drive also supports the burning of the different DVD media types including Dual Layer (DL) at up to 22X depending on the time of DVD media. Definitely a benefit over having no DVD reading or burning capabilities at all.<br />
<br />
One last significant difference you may have noticed is the difference in the cache sizes between the two. The stock drive had an 8 MB cache whereas the replacement one only has a 512 KB cache. I'm not all too familiar with caches on CD/DVDs drives, but either way it shouldn't really hurt the CD burn tests I will be performing. I'm positive the cache comes more in to play with reading files and playback performance. <br />
<br />
I plan on burning a copy of the latest version of NetBSD 6.5.1 to install on an old purple G3 iMac. In a previous post, I discussed the possibility of installing NetBSD (I might have even said FreeBSD) onto my PowerBook 1400CS only to read that it is not actually officially supported as it is one of the older Mac models with the NuBus architecture. Oh well. I still want to give NetBSD a shot, so that's why its going on the iMac.<br />
<br />
The NetBSD ISO I downloaded from <a href="ftp://mirror.planetunix.net/pub/NetBSD/iso/6.1.5/NetBSD-6.1.5-macppc.iso">here</a>, was 313920 KB (~307 MB if you were wondering) in size. Instead of burning it the boring old fashioned way in OS X using Disk Utility or the <a href="ftp://mirror.planetunix.net/pub/NetBSD/iso/6.1.5/NetBSD-6.1.5-macppc.iso">Burn</a> application, I decided to burn the ISO to a CD from the CLI while booted into Jessie using the simple and easy to use command line tool <code>wodim</code>. This <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/BurnCd"><b>Debian Wiki</b></a> page has some perfect documentation on how to use wodim and what other CD burning applications are available, but man pages are an excellent resource as well. For a measurement of performance, I will record the time it takes to burn the ISO once using each drive and report the results, which again, should speak for themselves and be quite self-explanatory. For the media type, I am utilizing a 700 MB Memorex CD-R.<br />
<br />
To burn an ISO using wodim, simply run the following:<br />
<code>wodim -dao [InsertFileNameHere].iso</code><br />
<br />
Here are the results:<br />
Stock CD Drive - 147.15s<br />
Upgrade MCE Drive - 100.18s<br />
<br />
So we have managed to shave off at least 32% of time when burning CDs. A welcomed improvement. Woohoo!<br />
<br />
In other news, I have ordered both a 1.8 GHz Sonnet CPU and a dual 1.4 GHz Giga Designs CPU off of eBay. I wasn't expecting to win the 1.8 GHz, but received notification late Sunday morning that my bid was the highest. Again.. oh well. It will be nice to test out and compare with the Giga Designs CPU. Both are compatible with the QS although from what I've read the Sonnet CPU requires a specific firmware patch from Sonnet that is no longer available on their website. :(<br />
<br />
Stay tuned for Part IV covering the CPU upgrade from a single 800 GHz CPU to a dual 1.4 GHz CPU. Things should start to become quite interesting from here on out.<br />
<br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-68197762727219475002015-05-10T18:09:00.003-07:002015-08-01T19:28:53.652-07:00Pimp My QuickSilver - Part II: RAMWelcome to Part II of my series on upgrading a G4 Quicksilver (QS) to its maximum capabilities. See Part I <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2015/03/pimp-my-quicksilver-g4-part-i.html" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>. So a few of the hardware upgrades arrived including the 1.5 GB of RAM, SuperDrive, and nVidia 7800 GS graphics card. Before I could really begin this adventure, I wanted to reload the Quicksilver in its current condition with fresh OS installs with a little bit of customization done for each. That's where the battle began.<br />
<br />
First, both 200 GB WD IDE drives failed to be recognized by any installer or currently running system of mine. When they would be recognized, it caused all sorts of modprobe errors and slowed the installer considerably, especially when the installer reached the disk partitioning step (of course). I found two matching 40 GB Quantam Fireball 3 drives that did work though and successfully swapped them out after zeroing out both disks using Disk Utility in OS X. Immediately after that, I went to start the install of Debian, but quickly learned that my install CD was not being read properly. Turns out it wasn't the CD, but the actual CD/DVD drive itself. I pulled the working one from my identical Quicksilver to quickly resolve that issue.<br />
<br />
Not only that, but starting the OS X installer off of my Leopard DVD had to be done in Open Firmware (OF) off of an external DVD drive. Here is the command I needed to run with the DVD drive plugged into the rightside on-board USB 1.1 port. The left would be <code>usb1</code>.<br />
<code>boot usb0/disk@1:,\System\Library\CoreService\BootX</code><br />
<br />
If there were multiple partitions on the install DVD, I'd include the partition number the installer was located on after the colon in the above command.<br />
<br />
The first 40 GB Fireball HD will house OS X Leopard and the second was going to be home to Debian Wheezy running LXDE. I chose Leopard because it was my first real experience with Mac OS X and I've never been able to grow very fond of OS X 10.4 Tiger. The caveat being that the CPU in my QS only ran at 800 MHz so I had to use the OF hack to fool the installer into thinking the CPU was running at 867 MHz, which happens to be minimum requirement for Leopard. Of course, the change does not actually increase the clock frequency of the CPU, but changes what frequency it advertises itself as running at. The change to the CPU clock speed advertisement within OF is only good until the system is rebooted. More information on how to do this can be found <a href="http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071214143723301"><b>here</b></a>.<br />
<br />
Eventually, I also decided to just upgrade to Jessie for the Debian install. As expected there were video issues as the G4 currently houses an ATI Radeon card. I had to boot to rescue mode and install the linux-firmware-nonfree package before video would work. I have yet to add any additional sabot parameters to assist related to the Radeon card, but haven't really found the need to either. Time will tell.<br />
<br />
So all of that and more caused quite a bit of delay in getting this put together. Was it worth it and perhaps a little bit of fun? You betcha. But I now bring you the results of upgrading and maxing out the system's RAM.<br />
<br />
As mentioned in Part I, the system started with 1 GB of RAM and I've upgraded it to 1.5 GB (it is maximum memory capacity). I ran a series of tests to help gather some hopefully more realistic day-to-day numbers you would see from increasing the amount of available RAM. I've also ran GeekBench against the system in OS X as well just for the heck of it to provide you with those results as well.<br />
<br />
The tests include the following: <br />
<ol>
<li><u>Boot Time</u> - probably not going to be affected a whole lot, but it should be nice to have these numbers available throughout the entire series. By boot time I mean the time it takes for the system to boot to the login screen with and have the first typed character appear.</li>
<li><u>Browser Launch Time</u> - No add-ons installed running TenFourFox and IceWeasel 31.6.0. I thought about installing uBlock and XMarks for syncing bookmarks but decided to keep it simple this time around. I'm measuring the amount of time it takes to click the browser icon and type the first letter in the Google search bar on the default home page.</li>
<li><u>Maximum # of Browser Tabs</u> - This one should be most interesting for my use. I decided to use Twitter as it is an incredibly memory hungry website with each tab using anywhere from roughly 20 - 40 MB of memory apiece. I continued to open new tabs and loading Twitter until the system was starved of memory and started to swap to the hard disk. I was NOT signed in during my testing.</li>
<ul>
</ul>
<li><u>GeekBench Results</u> - Ran on the OS X side only as mentioned previously. I'm using version 2.2.7, the latest version available for our PPC machines. You can download it <a href="http://support.primatelabs.com/discussions/geekbench/645/r?go=aHR0cDovL2dlZWtiZW5jaC5zMy5hbWF6b25hd3MuY29tL0dlZWtiZW5jaC0yLjIuNy1NYWMuemlw"><b>here</b></a>. </li>
<li><u>Other Suggestions</u> - If you have any suggestions, I will gladly run those as well and update this post with those numbers. I'm positive their are better tests to run than what I've outlined above.</li>
</ol>
As most of us know, some of these will also be affected by some of the other system hardware such as CPU and system bus speed (133 MHz) which could be a significant bottleneck. To keep track of memory usage in OS X, I'll stick with Activity Monitor and for Jessie I'll use the well-known CLI tool <code>top</code>. I wanted to use conky, but many of the characters appear garbled. Not sure if it's a font issue or perhaps a screen depth issue? Reloading conky after logging in helps clear up some of the garbled mess, but not all of it.<br />
<br />
That aside, let us move on to the memory install. I don't think there really is a need to cover much here as the process to upgrade the RAM is about as straightforward as you could make it. In fact it is so easy that it's not even a <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Power_Mac_G4_Quicksilver" target="_blank"><b>documented procedure</b></a> for the QS over at iFixit's website. The QS has 3 slots for RAM, meaning each slot can house a 3.3 volt 168-pin 512 MB stick of PC 133 SDRAM. The 133 indicating the speed of the RAM in Megahertz. Not knowing enough about SDRAM in particular I took to the ever faithful Wikipedia to learn more about it. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_dynamic_random-access_memory"><b>Feel free to do the same</b></a>. I happened to purchase 3 sticks myself from OWC. I wanted to have a complete set of brand new RAM to run off of.<br />
<br />
This particular RAM doesn't include heat spreaders, but I'll live with that for now at least. I should be able to purchase those at a later time. My question is does it really add that much benefit for this type of RAM? Or would it be more for form rather than function? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.<br />
<br />
I swapped out the RAM and filled all 3 slots, closed 'er up and watched it boot. Here are my resulting numbers from each of the previously documented tests above.<br />
<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Measured Task - Jessie (8.0)</b></td>
<td><b>1.0 GB RAM</b></td>
<td><b>1.5 GB RAM</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Boot Time (in seconds)</td>
<td>(88.22,83.57,83.64) AVG=85.14</td>
<td>(87.16,83.89,83.92) AVG=84.99</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Browser Launch (in seconds)</td>
<td>(7.82,8.31,8.08) AVG=8.07</td>
<td>(7.78,9.23,8.76) AVG=8.59</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Number of Open Tabs</td>
<td>21</td>
<td>43</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Measured Task - OS X Leopard</b></td>
<td><b>1.0 GB RAM</b></td>
<td><b>1.5 GB RAM</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Boot Time (in seconds)</td>
<td>(48.99,53.85,48.43) AVG=50.42</td>
<td>(53.67,51.70,56.07) AVG=53.81</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Browser Launch (in seconds)</td>
<td>(8.51,8.63,8.98) AVG=8.71</td>
<td>(9.28,8.80,9.06) AVG=9.05</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Number of Open Tabs</td>
<td>24</td>
<td>43</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>GeekBench Score (OS X)</td>
<td>473 (Memory: 323)</td>
<td>473 (Memory: 323)</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Most of the numbers you see above should be pretty self-explanatory. For the boot times, I noticed that booting to OS X after using Jessie or vice versa took about 15-20 seconds longer, so for each of the tests above, I made sure to start the boot up after having last used the OS I was currently testing. My guess is that the last used startup disk is cached by OF somehow. The other significant difference for the boot times between Leopard and Jessie are that Jessie has to go through the necessary yaboot parameters to address Radeon driver issues which adds a good chuck more of time when booting up.<br />
<br />
I want to quick note that it took forever to come up with the results of the maximum number of open Twitter tabs as the CPU became overworked after opening the second tab in both operating systems. :) However, once Twitter loaded on each tab, the browser's responsiveness and stability would return. Here is a screenshot of Activity Monitor when I hit 43 Twitter tabs in OS X with 1.5 GB of RAM.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZZ5ArDl9MgY/VVABMr5aeyI/AAAAAAAAAS4/2EtLyOmYRA8/s1600/TwitterTabs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZZ5ArDl9MgY/VVABMr5aeyI/AAAAAAAAAS4/2EtLyOmYRA8/s320/TwitterTabs.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span id="goog_1402011001"></span><span id="goog_1402011002"></span><br />
The only other thing worth noting at this point is that the Geekbench score did not change. In fact, the numbers were exactly the same through and through. Makes me a little suspicious, but I"m not familiar enough with the application to really argue anything at this point.<br />
<br />
That's it for this segment. Not super exciting given that the system only maxes out at 1.5 GB of RAM, the upgrade is super simple, and the rest of the system is still quite the bottleneck at this point. Part III will tackle the CD/DVD drive upgrade. Stay tuned.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-49342550161772582172015-04-22T11:17:00.002-07:002015-08-01T19:28:08.724-07:00An Applet a Day Keeps the Doctor AwayI'm subscribed to the Debian PPC mailing list (if you aren't yet, you definitely should be!) and recently read about a "new" Gnome (both a gtk2 and 3 version) battery menu applet for our PowerPC portables as well as a version of it that was ported to C.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
You can read more about the applet <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2015/04/msg00018.html" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a> and the C code can be downloaded from Github <a href="https://github.com/gungwald/mac-battery-applet" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>. The version written in C is actually relatively straightforward code to read through. As another user mentioned, it is kind of cool to see how a menu applet can actually be written and works.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Once you've downloaded the zip file, unpack it by running the following command inside the folder where you downloaded the zip, such as your user profile's <code>Downloads</code> folder.</div>
<div>
<code>unzip mac-battery-applet-master-master.zip</code></div>
<div>
<br />
Change directories into the unzipped folder and run:<br />
<code>make install</code><br />
<br />
This should copy the Linux PPC executable to your <code>/usr/local/bin</code> folder so go ahead and type <code>mac-</code> and it should auto-complete the command to <code>mac-battery-applet</code> for you. Hit enter and you should see a small battery icon appear in your task bar/panel as can be seen from the screen shot below.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K-h9MxBKcYI/VTakriqK5tI/AAAAAAAAASg/Q01J1JkyLvQ/s1600/BatteryApplet.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K-h9MxBKcYI/VTakriqK5tI/AAAAAAAAASg/Q01J1JkyLvQ/s1600/BatteryApplet.png" /></a></div>
<br />
Hovering your mouse over the icon brings up a small pop-up of sorts that gives you the remaining estimated battery capacity and number of minutes of runtime until the battery is depleted.<br />
<br />
Of course, you don't want to manually run this every time you reboot or power on your PPC laptop, so go ahead and add it to the necessary startup configuration for your desktop environment. For LXDE, I added the line <code>@mac-battery-applet</code> to my <code>autostart</code> file located at <code>/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE</code>.<br />
<br />
There are numerous battery icon files for showing the percentages of remaining capacity and they exist for both when the laptop is on battery power and when it is charging. When the laptop is plugged in and charging a small + symbol appears on the upper right hand side. A function called <code>build_icon_file_name</code> creates the necessary filename and it uses the code in <code>files.c</code> to construct the path for the corresponding file for that % of battery based on the built filename. There is a lot more to it all, but pretty cool I think overall. Some might prefer to have more granular results, but I think the 10% increment icons are an okay trade-off. Ideally, I might do 5% increments, but that could become quite tedious when creating the icon files. <br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Reading through the README, it says there is currently no Debian package for this applet, but the author states he would be more than willing to let someone else tackle that project. I've personally never done this, but perhaps it would be worth it to finally use it as a chance to learn all that does go into building a Debian package if it is even that much? I've heard arguments on both sides.<br />
<br />
Anyways, there is much more valuable information in the links I provided, including possible future updates to the applet, such as custom icon themes, so I encourage you to check those out. Did I mention this was done on a recently purchased 1.42 GHz G4 iBook? Yeah, I am stoked. I'm almost done with the memory upgrade and tests on the G4 QS. Look for it in the next couple of days.</div>
B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-53412721381509106072015-04-01T09:31:00.001-07:002015-04-01T18:20:10.006-07:00Thoughts on the Filesystem's FutureIf you don't mind too much, I'd like to sort of run astray from my usual PPC related content here and discuss my thoughts about the future of the filesystem. Roughly 99% of it is entirely my opinion so take everything with what some call a "grain of salt."<br />
<br />
I've recently read a couple of articles about the subject of the filesystem that covers arguments about both its impending doom and its forever omnipotence in computing devices. Since then I've wanted to add in my own thoughts on the matter. For some reason, I am currently unable to access the article I am referring to, but will check back periodically to try and post a link. The articles are not so much discussing the
actual end of files and the filesystem, but the idea of its access being
stripped or abstracted away from a typical user. Much of what you'll read below covers both such scenarios, so hopefully it's as clear as mud.<br />
<br />
You could say the topic is still somewhat related to my blog content as of course our PPC system's are computing devices and would likely be affected by any changes that may or may not happen to the filesystem going forward. I'd like to argue that the filesystem is a construct which is here to stay for a very considerable part of the foreseeable future. <br />
<br />
Let me provide a few of my arguments that will support my earlier outlined stance on the topic. Personally, I believe, overall, the filesystem has a long life ahead of it as it
is currently such an integral part of a typical computing device whether that be a desktop, mobile phone, wearable devices... the list could go on and on.<br />
<br />
Many define the filesystem as the construct allowing the control of the storage and retrieval of data, which is true, but its so much more than
that. Some would also state, the filesystem is a lower level construct, probably even more so these
days with mobile device operating systems (Android, iOS), which have
abstracted away the idea of files and file organization in one sense,
but more on that later. Regardless of whether an end user knows it or
not, the filesystem is an important piece in the operation of the
device in so many different ways. <br />
<br />
Now I'm well aware that so much more is happening between the thin layer that is the filesystem and the actual hardware, but it is a good portion of the glue mixture that brings everything together in the end to make the device useful. I might even go so far as to say it is the very foundation and fabric of any virtual existence.<br />
<br />
I often create analogies of computer related concepts of which correlate to that of the human body or a vehicle as it often helps paint a more clear picture for myself and others of what the subject's function is and how it works. So bare with me here. Files are to the computing system as DNA is to the human body. They contain a lot of the logical computational makeup (not the physical makeup obviously) of the device helping to shape what it does and again how it works. The analogy isn't a perfect fit, but I think it does the job well. Basically, just know files are incredibly crucial at this point to the operations of a device.<br />
<br />
My second argument is that the filesystem itself is still rapidly evolving to this very day. Think of the numerous types of filesystems in existence such as FAT32, OS X Extended (and extended journaled), NTFS, EXT4, ZFS, CIFS, etc and the differences and similarities between each. Some have been around for ages, but there are always newer versions or replacements being introduced that build on or improve the ideas of those that came before it. Overall, there are still many weaknesses to be resolved and strengths to be improved upon. I could write on and on about the complexities of such filesystems and what they are or are not capable of or what could be done to improve them. <br />
<br />
Unfortunately, a lot of the knowledge and understanding of files and the filesystem has always been an incredibly difficult one for non-technical individuals to comprehend and make use of, so a lot of them could care less about its existence. Hence the reason for it slowly but surely being phased out on some platforms. To them the filesystem is another layer of complexity they would rather NOT have to care about in the first place. All these end users want to know is that their files are 1) there (and by "there" I mean on the desktop usually), 2) safe, and 3) (for some more tech-savvy) secure.<br />
<br />
As a network administrator ("IT guy") it is a bit frustrating trying to teach others to grasp such a concept as for me it is incredibly straightforward, simple, and analogous to the real physical things in the physical world. I'm sure all of us have heard of the idea of thinking of the filesystem as being quite similar to an actual filing cabinet. So one part of me is partially glad that its disappearing as it is less overhead for me when working with end users, but at the same time, I do not want to lose the vast amount of power that comes with having unlimited access to the filesystem. Then again, will it be less overheard for somebody who does IT work/development or will it actually increase? Either way, I believe its going to further devolve the computer abilities of the masses in many ways and likely decrease the already thin patience of an end user when something does go wrong in relation to their files.<br />
<br />
Let me be very clear and state that I'm not in any way against the possibility something could
eventually replace the filesystem as in time all things must live <i>and</i> die. As all tech-savvy people know, this is most definitely true in the technology world and is so at a much more rapid pace than many other areas in life. The difficult part is trying to imagine or conjure up any sort of idea of what would take its place as the application and use of the filesystem has been strongly cemented into my understanding of computational devices and how they work. As a coder or developer, I would feel even more strongly of this as everything I code comes together across multiple files both of my own and of the system I write code on to create a lot of the "magic" we take for granted today. I'm being incredibly vague, but again I'm trying to paint a clear picture here.<br />
<br />
Part of me wonders if somehow the idea or even the files themselves will be somehow virtualized in some sense beyond that of which they currently are and can be today. I'm talking at a much lower level than of which is available to us today through actual files (of course they are not physical) and virtual hard disks using technologies such as VMware, XenApp, Linux KVM, or Hyper-V. Beyond that, my mind simply draws a dark empty blank void of which nothing can fill.<br />
<br />
My guess is that you (the reader) have much different thoughts and opinions on the matter and I would absolutely love to hear each of them. So please do share! Anyways, back to regular content after this, but I hope you enjoyed the small change of password and perhaps thought provoking content.<br />
<br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-72788480422645662992015-03-01T14:30:00.000-08:002015-08-01T19:27:09.796-07:00Pimp my Quicksilver - Part I: IntroOne of the best things about the G4 PowerMacs was their wide array of possible upgrades. That said, I currently have 2 identical <a href="http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powermac_g4_867_qs.html" target="_blank"><b>2002 G4 Quicksilver PowerMacs</b></a> both with a stock <strike>867</strike> 800 MHz Motorola CPU. I've officially decided to soup one up in every way I know how while likely leaving the other one exactly as it is. The idea came from one of Cameron Kaiser's <a href="http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/02/biggus-diskus-plus-3150-and-how-to.html" target="_blank"><b>recent posts</b></a> where he mentions the fact that he has beefed up his Quad G5 in almost every aspect. If anyone reading this knows of an even better, more powerful, efficient (not likely in terms of power consumption as you'll discover below) option, please, I say, let me know. I always have an open ear, but I also know when to make a solid argument as well. :)<br />
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Here are photos of the machine as it is before any upgrades. Provided are shots of the front, back, inside, and sides with the machine's case opened up. <br />
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<br />
Here's my plan of action:<br />
<u>Memory</u> - . Max out the RAM at a whopping 1.5 GB Easily the most achievable and probably one of the cheapest upgrades for improving the performance of the PPC machine. I've already purchased the necessary 1.5 GB of RAM from Other World Computing as I've never had any issues with their memory in the past, it is competitively priced, and has a lifetime warranty.<br />
<br />
1.5 GB may not seem like much to somebody NOT using an older [PowerPC] machine, but trust me, it's more than enough and currently not the bottleneck of either machine in Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS 9, or Debian Jessie.<br />
<br />
<u>CD/DVD Drive</u> - Right now this is the stock
SuperDrive, but it's not in fully working order and has a most difficult
time trying to read DVDs. Does it absolutely need to be upgraded?
Probably not. But will I? You bet I will. I've always been a fan of
the drives offered by MCE Technologies. So I'm going to go with the MCE
internal SuperDrive seen <a href="http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=DVDR22XDT-D&Category_Code=STORDVDRW&Product_Count=2" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>.
I don't believe I'll find any other alternatives supporting such a wide
array of CD and DVD formats or one that surpasses the recording
speed for either media type. <br />
<br />
<u>Video</u> - Replace the existing <a href="http://www.welovemacs.com/16.html" target="_blank"><b>4X AGP ATI Rage 128 Pro card</b></a> with its measly 16 MB of VRAM with an 8X AGP nVidia GeForce 7800 GS with 256 MB of RAM. Preferably the card will be purchased without the <a href="http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvidia-geforce-7800" target="_blank"><b>flashed ROM</b></a> on it yet, so I can enjoy attempting to tackle such a feat. I'll need to make sure that the one I purchase is running BIOS version 5.70 as a newer version of the card was released running 5.71, which CANNOT be flashed to work with a Mac.<br />
<br />
I've already done the liberty of locating an older PC with a 4X AGP slot as well an older PCI video card so I can actually flash the card. What an incredibly difficult task that was although in the end I did not pay a dime for it! You'll probably laugh when I provide more details on the machine and how it works.<br />
<br />
<u>CPU</u> - Preferably, I'd find a working dual CPU upgrade, although they are starting to go the way of the dodo bird in terms of locating one. At the current time, I'm leaning towards a dual Sonnet upgrade for a couple of reasons. First of all, I've haven't had much luck looking for the other available brands' upgrades anywhere on the web. Secondly, based on what I've been reading on the Internet, they are some of the top performers in terms of G4 CPU upgrades. Correct me if I am wrong.<br />
<br />
<u>Hard Drive </u>- Although some may argue on this one, I'm still going to bite the bullet and purchase an IDE/ATA SSD from OWC. The speed of the drive likely exceeds that of the bandwidth available on the hard drive bus, but that's okay with me. Trying to decide on either a comfortable 60 GB or the 120 GB in order to have plenty of breathing room. And since the unit has another slot available for another 3.5" drive, I'll likely plug it with an existing 250 GB Ultra ATA/66 drive I already own. It will be used as either a data or backup drive.<br />
<br />
<u>PCI Add-Ons</u> - The G4 already has Gigabit connectivity, so I don't think I will be purchasing any sort of PCI network card. However, I'll still have 4 PCI slots to fill if I so desire. My question is, what do I fill them with? I don't mind Wi-Fi but it will never be as reliable as a wired Ethernet connection so I will NOT consider that as an option. Of course there is an available Airport expansion slot that would support up to 802.11b if I for some reasons still want to add some sort of wireless connectivity. <br />
<br />
There are so many options to choose from, I'm having a tough time narrowing it down. Perhaps I would like to add more USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 ports for connecting more external devices? Or maybe I want to add a RAID controller card plus additional drives for either better drive performance, more storage, or reliability? I'll provide more details about which ones I go with when I reach the post covering this part of the process, which may need to be subdivided into separate posts as well for each PCI slot depending on the type of cards I choose.<br />
<br />
<u>Power Supply</u> - With the upgraded dual CPUs and more power hungry video card, the existing power supply <i>may </i>be overworked. If that is the case, I'll need to find a replacement that is both compatible with the G4 and sufficient enough to supply enough power to all on-board components. Research is still ongoing with this particular piece of it all. What I do know is that the max output supported by the existing power supply should NOT exceed 355W.<br />
<br />
<u>Fans</u> - With all this extra hardware running on the system, it is safe to way it'll produce more heat, so it may be necessary to replace the existing fans to better regulate the temperature and keep the system running as cool as possible. I'll be watching temperatures closely throughout each upgrade and I'll post my results during each phase. One nice thing about the video card above is that it includes an on-board fan so that <i>should</i> help but that depends on several factors as well. Overall though, this piece is also still under heavy research. So far, I've read positive reviews for this <a href="http://www.frozencpu.com/products/4274/fan-235/SilenX_120x120x38mm_-_18dBA_-_90CFM_iXtrema_Pro_Fan_IXP-76-18.html?tl=g33c165s358" target="_blank"><b>SilenX fan</b></a>. <br />
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<u>Exterior/Casing</u> - Haven't decided for sure on this one, but I'm quite positive I'm going to move forward with it here sometime soon. As I've seen and read of many others doing, I want to paint the exterior body another color. I'll likely have an Apple decal on hand to paint the Apple logo another color too. I've made no headway yet on a color scheme.<br />
<br />
Whew. That's a lot of hardware. Keep in mind, there is a lot of information and specifics I didn't include in the above descriptions that I'll need
to be aware of mostly because I wanted to save that for the post I'll
write when upgrading that particular piece of hardware. Wouldn't want to spoil all
of the fun now. For example, taking into consideration CPU level 2 and 3 cache when seeking the best possible CPU performance upgrade or caveats of using a flashed nVidia card.<br />
<br />
What I also plan to do is record some measurements of performance for completing certain tasks before each upgrade and after and post the results during each installment of this series. I'll use tests that will likely provide the best sort of overall picture of performance improvement with the upgraded hardware.<br />
<br />
I know some of you may look at all of this and wonder why? I say why not? This should be interesting, fun, and most of all expensive, but it's a hobby and those are never cheap right?B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-20507072275244460382015-02-22T19:36:00.003-08:002015-08-01T19:26:14.475-07:00The Time [Capsule] MachineNo posts for the past couple of weeks as I've been trying to track down an I/O error occuring on my OWC SSD, but that's a story for another day. I'm positive it's the drives cable and not the drive itself.<br />
<br />
Coincidentally, the errors started right after I had completed some configurations to mount my Apple Time Capsule as a CIFS volume on my Wheezy install, which happens to be the subject of this post. About 5 or 6 years ago, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I invested in an 500 GB Time Capsule, model <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/SP9" target="_blank"><b>A1254</b></a>, we could use to back up both of our Macs. At the time, I only owned a white 2008 2.4 GHz Penryn MacBook (my first Mac) and had just started using it only a couple of months prior. OS X Leopard had just come out and one of the major touted features was that of Time Machine; the quick and easy way to back up any Mac. Because of those two reasons, we decided it would be useful to backup our more important school work.<br />
<br />
Fast forward to present day, and I have since upgraded the drive in the Time Capsule (TC) from a 500 GB HD, to a 1TB, and eventually to a 2 TB 3.5" hard drive. I'm having hard time remembering what brand I installed and the RPMs. I have also recently replaced the internal power supply as the Time Capsule finally kicked the bucket one day, but I had been expecting it as the handy little machine had been chugging nonstop 24/7 365 for almost 5 years. The little guy is currently the backup device for my wife's iMac (she is a <a href="http://www.hooverheightsmedia.com/" target="_blank"><b>photographer</b></a>), the backup for our MacBook Pro, and the backup for my OS X Leopard install on the G4 PowerBook. It may seem like a bad idea having all of these <strike>eggs</strike> backups in one basket, but I also routinely make bootable clones of each of my systems using <a href="http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html" target="_blank"><b>SuperDuper</b></a>, a utility I know many are familiar with along with <a href="https://bombich.com/" target="_blank"><b>Carbon Copy Cloner</b></a>.<br />
<br />
If you don't currently own a Time Capsule, I'd encourage you to check them out as they can be quite useful in several different regards. The first is that it can act as a networked storage device for storing your files or backups, create its own Wi-Fi network supporting even 802.11n (which was only in draft at the time) or bridge an existing Wi-Fi network and extend the signal by acting as another available access point (AP). Other notable features include NAT firewall, MAC address filtering, and RADIUS authentication support. Some of the newer models obviously offer newer wireless protocols and features, but I'd save some cash and go with an older model such as the one we own. Replacement parts are cheap and it is relatively straightforward to gain access to the Capsule's innards. I should also add it also contains a single USB port for you to attach yet another external drive and I currently have an external 1 TB Seagate attached to the USB port. And last not but not least, it contains 3 Gigabit LAN ports and a single Gigabit WAN port for reliable wired connectivity. <br />
<br />
Anyways, I want to use it as a backup source for my Debian install as well. I haven't quite narrowed down what I want to deem worthy of backing up, but I'm positive it will consist of my <code>etc</code> directory as well as my <code>home</code> directory. Eventually I'll look into what existing backup utilities are available and review them on this blog, but for now, I will write simple shell scripts to back up a few things I find important and necessary. I also plan to create a <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/Backup/Clone" target="_blank"><b>bootable clone</b></a> of my Wheezy system onto an external HD.<br />
<br />
After a bit of online research and light reading, I discovered the most common way of mounting the TC was using the Common Internet File System (CIFS), although mounting as an AFP share was possible as well if you installed the <code>netatalk</code> utility. I wanted to keep things fairly simple and since mounting it as a CIFS share was feasible without the need for installation and configuration of additional software, I went that route. I should add here that another part of this set up is that I want access to the disk share to be secured via account authorization instead of having it freely available for anybody to mount and peruse. In short we need to complete the following tasks:<br />
<ul>
</ul>
<ol>
<li>Set up an dedicated account for Debian to use for access</li>
<li>Determine Time Capsule's IP Address or Hostname</li>
<li>Mount the network share using the <code>mount</code> command.</li>
<li>Optionally configure it to be mounted at startup</li>
</ol>
<ul>
</ul>
So let me describe the necessary steps to set this up using Apple's Airport Utility in OS X. I'll be doing this from Airport Utility v5.6.1, which also happens to be the last version made available to OS X Leopard.<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Select and authenticated with your Time Capsule as well as select the option to make changes (versus restoring the unit to factory settings). </li>
<li>Skip the option to change the TC's name and access password or change it if you feel the need</li>
<li>The second screen you reach after hitting <b>Continue</b> is the place where you can edit and update your Time Capsule's disk sharing settings. Select the option to <b>Change these settings</b>. Under the <b>Secure Shared Disks:</b> option, select the option <b>With accounts</b> from the drop down menu. </li>
<li>Now you should be able to click the <b>+ </b>to add as many accounts as you would like. For each account you should set the username, password, and set the account to have read and write access. Obviously you can select the other available permissions as well if the need is there.</li>
<li>Under the option, <b>Airport Disk Guest Access</b>, I'd recommend <b>Not Allowed</b> since you are taking the time to set up account based access. </li>
<li>From there, go ahead and click <b>Continue</b> repeatedly until you come across <b>Finish</b> where you can apply your changes to the Time Capsule. </li>
</ol>
Now that is out of the way we can work on actually mounting the share. Before we can do that though, we need to know the TC's IPv4 address or DNS hostname, which you can
obtain using a number of different methods such as using Apple's Airport
Configuration Utility in OS X, your router's DHCP table available from
its web interface, or using a utility such as <a href="http://angryip.org/download/#linux" target="_blank"><b>Angry IP Scanner</b></a>.<br />
<br />
Onto step 3. As mentioned, we need to use the well known <code>mount</code> command to make the share available for use. Now, there's a plethora of information available in this command's man pages, but eventually I constructed the following command:<br />
<br />
<code>sudo mount.cifs //192.168.66.7/Data /media/Backup -o username=MyUser,password=MyPass,uid=1000</code><br />
<br />
Let's break this command down piece by piece so we're aware of exactly what it is accomplishing for us.<br />
<ul>
<li>mount - the command keyword telling Debian we are wanting to mount another filesystem available via a directly attached device or network share</li>
<li>//192.168.66.7/Data - the IPv4 address and mount point of the share you created on your Time Capsule </li>
<li>/media/Backup - Destination folder for mounted share. This could be anywhere you wanted, but I'd keep it either under /media or /mnt</li>
<li>cifs - tells the system the share is of type CIFS</li>
<li>-o - specifies you are providing an additional list of options</li>
<li>username= - the user created with access to the TC share</li>
<li>password= - password of the user above</li>
<li>uid= - sets the owner of the filesystem share. In my case, I set it to 1000 as that is my user account id. </li>
</ul>
Last but not least, let's add the necessary addition to our <code>/etc/fstab</code> file so the new CIFS share is mounted automatically when the system boots. A lot of what you see here is almost exactly what was used to originally mount the share, so no surprises here. Note the / at the end of line 2. Merely a means to indicate the command continues on the next line.<br />
<br />
<code># Mount CIFS Backup Share<br />//192.168.66.7/Data /media/Backup /</code><br />
<code>cifs /username=MyUser,password=MyPassword,uid=1000 0 0 </code><br />
<br />
Save the changes and reboot to the awesomeness.<br />
<br />
Simple enough am I right? Luckily, there's a lot of documentation and other blog posts about this exact same topic, but hopefully all the information here helps you get the job done in one fell swoop. If you want to make this work with your own Time Capsule and run into any issues, let me know and I'd be glad to help. Given that my blog is dedicated to making the most out of our older aging hardware, I thought this would be an excellent way to continue using an older network storage device to store or backup your files for you on a still supported PPC OS.<br />
<br />
I do have an update on the 1400 PB coming down the pipe. And yes, the Clang post is coming too. I'm just slow moving and always more nervous about posts regarding coding. :) Anyways, in the words of Joe Dirt, "Keep on keeping on."B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-81576488878317774122015-01-30T19:09:00.000-08:002015-08-01T19:25:42.400-07:00How Does This Remote Work?As sad as it may seem, there are some applications and utilities I use in my Network Administrator position which are simply not available for PPC OS X or Linux that are essential to doing my job in a effective and efficient manner. One in particular is managing our vSphere 5.5 virtual environment and infrastructure. VMware's vSphere Web Client requires Adobe Flash (minimum version of 10.1.0), which is of course, not officially supported on the PPC architecture and hasn't been for sometime. Even if it was, I have a strong feeling it would perform poorly.<br />
<div>
<br />
I decided to try out a few pieces of software that would allow me to connect either via VNC or RDP to other machines on our network and to other PPC machines at my humble abode. The first one I attempted to use was the well-known and popular Remmina application, which I was surprised still supported the PPC architecture. Remmina is incredibly straightforward and has a unique array of settings you can adjust to best fit your needs for each remote session/device. What I find most useful is the fact that you can save as many individual connections as necessary for each of the devices you would or might be needing to connect to while being able to maintain separate settings for each one, including resolution, color depth, performance, etc. The VNC connection to my G4 PowerMac running Jessie works flawlessly, so I'll continue to use it for my VNC connections.<br />
<br />
Upon trying to RDP into my Windows 8.1 machine, I would initially receive the login prompt, where I could input my username, password, domain, and accept the certificate, but from there, a simple generic error would appear right afterwards as such:<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rwx72rBIBvc/VMxAApwPi5I/AAAAAAAAAQU/dlV-bYrKLDE/s1600/RemminaRDPError.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="123" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rwx72rBIBvc/VMxAApwPi5I/AAAAAAAAAQU/dlV-bYrKLDE/s1600/RemminaRDPError.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Not very useful, am I correct? This was with the default <b>Security</b> setting of <b>Autonegotiate</b> under the connection's <b>Advanced</b> tab. By leaving the setting as is, Reminna should work with Windows 8.1 to figure out what security was to be used automatically whether that be <b>NLA</b>, <b>TLS</b>, or <b>RDP</b>. Just as a test, I tried to set the <b>Security</b> to each of the 3 available individual options with different failed results. What I needed was a bit more information in order to determine the cause of the failure. I decided to run Remmina from the terminal to watch for the output that would appear while trying to RDP to my 8.1 PC. This is the more detailed error I received during the connection attempt:<br />
<br />
<code>SSL_read: Failure in SSL library (protocol error?)<br />Authentication failure, check credentials.<br />If credentials are valid, the NTLMSSP implementation may be to blame.</code><br />
<br />
First of all, I love the error. Seems like a bit of finger pointing. Anyways, based on that information, I figured it has something to do with Microsoft's NLA, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Level_Authentication" target="_blank"><b>Network Level Authentication</b></a>, which was a new feature for Windows RDP 6.0 made available as of Windows Server 2008 and Vista (Windows XP SP3 supports it as well now). NLA requires users properly and successfully authenticate themselves before establishing the actual RDP session. As stated in the article above, this helps combat DDoS attacks because no resources are used on the remote server/device until authentication is successful. Somebody could previously make an unprecedented number of connections to a remote device without needing to authenticate themselves thus using this as a way to consume all available resources on the remote device.<br />
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My initial thought was that perhaps it was an incomplete implementation of NLA in Remmina or a bug, so I downloaded and tested both <a href="http://www.rdesktop.org/" target="_blank"><b>rdesktop</b></a> and <a href="http://www.freerdp.com/" target="_blank"><b>freerdp</b></a>. Both are command line only with freerdp actually being a fork of rdesktop with supposedly better support for newer protocols such as NLA. However, I received the exact same error message (verbatim actually) with both utilities as I was with Remmina.<br />
<br />
At this point, I ended up spending quite a bit more time trying various things to overcome the issue and ended up deciding to go with a workaround for now by disabling NLA on my Windows 8.1 laptop. You can do this under <b>Control Panel -> System and Security -> Allow Remote Access</b>. Under the window that appears, uncheck the option <b>"Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (recommended)"</b>. Again, the caveat being that disabling this will make the connection less secure, but for the meantime it will have to do. Thankfully (sort of), this worked and I was able to RDP to the PC witih Remmina via my saved connection. On the downside, the colors were way off and there was what seemed like a heavy blue tint to the display. I tried adjusting the <b>Color depth</b> option to set it at the highest possible value of 32 bpp (True color) as well as trying to make RemoteFX work, but the results were again, exactly the same. Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about:<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vpWXEsaKlLU/VMv_O5dm15I/AAAAAAAAAPo/kopT9Q0mdFw/s1600/BlueRDPSession.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vpWXEsaKlLU/VMv_O5dm15I/AAAAAAAAAPo/kopT9Q0mdFw/s1600/BlueRDPSession.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>(Makes me think of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgV1O0X4uXI" target="_blank"><b>this song</b></a>)</i></div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
Eventually, I tried rdesktop again (since I had disabled NLA on the Windows 8.1 PC), but this time with successful results all around! Here is a screenshot of the resulting RDP window:<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iaD9BJ2mMvE/VMxB39o2v5I/AAAAAAAAAQg/RuqeSyjNxGE/s1600/SuccessRDP.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="248" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iaD9BJ2mMvE/VMxB39o2v5I/AAAAAAAAAQg/RuqeSyjNxGE/s1600/SuccessRDP.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />
From the command line, I simply ran the following:<code>rdesktop -u HarryPotter -d Hogwarts 192.168.10.1</code><br />
<code></code><br />
Values have obviously been changed for security purposes. The -u is for username and the -d is for the domain name. I could have passed in the password as well, but decided to let the connection ask me for it. The colors were near perfect to that of what I saw when actually sitting right in front of the PC. However, the default window size was a bit small. To be honest, I'm not sure what the dimensions were nor did I care to look. What I did care about was adjusting that default window size when starting the connection so that it would occupy the entire display of the PowerBook, which again, has a resolution of 1440x960. Even if not the entire screen, perhaps a good portion of it. So as usual, I dove into rdesktop's man pages to see what other flags and options were available to make this happen.<br />
<br />
To adjust the window size, you pass in the -g option (g for geometry!) or try out the -f option to have it start in full screen mode. For the -g option, you can either pass in a percentage value, which is what I did first, or it pulls the value from the extended window manager hints property (a.k.a <code>_NET_WORKAREA</code>).<br />
<br />
Here is a screenshot of the entire screen with a set screen size of 90% for the RDP session:<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LfRzqhKx_jE/VMw8VbgweXI/AAAAAAAAAQI/7Wnqjpav1FM/s1600/RDPEntireScreen.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LfRzqhKx_jE/VMw8VbgweXI/AAAAAAAAAQI/7Wnqjpav1FM/s1600/RDPEntireScreen.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Based on what little I know, it appears the blue tint with Remmina is an implementation bug. I'll probably look in the next day or two to see if the bug is out there and if it isn't I'll do my due diligence and file a bug report. <br />
<br />
The application only uses between 10 - 15% and at times up to 20% of the CPU on my 1.67 GHz PowerBook, so impact is usually small and does not affect performance of other applications I have open. Most of that CPU consumption is to redraw the screen as of course all actual applications on the remote session are running on the remote machine. As I had mentioned earlier, what I really wanted to do was access the vSphere Web Client, which I can do in a Mozilla browser on the PC while still accessing all the applications I use on my Debian install.<br />
<br />
Lastly, there are a few oddities I still need to work out with this setup. The first being that when I initially remote into my PC, it brings up the login screen where I have to actually select the <b>Other User</b> option as it will not let me sign in automatically to my existing desktop session. The <b>Other User</b> option already has my username entered (assuming because it was the last user to login) and once I type in the correct password, it connects me to my existing desktop session. Secondly, I cannot run the session in full screen mode as I have not yet figured out how to successfully either exit the rdesktop application or change applications on my PowerBook as the <b>Option (Alt) + Tab</b> shortcut actually switches applications on my Windows machine. I'll play around with each of these and provide updates (good ones hopefully) in a future post.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Again, I have not researched the small possibility of somehow running Adobe Flash applications on PPC and have yet to play with any of the Flash alternatives such as Gnash or Sparkle that are available on Linux. I'm not quite yet ready to try and tackle them at this current time. If I do, I'll probably try it out first and use it only on my G5 as it has more adequate processing power and memory needed to provide somewhat smoother playback and performance. My luck, is that by the time I do figure something out, VMware will have hopefully decided to rewrite the Web Client in HTML5, which should happen sooner rather than later. I say that because even YouTube recently <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flash-for-html5-video-default" target="_blank"><b>announced</b></a> that HTML5 is now the default video playback format in most modern browsers. Now that is something to be stoked about!</div>
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B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-6079786387623445022015-01-19T19:19:00.002-08:002015-08-01T19:25:10.877-07:00Pour Me a Bowl Of SerialHopefully you'll enjoy yet another one of my funny and sometimes not so clever titles that are indeed relevant to my posts. One of my job responsibilities as a Network Administrator is connect to and configure new network devices, most often either a layer 2 managed switch or a Cisco router. To do some of the initial configuration, I usually connect the appropriate Female DB-9 to RJ-45 console or F DB-9 to F DB-9 serial cable and I'm off on my way using a program such as Putty or HyperTerminal when using my Windows (not)workstation..<br />
<br />
Fortunately (not unfortunately) the aluminum G4 PowerBook does not include a built in serial communications port. However, I found a <a href="http://www.tripplite.com/usb-male-to-db9-male-serial-adapter-cable~U209000R/" target="_blank"><b>Tripp Lite male USB to DB9 serial adapter cable</b></a> in storage and decided to see if I could make it work with my Wheezy install to configure a couple of brand new Cisco routers that will consolidate a bit of our spoke and hub network design. In short, just another way to make this old PowerBook useful in my everyday life.<br />
<br />
Not knowing if it would work without any extra configuration or drivers, I decided to just plug it in and see what would happen. But wait, what would I use to configure the serial communications interface and settings such as setting the bps rate etc? Luckily, it's a <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CiscoConsole" target="_blank"><b>well documented procedure</b></a>. It required a quick install of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicom" target="_blank"><b>minicom</b></a> and some very simple and straightforward initial configurations. Since there are PCMCIA serial adapters available, I should be able to
also use my 1400CS to do the same thing, once I have put it into
production. <br />
<br />
Once minicom is installed, you'll want to run <code>sudo minicom -s</code> to start terminal emulation. This should bring up the software's configuration menu. To start, you'll first want to arrow down to <b>Serial port setup</b>, hit <b>Enter</b> and then tap the <b>A</b> key to configure the filesystem location of the serial device you'll be using for your serial com port connections. Since I was using the USB to serial adapter, mine was located at <code>/dev/ttyUSB0</code>. Depending on your system and which USB port you use, this device may vary. The fastest way to determine the device name is to change directories into the <code>/dev</code> folder and do an <code>ls -alh | grep ttyUSB</code>. It will almost always be <code>ttyUSB0</code> though, so no worries there. <br />
<br />
Once you have set the correct device location, hit <b>Enter</b> to be able to choose a different menu option. Depending on the device you are connecting to (be that a router, switch, server, modem, etc) you may need to also adjust the <b>Bps/Par/Bits</b> setting to something other than the default 9600, which happens to be what you usually set it to in most cases. You'll also want to consult the vendor documentation of the device you are connecting with to see whether or not <b>Hardware</b> and/or <b>Software control</b> need to be on or off. When you are finished, hit <b>Enter</b> again and arrow down to <b>Save set up as df1</b>and hit <b>Enter</b> again. This should bring you back to the initial configuration menu, so go ahead and arrow down to <b>Exit</b> and hit <b>Enter</b> twice more. You should now see communication with the attached device. <br />
<br />
When you are finished, you can exit the <code>minicom</code> session by simply hitting <b>Command + A</b>, and then hitting the "<b>x</b>" key. This should return you to your expected shell prompt. Now have at it and enjoy another practical everyday use for your ole PowerPC machine.<br />
<br />
And finally, in Debian PPC related news, I filed my first Debian bug report #<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=757015" target="_blank"><b>757015</b></a> (well an extension to an existing one confirming I had the same issue) against the PPC Iceweasel package. It's a small subtle issue resting among many in a deep sea of <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=iceweasel;dist=unstable" target="_blank"><b>Iceweasel bugs</b></a>, but apparently one other individual has ran into the same issue. In short, my synced XMarks folders do not appear in the Bookmarks toolbar. It's not an XMarks issue because even just creating a simple folder and placing it in the Bookmarks toolbar does not work. I tried it with a brand new and clean profile as well with the same results. However, when viewing my bookmarks via <b>Command + B</b>, it shows the folders as being on the Bookmarks toolbar. Web page bookmarks still appear and work as expected and it's not due to my only other extension I have installed, which is AdBlock. I don't have high hopes for the bug being squashed, but at least it is out there.<br />
<br />
Speaking of bugs, you may want to join the <a href="http://powerpcliberation.blogspot.com/2014/12/debian-bug-reporting-party.html" target="_blank"><b>bug reporting party</b></a> over at PowerPCLiberation. We need to do our part in whatever we can to improve the Linux PPC experience and platform!<br />
<br />
Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments below. <br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-78293589351838350282015-01-12T19:34:00.003-08:002015-08-01T19:24:33.825-07:00New (Old) PowerBook Teardown & ResurrectionSo as noted in an <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-hardware.html" target="_blank"><b>earlier blog post</b></a>, I recently purchased both a PowerBook 1400CS and a PowerBook 190CS. I plan on using the PowerBook 1400CS extensively in as many creative and useful ways as possible at both home and at my network administrator position. Unfortunately, neither PB came with a power adapter, so for the first couple of weeks, I could not even determine whether they worked or not. One thing I did not want to do was jump the gun and purchase some no good, rotten, dangerous, self-detonating piece of junk replacement adapter, but instead took my time to find a genuine Apple replacement for each. Luckily, I scored on the 1400CS first although I'm not sure it's the official adapter originally shipped with a brand new unit. It is a 45W adapter with a model number of M4402. In either case, it's compatible, works, as well a genuine Apple product/replacement.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uD153yXPO38/VLSQUHayqMI/AAAAAAAAAPI/vCj4R-1XlKM/s1600/IMG_0045.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uD153yXPO38/VLSQUHayqMI/AAAAAAAAAPI/vCj4R-1XlKM/s1600/IMG_0045.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Forgive my terrible photography skills. My wife is a professional photographer and would be ashamed of these, but rightfully so!<br />
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Before powering on the near 7 pound beast (6.7 lbs <a href="http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook/specs/mac_powerbook1400cs_117.html" target="_blank"><b>according to everymac.com</b></a>), I decided to tear the PB apart first just to take a quick look at its innards and see what it had for specs as well as make sure that from a quick glance everything seemed clean and in good overall condition. Never having owned a 1400CS before, I knew very little on how to tear it down appropriately, but my gut said it would be much easier than what it takes in this day and age to take a part a newer MacBook Pro or an iDevice. Wanting to be careful but curious,I decided to search the web for walk-throughs, but promising results were scarce. Luckily, iFixIt, had a <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Macintosh_PowerBook_1400_Series" target="_blank"><b>few walk-throughs</b></a> for various parts of the PowerBook, but nothing too difficult like the motherboard or trackpad. Eventually, I came across a 1400CS repair manual available <a href="http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/powerbook/powerbook_1400_series.pdf" target="_blank"><b>here</b></a>. This guide has an immeasurable amount of useful information, although the hardware replacement guides are a bit difficult to understand, but I attribute that to my lack of ability to properly read and follow instructions very well. Your results may vary. :)<br />
<br />
I removed, the Nickel metal hydride (NiMh) battery (which of course is shot), floppy drive module, speaker grille, cover plate, and keyboard to discover the system came with an upgraded 216 MHz NewerTech NuPowr G3 CPU, two memory modules, a video-out card (HDI45 slot), and an original 750 MB Apple Iomega HD. Safe to say, I was quite pleased with these findings, although worried I might have a model with only 12 MB of onboard RAM. Not sure yet whether my particular model supports 64 MB of RAM or only 56 or 60 MB as again, I do not yet know how much onboard RAM it holds and I did not look closely enough at either of the two memory modules to determine their capacity. The fact that the drive is 750 MB, makes me believe it was originally a 1G 117 MHz 1400CS. Sadly, the current 56 MB is not enough recommend memory for running Classila, although there are <a href="http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/releases/" target="_blank"><b>workarounds</b></a>. <br />
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Here is a picture of the partial teardown:<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I2MroxM0JIw/VLSQJw4einI/AAAAAAAAAPA/h8q_OFdzIQQ/s1600/IMG_0288.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I2MroxM0JIw/VLSQJw4einI/AAAAAAAAAPA/h8q_OFdzIQQ/s1600/IMG_0288.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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Now that the system was partially torn down, I thought it might not be a bad idea to wipe it as clean as I possibly could, including the external shell, keyboard keys, speaker grills, and adapter, etc. I will admit that the thorough cleaning has helped restored a look of being close to brand new. From there, I completed reassembly, plugged it in and waited. Instantly, I heard the well known Apple startup sound, although it sounded terrible (not too worried about this though). And as expected, the hard drive made a terribly loud grinding sound, so I'm a little concerned about the remaining life it holds but the PowerBook eventually booted into Mac OS 8.1! Success! <br />
<br />
However, my joy would be short lived as I soon discovered that the trackpad did not work. Not only that, but I did not have an ADB mouse on hand to still peruse the system and its goods. After double checking to make sure the trackpad ribbon cable was firmly inserted into its slot on the motherboard, I decided it was probably shot and started the hunt for a replacement as well as an ADB mouse. I didn't necessarily need the mouse, but I thought it might be handy in the future for the other older Macs I acquire, tinker with, and restore. While I was out shopping for replacement parts, I thought I would go ahead and purchase a HDI45 to DB15 adapter (Part # 590-0831-A) which will also eventually require a DB15 to VGA adapter (likely with dip switches) in order for me to have the ability to plug the PowerBook into any VGA display, albeit it at a maximum low resolution of 800 x 600. <br />
<br />
I must admit that replacing the trackpad was simple, but yet at the same time incredibly tedious and difficult. There were two screws I did not see as they were covered by circular stickers of the same color as the PB itself. As a result I ended up busting the old trackpad while trying to remove it. Those two screws can be found on the left and right rear of the device, right at the seams whether the bottom and top halves of the PB's base meet. You'll want to carefully remove these two circular coverings and keep them safe for the replacement trackpad. Of course, remove those two screws as well. As for the old trackpad... oh well. It was shot anyways and I was still able to salvage the screws and use them to properly attach the new trackpad. Re-inserting the trackpad ribbon cable was incredibly frustrating as my large hands proved to be a nuisance. Luckily, the replacement trackpad works perfectly, (as does the used Apple ADB mouse).<br />
<br />
It doesn't stop there. The uphill battle continued. Come to find out certain keys on the keyboard were not working either including, j, u, m, p (funny I know). A working replacement keyboard did not do any justice either, so it has to be something with the connector slot on the motherboard. Perhaps there is a piece of debris blocking access to some of the contacts. I'm still working on this one, but hopefully I have it resolved soon without having to go as far as replacing the entire motherboard. That would be incredibly sad, but call me crazy, because I'd do it jump, I mean just because I want this thing in perfect working condition. On the bright side (pun coming), I also found out the brightness and contrast controls to the right of the display work great. Please let me know of any possible ideas or fixes for the keyboard/key issues.<br />
<br />
At this point in time, the only other vital missing piece is a working CD-ROM drive module I could insert in place of the existing floppy drive module. I have yet to locate one that a) was not incredibly expensive b) not for sale from some sketchy website or c)included with the purchase of an entire 1400CS laptop. I've been keeping an eye on the <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lemswap" target="_blank"><b>LEM swap group</b></a> as well, but if you know of anywhere that has them for sale at a more reasonable price, let me know! Other than that, I'd like to find a working Ethernet card so I can cable it into my existing network. I would do a wireless PC card, but from what I have read, no existing PC card offers support for any wireless protocols after 802.11b. I wouldn't have minded if it supported 802.11g, but I can also understand why no such card is not available. The machine simply wouldn't have enough processing power to adequately support it.<br />
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Once I do have a working CD Drive, I plan to install the latest version of FreeBSD. I've already downloaded the latest copy of <a href="https://www.freebsd.org/where.html" target="_blank"><b>FreeBSD</b></a> via the torrent
networks and burned to a disc using my G4 PowerMac (Apollo11). From there, I may use it as a machine to handle most of my SSH connections to various machines as well as a tool for running various command line utilities. Even though the PB 1400CS is approaching 20 years in age, I strongly believe in the fact that this old laptop can still prove incredibly useful and at times even nostalgic. I'm so eager to put this machine into everyday production!<br />
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That's it for this post. There are a few interesting pieces of software installed I would like to discuss briefly in the coming weeks that are in my opinion kind of cool. Otherwise, I'm just tidying up the last few pieces of the introduction to Clang post, so look for that in the next week or two. B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-68231675664096042702014-12-19T12:50:00.003-08:002015-08-01T19:23:48.692-07:00Am I Getting Hot or Cold?Yes. A post on monitoring your PowerBook's temperatures when running Debian or similar variations of Linux. As mentioned in a previous <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2014_09_01_archive.html" target="_blank"><b>post</b></a>, I am a big fan of Conky, which I utilize to show me several pieces of information regarding my PB and other PowerPC systems at any given time. Conky shows me such things as CPU, battery, and memory usage, as well as the capacities of each plus disk space usage across all partitions, up and down network statistics on all interfaces, and top process CPU consumers. I should note that right now, when completely idle with no GUI applications running, Conky states CPU is at 1%, which I see as very ideal. Usually it's Conky taking up a majority of that 1% of CPU. <br />
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The only thing I was missing was a way to monitor temperatures that are reported by the machine's included sensors. PowerPC portables have a history of running quite warm. Obtaining this same information in OS X is incredibly easy using a dashboard widget such as <a href="http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/20364/istat-pro" target="_blank"><b>iStat Pro</b></a>. Still being incredibly new to many things Linux and even PowerPC, I had to start doing a little bit of research to see if or where this information could be stored for retrieval. After perusing the different Conky options, I came to the conclusion that the desired information could not be natively retrieved using any existing Conky options as most deal with the (ugh) Intel architecture. If I'm wrong, please let me know either through the comments belows or via email if you don't feel like publicly shaming me.<br />
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One way to start was to run the <code>lsmod</code> command, which would provide me with a list of loaded kernel modules. One of those sure had to be doing something temperature/fan related? Well, a few stuck out at me including, <code>ic2-powermac</code>, although it was not being used by anything, but I ran into this module when doing some research online. The other one in particular was <code>therm_adt746x</code>, but again was not being used by any drivers. I'll be doing some more reading of these modules in the near future.<br />
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Luckily, I also discovered a couple of the sensors and output I could retrieve from various files under the <code>/sys/devices/temperatures</code> folder. I simply did a search of the file system using <code>locate temperature</code>. There were only two sensors listed along with a few other configuration files that I have yet to investigate any further. <br />
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For each sensor, there were 3 relevant text files (actually 4 for sensor1): sensor[#]_limit, sensor[#]_location, and sensor[#]_temperature. Sensor 1 also included a sensor[#]_fan_speed file. I ran <code>cat</code> on each of the 3 files (again 4 for sensor1), just to obtain some sort of idea of what information it would provide. Here is a quick overview:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li> fan_speed – provides the current speed of the fans in RPMs </li>
<li> limit – specifies the upper limit of the temperature that the sensor can reach before I assume either you start to have issues or the fans kick in </li>
<li> location - specifies the location that the sensor is monitoring the temperature for</li>
<li> temperature – this file provides a single number, which happens to the latest temperature reading in degrees Celsius (converting this to Fahrenheit should be trivial)</li>
</ul>
According to the locations, one sensor was for the <code>CPU_BOTTOMSIDE</code> and the other <code>PWR_SUPPLY_BOTTOMSIDE</code>. My understanding (again please correct me if I am wrong) is there should
be other additional sensors on the PowerBook that we could pull values
from. If there are, I'd love to figure out how to do just that. For example, on the OS X side, when looking at temperatures in iStat Pro, it also provides temperature values for CPU top, battery, trackpad, and HD. Perhaps
there is some additional documentation somewhere covering this sort of
information?<br />
<br />
Great, so how can I customize Conky to pull in these values and output them to the grid of information I have running on my desktop? Well, one of the first ideas that came to mind was using a shell script that essentially grabs the temperatures and fan RPM values from the corresponding files and assigns each to a variable that can then be output by Conky. Perhaps there is an easier way to do this?<br />
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Yes there is. Here is where <code>exec</code> object comes in handy. This particular object will let you specify a shell command you'd like to run and output. If you want to have the command ran at your own set intervals, use the execi command instead, but be aware that the interval value you set must be lower than your configured <code>update_interval</code> (mine is set to 1.0 second) for Conky. So for each sensor I added the following line:<br />
<br />
<code>Bottom CPU Temperature: ${exec cat /sys/devices/temperatures/sensor1_temperature}</code><br />
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<code>Battery Temperature: ${exec cat /sys/devices/temperatures/sensor2_temperature} </code><br />
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According to the man pages for Conky, running shell commands within Conky tends to be more resource intensive. Personally, I have seen a small average of about a 1% increase in CPU consumption, but that could be to other configuration changes I've made recently to the PB. These two additional lines in my Conky configuration file worked and do as they are intended, so in some ways a success. Here's a screenshot:<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2UBMO5ihFw/VJSftDOB_qI/AAAAAAAAAOw/6BM0i9kvKPM/s1600/ConkywithTemperatures.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2UBMO5ihFw/VJSftDOB_qI/AAAAAAAAAOw/6BM0i9kvKPM/s1600/ConkywithTemperatures.png" width="261" /></a></div>
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<br />
One last thing I would like to share about Conky. If you want to disable any sort of flickering Conky may be experiencing, add <code>double_buffer yes</code> to your list of options. Makes everything look like it is running much smoother. I was going to post a link to my conky.conf file somewhere, but decided if somebody was interested in taking a look at it, I send it to them via email. <br />
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I know I've barely scratched the surface on how all of these sensors work, but it's a start. One thing I haven't quite figured out is how often the temperatures are being updated in those specific files, so the quest for answers and understanding continue!<br />
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Hopefully you enjoyed this post and can use it as a starting pointing for doing your own temperature/fan speed monitoring on your PowerPC machine(s) or even as a gateway to other great ideas for information that can be displayed by Conky. <br />
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I still have yet to finish the post on my PowerBook 1400CS (waiting on a few more parts) as well as the introduction to Clang on PowerPC. The latter is a post I am taking extra care to refine before I put it out there in the wild.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-56687494535711531742014-12-07T13:28:00.000-08:002015-08-01T19:23:32.160-07:00Don't Push My PBButtonsSo I wanted to cover something I ran into when first installing and configuring my Debian distro that almost drove me over the edge. Now as you read on and discover the former source of my misery, you may laugh at its minuteness, but I'm quite particular about configurations and making sure things work exactly as I wanted them to, which as you can probably guess is never easy as you'd like it to be. However, they (who are they?) say Linux is all about being able to customize everything to your liking. <br />
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The problem was with configuring the G4 PB's eject key to work as you'd eject, I mean expect. That is, upon pressing the eject button, it would eject any CD or DVD you currently had inserted into your system if any. Just as if I was still using good ole Mac OS X. Sounded like a piece of cake. Every other key on the keyboard did exactly what it said it would do including the volume up, volume down, and brightness keys. However, whenever a disc was inserted, I had to revert to using the probably better known <code>eject</code> command line tool, which is simple enough, but I'd still like to have the key working as well.<br />
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Still being in the infancy of my foray into using Linux (and Linux on PowerPC), I started to research how certain keys were mapped in Debian and other Linux variations on PPC hardware. I quickly learned certain specific key mappings worked through what software is known as <a href="https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=pbbutton" target="_blank"><b>pbbuttons</b></a>. This runs as a background daemon and can be restarted with the usual restart methods at your disposal. It has a configuration file stored in the <code>/etc</code> directory. Full path is <code>/etc/pbbuttonsd.conf</code>. Being in the <code>/etc</code> directly, the file will require root/sudo privileges to edit.<br />
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The configuration file has a number of customizable options that are way beyond the scope of this post, but as always, I encourage you to peruse the file and make adjustments where you see fit. It includes such settings as the default values for the brightness values at login/startup, different configurations for when on battery power, and default values for sound and volume.<br />
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Anyways, the specific section we were looking for was the <code>[MODULE CDROM]</code> that allowed you to customize which keyboard key to act as the eject key, the delay when pressing that key and which CD/DVD device it was to work with. Right away, I learned from the config file that eject was mapped to the key <b>161</b>. Okay, that's nice, but what actual key on the PowerBook's keyboard does that actually map to exactly? So... more research, which taught me another handy command line utility (honestly, what command line tool isn't?) called <a href="http://www.x.org/archive/current/doc/man/man1/xev.1.xhtml" target="_blank"><b>xev</b></a>. Pretty straightforward tool. Just type <code>xev</code> and it will open a new window that intercepts events such as moving a window, resizing a window, or clicking on something, and spits out information regarding that particular event. For example, you can punch any one key on the keyboard and it will print out a number of pieces of information regarding that key. When I hit the escape key, the utility printed back the following information.<br />
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<code>KeyRelease event, serial 46, synthetic NO, window 0x2800001,<br /> root 0x121, subw 0x0, time 2053168, (639,-2), root:(840,578),<br /> state 0x10, keycode 169 (keysym 0x1008ff2c, XF86Eject), same_screen YES,<br /> XLookupString gives 0 bytes: <br /> XFilterEvent returns: False</code><br />
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I changed the keycode value accordingly, but sadly, no go. Long story short, the keycode returned by the utility is not correct and the 161 was actually the value for the eject key as was originally hoped. So why was it still not working?<br />
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Well the only other configuration option that could be the issue was the CD/DVD device it was mapped to. I double checked and it was pointed to <code>/dev/cdrom</code>. Sounds correct, but I decided to change directories over to the <code>/dev</code> directory to make sure such a device did in fact exist. I ran my alias command for '<code>ls -alh</code>' to list out the contents of the directory as well display ownership and permissions among other things.<br />
<code>lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Dec 7 14:15 cdrom -> sr0</code><br />
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Almost right away I noticed in the permissions that the advanced permissions flag (first character in the list of permissions) was set to <code>l</code>, which indicates it is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link" target="_blank"><b>symbolic link</b></a>. So moving my eyeballs further to right, the listing indicated that <code>cdrom</code> was a symbolic link to <code>/dev/sr0</code>. I immediately updated the conf file to use the actual <code>sr0</code> device instead of the symbolic link. I saved the changes and restarted <code>pbbuttonsd</code>. And what do you know, the key finally worked! Victory!<br />
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Here is the full posting of the CD module section if you are interested.<br />
<code># [MODULE CDROM]<br />dev_CDROM = "/dev/sr0"<br />EjectCDKey = 161<br />EjectCDKeyDelay = 0</code><br />
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In short, you need to map the CD/DVD drive to the actual <code>/dev/[device name]</code> as symbolic links will NOT work. I thought I would share this little tidbit of information in hopes that it helps somebody else someday. I'll wrap it up here though and continue working on a few other posts I am putting together, including my work on my PowerBook 1400CS, installation of Debian Jessie on a G4 Quicksilver and working with the Clang compiler on PowerPC architecture. Comments are welcomed!<br />
<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-67335390334789825672014-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:002015-08-01T19:23:11.090-07:00Some Hardware NewsA couple of things that I've come across lately that I have felt obliged to share with you. The first is that an individual by the name of Robert Innocenti has embarked on a new project to develop new portable PowerPC hardware that would utilize some of Freescale's newer lineup of 32/64-bit PPC CPUs. Much more information can be found on the <a href="http://www.powerpc-notebook.org/" target="_blank"><b>website</b></a>. If you are even remotely interested in assisting in some way or another, I encourage you to do so. For a project of this scale, it requires participation from people with varying skills and abilities. I wish him and the team the best at bringing this to fruition.<span style="background: #ffffff; display: block; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0;"> </span><br />
In other PowerPC hardware related news, somebody has found <a href="http://projektgalerie.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/mac-g5-moebel/" target="_blank"><b>another way</b> </a>to make G5 PowerMacs (and
as a result earlier model Mac Pro's) useful. Well, I think it is much less useful
than what those machines are still capable of today still, but I still commend
him for the effort. I have to admit, the recycled furniture does look
pretty cool, although I'd much rather load the machine up with a Linux
distro and tinker with upgrades and various PCI card add-ons.<br />
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Never thought there would be so much news about PPC hardware in this day and age. But there you have it. If you have suggestions or questions I could answer in future blog posts, please let me know in the comments below or shoot me an email! I'm currently trying to get the trackpad working on my new 1400CS in order to complete my blog post regarding the new hardware and its specifications.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-13484609643711322482014-10-25T18:27:00.000-07:002015-08-01T19:22:38.695-07:00PowerBook DVI to HDMI to HDTVMy wife and I own a 55" Vizio LED HDTV that is a little less than a year old. It's a fantastic TV that has already served us quite well. It has a 240 Hz refresh rate, which has its pros and cons, but we have become accustomed to such a high frame rate even in slower moving scenes. The display itself is 1920x1080, with very vibrant in your face colors and picture quality. At least it comes off that way after using my G4 PB's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film-transistor_liquid-crystal_display" target="_blank">t<b>hin-film-transitor (TFT</b>)</a> liquid crystal display all day.<br />
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Knowing the television (anybody actually spell that word out anymore? I feel like the device itself has outlived its name) has 4 HDMI inputs, I decided I should dedicate one for when I want to hook my PowerBook up to it when I feel like working on a significantly larger more colorful display. So I set off to purchase both an HDMI cable of appropriate length as well as an HDMI to DVI-D adapter. Knowing the signal on both output types is digital, I knew such an adapter would exist as well as exist at a reasonable cost, although I had never previously looked for or came across one. Of course, HDMI is capable of transferring both audio and video, but the dual-link DVI port on the G4 only does video. Meh. I can live with that.<br />
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I purchased an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insignia-8-FT-HDMI-Cable/dp/B00MV0WF3W" target="_blank"><b>8 ft Insignia HDMI cable</b></a> as well as the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rocketfish-1080p-Female-DVI-D-Adapter/dp/B0031O48YQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1414284314&sr=1-1&keywords=rocketfish+hdmi+to+dvi" target="_blank"><b>specified adapter</b></a> from Best Buy for nearly $50. I should have stuck with ordering each from the webs to save a little cash, but felt like making a quick run to Best Buy. Either way, the quality of the adapter and cable are fitting for my needs.<br />
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Once all the connections were in place, I fired up the old laptop and let it boot to Debian. Right away, the resolution on the laptop's display was blown up at 1024x768, but that is to be expected. Soon as I logged in, the display was replicated onto the TV, although resolution was not optimal there either (again at 1024x768). I had to manually set the resolution to 1920x1080p via <b>Preferences -> Monitor Settings</b>. The <b>Refresh Rate</b> was set to <b>Auto</b>, but would not go any higher than 60 Hz, which was also to be expected.<br />
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In regards to the resolution, Debian actually offered both 1080p and 1080i. The i in 1080i option stands for interlaced, meaning the video is interlaced with frames being broadcast at 30 frames/second but played backed at 60 frames/second. It does this by displaying each frame twice, one on the even scan line field and one on the odd. The whole idea behind this option is to try and reduce any possible perception of flickering and increase that of motion. On the other hand, 1080p (progressive scan), does not interlace the video, but instead draws it line by line, which provides excellent quality for fast paced video such as a scene from an action movie. Why does all this matter on this post? It doesn't. I just wanted to share with you some extra information. I couldn't see any noticeable difference between the two. However, I did not test this out when playing a video back at full screen in an app such as mplayer or VLC. Perhaps it would be worth looking into?<br />
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Boy did it look good though. The machine has the on-board Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card without 3D acceleration, but the machine was able to handle the output quite easily with the card's 128 MB of VRAM. See my photo of it in action below.<br />
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So maybe it is not all that practical, but I enjoyed working through the setup and typing up this post on a larger 55" display. Perhaps if I can find a way to use the HDTV as an extended external display using something such as xrandr that would be even more useful. Another blog post for another day. :)<br />
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<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-81840642427139007692014-09-25T18:56:00.001-07:002015-08-01T19:21:44.416-07:00Me Daily AppsSo I thought it might not be a terrible idea to discuss the software I currently use on my Debian Wheezy systems. Perhaps you'll find something here you been looking for your whole life. Maybe not. Doesn't matter.<br />
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First of all I use the LXDE (<a href="http://www.lxde.org/" target="_blank"><b>Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment</b></a>) for my desktop environment. I know there are more feather light options, but I found LXDE to be the best fit for my needs. <br />
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The biggest app I use is <b>Kupfer</b>. I use it all the time to open files (which open in the default associated app), folders, apps, HTTP links, you name it. Basically just about anything you can think of in one way or another. Huge thank you to Zen over at the PowerPC Liberation blog for <a href="http://powerpcliberation.blogspot.com/2012/09/kupfer.html" target="_blank"><b>introducing</b></a> me to this tool. It saves me several (and I do mean several) seconds of time from switching back and forth from the trackpad to the keyboard. I prefer to stick with just keyboard commands, but I'm not opposed to the trackpad by any means either. Depends on the task at hand.<br />
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I have most of my other commonly used apps in my "natively" running dock that automatically shows and hides as I hover over it, similar to the OS X dock. For the GUI filesystem browser, I use the default <b>File</b> <b>Manager</b> that is included with the LXDE desktop environments (if I'm not in a terminal, which is usually the case). I wouldn't mind test driving alternatives, but I just haven't made time for it. It does what I want it to and I don't have any issues, except that I can't seem to get the mounted Lubuntu partition from showing up in the side bar along with the OS X partition. Nothing in the File Manager's preferences helped, but I'm still digging around on the system. Let me know if you know the way.<br />
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For my browser, I also use the default <b>Iceweasel</b> that is a fork of Firefox. The only add-on I use with it is <a href="http://www.xmarks.com/" target="_blank"><b>XMarks</b></a> for syncing my bookmarks between different systems. As a webkit alternative, I use <b>Midori</b> as it is incredibly quick, smooth and lightweight in terms of resources. I've used a few others, but nothing that I thought was worth keeping around. If an app is not going to serve a purpose for me, I make sure to not keep it around and take up valuable bytes of space.<br />
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For my PDF/document viewer, I use the cleverly named <a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince" target="_blank"><b>Evince</b></a>. It handles PDFs pretty well and it supports several of the expected features associated with a PDF viewer. Speaking of documents, I also have the <b>LibreOffice</b> suite installed to be able to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. I've actually come to enjoy using these more than regular old Microsoft Office suite.<br />
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As discussed already in one of my previous <a href="http://powerofpowerpc.blogspot.com/2014/08/get-liferea.html" target="_blank"><b>articles</b></a>, I use an RSS feed aggregator by the name of <b>Liferea</b>. For FTP, I use the well known <b>FileZilla</b>, which is actively maintained and updated on a regular basis. Along with that I use Transmission and for media I run both <b>VLC</b> (some of you may gasp at that) and <b>Audacious</b> for music playback. Eventually, I'll make use of a better suited piece of software for video playback, but haven't spent too much time looking into it. What I don't have or use is any form of streaming radio, although that would be worth having. I'll have to research that further.<br />
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I have <b>Hotot</b> installed as my Twitter client, but I don't use Twitter as much these days and this application no longer runs on PPC. And for the final nail in the coffin, it is no longer being maintained or updated by anybody. In fact, it doesn't currently work on any of my machines, so it shall be soon tossed into the nothingness <br />
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For coding, I rely heavily on <code>vi</code> in the color coded <b>LXTerminal</b> and <b>Geany</b>. Geany supports a multitude of languages including the most commonly known ones such as C, C++, Python, etc. For compilation (or is it compiling?), I am currently using GCC 4.6.3 and am just starting to make use of the Clang compiler (more on that in the future... you can learn along with me! :) ).<br />
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Oh and lastly, on a entirely separate note, if you haven't heard by now, there is a <a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/09/concern-over-bash-vulnerability-grows-as-exploit-reported-in-the-wild/" target="_blank"><b>monster vulnerability</b></a> in bash associated with the handling of environment variables that has been around for far too long. Debian has already pushed out security fixes for this, so make sure to run <code>sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade</code> on your system to receive the patches. You are set up to receive security patches and updates right? Lord have mercy on you if you aren't.<br />
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That's it for this article. Once again, I droned on a tad bit with nontechnical opinionated words (sounds like several big name tech writing companies these days). Hopefully you read about an app or two here that might be just as useful or more useful to you on your own PPC Linux system. I didn't quite cover all the apps I am using, but it's a pretty decent start. Let me know what you are using in the comments below. And of course, suggest any new topics or questions if you have any.<br />
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<br />B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2626963991476624315.post-89208780509522062692014-08-24T18:16:00.002-07:002015-08-01T19:21:11.434-07:00Get a Liferea!As mentioned in a previous post, I am going to cover, in my opinion, the wonderful and extremely lightweight application known as Liferea (not that most RSS readers <i>aren't</i> lightweight). <br />
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I love feed readers as they allow me to keep tabs on all the articles from various blogs and sites I follow on a regular and irregular basis. I love being able to organize and group feeds by content and purpose.<br />
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As its very core, it's an RSS reader, but if you want to sound fancy, you can call it a news feed aggregator, but I'll stick with RSS for the time being. The name itself is actually an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader.<br />
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Here is a screenshot of it in action. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6dbrs2x2W0c/U_qOKdksLcI/AAAAAAAAANk/CCA2xUO3mjo/s1600/Liferea_20140824.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6dbrs2x2W0c/U_qOKdksLcI/AAAAAAAAANk/CCA2xUO3mjo/s1600/Liferea_20140824.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Anyways, it's in the main Debian repositories and can be installed with the usual apt-get install command. In case you need the full thing type the following in your terminal app of choice or install it via the Synaptics Package Manager via <b>Main Menu -> Preferences</b> menu.<br />
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<code>sudo apt-get install liferea</code><br />
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The app consists of mostly C code with small amounts of XML, HTML, and a few other oddball languages. I haven't quite peaked at the code yet, but according to the <a href="https://www.openhub.net/p/liferea" target="_blank"><b>statistics</b></a>, it's a little over 27,000 lines of code.<br />
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<u>Pros</u><br />
1. As I mentioned in the intro, the app (for all of you iOS haters, forgive me for calling it an "app") is extremely simple and as a result incredibly lightweight. Having it running in the background and periodically refreshing my feed list is unnoticeable. The software's website states that not many features are or will be added as the goal of the app is to keep it simple and lightweight. However, anybody willing to contribute their own time and features are welcomed to do so.<br />
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So far the app has not crashed once for me nor has it given me any other sort of issues.<br />
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2. The developers and contributors have provided excellent documentation for the application that is accessible from within the application itself. Much more information can be found on their <a href="http://lzone.de/liferea/faq.htm#security" target="_blank"><b>FAQ</b></a>. <br />
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3. The app does have a built in browser, but you can actually custom configure it to launch an external browser of your picking. To set it to something such as Iceweasel, head to <b>Tools -> Preferences -> Browser</b> tab and enter in "iceweasel %s" without the parentheses under the <b>Manual</b> option at the bottom of the tab. The %s is the variable placeholder for the actual URL that is to be loaded by your browser of choice.<br />
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4. Plenty of keyboard shortcuts for commonly used tasks such as doing a manual update of all of your subscriptions with<b> Ctl + U</b> (or <b>Command + U</b> if you have swapped these button's functions). I shan't go over them all here, but having them available saves me time from swapping back and forth between the trackpad and keyboard. Huge win in my book.<br />
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5. Support for all walks of feeders. I'm sure there are some that are not supported and will not work, but I haven't run into one yet. <br />
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6. Lastly, there is support for organizing your subscriptions into folders that you can name each whatever you please. Yes, a no brainer, but definitely worth mentioning. Moving subscriptions between folders is simply a drag and drop of that subscription or subscriptions.<br />
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<u>Cons</u><br />
1. Unfortunately, the latest version (1.10.11) has not been made available on the PowerPC platform. I am going to help change that here in the next couple of days. I'll provide an update to this existing post once it has been made available.<br />
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2. On the security front, it has some pretty big gaping holes. The first being that any proxy or authentication configurations to certain feeds are stored in plain text in ~/.liferea/feedlist.opml. Ouch. Obviously, if you aren't using any feeds that require any sort of authentication and/or proxy configuration, no worries. The second is that the content database cache data is also stored in plain text. The maintainers have also made it known that there could be and probably are other possible existing security issues.<br />
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Of the two issues described above, the first does not affect me and the second doesn't concern me a whole lot as the content I have in my feed is nothing I feel the need to be concerned about having in plain text. If I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective, let me know.<br />
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3. This may sound a bit picky, but there is no keyboard shortcut for adding a new subscription or folder. Seems like it would be simple enough to implement, but perhaps moving forward I could help in that arena as well. <br />
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All in all, it's the best lightweight Linux RSS reader I've been able to find to date and right now the pros outweigh the cons by a significant margin. There are a ton of other preferences and features that I did not cover, so check them if you feel enticed enough. If you know of something more lightweight, powerful, or perhaps even secure, I'd love to hear about it in the comments below.<br />
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And of course, if you have any suggestions, questions, or requests on a post for me to cover regarding PowerPC Linux let me know. Lastly, on another side note, I've decided instead of posting about all the different PowerPC hardware I own, I will create a dedicated hardware page.B-rockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03997596702539921342noreply@blogger.com0