Posts Tagged “Ubuntu”

On my aluminum Apple Keyboard I prefer to have the F1 - F12 keys operate as the F1 - F12 keys by default, and access the brightness, expose, and other extras in combination with the Fn key. The is the opposite of the way they function in OSX. In OS X, you very rarely ever need to use the F1-F12 key unless you are using some professional software that uses them for shortcuts, so it is not that big of a deal. In Linux, however, I use these keys a lot to switch to virtual consoles and access gnome shortcuts. Previous to Intrepid, it was recommended to install pommed to enable the functions of many of these special keys. pommed’s config file had the option to swap the way the Fn key works, requiring you to use Fn in order to change the brightness, etc. Now, in Intrepid (8.10) most of the functionality of pommed has been implemented into hal and pommed simply creates conflicts. So how do we swap the function of the Fn key?

First edit /etc/modprobe.d/options
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options

and make sure it has the line
options hid pb_fnmode=2

Then save and exit. Lastly, we need to update ramfs:
sudo update-initramfs -u -v -k `uname -r`

Then just reboot!

There has been a bit of confusion on how to get the iSight working on many of the Intel Macs recently. Fortunately, the newer MacBooks coming out have a working iSight out-of-the-box without needing to do anything, but for older iSights, firmware loading is still required. They changed the firmware loading back to the kernel out of userspace, so all you have to do is get the firmware and place it in the correct location in the filesystem. Let’s do it step by step.

1. First you need to get the firmware out of a particular file located on your OSX install. You can copy it to a USB drive or other location so that you can acess it from Ubuntu. It is located in /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/
AppleUSBVideoSupport.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleUSBVideoSupport
2. Boot into Ubuntu and install isight-firmware-tools

   sudo apt-get install isight-firmware-tools

3. Go ahead and place the AppleUSBSupportVideo file in /lib/firmware

   sudo cp AppleUSBSupportVideo /lib/firmware/

4. Now, extract the iSight firmware from the file

   sudo ift-extract -a /lib/firmware/AppleUSBVideoSupport

This should place a file called isight.fw in the /lib/firmware directory. It would be a good idea to save a copy of this file somewhere so that you can find it again later and not need to extract it from the AppleUSBVideoSupport file. In the future, you just need to place the isight.fw file in /lib/firmware/.

When all this is done, you need to shutdown your Mac and Start it up again (not reboot!!). Completely shutting down will reinitilize the hardware and allow the firmware to load while starting Ubuntu.

It was recently announced that ath9k, the newest of the open Atheros Linux drivers, is now available. This is great news for Mac folks, as a majority of the MacBook and MacBook Pros out there have one of the newer 802.11n cards that is not really supported with madwifi, but this new driver supports.

Of course, it is Ubuntuforums user, volanin, to the rescue again who took it upon himself to backport the wireless-testing portion of the kernel to the 2.6.24-19 (and -20) kernel currently used in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and packaged this ath9k driver into a nice little deb file so that Ubuntu-On-Mac users will have easy access to use it on their machines without having to go through the trouble of compiling a custom kernel. Of course, this is not limited only to Mac users, but rather, any user with an up-to-date install of Hardy Heron will have the benefit of using this driver. A link to the download and full instructions can be found at the following thread. Enjoy!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5545069&postcount=5

Now, if only Broadcom could realize that they need to release an open driver driver just to keep up…

Update: A new kernel driver has been created that adds the multi-touch functionality to the Linux kernel rather than through a daemon. A version has already made its way into the vanilla kernel source.

New kernel driver for the BCM5974 touchpad (Macbook Air, Penryn)

I regular the Ubuntu Apple Intel forum and had the pleasure meeting a user, tannewt. He had just obtained a new Macbook Pro (with the multi-touch trackpad) and was very helpful in getting some of the first information about the new hardware into the forums. He also started hacking on the touchpad to make it a bit more useful since the new hardware was quite limited with the current available software

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We get the question or comment quite a bit that people are planning to purchase a Mac and want to run Ubuntu (or some other variant of Linux) on it exclusively. Now, this can be done, and you might end up with exactly what you want in the end, but I have to say, “Why in the world would you do that?”

Don’t get me wrong, I like my iMac, and I am even getting a Macbook Pro soon for work. I also like running Ubuntu on my iMac, but buying a Mac just to use Linux just doesn’t make any sense to me. There are so many other options out there for a linux-specifc application. With Dell now offering machines made specifically with Linux compatibility in mind in addition to the several linux-compatilible hardware vendors out there, it is way too easy to obtain hardware that can coexist with linux peacefully.

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I like to help in support forums for various things that I am interested in. I am not paid for it. I don’t do it for glory. I don’t do it for popularity. I am just interested in sharing my knowledge with others so that they might be able to do something that they were unable to do before.

I am not going to claim that Linux is the perfect OS and that anyone can use it. I think it just “makes sense” myself, but I also have a machine running Windows Vista that I use as a PVR, and I actually tend to spend more time on my iMac in OSX Leopard than I do in my Ubuntu install. I have the mindset to use whatever you want. I don’t preach Open Source. I am not a Apple fanatic. Yet, more than once, it has been the case that, when someone is frustrated in the Ubuntu Apple Users’ Forum (as well as elsewhere) they threaten to ‘leave’ Linux… to go back to Windows, or OSX, or whatever.

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Since we now have a baby on the way, my wife and I thought we could buy ourselves a video camera for our anniversary, which is this month anyway. I started looking around, and I wanted something that would be easy to use with my Mac and iMovie and such, so I checked out what was on the Apple Store. I really like Canon cameras, and there were a few listed, as well as a couple of Sanyo Xacti cameras.
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Via Popular Mechanics:

Computer operating systems loaded with stuff I don’t want and will never use.

 

In the tech world this phenomenon is known as “software bloat” or “feature bloat.” It’s a well-documented problem and a frequent complaint about Windows OSs—Vista in particular. In addition to being buggy, the extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don’t load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat.

 

Most features can be set up as options. Why not start with a computer loaded with basic stuff that works 100 percent of the time? Then, give us the option of adding the bells and whistles. There’s another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there’s no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.

 

And high-tech companies—stop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn’t routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3.

Introduction

Intel Macs use EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) instead of the typical BIOS (Basic Input / Output System) that most PCs use. EFI has a standardized specification that, unfortunately, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they do not need to abide by, and slightly modified their implementation. This makes developing Linux software that interfaces with this system difficult. In fact, there is, as of yet, no reliable method of booting Linux directly through EFI although work is being done by the mactel-linux group, elilo, and Grub2 to allow for this functionality. Part of this system is the use of a partitioning system called GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is used in place of the MBR (Master Boot Record) that would coincide with the use of a BIOS. NOTE: GUID means Globally Unique Identifier, which is basically a unique number that is used to identify something, a partition in this case. There is not much more that is needed to understand about that. Apple also places an “EFI partition” at the very beginning of the disc. This is used as a location to place executables for the EFI system to perform firmware updates. Read the rest of this entry »

An Ubuntuforums user (volanin) posted some good info about power saving in Ubuntu Gutsy and also pointed out in another thread that Fedora backported the tickless kernel code from 2.6.24-rc into the 2.6.23 kernel. Since I went through the trouble of getting it, configuring and compiling, I thought I would post the source and my config file for the working kernel.

Patched Kernel Source Archive

config-linux-2.6.23.1-42.f8-cd33_20071201.tar.gz

It works superbly for me even with the latest ATI proprietary drivers.