A Man and his Penguin

Feedback results

Feedback Results on Copland:

1. It was a good idea.

2. It's not a necessary distribution anymore because (X)Ubuntu Feisty is so good.

3. The classic MacOS-styled desktop was difficult for certain people to use (understandable, I find the OS X desktop difficult to use), but others liked it and would continue using it in the future.

4. The community preview version of the distro was too unstable and buggy.

5. I should help the PowerPC community team.

Number 5 is something I can't really do - I don't get enough download allowance to download Tribes and Dailys, and I don't have enough coding knowledge to debug anything written in a language other than Python.

Number 4 I agree with.

Number 3, about the OS 9 desktop, is something I might consider implementing in Gnome as well as XFCE, and offering it as a kind of one-in-one-out pack for Ubuntu and Xubuntu on all arches.

Number 1 and 2 I agree with.

Here's the deal: I want to contribute to PowerPC users. I'm thinking I might do that through learning again how to create Debian packages, and creating those for the latest versions of programs and stuff like that. Long-time readers will know that I once created a real Debian package for the game Bloboats, but unfortunately it could've caused system breakage.

My only concern is how to back up my father's data on the iMac before I attempt to install Xubuntu Feisty on it. I don't have another Mac, so how on earth will I preserve the resource forks of the files? The only things I can think of are to create disk images of the partitions and put them onto the external hard drive, or binhex everything.

Disk images is probably the better idea, as long as they aren't over 4 gigabytes (the iMac can only access the Fat32 partition of the external hard drive, and Fat32 has a filesize limit of 4 gigabytes).

Is Copland necessary?

I've just downloaded Xubuntu 7.04 PPC with the intention of creating Copland from it.

But it seems to be an excellent PowerPC distribution - my iMac's screen started up immediately which it never did before under straight Xubuntu, there's compositing support in XFCE immediately, my Mac partitions were recognised and mounted out-of-the-box, and the only bug I've found in it was one that I couldn't fix in Copland CP! It's reasonably fast, too.

It looks like the community PowerPC team has created something very impressive; not to mention the XFCE/Xubuntu team. Frankly people, I can't see anything that I can do to improve on this. My wish was for PowerPC users to be serviced properly by a distribution which understands the pitfalls of working on this platform; it looks to my superficial eye like this has already been achieved.

Are PowerPC users left wanting of anything, other than a precompiled Gnash?

Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased and very impressed. But I'm at a loss and I have to reconsider whether I can really add anything to Xubuntu PowerPC.

Xubuntu 7.04 PPC - Based on Copland?

Spooky stuff.

I downloaded and burned Xubuntu 7.04 for PowerPC. I booted it up. It went straight to an X display - no blank screen, no BSOXD (Blue Screen Of Xorg Death). When it got to the desktop, the panels didn't start!

But in all seriousness, I'm wondering if PowerPC users really need Copland. Xubuntu Feisty for PowerPC appears to be excellent. It even automatically mounts my HFS partitions.

Feisty Merge begins shortly

It's 11:58pm here in Perth. Right now I'm downloading Feisty Xubuntu for PowerPC - the long-awaited release version.

Once that's done and I've got a few moments, I'll extract the SquashFS image and begin work on merging Copland's changes with the new Feisty codebase.

This might not take such a long time. I want to keep track of exactly what changes I make, so if anything breaks I can reverse my changes. In particular, I want to see at what point the installer breaks, if it does actually.

For those wanting some information about the next Copland release, I have two words for you: Gnash 0.8! (there will be more new features, don't worry! Possibly something to do with MoL!)

Copland Screenshots

Just to whet your whistle:

Notice it says "Gaim Pidgin"? Also notice the Control Strip at the bottom-left of the screen, fulfilling the same sorts of functions as it did in OS 9.

Getting some music done. I mean, getting some work done. Notice the window list / application switcher menu in the top-right corner? Yep, it's fulfilling the same kinds of tasks that it did in OS 9.

And, of course, no Copland-related screenshot gallery would be complete without HFS Browser. Look at that lovely wallpaper - it's one from Gnome-look.org that is designed to be distro-branded.

Torrent Available

http://www.linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=4146

Please be patient - only 2 seeders as yet, and 1 leecher. I'll run Bittorrent all night to try and push as much of the file out as possible. 13 hours will see the sending of one complete copy, so I'll aim to have the computer up for that amount of time or more if possible.

God, work today was hectic. I did sell quite a bit though - two washing machines, a gas heater, a couple of electric heaters, and some smalls. We finally got the 1080p hard disk video player to match our Full HD 42inch Sharp LCD; to see that screen operating at close to its full potential put a smile right on my face. Pity it's got HDCP in it.

No e-mail back from Roadshow. I'll have to call them tomorrow, damn it.

Uploaded Copland

I found a free file transfer site that lets me send a 500 megabyte file to be hosted forever and ever. So I did it. It took 12 hours, but it has succeeded.

http://www.mooload.com/new/file.php?file=/data/200507/1179674629/copland-cp.iso

Although nobody else has used the distro yet (the invitations to download have only just gone out), I've had some good feedback:

1. Cheers! Thanks for the great job. Unfortunately I can't test it because i'm very short in bandwidth but hopefully this project can go on

2. Hey thanks! I'll test it on my Powerbook G4 (Ti). Looks like a great distro

3. Congrats and thanks! Monday is a holiday in Canada so I won't get to try this out until Tuesday (left my iBook at work!). I'm excited and can't wait to read the first reports on how this distribution works. I think it has a very bright future.

Another potential user was asking about screenshots. As stupid as it sounds, I actually don't have any! (I used to, but lost them). If you've got screenshots, please send them to me: chris (my name) _*at*_ ubuntu PLEASEDON'TSPAMME os.com.

I'll get some screenshots tomorrow night, I hope.

In other news, today while my file was uploading, I went into the city. First I went to Harbour Town, where I looked around for a cap to match my nice new clothes; I did find one that sorta matched, but it took a while. The Brooks store came through for me.

And I also went to the city city and found the new Borders bookshop. Man, that place is huge. Not only are there books, but also magazines, DVDs, and CDs. Most bookshops have a rack or two of computer books - this place had 6 full-height racks full of them. Quite a good Linux section, with a book about Ubuntu, but it was child's play stuff. I did actually buy Revolution In The Valley, which is the book containing stories about the development of the Macintosh computer. You can read those stories at www.folklore.org; some are quite funny, and they provide a lot of insight into the developers.

I'm glad I bought the book. The website is good, but there are a couple of things that the book has (alternate points of view) and lots of photos; as well as it looking like a coffee-table book. It wasn't cheap - $50 - but it's given me new perspective on Linux, so much so that I'm now starting to think that Syllable really is the way forward for GPL personal computers.

I just thought you should be the first to know

...that Copland Community Preview has officially been released!

Yes, you can now get all the new hotness for PowerPC-based Macintoshes just by sending a PM to me (3rdalbum) on the Ubuntu Forums, or by leaving a comment on this post, or even by sending an e-mail to me: chris (that's my name) _*at*_ ubuntuos.com

As I don't have a download server, nor even a computer I can leave serving a torrent until eternity, it's through yousendit.com - send me your e-mail address, and I'll send the file to you through yousendit.com.

Please, if you do recieve the file from me, create a torrent of it so as to ease my own bandwidth concerns.

EXTRACT OF RELEASE NOTES:

System Requirements

       

Any "New-world" PowerPC-based Macintosh computer (i.e. a "Bondi-Blue" iMac or later).

   

128 megabytes of RAM (192 megabytes recommended)

   

1.5 gigabytes of hard disk space for installation

   

Bootable CD-ROM drive

   

You will need more memory plus a copy of the Mac OS in order to use the Mac-On-Linux virtualisation.

       

Quickstart

       

Burn the .iso file to a CD; remember, you must burn it as a disc image, not just as an ordinary file. Burn at 8x or slower. Users with tray-load iMacs, I suggest you use a CD-RW or a "music" CD-R. The disc can be burnt on a PC or another Linux machine if necessary.

       

Insert the CD into your drive, restart the Mac and hold down the C key. Press Enter at the prompt. Some grey scrolling text will come up your screen to tell you exactly what is loading. When it has all finished loading, you will get a grey login screen with the Copland logo.

       

Username is ubuntu

   

There is no password.

       

----------------------

           

Changes from Xubuntu 6.10 (Copland's base distribution)

       

1. New, classic Mac-like configuration for the XFCE desktop environment

   

2. Aiff Interchange, a program that allows the conversion of AIFF audio files to WAV or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

   

3. Hfs Browser, a program that helps you browse HFS and HFS+ removable disks.

   

4. Higher brightness setting as many iMacs display images too dark on Linux.

   

5. Removing of nonessential packages and language packs to keep the download and memory requirements low. Replacement of certain system software with faster/more functional equivilants.

   

6. Mac-On-Linux virtualisation software

   

7. Free-as-in-beer codecs

   

8. New artwork and theme.

   

9. Airport Extreme driver

   

10. New software added:

       

* VLC movie player

   

* Quod Libet music manager

   

* Ex Falso ID3 tag editor

   

* Font Forge (can be used to convert Mac fonts to Linux ones)

   

* Fish - Friendly Interactive SHell.

   

* Gnash 0.9.7

   

* Pidgin 2 beta 6

   

* Essential packages for compiling software and creating Debian packages of them

   

* GTKpod iPod manager

   

* HFS command-line tools

   

* TkChooser - a familiar interface for various network tasks

       

11. New options in the XFCE menu for Administrator Terminal and Administrator File Manager

   

12. Whenever your password is needed, an explanation is given.

Contributing

       

You are encouraged to contribute to the Copland project, especially through documentation, distro hacking and programming GUIs. Any enquiries about getting involved should be directed to chris (that's my name) _*at*_ ubuntuos.com for the moment until a proper website is set up.

       

Please enjoy using Copland. You are free to use it for however long you want and for whatever purpose, distributing and making changes, as long as you remember that this software has no warranty, and that it is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). For a full text of the license, type man gpl into the terminal.

       

Copland is finally here!

       

Christopher Lees

   

Main developer of Copland

   

http://code.google.com/p/coplandppc/wiki/MainPage

Gee, thanks community.

Judging by the number of people who have been talking excitedly about Copland, and those who have been advertising my project and imploring people to get involved, I've had remarkably little involvement from the community.

Not only have I not received a single line of code, it seems that nobody has even tried the technology that I've developed for the distribution and placed on the website. Today when testing HfsBrowser, I found one of those simple "one missing character" errors. Blind Freddie with an HFS+ hard disk and a root terminal could have noticed it (my main development machine is x86 and I didn't have an HFS+ partition available to test it on).

No, it's not an excuse that I didn't actually test the HFS+ functionality on my target machine. I should have. But on the same token, it's ridiculous for some of those people to ask about creating artwork for the distro and then not help in other more useful ways. I mean, why didn't anyone else test this program? It's very useful on PPC-based systems, and actually even more useful on x86 systems where HFS formatted CDs and stuff are going to be used.

I'm fixing this bug (and one other that I found; more permissions stuff), and then releasing the thing. If I don't get anyone contributing utilities or helping bugfix after Community Preview, then I simply won't bother creating a proper release. I'm serious. From the beginning, I said that I wouldn't be able to single-handedly develop the distribution that PowerPC users deserve, and single-handedly I haven't yet managed to create a starting point.

I'm sorry if I sound angry; I'm mostly angry at myself and I had a bad day at work, but I am also puzzled about why nobody is even thinking of running my code until it's packaged neatly on a CD.

Copland Watch: Community Chatter

As I sometimes do while waiting for the filesystem to squash, I use Google to search for what people are saying about Copland.

Here's what I've found:

My initial Wikipedia entry has had some wiki links added to AIFF, HFS, Apple Computer and more. It is also listed on the "List of Linux Distributions" in Wikipedia.

And much more excitingly, some people at the German Macuser forums are talking about Copland! (or rather, they did briefly talk about it :-)

Original thread in German
Google's lacklustre translation into English (whenever it says "copilot country", it means Copland)

My recent idea has been vindicated - one of those people says that he'd prefer a small window manager as it will be more lightweight. Also, I guess my next CD image will contain the German language packs :-)

That CD build was a piece of crap

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn't seem to have worked. But then, I can't really tell as xorg-profiles doesn't even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?

That CD build was a piece of crap

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn't seem to have worked. But then, I can't really tell as xorg-profiles doesn't even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?

That CD build was a piece of crap

1. The thing I followed to try to get xorg-profiles running on startup doesn't seem to have worked. But then, I can't really tell as xorg-profiles doesn't even manage to create its log file (see 3 below).

2. When I copied over the xorg-profiles script from my internal hard drive to the chroot to ensure that I had the latest copy, I actually overwrote the latest copy with an earlier copy.

3. After I did that, I forgot to make it owned by root, and also forget to setuid it. So it was running as ordinary user, failing to create a log file in a root-accessible area and of course failing to replace the faulty xorg.conf file with the good one.

What a complete waste of time. Oh sure, I learnt a lot (like "think before you squash"), but this is ridiculous. I need to document things a lot more; otherwise how are other developers going to take over maintanance of parts of the distro?

Compiled Pidgin, compiling Gnash

As the subject line says, I've recompiled Pidgin (hopefully with SSL support for MSN) and am currently compiling Gnash.

Why are you compiling Gnash? It's in the repos!

True, it's in the repos, but this is the example where having x86 users building a PowerPC distribution is really dumb. On x86, it's a great idea to use OpenGL as the rendering engine for Gnash. The official graphics card drivers allow hardware acceleration. On PowerPC, it's a bad idea - there are no official graphics card drivers for PPC, so you don't get direct rendering; which makes OpenGL programs run very slowly.

Gnash supports the Cairo backend (experimentally), and this should run quickly enough for our purposes.

Why not use swfdec? That supports Youtube videos!

All the really good stuff from Youtube is also available on Google Video, and you can download and play stuff from Google Video without even having any Flash support. Also, you can use the Video Downloader extension (not included) for Firefox to download the actual video data from Youtube as a .flv, and then play it in Mplayer (not included).

If you really want swfdec, you can install it exactly the same way that you always did on PPC. Gnash seems to have better compatibility with various Flash movies.

Where can I download Copland Community Preview?

Hold on, not yet... but it will be available soon. I'll probably release it as a torrent + a Yousendit.com service (you e-mail a particular address, it will be sent to you that night on www.yousendit.com).

How long until Gnash finishes compiling?

It just has! Brilliant!

---------------
I got the chance to play with Windows Vista today at Dick Smith's. It was on a laptop, and the Aero interface was enabled. Honestly, it's not a patch on Beryl. Having windows fade in and move toward the viewer a smidgin looks quite smooth, but there certainly wasn't a WOW factor about it. Speed-wise, Vista seemed to be okay... but it took longer to display the recycle bin window than Ubuntu+Beryl does to display the trash.

It works now

Funny, that...

I burnt a new copy of the same disc image, and when it was booting I edited the Xorg, so when X started up it already had the correct configuration. Now it's working fine when logging in as the default user.

That's good! So it was either a bad burn (I've been burning onto the same disc each time) or for some reason you have to have the Xorg configuration correct from the get-go. That means that, either Copland will work for everybody, or it will at least work for everyone who DOESN'T have a G3 iMac.

Copland logins are buggered

I haven't recompiled Gaim yet, but I've found something else to do while in the chroot.

My latest CD image has some kind of bug. When I try to log in to XFCE as the default user, it gets as far as starting xfdesktop and then stops. Pressing Control-Alt-F2 causes the CD to make some noise for a few seconds, but nothing else. Pressing Control-Alt-Delete causes the machine to freeze.

It was quite a while in between CD image builds, so I don't know if maybe it was something I added a while ago and forgot about. I remember adding the Broadcom driver, which loads using rc.local. That may be the problem, but removing the driver before logging in does not help.

Curiously, if I kill X and then do "sudo startx", it all works fine.

So, the next time I'm in the chroot, I'm going to set a root password and allow root logins (I think XDM allows these by default). So Copland testers will have to use the root account. I think we're safe though - security through obscurity. Obviously this isn't ideal, but it's a good stopgap until I can figure it out (or until I start again from the Feisty codebase, which is more likely!)

--------

At work today, the dimwitted single-mother I sometimes work with asked me if she had to remove Norton before "installing another virus" (I choked back a giggle). Then she pulled a copy of Windows LiveCare from her bag - apparantly it has a 3-user license? Anyway, I told her to stick with Norton.

I don't really know why I related this almost-amusing personal anecdote. I just found it funny that she thought those security suites were actually called viruses.

---------
I wish Angelica would come online tonight.

Spent all afternoon compiling Gaim

Under a whim, I decided that Copland Community Preview should have the latest version of Gaim. After all, the old 1.5 version doesn't really work anymore (maybe it does, but not well!), and I successfully built Beta 6 on my Dapper system. It works a treat.

So, I put the iMac back into the chroot and copied over the Gaim source code. Then I did a ./configure. After about 5 minutes of configuring, it complained about a build dependency. I downloaded it. Another 5 minute configure later, it complained about another build dep. I got it. A 6 minute configure later, it complained about yet another build-dep - this one was a multiple dependency, took up 14 megabytes.

Then finally the configure step completed, and I ran make. About half an hour later, make gave me an error about incorrect ELF files. Then I realised - I had compiled Gaim beta on the x86 before, put the folder with its x86 binaries on the PowerPC, and hadn't done a make clean.

So I did a make clean to get rid of all the x86-compiled stuff. 8 minutes of configure later, I ran make. An hour afterward, make finally finished. Aptitude purge gaim. Sudo checkinstall. It all went okay. So I worked on some other Copland stuff for a little while, had a long break, made a new desktop entry (calling it "Pidgin") and an updated About box picture, deleted all the build-deps for Gaim, then built the CD image.

It's 9:45 pm. I run the disc, and debug the xorg-profiles code. Now I'm at a desktop. I set up my internet connection, start Gaim, and input my MSN details... to find that Gaim won't connect because I don't have the right SSL libraries installed into Copland. Furthermore, I find that the SSL development libraries were needed at compile time. Doh!

Luckily, I did keep a copy of the /var/apt/cache directory, so I probably have all the build dependencies for Gaim. But they are there as debs, which I must now install manually in the correct order into the chroot. Then compile Gaim again. Lucky me. Lucky little me.

And I was planning to probably release this disc image! It certainly won't happen now, until these bugs get ironed out - and then I'll have the fun of migrating to Feisty's base with the same problems! But no, I will release an Edgy-based disc image.

Back on the Copland horse

I hadn't done any work on Copland for a while, but now I really want to. I will go into the chroot and try reinstalling Ubiquity. I've also got some interesting ideas from this page: http://joona.kuori.org/ubuntu-powerbook/

Like getting Airport Extreme working and making the trackpad faster.

Very productive morning

The latest Copland Community Preview CD image, 14-3-7 (today's) is currently booting on my iMac. I've got rid of the Debian logo from the XDM login screen (God, I can't believe how fast XDM is!) and replaced it with the Copland logo.

This morning I did a search for the script that starts xfce4-session, and although I couldn't find it, I did find some other XFCE startup-related scripts. I made some little modifications to these, rebuilt the disc image and that fixed TWO of the bugs!

That's right, folks: xfdesktop starts automatically, and I don't have three terminal windows on my screen. All I've got to do now is figure out why xfce4-panel isn't loading, and then I believe we'll be able to release the Community Preview!

Bugs for the latest CD image

1. When XDM comes up, it has the Debian logo on it (being fixed for copland-cp-110307)

2. Automounter still doesn't work - I still have no idea why not

3. Add/Remove Applications has the word "Ubuntu" in one of its dialogs (being fixed for copland-cp-110307)

4. XFCE's logout panel button just kills the panel itself - due to Bug #6. (panel logout button will be removed in next CD image)

5. CRITICAL: "Leave this computer..." menu item just gives an error about xfce4-session not being open. Due to Bug #6.

6. CRITICAL: xfce4-session is crashing on startup. Very little of Xfce starts up before the crash happens - panel and desktop must be started manually. Thanks to someone on #xubuntu for giving me the idea to check if xfce4-session is open. This is an upstream bug, but I will work around it in copland-cp-110307.

The workaround for bugs 4-6?  Write my own logout program in Pythoncard, and write my own session manager (I'm serious; but all it will do is start xfce4-panel and xfdesktop) in shell scripting.

I also just got the idea that the automounter might not be working if it's a service that is started by xfce4-session. I'll check on that.

Finally, I'd just like to close by saying that you shouldn't buy any consumer electronics by Conia or Hyundai. Their HD set-top-boxes never last longer than a couple of months, and recently one of their DVD recorders went belly-up after just 12 hours of being in the person's home.

Things are good

VLC does play media files, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for anything other than stock-standard formats. DivX movies crash VLC, real MPEG movies play, MP3s, Oggs and Flacs play.

I also found that I'd forgotten to include the Flac package for encoding, so half of AiffInterchange doesn't work at the moment. I did test the Wav portion, and that worked perfectly.

I'm glad I managed to figure out how to add Backports to the sources.list! Gnash is now in Copland, and I'm surprised to say that it works really well. It's terribly terribly slow on my iMac, but winnoise.swf works well (the visuals are slower than the audio, but everything works) and a little game I found called Penguin works too - although much too slowly to be playable. Still, it should all be a good help when you encounter Flash-based sites.

The other little problem with Gnash is that the menu item for the standalone Gnash player doesn't actually do anything - you must invoke it from the command-line. Little things like that bug me - I could knock up a reasonable GUI frontend in Pythoncard in an hour, and someone could make a good one in Glade and Python in a couple of hours. So why this inconsistancy?

Note to self: Write GUI frontend for Gnash Player.

The other problem I noticed was that the Administration File Manager menu item gives the error "Missing command to run". Oh, and Ubiquity still crashes - I'll try turning swap off.

If thee eye offends...

...rip it out and replace it with a solar cell!

That is what I am seriously considering doing, in a way. GDM is still giving me hassles, I've no idea why and I'm ready to cry. I noticed that XDM is in the repos - I am thinking of making a backup of the chroot, getting rid of GDM and installing XDM instead. It should be lighter and less trouble-prone.

Otherwise, things are going a little better than before. I have Copland running under root thanks to sudo startx. Quod Libet is now playing MP3s and Oggs; excellent! Thunar is automounting like it never has before. Gxine has gone and is replaced with VLC, which I am about to test.

On the downside, xfdesktop and xfce4-panel didn't start. I mean, NEITHER of them started until I did it manually. This bug isn't unique to Copland - it could be introduced by Xubuntu or by XFCE (the version of XFCE in Edgy and Copland is actually a beta).

I have a large checklist of things to... erm, check, so I'll get back to it. Copland is starting to grow on me. And it's only a 477 megabyte download!

UPDATE: I want to check whether VLC will play video. The silly thing is, the only video files I have on my external hard disk are ones that my friend Joe gave me, i.e. they're pr0n. And I'm too lazy to unmount the disk, plug it into my computer, and copy some legitimate videos onto it. Thankfully, it's now 10:40pm here, so my parents will have gone to bed.

Gnash and VLC in Copland

During my testing last night, Quod Libet wouldn't play anything and GXine only played Oggs.

So I went back into the Chroot environment and replaced GXine with VLC, and I added the useful Gstreamer0.10 plugins (how did I forget to include them in the first place?).

And I also worked out how to add the Backports repository to the sources.list - I've done it on my main box, but I had forgotten how to do it. So now Copland has Gnash. Excellent.

I also was going to install the Quod Libet extensions, but I completely forgot to. I'll get back into the chroot, probably tomorrow, add them, recreate the package manifest and build another development CD. Along with as many bugfixes as possible.

There's only, like, 3 days left in February - looks like Copland will miss its initial release date. It doesn't really matter - I'd rather release a little later and have the thing work, than release it too soon and have it get a reputation for being overly buggy.

The audio and video support is definately something I needed to get right.

Also, note that the official Copland website on Google Code is getting outdated.

--------------
Today, my parents held a barbeque-thingy for all their friends. They asked me beforehand if I wanted to invite anyone as well, but really there's very few people in Perth who I have contact with. There's my friend Joe, and the people I work with (who I don't really want to see outside my working life)... there's one girl who I have some Internet-contact with but she has a chronic aversion to meeting me :-(

It did make me realise that I'm a bit lonely. I don't always feel it; in fact, I don't often feel it. I do wish I had a girlfriend, but I'm really the sort of guy who most girls don't find interesting. It's a fact that I've accepted, but it doesn't stop it from (occasionally) hurting.

Getting too depressed. I'll stop this post now, and hopefully edit the podcast some time before it gets stale.

More sudo fun

Yes, I had more problems.

After I setuid'ed "sudo", it told me that it still had the incorrect permissions set. Thankfully, it told me what octal permissions it was set to, and what it should be, so it was very easy to satisfy that.

Just in case that didn't work, I wrote a tiny program called "Clarus" (named after the Dogcow). It's just a simple setuid program that launches a root terminal, after warning that this is a bad thing to do. If sudo doesn't work, then Clarus will.

However, sudo worked the next time.

But then I discovered that Xorg actually wasn't installed. Apparantly, when I removed the unneeded Xorg drivers from the Copland chroot, it also removed Xorg itself. This took me quite a while to figure out.

FINALLY I got Copland running to a desktop, albeit as root as the GDM login screen kept crashing. I'm hoping that GDM is crashing because of the insane settings I gave it, not because of the modified Zenwalk login theme I chose. Of course, I had forgotten to put my custom XFCE settings into the /root directory, so it looked exactly like Xubuntu. My bad.

On the good side, Pythoncard works; I ran the AIFF Interchange program (I didn't put an AIFF through it - the computer is REALLY too slow to run Copland from disc let alone do anything that would require putting audio files into RAM). That was the one bit that I was really worried about, and it worked perfectly.

I've made the changes that I am going to make for this next Release Candidate (I call all my development masters "release candidates", because if everything works perfectly I'll release it!). Tomorrow I'll build another CD image and see what happens.

Good news: I think I found out how to stop the Xubuntu splash screen from appearing on startup, and this only involves a simple edit to the Yaboot.conf file. Kernel arguments.

------------

Yesterday, I went to Big W and had a look at their Windows games. There was one there for $5, called International Golf Pro. Someone on Ubuntu Forums had lately been talking about how there's no real golf game for Linux (real golf, not mini golf), and I'd remembered how much I liked PGA Tour Golf 2 for Mac, so I decided to buy it and see if it would run on Wine.

It didn't run on Wine; well, it crashed before the actual game started. So I tried running it on Windows. Guess what? BSoD. I tried it again; same result. Windows told me to run Chkdsk, so I did. Tried the game again: BSoD.

I tried every variation of installing, uninstalling, and setting options for the game, but nothing worked UNTIL I ran the game under "Windowed Mode". This DIDN'T result in a BSoD, but the graphics went really weird and a box popped up telling me that there was a problem with my video card drivers. Bingo! I updated them and that fixed the problem.

Unfortunately, after all that work, the game wasn't really very good. Graphically, it's better than PGA Tour Golf 2. In terms of gameplay, it's nowhere near. Good for a $5 game though, and it (along with a live Ventures album that I have) kept me occupied during those long Copland bootups.

Will have to rebuild the image

Yes... I've just realised that I forgot to copy over my custom bootmessages and yaboot intro text. Right now, Copland Community Preview is booting on the iMac, with the Xubuntu splash. I thought I'd disabled that thing? Looks like another trip to the chroot for me :-)

Oh, and now the damn thing won't let me sudo. It says "sudo: must be setuid root". And in the uncompressed filesystem, sure enough, sudo is not setuid root. How on earth did that happen? However it happened, unfortunately, it means I've got to boot up the Xubuntu Desktop CD again and recompress the SquashFS filesystem... after I've setuid'ed all the appropriate programs.

The Longest 11 Minutes Of My Life

I'm waiting for the ISO of Copland Community Preview RC 1 (Release Candidate 1) to burn to disc. It feels like it's taking longer to burn than it did to create the package manifest and compress the filesystem, even including that bit where I had to switch to the Mac to run a command in the chroot :-)

Once the disc is burnt, I'll chuck it into my Mac and try it out immediately! I'm so excited! Well, it's just finalising, so I'll go now :-)  Oh, the ISO is 450 megabytes, how cool is that?

Beta Stage Reached

Yes, I'm aware that Copland Community Preview has more dropped features than Windows Vista :-)

But I've reached beta stage. All the work that I haven't deferred is done. All I've got to do now is reconstruct the chroot environment into an ISO, burn it to CD, and try it out.

I'll bring in the new guys soon, and I'm also looking for donated webspace and bandwidth.

---------
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'd like to become my own OEM (Own Equipment Manufacturer), buying Linux-compatible PC parts and building computers, then selling them to electrical stores that don't get competitive pricing for PCs. Of course, all computers would be preloaded with Linux - I'm thinking Linux Mint would be a good option. Also, the Windows Media Codecs bundle from Fluendo would be a great addition.

I'm going to check out some component pricing, work out what my costs would be, and then get one set of components and try my hand at putting the computer together.

I DID IT!

Last night, I posted a message about the slowness of HfsBrowser, and as I was writing it, I thought of a solution and proposed it.

Today, I implemented the solution.

Last night, on my AMD Sempron 3200+ at 1.8GHz, it took between 10 and 15 seconds to display a list of 240 items in HfsBrowser.

Today, with exactly the same circumstances, it now takes less than 1 second. Oh, I love working this stuff out.

There are now only two things that don't work - getting a list of local HFS drives (may be because my development machine is x86, and fdisk on x86 formats its results differently to on PPC), and copying files from the HFS partition to any other disk (fairly critical!). The latter is all due to me not being able to get a library to abstract GTK's Save dialog (curiously, I actually have an "Open" dialog ATM).

Anyway, I'll continue hacking around on it, and hopefully have a close-on-completion version up on Google Code tonight! It's just a pity I won't have time to do Xorg Profiles - but maybe the Ubuntu Feisty release will yield better Xorg detection, which is a much more correct solution.

Source release under the GPL

I haven't mentioned this on my blog yet, but the source code for AiffInterchange and HfsBrowser is up on the Copland site. It has been up for a while, but I've only just thought of mentioning it here since I've been working heavily on HfsBrowser (and uploading my changes every night).

So yeah, go and hack around on the code, fix bugs, add features! You'll find the code on the wiki - for this project, it's more trouble than it's worth to use SVN (especially considering how unreliable Google Code really is).

I had a very annoying battle with wx - it tries to decode Unicode strings to put them into list boxes. This causes problems with Macintosh files which have special characters. Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to skip it is... hang on, I've just thought of a better way to test for this. Right now, with the code on Google Code, it runs extremely slowly since it concatenates each new item to the dirList box when getting a directory listing. There's no way to test if it will cause problems UNTIL you actually put it into the box! (not as far as I can tell, and I can't ask anyone on #python...). And you can't add one item, then add another item - it doesn't seem to work.

But yeah, I've just thought of a faster way. Concatenating is very slow. I should instead create an invisible listbox, and put item 1 in it, then replace it with item 2, etc. If one of them causes problems, delete it from the Python list like I currently do. At the end, dump the whole list into dirList. That should be quite a lot faster than concatenating to the list every single time. I'll try it tomorrow.

Check out the code! It's not pretty, it's not overly foolproof, but it works. As I mention on the Copland project frontpage, I expect that HfsBrowser will be the one part of the project that makes it to other distributions' repos, as a replacement for xHFS. A replacement was definately needed, as xHFS freezes when you try to mount a drive... or maybe it's just concatenating massive lists? :-P

EDIT: Also, check out the little video on Sal's blog. It really puts into perspective what Sal was talking to me about before Podcast #26.

Look ma, I'm on Google!

A quick search for "Copland Linux" yielded this web site, called Planeta Ubuntu. I've noticed it before in the Ubuntuos.com "pages that have linked here" list, but I'm extremely humble that they seem to mirror my blog as well and have even created a category specially for Copland (seems to be automatically generated though):

Planeta Ubuntu

My post about Copland's default theme on Planeta Ubuntu

The site is kinda slow at the moment, bear with it. As slow as Copland development is at the moment. I've now had another offer for help, but only really for testing help and website devel.

Urgently need FUSE people

Right now, I really need a volunteer to help me with my FUSE filesystem.

I'm trying to write a Python script that will run as a Fuse module, and map filesystem requests to the hfsutils package. For instance, when the script recieves a message from Fuse to make a directory on the virtual filesystem, the script will invoke "hmkdir" (it's a little more complicated than that sometimes, but that explanation suits us plenty).

Right now I've got a filesystem that mounts, unmounts, ignores any "getattr" calls, and logs this activity. I've written much of the other stuff, but the getattr calls seem to be blocking it. I can't find documentation on the web to do with this. I can't find the "examples" directory for Fuse. I can't figure out at the moment how to send valid replies to the getattr calls, and I think part of the problem must be that most of the "getattr" information is completely irrelevent for HFS, and I have no way of retrieving any of this.

Please, if you have written a FUSE module before, or even if you know a good comprehensive tutorial for writing FUSE modules in Python (or heck, I'd probably settle for a .tar.gz of this elusive Examples directory!), please leave a comment.

That was the problem

I needed the Edgy version of SquashFS to unsquash the filesystem. I'm writing this from the Edgy Xubuntu x86 Desktop CD, and it's currently decompressing the Edgy Xubuntu PPC filesystem to my external hard drive. Success!

I am also going to put the Copland project onto Google Code. Among other things, it's so I can have my own wiki to organise things and use as a repository of information. It's also going to be handy for showing people what the Copland project is going to be about. Right now I refer them to a particular entry of this blog, which is hardly professional. I'll have all this information, and the code for each custom-written program, stored on Google Code.

Thanks for giving me the idea, Aaron.

First development version

Today, I booted up the Edgy Xubuntu Desktop CD and made the modifications to the interface that will be in the final version of Copland.

Unfortunately, I could not get the Ghrome GTK theme to work properly, nor my GDM theme. Maybe the machine would need a restart to get these things to work, but of course this wouldn't work for the Live CD :-)  It seems to require MORE than the gtk2-engines-pixbuf package.

The modified Ghrome-slim XFWM theme worked, and I decided that a desktop wiki probably wasn't necessary.

The fun part has finished... now the real work begins.

Here's a screenshot:

(click for full-size)

The miniature panel at the bottom-left is meant to replicate the functionality of the Control Strip from OS 9, as is the window list menu in the top-right corner. The GTK theme in this screenshot is "Grey" - not bad, but certainly not as nice as Ghrome. The icon theme is Rodent, but I think the final distribution will have Tango.

The Control Strip has the following functions in this order:

1. Show Desktop
2. Clipboard Manager
3. Notes
4. Take Screenshot (will not be in final version, only in screenshots)
5. Volume Control
6. Workspace Switcher (Graphical Pager)
7. System Tray (nothing in it)
8. Trash Can

The Logout button is next to the Applications menu... notice here that I haven't changed the Xubuntu logo in the XFCE menu, as I have nothing to change it to at the moment.

Edit: Here's the GDM theme, running on my main Ubuntu installation:

Theme has been selected

The default theme for Copland has been selected!

The wallpaper is a modified version of "ubuntu-unity" from Gnome-look.org.

The GDM theme is (I think it's called) "tango-project" from Gnome-look.org; but I've modified it to use the wallpaper as the background, and I've slightly altered the icons and colour of the text.

The GTK 1+, GTK 2 and XFWM themes are all Ghrome. Have a look at it on Gnome-look.org - it's one of the few really distinctive themes (I wanted it to be distinctive), and it's based on the Pixmap engine I think. It also comes with a Metacity theme, for the Gnomers out there. The XFWM set is extra-special, because it comes with a slicker "ghrome-slim" theme which I've decided to have as the default.

This theme needed one change in particular: Since the close button must be on the left side of the title bar, it doesn't have that nice bezelled look that you get with the buttons on the right side. I don't have enough art skills to create a rounded bezel for the close button, but I just improvised a square bezel and it looks a little better than before.

Package list: I've come up with an "extra package list" which hopefully I can fit in, for this first release. This does not include extra applications which I will need to source from outside the repos or write myself...

MoL - Mac usability
Maelstrom - feel
LinBolo - feel
hfsutils - Mac usability
hfsplus - Mac usability
hfsutils-tcltk (xhfs) - Mac usability - buggy?
Ghrome theme - feel
Zim - usability
Qemu - not necessary yet.. maybe in later releases or plugin packs?
Sox (note to self: find a sound-playing program that uses Sox) - Mac usability
Fish - usability
Gtkpod-aac - Mac usability
Macutils - Mac usability
Netatalk - Mac usability
Fontforge - Mac usability
tkchooser - feel
installation-guide-powerpc - Usability, but optional
SheepShaver - Mac usability, but possibly optional (note: Must convert from RPM)

Please, please, if you know anything about user-mode Qemu, or can write some simple Python programs, please send me a message!

Your assignment for this week: Read through your /etc/gdm.conf file.

First release: Feb 07

Yesterday I noticed that Australian PC magazine has Xubuntu 6.10 on their cover disc, so I bought the magazine. (quite a good mag, actually... a reasonable amount of Linux content, and some Linux applications on the disc. Also, the Dr Schueler's Home Medical Advisor Pro included on the disc works pretty well on Wine.)

I booted up the Xubuntu disc and did some customising. I changed the themes, the homepage in Firefox, customised the panels, and adapted 2 existing wallpapers from www.gnome-look.org. Then I mounted my ordinary Ubuntu partition, copied over the hidden configuration directories, and now I have some plain-text files I can modify at my lesiure until I get Xubuntu PPC Edgy (on Christmas day, probably, to take advantage of my ISP's billing months arrangement).

I'll try to make first release in February 2007, and the disc will be based on Edgy Xubuntu.

I've been trying to find out license information for the Chicago and Charcoal fonts that I've converted from Mac OS and am thinking of using within Copland's artwork, but I can't find any information. I think I'll just use them - after all, fonts are there to be used, and my copies of them have been legally obtained.

Do you have any skills that might help me? Are you an artist, Python programmer, experienced User-mode Qemu user or distro reconstruction expert? Do you want to have a say in YOUR PowerPC operating system? If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, please contact me through Friendster.

Planning for Copland v1

I think I mentioned this earlier on the blog: I want to use Live CD customisation techniques to fork Xubuntu for PowerPC. Here are some more details.

Copland was originally a project at Apple in the 1990s, to create a next-generation (by their standards) operating system for the Mac. One which was reliable, with room to grow, was easy to use, and still had good performance even when under load. (the classic Mac OS had no memory protection, and its multi-tasking and multi-threading support was tacked on during the early 90s).

The Copland project failed; it was probably mismanaged. It took years to get to the stage where it could be demonstrated in public, and even then it was terrible. No multi-threading, the Finder still didn't run at the same time as other applications, and it was unreliable. The best new features of it were backported to System 7.5 and Mac OS 7.6 and 8.

I don't believe Apple has filed a trademark, so I'm going to appropriate the name Copland and use it for my own Linux distribution. To misquote one of Apple's early marketing phrases, "Copland will not be like Copland" :)

My Copland distribution will be a heavily-customised Ubuntu PPC Live CD, containing:

XFCE, which will make the system fast and resource-efficient.
The latest PowerPC kernel, to make the system compatible with the G5s.
HFSutils and xHFS, to access Mac-formatted CDs and things; and a utility to help the user perminantly mount their Mac partitions.
A Bash script with Fontforge, to convert the Mac fonts to Type1 fonts and use them on Linux.
A distinctive, professional theme; with the XFCE compositor on by default.
A brightness control application - the need for one has been talked about recently on UbuntuForums
GTKpod and Exaile - here's hoping that Exaile can add full iPod support soon
Gnash
Maelstrom and Linbolo - yep, to make the Mac users feel at home.
Zim and a good photo management app - I want the functionality of Tomboy and F-Spot, but I don't want to pull in Mono due to size concerns.
build-essential - On PowerPC, it's absolutely necessary.
No obscure language support - I don't believe any Macs were sold to Benghalis.
Original artwork - Made with original, possibily unusual design techniques. None of this "Make the top of the logo one colour and the bottom a darker colour" like Ubuntu :-)
Lightweight applications with no Gnome or KDE dependencies. No Evolution - Sylpheed Claws, maybe Eudora if it's available for Linux by then? (Mac users are familiar with Eudora). No OOo - instead, Abiword and Gnumeric, and let's try and find a presentation program.
User-mode emulation with Qemu - a big ask here, probably defer this until the second release, and even then only through optional download. Pre-defined user-mode emulation profiles that will let you use MPlayer for x86 with w32codecs, or Wine, or possibly even Skype. You'd need a heck of a machine - a dual-core G5 with a gig of RAM would probably do the trick, but it would be possible. Assuming it's possible.

I'm a step closer than I was this morning. This morning, as I recorded the podcast (which I will upload tomorrow), I had no idea how to make predefined XFCE settings stay across new user accounts. I could put the settings into the first user's home directory, but if they created a new user that second user would just have the Xubuntu defaults. This evening, while carefully examining a Xubuntu Live CD, I figured out how to keep this kind of persistance. I was so thrilled. I feel like this distribution is going to go somewhere.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could get the distribution onto the Linux Format cover DVD? I know they're not interested in putting PowerPC distributions onto their DVD, but it would be quick enough to run in Qemu on x86 and they've been having lots of complaints from PowerPC users recently :-)

Anyway, I know this has been a long post, thanks for staying with me. I am sending out the call: Artists, I need a logo, a wallpaper, a GDM screen, and an XFCE splash (hint: Dark blue and dark grey). Programmers, I need a PowerPC kernel that has thermal control for the G5s, and a way to improve Xorg's auto-detection on iMacs. PPC Linux users, I need suggestions for what programs would be specially useful in a PowerPC distro; ideas for programs that don't currently exist can be submitted too, if I get some programmers :-)  People who want to donate hosting or web design/web development services, much much appreciated. Anyone who I haven't listed here who know that they've got something to offer (information on bits that can be customised, test machines, anything really), please also get in touch with me.

Our Copland will be the operating system that Apple could never develop.