war journal 013 - gentoo on parallels for mac

previously, i posted (also here: the case of parallels 2.1 beta and the crashing iMac and Ubuntu on OS X that i have had a heck of a time trying to get gentoo to work on parallels for the mac. its been a couple of months now, and i realize that i haven't posted the resolution to that problem.

it was quite simple really, and i banged by head several times after realizing how simple the answer was:

gentoo noapic acpi=off

and gentoo live cd (i used 2006.0) would boot properly and using the grp packages (i wanted to get up and running very quickly) a gentoo system was live on my core duo iMac.

war journal 012 - Ubuntu on OSX

(Updated) - The world turned upside down the past few weeks as Boot Camp went into full swing. And no they won't be joining the boys and girls in Iraq pretty soon, rather--- hell froze over and Windows once stuck in black, borning boxes could now reside on the stylish Mac hardware.

Dual booting has been around for years--- linux users have been booting windows in their boxes thanks to bootloaders like lilo and grub. now, Boot Camp is a similar tool--- essentially getting windows to boot on an intel mac. now as hackers have showed in the past few months, it takes a little bit of hack to pull it off. for one thing, the mac has no legacy bios to worry about--- which is problematic in that Windows lives in the archaic past and does not support (nor will Windows Vista) EFI. thanks to Apple, it can now be done.

Many people have tried boot camp and have successfully dual booted windows xp and os x--- you'd have to bring your own licensed copy of XP to the party though. Still, after years of being a Linux user, i've had my fair share of dual booting. And yes certainly it is very helpful to dual boot especially for that app that only exist in Windows that you couldn't live without and for the occassional games one might want to play. Take it from me--- six years of this dual booting thing is a hassle. Nothing is better than running on one single operating system or having another computer do that one other thing you might need it to do.

Now here comes the solution. Virtualization. It isn't new--- its been around (the technique anyway) since the day mainframes were king of the world. And there are many companies/organization that offer such solution--- VMware, Microsoft, Xen, OpenVZ but this upstart--- Parallels runs on OSX, among other things. You could for instance run, in near native speed, Windows XP side-by-side with OSX, and switch by just tapping on your keyboard.

Now, we've all seen and heard the promise that Virtualization has given. I have had numerous opportunities in the past to try it out, and at the end of the day, preferred to run my apps on a separate machine.

Still, its been years--- and the business has matured and everything else looks promising so why not give it a try? So I spent a week's Easter vacation running through hoops to get Parallels a shot. And after several failed attempts to get it to do what i want, like system crashes, did i just say that?

Parallels was finally running Ubuntu Linux beside my OS X. The choice of Ubuntu is simply to get one distro running in my experiment. Parallels has several options--- Windows, Red Hat, Suse, Debian and many others, though personally i'd love to put gentoo linux on this thing, but the lack of network support and the fact i crashed my mac several times doing it... i just wanted to get something to work. (Update) - Was able to get the networking stuff going by using dhcp--- though i still haven't been able to get it when i plug the mac direct to my adsl modem, i was able to do it by building a home-router-dhcp-linux box.



Man, it responds in near native performance, it even has sound to boot. The only thing I have problems with this and a lot of people, judging by the forum responses over at Parallels is having the same--- the lack of good network support. A guest OS still can't connect to the internet.



There are a few people over at the forums and over at Macworld who have done this using Windows. You might want to check them out, if you haven't already.

Now I'd like nothing more than to run Gentoo Linux on my iMac Core Duo--- it saves me a lot of trouble maintining just one single machine to do my testing and leave my server to stand as purely production and i'm sure the day will come when Parallels can get network support right and it will be an amazing thing!

war journal 011 - the case of parallels 2.1 beta and the crashing iMac

(updated)
a shadow suddenly fell on my iMac Core Duo, and a small black window in the middle of my screen appeared requesting i reset the system--- press the power button for a few seconds.

And i did.

what madness! i broke my mac! the horror! the insanity!

ok thats putting too much into it.

what happened?

quite simple really, i was playing with Parallels 2.1 beta. i downloaded it from their website--- hoping to test out the virtualization stuff. i of course don't have a licensed copy of windows (except the one that came with my laptop, which is not being used as it is running gentoo linux), so i opted to go gentoo, my linux distro of choice. all right the system was up. gentoo live cd booted all right. i had done what any gentoo user would have at that stage, setup lan, and made my partition.

so far so good.

fdisk went well. did my mkreiserfs /dev/hda1 and did my mkswap /dev/hda2 and ran swapon /dev/hda2

all great stuff.

then i mounted /dev/hda1 on /mnt/gentoo---- all normal, all doing fine.

now the next step is fetch stage3 tar balls. now, my style is to fetch the link from via links--- and save the stage3 tarball and a portage snapshot on /mnt/gentoo, then do the necessary untar as stated on the gentoo handbook. now normally i would be at tty1 so i did control+alt+f2 to switch to tty2--- then the black screen of death appeared!!!!



after the imac restarted, i logged on to my user account and a window was waiting for me. it was an error window, asking the error to be sent to apple. now i've been using linux for quite sometime and unix pedigree is really hard to crash. i mean, fatal crash that halts the entire system kinda thingy. so why a kernel panic?!

here is the text of what was sent to apple:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0034FC40): freeing free mbuf
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x1c723b08 : 0x128b5e (0x3bbeb8 0x1c723b2c 0x131bbc 0x0)
0x1c723b48 : 0x34fc40 (0x3db934 0x2e33bc00 0x1c723b78 0x2e276400)
0x1c723b68 : 0x34ffe7 (0x2e276400 0x312ecbf 0x6 0x2e276400)
0x1c723b88 : 0x6d9983 (0x2e276400 0xe 0x1c723bc8 0x1c723c38)
0x1c723bc8 : 0x1f7240 (0x3232004 0x2e276400 0x2 0x1c723c38)
0x1c723c28 : 0x227af5 (0x3232004 0x2 0x2e276400 0x41baa04)
0x1c723d68 : 0x232de5 (0x2e33bc00 0x0 0x0 0x2d503f0)
0x1c723dd8 : 0x3549e0 (0x32b8dd0 0x0 0x2e33bc00 0x4a0d604)
0x1c723e78 : 0x35932e (0x32b8dd0 0x4a0d604 0x3e38180 0x2e33bc00)
0x1c723ed8 : 0x3595ca (0x3e38180 0x0 0x37f46a0 0x0)
0x1c723f78 : 0x36d8e4 (0x39951f4 0x37f465c 0x37f46a0 0x0)
0x1c723fd8 : 0x197e7e (0x3996ef0 0x3996ef0 0x4a1000 0x1c723d0c) No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbfffe008
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.0)@0x6cf000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.6.1: Tue Mar 7 16:55:45 PST 2006; root: xnu-792.9.22.obj~1/RELEASE_I386

Model: iMac4,1, BootROM IM41.0039.B00, 2 processors, Intel Core Duo, 1.83 GHz, 1.5 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600, ATY,RadeonX1600, PCIe, 128 MB
Memory Module: DIMM0/BANK 0, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
Memory Module: DIMM1/BANK 1, 512 MB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x89), 103.2 (3.120.28.3)
Bluetooth: Version 1.7.3f4, 2 service, 1 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Built-in Ethernet, PPP (PPPoE), ppp0
Network Service: Bluetooth, PPP (PPPSerial), ppp1
Serial ATA Device: WDC WD1600JS-40NGB2, 149.05 GB
Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-846
USB Device: Built-in iSight, Micron, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Optical USB Mouse, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 1.5 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Hub in Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 250 mA
USB Device: Bluetooth HCI, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: IR Receiver, Apple Computer, Inc., Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA

other stuff--- intel virtualization (core duo has the intel-vt thing running and was active when parallels was running). i had several apps running (bon echo).

anyway going back to play with parallels now. will update when more news comes back. don't know though if i could figure out why this happened. i'd certainly like to know more about it. maybe will do a google on it.

UPDATE-1 well it happened again. well this time around was certainly my fault. i force quit parallels while it was running something. and i had iTunes running in the background etc. etc. i guess the system just had too many things on ram that it went crazy. anyway, there is an excellent forums for parallels here. seems my problems has occured before. sort of.

UPDATE-2 2nd panic log:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0019CAEF): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 0, Type
14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x2e4b0000, CR3: 0x00d0e000, CR4: 0x000026e0
EAX: 0x2e4afff0, EBX: 0x1c4d3764, ECX: 0x03223c04, EDX: 0x4524a65a
ESP: 0x2e4b0000, EBP: 0x1c4d36f4, ESI: 0x2e4afffe, EDI: 0x00000022
EFL: 0x00010202, EIP: 0x4524a672, CS: 0x00000014, DS: 0x0000001c

Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x1c4d3594 : 0x128b5e (0x3bbeb8 0x1c4d35b8 0x131bbc 0x0)
0x1c4d35d4 : 0x19caef (0x3c1340 0x0 0xe 0x3c10f8)
0x1c4d3684 : 0x197b53 (0x1c4d3698 0x1c4d36f4 0x4524a672 0x210048)
0x1c4d3690 : 0x4524a672 (0x210048 0x2e4a001c 0x312001c 0x1c)
0x1c4d36f4 : 0x1f720f (0x3959d80 0x3223c04 0x22 0x1c4d3764)
0x1c4d3754 : 0x20f9a0 (0x3223c04 0x22 0x2e4aff00 0x0)
0x1c4d3784 : 0x322e43d5 (0x3223c04 0x22 0x2e1c6100 0x0)
0x1c4d37c4 : 0x322e6a08 (0x3223c04 0x2e1c6100 0x3218a32 0x8864)
0x1c4d3814 : 0x322e6afc (0x3218804 0x2e1c6100 0x3218a32 0x8864)
0x1c4d3844 : 0x322e737a (0x3218804 0x2e1c6100 0x3000000 0x26ebd670)
0x1c4d3884 : 0x322001ea (0x35a9504 0x2e1c6100 0x2da2e80 0x1c4d38c8)
0x1c4d38b4 : 0x321feb89 (0x35a9504 0x2e1c6100 0xf5fc628 0xb36)
0x1c4d3904 : 0x321fee27 (0x3453a04 0x2e1c6100 0x1c4d3924 0x19ba56)
0x1c4d3964 : 0x321ff060 (0x3453a04 0x2e1c6100 0x1 0x3453a04)
0x1c4d39c4 : 0x1f7240 (0x3453a04 0x2e1c6100 0x304db94 0x1c4d39ec)
0x1c4d3a24 : 0x227af5 (0x3453a04 0x2 0x2e1c6100 0x37c9f04) Backtrace
continues...
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.nke.pppoe(1.4)@0x322e3000
dependency: com.apple.nke.ppp(1.4.1)@0x321fc000
com.apple.nke.ppp(1.4.1)@0x321fc000
com.parallels.kext.Pvsnet(2.1)@0x45248000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.6.1: Tue Mar 7 16:55:45 PST 2006;
root:xnu-792.9.22.obj~1/RELEASE

_I386

Model: iMac4,1, BootROM IM41.0039.B00, 2 processors, Intel Core Duo,
1.83 GHz, 1.5 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600, ATY,RadeonX1600, PCIe, 128 MB
Memory Module: DIMM0/BANK 0, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
Memory Module: DIMM1/BANK 1, 512 MB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x89),
103.2 (3.120.28.3)
Bluetooth: Version 1.7.3f4, 2 service, 1 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Built-in Ethernet, PPP (PPPoE), ppp1
Network Service: Bluetooth, PPP (PPPSerial), ppp0
Serial ATA Device: WDC WD1600JS-40NGB2, 149.05 GB
Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R UJ-846
USB Device: Built-in iSight, Micron, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Optical USB Mouse, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 1.5 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Hub in Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Pro Keyboard, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 250 mA
USB Device: Bluetooth HCI, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: IR Receiver, Apple Computer, Inc., Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA

* * *

anyway, i just emailed the two panic logs to parallels and hope they find a solution to it. :)

war journal 010 - Parallels 2.1 and Xen 3

parallels is a desktop virtual machine solution for Mac OS X. i installed it on my 17" Core Duo iMac with 1.5GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive. i was able to create a virtual environment for linux 2.6. i downloaded a gentoo 2006.0 mini cd. parallels was able to boot it with some minor adjustments: i set it so that the vm would use the physical (super)drive.

gentoo booted very well. though i did notice that my machine is designated as celeron-a, 2.7 ghz. i allocated 512MB ram to the machine. i have activity monitor in the background to monitor system performance. needless to say, i had 0% idle time on the real machine while using parallels.

parallels is registered compiled for intel. and i had several apps in the background including my browser which is designated as powerpc. this is bon echo.

anyway--- back to parallels-gentoo. i reached to command prompt the problem now is, parallels has the network as "bridge" now i have to figure out how to set the network card in that regard on gentoo. i'll try to do that tomorrow.

all in all, parallels is a very easy thing to setup. i did it under 5 minutes. so far so good.

in other news, was able to get xen to run domain 0 on my gentoo amd64 linux box. i have yet to compile a kernel for domain 1... which i'm having problems running. i think its just a matter of getting the configuration properly. i did notice a system slowdown (slightly sluggish running gnome on domain0), since the box is now running xen on domain 0, probably because everything passes through the hypervisor. when executing top on domain 0, you could see that the system had already lost ~256mb--- from 1024mb.

so far those have been my observations.

war journal 009 - xgl

Kororaa XGL live CD that demonstrates Xorg7 features can only be described as uber-wow!

i got the torrent from above, burned it (400+mb) then popped it into my centrino laptop. sadly, a kernel panic happened. don't know why. anyway, i popped it into a dell precision 340, pentium4 512mb machine with 32mb nvidia video card. and oh wow! wish i could have screenshots of that thing.

transparent window borders. workspace switching was supersmooth. even the animation of the windows and the border shading. i'll be studying how to migrate my gentoo64 at home to xorg7--- if kororaa is a sign of things to come, it is well worth it!

war journal 008

success!!!!

everything works now.

i can browse all the sites. i did some minor kernel tweeking. and some updates. and a reboot to gentoo-linux and here we are. all systems are operating normally. i can now get podcasts on my iTunes over at this imac.

:D

warjournal 007

ok. i finally found sometime to fix up my home network! as of this posting, i'm writing this on my imac which is connected to my gentoo box. my gentoo box provided local dhcp, masq, and firewall features.

everything ought to work.

but somehow... software like itunes, and system update won't work. heck, just pointing my browser to www.apple.com i get a dead link. as do mac dev center and many other sites.

i just don't know why. and still tracing the problem through my logs. could it be that these services use a different port? because my firewall blocks all other ports except ones that i allow of course. or something else?

i dunno. but i'll try to figure it out soon.

from a newbie: an intel imac

several posts ago, i mentioned getting a macbook pro. well i had that cancelled because i really needed a new computer and couldn't wait for a few more weeks. so instead, i picked up a brand new intel core duo-based iMac.

my imac is an 1.83 ghz, 17" lcd, 1.5gb ram, 160gb sata drive, with frontrow, isight, the mighty mouse, keyboard and a 2.1 harman/kardon sound stick 2.

right now i only have 512mb because the local apple center didn't have a 1gb stick and i was asked to bring the unit back this coming week of the 20th for it. no prob.

right now with only 512mb, i have no complaints. and this coming from a guy who demands more ram. nothing beats, more ram, i know.

this machine is my first mac. i've been a pc user since i was 10. i have been using pcs for 16 years. and this is the first time i have ever powered open a mac. or even touched one.

the white screen booted. and the local tech at the imac store walked me through the registration process. and introduced me to the dock, and stuff.

while i'm not new to unix boxes, the interface was kind of familiar. it was like kde. make a change, and the system would automatically adapt to it. wow. no need to select "apply" it just worked.

the mighty mouse is another device that took some getting used to. i'm used to feel the buttons on my mouse. here i had to adjust to the fact that all i needed to do was move the mouse to click. and plus the fact that i have at least 5 buttons all could be programmed to do a specific task.

wow.

when i brought the unit home and got it out of the box, all i had to do was plug the unit in, configure my pppoe stuff and off it went. of course it was the first time in years i turned to the help menu to figure things out. but yes it did work on the first try. all i needed was to put my user name and password for the dsl modem and off it went. all systems go.

now, if you're expecting to start working right away you'll probably could. osx has the browsers, a copy of office test drive, ilife and all the neat stuff. but being me, i was looking for xcode, particularly gcc. now i'm sure more mac users don't need gcc. thats fine. so i went to apple's developer center. being already a registered user long before i got the mac, i logged in and fetched xcode. ok, its an 800mb download, no big right? in this day and age of broadband internet, thats nothing. hell pirates on the net can fetch gigabytes of stolen movies with today's tech.

now, apple is great in offering xcode 2.2 as a download but they could at least provide a torrent file or at least enable people to resume download if they get cut off. i had to restart my download at least 5 times. i'm sure a lot of people would love to develop using xcode for the mac, if they could have the free development tools with less trouble.

now while downloading i was playing with the stuff. truly, osx just gets you to start working on your office, or personal stuff as soon as you plug in the unit and log in. you can't beat that kind of service. it just works.

i installed my camino browser, downloaded adobe acrobat reader (osx already has a pdf viewer and a browser) but i prefer my apps over the default stuff that goes with osx but for most users, everything just works on the fly--- flash, pdf viewer, java, python, vim, etc.

performance. i haven't ran any benchmarks on this machine. but at 512mb, i've yet to experience a system slowdown. or a chappy mp3 playback. i don't know about any rosetta stuff if any of my apps are working by running through rosetta. my browser, the camino is already universal binary. and ilife is already universal. so i really wouldn't know. but so far, i'm very very happy with its performance. and i expect better as the ram gets bigger this coming week.

there was a slight hitch though. i've noted in two incidence that the keyboard stopped working. i was merely browsing. what i did was remove and reattach the keyboard and it worked. so far thats my biggest complaint. and there is also that slow loading of a disc, which to me seemed to take longer than in the windows world. i don't know. it was just an impression, never actually timed it.

the superdrive without an eject button does take getting used to. coming from the pc world, our optical drives have buttons outside for physical eject.

another stuff that took a bit of getting used to is installing apps. to me the dmg thing is like mounting an iso image in linux--- via loop back but without the commandline stuff. i don't know how osx does it or if it does something similar. but its a good way of doing things.

i also miss wget, and other normal tools i'd have running on linux from the get go. but since this machine is more geared towards the general user, i'm sure apple didn't feel the need to include them as default stuff.

overall, being a newbie in the macworld, wow it blew me away. i have a windows laptop and a linux box at home. i'm utterly convinced that i'd be buying macs for my desktops and notebooks for years to come and that linux for me will be for my business server space. i love my mac. seriously. it just works.

war journal 006

to be honest i was going out of my mind on how to get the scroll to work on gentoo linux.

stupid me couldn't be bothered to google. eventually i did. it must have been hours.

when in doubt. google it. seriously.

anyway add these simple lines to your xorg config. simply look for the mouse section... and copy the lines below and scroll will be enabled after restarting X.

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"


last post i mentioned that i'd go into the home networking in greater detail. turns out that shorewall, now shoreline is a much more complex beast from the last time i played with it.

i suggest reading and following the instructions from gentoo's home router guide.

but my little change comes with the masquerader and firewalling features of shorewall.

so i emerged shorewall... then after playing with the configuration files... told me i needed to compile ipv6 with the kernel. so i modified make.conf... and included ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" then did an

emerge sync && emerge gentoo-sources

to get the latest stuff.

then after fetchign the sources, symlinked the new kernel directory to /usr/src/linux, copied the old .config to the new directory and added the ipv6 packages.

i was too lazy to read other stuff... and while the kernel was compiling, did an:

emerge -u --fetchonly world && emerge -u world

to update my system. turned out that i needed to make some changes to my net work config at /etc/conf.d/net --- because the new pppoe stuff had a more modular convention that threw away the old stuff.

when it was done, i rebooted, and the system was back online.

then i played with shorewall for the firewalling settings.

but i seem to have been locked out of the internet. so i turned it off.

oh well, i'm tired so i gave up on it... for the time being.

after getting the firewall to run, i'm considering migrating from my 6.8.x xorg-x11 and building modular xorg-x11... but after reading the gentoo modular migration how to it seemed it to be a dangerous transition.

war journal 005

gentoo on my amd64 machine really rocks.

seriously.

i was emerging kdelibs and serveral other stuff last night while playing a rented star wars ep3 dvd. and the machine had a load average between 2.0 and 3.0.

with 1gb of ram, the machine barely scratched the swap.

the machine was clearly responsive, no lags of any kind while playing the dvd and even running firefox on the side.

running windows xp on the same machine wouldn't give you the same quick response. i attribute it of course to the lack of 64-bit support on xp, as well as the fact i had compiled the entire system on 64-bit gentoo. and linux kernel's better memory management over windows.

i know this isn't a scientific benchmark... far from it! its just a comparison of user experience. more on the "feely" side of things. still at the end of the day... sometimes thats just as important.

more on the home networking stuff i've been building as well as getting the bloody scroll on x to work on the next blog.

war journal 004

so i took a break. a long one in building gentoo on my centrino-based notebook.

it just wasn't viable enough to do on only 256mb ram--- and 64 mb of it shared video.

ram matters. more of it the better.

anyway, i got a dsl connection for the house and started setting up an operation here. cleaned up the old library and turned it into my little home-office with some interesting plans for it.

now, with the adsl connection, i plugged in my gentoo linux.

sometimes, not compiling everything in the kernel is a good thing. the kernel isn't bloated with stuff i'll never use, hence, i normally never turn them on. and i avoid modules. in this case that backfired. you see, i never did emerge adsl, pppoe packages. not even compiled them in the kernel. hence, having the new adsl connection, i had no way of connecting to the internet to emerge packages.

i was forced to rebuild the gentoo system.

no problem. its not production. more experimental in nature. i quickly plugged in an old ide 40gb drive and uploaded data to it. and set about to rebuild gentoo. i booted into the new system and less than 8 hours later ( i couldn't give you the exact number because i slept through most of it and when i awoke, portage had stopped on an error when it reached 30 packages out of 189, that was 4 am). by 10am the following morning, xorg-x11+gnome was built and working.

a quick edit of the xorg.conf gave me 1024x768 resolution and my scroll mouse working properly.

it was time to get some stuff in. sure this would be used for application/web development but i still wanted officeorg installed and i did.

because sun-sdk (java 5) is masked--- i did a minor hack. i went and downloaded sun java 5 from sun and extracted it to a local directory and copied the entire thing as root to my /usr dir. java 5 is working on my machine.

as this was happening i was building firefox. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge =mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.1-r1

it of course worked. sort of. because after reading the amd64 how to, i should have built from binary to take advantage of flash. may be i'll find some other way around it.

as i'm writing this, i'm compiling mplayer to play some videos and dvds. (off topic: though i don't mind playing with mplayer, it does peeve that for me to watch my legitimately owned dvds in linux, in any distro, i have to go through hell, talk about a consumer right)

i love my amd64 and i love gentoo on it. i'll be doing some stuff with this machine. the fun part of gentoo is building things from scratch and learning about interesting hacks. its fun.

gentoo linux on amd64 is the ultimate experimental car. sometimes you get to play with it in productive ways. when this is done, i'm sure it will be one powerful system. and worth the trouble building.

Setting the Record Straight: Intel Macs

As I'm wrting this, I'm waiting for my macbook pro to be delivered. Now everyone's probably read one or two or three articles on how fast the new Macs are compared to their Power-processor siblings. Even weird comments that the new Macs may be more vulnerable to viruses now that they've transitioned to Intel. Its time to dispel all this!


What makes a computer a computer? You could probably say its the processor, stupid! well that may have been true in the past, (and i use may in the heaviest sense) but today's screaming babies, require a symphony of all the parts--- ram, hard drive, system bus i/o, graphics card and Operating System to produce a well built machine. yet we still get stuck with the ghz question. every machine with a faster clock speed is deemed good. yet we have seen benchmarks of amd64s out pacing intel p4s.


lets look at the mac, because thats what we've set out to do. is it really conceivable that the G5s are slow? what was all that hoopla that the g5 was the best processor on the planet (at least when it was born having won a microprocessor award way back when). Yet we have benchmarks from macworld and from so many others that say the dual-core cpus of the new iMacs best or at the least equal the performance of the single core G5 (a 64-bit machine).


its hard to compare apples-to-apples when Core Duo is a 32-bit, dual core processor and the G5 is a 64-bit, single core machine (on the iMac). Not to mention, Core Duo is x86 and G5 is PowerPC. they're two very distinct species.


We can also argue that OSX for the G5 was compiled to run both 32-bit and 64-bit code while for OSX for x86 (at least the core duo version) was compiled with dual-core and 32-bit code. If you've ever tried to build your own Operating System i.e. compiled Gentoo Linux on multiple platforms (AMD64 and Intel) you would know that you can optimize for each distinct processor family using the C compiler you've got. Hence that benchmarks comparing the two machines are not very scientific.


That said, we can argue that user perception is always superior. After all, does the average faithful care if you have better floating point performance on one processor than the other or that you run on an Intel rather than a PowerPC? Steve Jobs said it in last year's developer conferrence (2005), it's OSX that people love. Its what Mac users love about their macs. the Hardware underneath makes it possible for Apple to give the user a distinct, powerful, user experience because they don't have to worry that multiple hardware must work with OSX like Microsoft does.


[off topic: Which leads to the question whether OSX will ever run on other intel machines. it probably wouldn't because the cost of maintaining code for different drivers would drive apple to be like microsoft. ]


So what do these benchmark tell us? That the Core Duo machine will equal or slightly exceed the performance of a single core G5, at least in raw speed. hence that iMac G5 you bought before christmas, is still good and will still do the job, two years down the road. That Quad Mac is still the fastest kid on the block. That these new machines, will just give life to people who need new mobile macs and that the good stuff is yet to come. OSX still rules.


As for viruses and such now that OSX has moved to Intel, viruses, trojans and so many other security breaches are Operating System-level problems. They're vulnerabilities in Windows, in Linux, in Unix and yes, OSX. It got nothing to do with which processor your OS is running on.


People write in windows viruses and such because a) a lot of machines are on windows so more people have access to them, hence the probability of more trash, b) windows was never designed for the network in the first place so security wasn't a major issue that they had to address which they are doing so only now, c) its much more difficult but not impossible to exploit vulnerabilities in Unixes like Linux and OSX and when we say vulnerabilities we're not limiting ourselves to operating system/kernel level flaws but applications as well (which should be separated btw).


i ordered the new macbook pro because i need a new machine, a unix based machine that will let me do my work in peace and in full power as well as have good multimedia features like iTunes, which gentoo doesn't have sadly. people who need new machines now would probably get them but those who can wait probably should for the better toys sure to come (we speculate by reading the Intel roadmap which tells us what ought to come in the next few months).


So what does Intel on Macs mean for us ordinary people? its OSX that makes the difference. so unless you buy a Mac, on Intel or Power--- nothing.