I got a commit bit for the gcc subversion repository yesterday, and exercised it for the first time today with this commit. Even though the number of patches that we have for gcc is very small, doing the commit beats heck out of begging on the mailing list for someone to commit for us 
Archive for the 'computers' Category
Only a little late - it has been promised to arrive in the next couple of weeks for 4 years now, Gary released libtool-2.2 today. Thanks Gary!
One of the changes that we made in libtool-1.5.26 and cvs HEAD was to change the archive_expsym_cmds on darwin. With leopard the older method of creating the output and then using nmedit to reduce the exported symbols seems to work, but the dynamic linker then sometimes fails to load the resulting object. Both this apache bug and this gnome bug are fixed by using ld’s -exported_symbols_list flag instead. I am glad the change made it into 1.5.26
Of course the reason that libtool did not use -exported_symbols_list in the first place is that Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 do not support it, and nmedit did the job just fine up to 10.5. Apple seems to have allowed nmedit to bitrot, it no longer does the same job that it did in 10.4. Filing a bug that you know in advance is just going to be closed with “use ld’s -exported_symbols_list flag” seems kind of pointless, but I guess I should do it anyway.
I released libtool-1.5.26 yesterday and Gary released 2.1b the day before. With any luck 2008 will be the year the 1.5 branch dies forever.
People seem to still be downloading MySQLControlCenter , 1-2 people per day, this is unfortunate as I have not looked at it for years, and MySQL A.B. have abandoned it. Why not try these instead?
Not that I have tried either one, but they can’t be worse than an unmaintained binary that some random person (me) ported to Qt/mac years ago and then forgot about…
I have now installed leopard GM on my macbook, so far things are going well. But the new X11 does not appear to be as popular as I had assumed.It does have some pretty major bugs:
- Fullscreen does not work (I never really used fullscreen, so it is not an issue for me)
- If you don’t have a three button mouse, you may have some issues, modifier keys do not work.
- xinerama does not work.
- The Applications menu has issues.
- Broken with spaces (I never really expected that people would expect this to work, but they do)
- xterm does not do unicode
Now, this is disappointing, but remember that people have been complaining for quite a while that Apple’s X11 is ancient, and have been requesting that Apple upgrade to the latest x.org. They did that, and it was a major change, so there are bound to be bugs. Would it be better I wonder to have all the old known bugs forever?
The integration with launchd has thrown a few people also. The DISPLAY environment variable is set when you log in, it points to a socket that is controlled by launchd. As soon as any application accesses the socket X11 will launch if it was not already running. So you can double-click on an X11 app in the finder, and it will start X and run. Pretty darn cool. People who set DISPLAY in their login shells without testing if it was already set have had issues.
Ben Byer has not yet learned that he is not required by his contract to provide help and support on mailing lists, so he has been busy answering questions and being polite, even with all the vitriol on the x11-users list, when he could have just stuck with dealing with formally reported bugs. Some seem to believe that he’s the head of an X11 team within Apple, I’m sure that he just wishes he could devote more of his time to X11.
Today there was more friendly discussion, Ben has asked for help and patches, and there was someone looking for the sources to xterm so that they could fix the bug that bothered them (and then give Ben the patch so that everyone could benefit), now if everyone with a pet bug would download the source and fix their issue we would have a better X11 in a much shorter time.
Apple has committed their changes to upstream git, and hope to eventually do all development in the freedesktop.org repository, with bugs also at the freedesktop bugzilla (open bugs, none of this closed radar crap), so I have nothing to complain about. There are bugs, some serious, if one really bothers me, I will attempt to track it down and fix it. If a bug bothers you, why not do the same.
- http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00201.html
- http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00214.html
Update:
Ben took off his Apple employee hat and made a private release of sources and an Xquartz binary that has a number of bug fixes. How’s that for service!
I have this LCD monitor that is a little broken, it works fine for digital DVI input, but does not work at all for analog. It used to work, but just after the warranty expired, it stopped working. The only computer that I had with digital DVI output is my macbook, and I have occasionally used it as a second screen for that, but the macbook lives in the living room and is rarely in the same room as the slightly broken monitor, so on Monday I ordered the cheapest video card I could find with digital DVI output from TigerDirect, and it arrived yesterday.
I immediately put it in the machine, hooked up the monitor and booted into my Fedora Core 6 linux. The second monitor showed nothing. Before I go on, here is a real quick HOWTO for other systems:
Mac OS X:
1) Plug in monitor.
2) There is no (2). Mac OS X will detect the monitor and use it, allowing you to change the settings etc. in System Preferences if you desire.
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic (the only windows system I’ve ever tried this with).
1) Plug in monitor.
2) Find the control panel for displays, and set it up to use the second screen.
Both pretty easy, though I prefer the Mac OS X way of automatically using the monitor by default. It is a rare occasion that one would plug in a monitor and not want to use it.
So, this is linux, no problem, there is a ‘Display’ menu item under System -> Administration. So I go there, set the nice GUI options for dual head, and reboot. What do I get? Not only does the second monitor not come up, but the first one goes to 800×600 resolution. Hmm. A bit of messing about later, and x.org starts but both monitors are now blank. Grr. At this point I googled (on another computer, of course, because the linux machine was effectively headless). And I discover that the auto configuration thing had added a ‘Screen 1′ line to the Device section of xorg.conf. So I sshed in to the linux machine and edited xorg.conf to remove that line (and clean up all the other crap that the linux magic GUI configuration tools had added), and finally got it working.
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard1"
...
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"
Screen 1 # This was bad, because the card only has one monitor attached to it
EndSection
So HOWTO for linux:
1) plug in monitor.
2) cry
3) goto 2.
Addendum:
If you need help setting up a dual head on your system there is a decent page at the gentoo wiki