Jessica and I at the christmas santa parade.
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Well, I was not sure that there would be a source release with 10.5, in fact I had convinced myself that there would not be any non GPLed sources released, but they are here.Thanks Kevin!
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!
Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is now available. In case you hadn’t noticed it comes with a slightly newer X11! Three cheers for Ben Byer!
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
I spent most of the afternoon listening to the UPS beeping, waiting a while, shutting down the computers, waiting for the power to come back on, powering everything up, and repeating. Manitoba Hydro seems to be like its counterparts all over North America, and is not able to deliver electricity reliably to consumers. Why? In the time we spent in Japan, power went out a couple of times, due to earthquakes and typhoons, never for more then a few minutes. I think that in Japan the power companies inspect power lines regularly and remove branches from trees that are encroaching, and ensure that everything is ship-shape. I guess that here, there is no inspection done, failure is expected. Consumers here seem to think that it is normal for power to go out. No blame is assigned.
Similarly, last week, MTS had an outage for their DSL in my suburb, a phone call to them resulted in an estimate of “between 30 minutes and a few hours” before it was fixed. The person on the other end of the phone exhibited no surprise and expressed no apology for the outage. I don’t know what I expected, I’m only paying through the nose for my DSL line!
This attitude that outages are “normal” from both the utilitiy companies and consumers is depressing. 
I decided it was time to clean up my home network, so I blew the dust off a 12 year old compaq, and downloadedOpenBSD 4.1, wrote it to a CD, and installed it, along with a couple of NICs. All was good, I then looked at the patches that I would have to install and realized that I would have to compile them. This made me a little sad, as there was no way the old compaq could manage it.
So, with the wonders of NFS, I mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj from my linux machine to the openbsd one, and I downloaded the sources. I then downloaded the trial version of VMware Fusion and intstalled it on my macbook. I started VMware and installed OpenBSD on it. You know where I am going with this, right? Yep, I NFS mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj in the VMware image on my macbook and built the updates there, when it was all done, I installed on the compaq. In case you’re wondering why I did not simply install VMware server on the linux machine, I’ll tell you. The macbook has 4 times the RAM and twice as many cores as the linux machine, it is only deficient in disk space (which the linux box has in abundance).
Which gave me an OpenBSD firewall and router. Yay! Of course, that was not enough. I have used dyndns.org for a while, and have been happy enough with it. I also subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, and finally, this year, decided to use fetchmail, dovecot and a custom Python script to deal with the mailing list subscriptions.
So, all mailing lists (and stuff marked as possible spam) ends up going through fetchmail and onto my linux box, where it gets sorted into IMAP mailboxes. All very neat and tidy, but it does mean that, in order to check my mailing list mail, I have to connect to the linux machine on port 143. This means setting up ssh tunnels when I am not at home. It is not hard, but is a bit of a pain just to check list email.
Between that, and IPv6 being in the news a little lately, I decided to get an IPv6 subnet. I went to go6.net and got a /48 subnet. I installed their client on the OpenBSD router, and viola, it “just worked”, IPv6 autoconf gave all the machines behind the router IPv addresses. Yay 2!
That’s not all! Can’t have IPv6 without reverse DNS working, right? So, a quick google turned up freedns.afraid.org, and I used their services to add AAAA records for a number of my computers! Now, I can reach individual machines while away from home without having to use ssh tunnels! Or can I? Well, no, actually, because I set the OpenBSD Packet Filter to block most incoming traffic, including IPv6. Oh well 
Then, being a little obsessed, I decided to make everthing on the local network resolvable. So I started named, and made a zone file for the internal network, so now, as well as the entries in /etc/host, I can rely on my nameserver to resolve names of the half dozen or so comupters running in the house… Of course, I could remember the IP addresses for them anyway, so you might wonder what the point is.
Having done all that, I also wonder what the point is. There was not really a necessity to do any of it. The $20 netgear router was working okay. As far as my wife can tell the internal network has not changed (she never has, and probably never will, consciously connect from one internal machine to another, so the whole nameserver thing is pretty meaningless for her), and access to the “internet” is the same as it ever was.
It looks like I set up a pretty home network, but, perhaps wasted my time Oh, well, I learned stuff, right?