Bored? You know your system inside out? Everything is just working? No more hacking required if not screwing up the system on purpose yourself? Even the unstable and experimental branches of your distro don’t bare challenges anymore? Here’s the solution: Switch $ARCH(tm)!

OK, it wasn’t that bad. This is my first entry using BloGTK (No, no Fink involved) under Ubuntu / Gnome 2.10 (Spare it, for this one I’ve been accused of heresy already). After some time figuring out what is needed to run Linux on a PowerBook properly, it’s up and running pretty well. Of course, there’s room for improvement but my basic needs are covered. Here’s the progress so far:

• Custom Kernel for you just can’t run a stock-kernel, can you? Current kernels don’t support sound on new PowerBooks. Benjamin posted a patch to the debian-powerpc mailing list which is included in 2.6.12-rc3 which is what is running here currently. Unfortunately, CPUfreq refused to build. Colin released two patches fixing that issue. On a side note: if you plan to do without an initial ramdisk, make sure that besides the filesystem drivers of your root partition the IDE drivers are compiled in.. that one took me a while.
• With the patches mentioned above, CPU frequency scaling works flawlessly. Testing on the battery life to come.
• Trackpad. Current PowerBooks seem to use USB for the keyboard and trackpad so the ADB drivers won’t work anymore. The keyboard works fine, for the Trackpad, Johannes wrote a driver, providing kernel-module and an userspace driver. It’s a little bit bitchy from time to time and has some limitations (no clicking by tapping the pad or scrolling), but works fine besides that. There’s also a working USB mouse here, just in case.
• USB and Firewire storage devices work out-of-the-box. The gnome volume manager seems to have problems handling multiple devices at once, though.
• My D-Link DWL-122 WiFi USB stick works fine using the latest linux-wlan-ng drivers, hotpluggable and WEP enabled. Screw Broadcom.
• Wired connectivity required? Internal ethernet works out-of-the-box.
• The special keys are also working mostly, that is volume, mute and eject using pbbuttons. Brightness control does not but I haven’t looked into this, yet.
• For nvidia won’t release drivers for ppc, I’m stuck with x.org’s nv driver. No 3D acceleration and therefore no advanced composite eyecandy, at least not with decent speed. Connecting an external monitor might also be a no-go.

Putting some problems with uber-proprietary stuff aside, the PowerBook turns out to be a formidable platform to run GNU/Linux on if you have some basic knowledge. Well, enough for now, more to come..

Reading this week’s DWN was fun and for I’m lazy, I just quote the fun part:

“GPL Programs belong in non-free? Adrian Bunk noted that all programs licensed under the GNU GPL have to go into non-free, since the GPL license itself must not be modified.”

Can Adrian be serious? How many beer would one have to drink? I have to admit, I had to read the post a couple of times before it clicked. Actually, it didn’t really click. No enlightenment.

(Before I go any further, please note that Adrian didn’t request anything, he just pointed at a possible problem with the DFSG. I’m well aware of that.)

While this might be a interesting topic to hang ones mind on (in certain conditions caused by consuming various substances), at least from a philosophical point of view, after performing the most basic reality check the bleak truth brakes free (hopefully!): This is ridiculous, big time, IMO. I mean I know know a bunch of hardline FOSS fellows who wouldn’t have that much applications left for they simply refuse to use non-free.

Can more freedom actually mean that you pull the ropes around your wrists a little tighter yourself?

If you ask me, such things have nothing to do with Open Source, Free Software Guidelines, “Free as in free speech” or anything else that claims to be about freedom in any other way. This is fundamentalism.

This thread on debianforum.de (german) brings up related topics. It started with someone pointing to Torvalds’ statement that OSS is alright as long as it’s fun. And it went from there.. GNU, Stallman, Jesus, scientists in fascist germany and so on. While it’s an interesting read and there are valid points on both sides, I’m a little worried about the course such non-existential discussions, that started with babbling about the fun of a notorious nonpolitical being, seem to take sometimes.

Like I’ve written here, Finder’s lack of FTP-uploading capability bothers me. KDE’s FTP-KIO-Slave enables me to do the following:

• Browse to the appropriate directory on my FTP-server using Konqueror.
• Open the desired file with Kate, KDE’s Advanced Text Editor.
• Edit the file and save it back to the FTP-server. Directly. No local copy and manual FTP-uploading required.

This is a very handy feature and I’m somewhat used to it. Is there any feasible way of doing so using OS X? Will Tiger’s Finder support such functionality or at least FTP-uploading? Guess I’ll have to wait and see. Anyhow, I’m open to suggestions and no, I don’t have SSH access to my FTP-site.

Well, this was was the perfect example of the usual Sunday. Getting up at 10 am, having one enormous cup of coffee, some breakfast and spending the rest of the morning on my couch reading Questionable Content and other web comics mentioned in Jeph’s comments while listening to web radio.

At some point I felt the urge to test the PowerBook’s recording capabilities using Garage Band, but after some, well, bad quality recording I gave up my home recording ambitions for today and focused on guitar only.

With my fingertips getting sore I decided to give them a break and sifted through a pile of unread books. I have the shelf-filling habit to buy at least one book when coming near a bookstore and for I seem to pass bookstores more often then I actually take the time to read some of that stuff, the shelves are occupied and I moved on piling them on the floor.

Anyhow, today’s pick was The Man Who Turned into Himself by David Ambrose which turns out to be as strange as the 1st book I read of him, The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk (back then I read the german translation called Epsilon). Like with the first novel it seems a bit too weird, but it worked out with Epsilon and so I guess this one will, too.

In between I messed with the kitchen cooking some pasta. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, some spices and herbs. Dead simple and very tasty.

Errr, well. Another Sunday survived. Great..

So I grabbed my guitar just to find it so out of tune. My tuner’s batteries are empty and somehow I really can’t trust my ears today (I’d probably consider just to stay away from making music then..). versiontracker to the rescue! a quick search for ‘tuner’ revealed Pefect Pitch, a really nice piece of software or as one comment puts it:

“This is a freeware application you actually want to pay for.”

I really like it if my application-needs get satisfied that easily. Kudos to the net and all those busy programmers!