July 2003 Archives

Gonna be heading up to Montreal for the International Fireworks Competition and then heading off to Vegas for DefCon. Expect pictures and updates sometime around DefCon; if I don't have net access there, something's gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I've updated the cheesetracker tarball. It's built with Qt 3.2.0, and also has some library path fixes so that it will properly load on systems that don't have libraries that look exactly like mine (ie, there was a bug in the install_name for a couple of the libraries inside the app bundle).

Please give it a shot and let me know if it works any better for you. There are still a couple of known issues:

• You must delete ~/.cheesetracker_QT every time you plan on running it. It doesn't properly read it's configuration files for some reason, and spins out of control.
• Loading IT files doesn't work correctly. It seems to be an endian issue of some kind, but I'm not sure. XM and S3M files work just fine.

Qt 3.2.0 is out. You can get it from the usual place (including Qt/Mac!). Looks like the Qt/Mac Free page hasn't been updated yet, though. (A more detailed changelog is here.)

Well, I got Scribus kind of working on Qt/Mac (with the help of David Leimbach, who figured out how to get the application bundle's path at runtime...). It still needs work, but it looks like it will be possible to make it usable.

The MetaPKG core team was interviewed by MacNews.de recently. (The babelfish translation is quite hilarious -- "information about postage run gene exchange"??)

I had to post this, if nothing else to annoy my emacs-using friends. =)

<landonf>    I'm still not entirely sure how I'm supposed to debug it
<Atalhlla>   Kev : Shoosh :P
* RangerRick misses the days when "eight megs and continuously
             swapping" was an insult.  now it's an embedded
             platform.  =D
<kevinvv>    landonf, it's its own debugger =)
<landonf>    kevinvv: yeah. fucking scary.
<kevinvv>    landonf, it's its own Batman too.
<Atalhlla>   geh.  The only thing I did on emacs was play tetris...

I've just finished up a new song, called "Moone". It's got a kind of lazy chip-tune sound, I think it turned out pretty nice. Feedback is welcome, be it bad or good. ;)

If, for some godforsaken reason, you want to run KDE in X11 as your GUI instead of the MacOSX Finder, it's possible!

gecko2 gave me this tip on IRC, I haven't tried it yet but I plan to when I get the chance.

First, the current Fink packages don't make a "kdm" file for pam, so copy /etc/pam.d/login to /etc/pam.d/kdm (this will be fixed in a future release).

Next, edit /etc/ttys and change the console line to:

console "/usr/X11R6/bin/xinit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc" vt100 on secure window=/sw/bin/kdm

You'll also need to turn on verbose booting, otherwise SystemStarter leaves the window server open when it finishes, and KDM can't get a login. To do so, run "sudo nvram boot-args=-v". That will update your OpenFirmware to boot in verbose mode (to do it just once, hold down command-v while booting).

Then, reboot, and (in theory), you should have the KDE login manager asking for your username and password, instead of the normal desktop or login prompt from OSX.

Update: it didn't work for me. I rather like my Mac interface, so I'm not terribly interested in digging into it and finding out why, but I'm sure there's some way to make it work...

Here is what I posted to my earlier Qt/Mac blog entry on the status of Qt/Mac-based KDE, for those interested:

Just an update since people keep posting here and don't necessarily look at my main blog page, here's what's going on.

1. I've been working over the last week to get all of my KDE-on-MacOSX-on-X11 patches back into mainline. Most of these patches will affect the Qt/Mac build as well (they're not really specific to X11, just general mac-related build fixes). I have one last admin/ patch that needs going in, and a few other misc bits in kdelibs, and a bunch of patches still for kdebase, but it's manageable.

2. Once at least kdelibs and kdebase are buildable out of CVS without needing patches, Sam (Magnuson) is gonna be working on bringing his patches up-to-date with current CVS. They currently don't apply cleanly, and even after attempting to rework them, there are still issues with the 4 months of changes that have occurred since he did his initial work. While he's doing that I'll be working on merging the rest of my stuff (kdeartwork/kdeedu/etc.) into KDE CVS.

3. THEN there will be a chance for binaries. :)

My guess is it'll probably be at least a few weeks before even the barest support is possible, and a month or two before things generally work nicely. So for now you can stop asking. :)

I'll be sure to post to my blog whenever any progress is being made. For now there's a lot of busywork getting things upstream before the more interesting parts can happen.