Re: Powerpc (mac-G4) -essentially broken
Thanks for the quick reply, Ben!
Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> >
> >First is that the sounds in KDE are white noise. I've seen
> >posted bug report about dmasound_pmac not honouring
> >byte-reversal requests, and I guess this is it.
>
> No. It's not the kernel driver who should do byte swapping.
> The userland app should do it. Most userland apps appear to
> be quite broken in their use of the audio drivers APIs though,
> some of them just consider the output is little endian, some
> are even worse and configure the driver for little endian
> while actually sending native endian samples to it.
>
Agreed! That's why my example programs all work correctly (actually they all
generate native-format ints anyway 8-)
>
> dmasound_pmac will reject a setting of 16 bits little endian
> and return a proposed value of 16 bits big endian. If the app
> cannot cope with that it should fail, not output noise. I
> think more recent versions of KDE sound servers have been
> fixed though. Maybe the one in sid ?
>
The launch date for woody in the lab is this summer (ready or not 8-), so I was
rather hoping this would get fixed as I'm not *too* keen on mixing sid and woody
debs (we actually have sid on our research assistant's machines, but they are
intel and work fine -- better than woody/ppc -- but probably only because I know
my way around PC hardware better and got to specify my favourite peripheral
cards when they were purchased)
>
> >Unfortuantely, I'm trying to run an audio programming lab,
> >and this is making things difficult to say the least 8-)
>
> Well... don't use a broken sound server ;) You can still
> directly talk to /dev/dsp. But I really think KDE sound
> server was fixed.
>
All my apps talk to /dev/dsp, or esd (I'm trying to give it up). It's just
things like the KDE stuff which use the sound server. Maybe I should just
disable sound in KDE. Or maybe the problem will disappear after a few weeks as
a testing deb changes?
>
> >Secondly, the # key has disappeared. Shift-3 just goes beep
> >(actually "shhhhhhh") on the konsole, or produces a £ in
> >emacs. The keyboard has no # (or delete (as opposed to
> >backspace), for that matter). Thank you very, very much
> >Apple. Perhaps they don't write C programs! Is there a
> >*preferred* workaround for this? Maybe an xmodmap placed
> >somewhere? Maybe I'm needing a keymap I don't know about?
> >(shift-3 is still # on the console logins, however)
>
> Well, Apple has nothing to do with broken XFree keymap. That's
> weird though as I don't have this problem here. What keymap do
> you use ? Is your kernel configured for ADB or linux keycodes ?
>
I don't think the keymap *is* broken. The 3 key has a £-sign on it, and no #.
There is *no* key on the keyboard with a # on it, nor is there a delete key. I
think I'm using Linux keycodes (yaboot.conf has append="video=ofonly
keyboard_sends_linux_keycodes=1" [or whatever the incantation is] in it) When
prompted about the keyboard for X, I said gb and it seemed to like that.
>
> >Thridly (out of two 8-): the mouse crashes when exiting KDE.
> >I've not seen this in a bug report. It's a USB one and works
> >fine until you exit KDE. The remapping of F11 and F12 as the
> >two mouse buttons works fine too (just left the stuff in from
> >Potato). I know there's a way to go yet before Woody gets
> >release, but I wanted to be ready 8-)
>
> What do you mean by "crash" ? It stops responding ? You can get
> it back after killing & relaunching it or not ? Could be a gpm
> configuration problem...
>
GPM is not installed, as we really only ever use X and it gave me grief a long
time ago on intel platforms, so I tend to do without it. Should I be running
GPM and feeding the XServer from that? I think I understand how that works, but
it seemed a bit complicated to me.
The mouse locks up, but the keyboard is fine. KDE exits cleanly, it seems.
When kdm comes back, I can tab down to Shutdown, and select reboot using the
keyboard, but the mouse is frozen (pointer in the middle of the screen); it's
just that it isn't the Unix way to reboot after each session 8-)
Hard to test the kdm think because the NIS is down at the moment: errors
everywhere! However, I killed the kdm screen with crtl-alt-bspace, when it
eventually restarted, the mouse seems to be alive again. This is currently
taking several minutes though, because of all the no-NIS problems (this morning
it might have been faster).
BTW, same behaviour starting enlightenment. But as I said, I'm trying to give
it up 8-)
Nick/
>
> Ben.
>
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