Alan Perry's Blog

Wednesday January 02, 2008

Updates on the MacBook and MythTV fronts

Well, the end of the holiday break is almost here and I figured that I would give an update to the ongoing OpenSolaris on MacBook and MythTV on OpenSolaris sagas.

OpenSolaris on MacBook

Well, it is mostly up and running.

I got the wired networking problem figured out. Added yet another PCI ID to postinstall script for the Yukon ethernet driver from Marvell (and patched up the checksums in the package so pkgadd wouldn't puke) and it worked. Having working networking makes installation of a lot of other things go much easier.

Don't have wifi working. Since they made my Mac Mini, Apple has switched to a Broadcom part, which is even harder to get a driver for than the Atheros wifi part in the Mac Mini. I don't need wifi working on the MacBook in the lab, but it would be nice to have when I give an OpenSolaris talk at WSU in a couple of weeks (A couple of weeks? Yikes!)

Audio is also not working. I installed OSS and it didn't even recognize that the system had audio hardware, even though the hdaudio driver was attached to it. After I removed the OSS package, the audio apps go through the motions of playing, but no sound comes from the speakers (or headphone jack). I guess I don't need audio for now.

One weird thing that happened after I installed build 80 was that the hald service was not enabled out of the box. After I enabled the service, everyone associated with it worked fine. Maybe as I start installing build 80 on the other systems in my lab, I might find that OpenSolaris has some new defaults as far as what services are enabled.

Tomorrow, I am gonna copy over an OpenSolaris build environment and workspace and trying building the system.

Just have to get used to only one mouse button!

MythTV on OpenSolaris

I am almost back to where I was months ago when I had all of the code compiled and was just starting to run and test it.

However, I really didn't want to be the guy responsible for a MythTV on OpenSolaris port. I just wanted to make a set-top box out of my Mac Mini. So, I kept putting the porting work off, hoping that someone would step forward to take my initial work and run with it. The problem was, no longer how long I waited, trying to convince myself that there was someone else out who really want to work on the port, no one else stepped forward. Since I had a bunch of people asking how the work was going, I decided to go ahead and finish the myself.

So, getting back to that "almost back to where I was" remark? Well, after meeting one of the Sun guys who works on the compilers and tools last spring, I decided to switch from building the code with GCC to using Sun Studio instead. Unfortunately, the MythTV codebase is full of gcc-isms.

After spending the last couple of weeks, making small changes in the code for the Sun Studio compiler (for example, unlike GCC, it doesn't like use of the ?: operator without the second argument). The big problem right now is that I am trying to resolve a conflict between a compiler setting that I think may correct a bunch of warnings that I am seeing and an incompatible setting in the version of the QT3 package that I got from blastwave. I am also trying to figure out how to convince the MythTV configure script mechanism to let the program building Makefiles that I want to link them with the Sun mlib library. If one enables mlib, the libraries get built presuming that mlib will be linked in, but the program Makefiles don't get the -lmlib linker argument.

So, that's where things are at. I'll posted another update in a week or so. I promise.

And I promise to keep this blog more up-to-date. Honest. It will happen this time.

( Jan 02 2008, 12:45:48 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]