Since I've gotten my X40, I've been conversing with markus@ about OpenBSD support since he also owns one. I've since ported a driver for the TCPA/TPM security chip and one thing I always wanted to do was hook into the blue "Access IBM" button to run xautolock -locknow for one-touch locking. The tpb program can hook into this button on Linux, but all of the work is handled by an NVRAM driver in the Linux kernel. Apparently the X40's BIOS toggles various bits in the CMOS RAM (NVRAM) when certain buttons are pushed, like the volume buttons, ThinkLight, and of course, the blue "Access IBM" button.

Last night I started looking into making an NVRAM driver for OpenBSD, which turned out to be relatively easy, since the i386's clock code already has functions for reading and writing to the NVRAM. I put together a simple driver to provide user-land read-only access to the NVRAM through a /dev/nvram device:

Continue reading 322 words...

I got a new Cisco T1 router with enough flash memory to run an IOS version that supports IPv6. I reconfigured my network a tad and now the Cisco does the freenet tunnel and passes traffic for the rest of the machines.

Apparently the neteng group at DLS is supposed to start working on IPv6 soon. Hopefully I can get native IPv6 routed here and rt.fm can support it as well.

This morning, I woke up early and stumbled over to the computer. My VT510 was blank, which is never good. It either means I lost power or rt.fm is down. I hit a key and see this scrolled over and over:

Which all stop at around 5:30. sd1 is the new /mirror drive which I just upgraded to a month or so ago. After a shower I went to DLS with the old /mirror drive to bring the server back up, but my keycard wouldn't open any of the doors at the NOC. Maybe i'm being fired…

Continue reading 342 words...

I gave up on making the kernel emulate right-clicking from the keyboard since X11 already has all of this built in. Someone on the ppc@ list hinted at binding PointerButton2 and Pointer_Button3 with xmodmap.

This is basically what I'm using now, to have middle and right mouse buttons through the Apple/flower key and the square 'Enter' key, respectively:

Continue reading 89 words...

Someone on the ppc@ list posted about a CVS tree containing drivers for a lot of macppc hardware that hasn't been committed to NetBSD yet. I took his snapper and i2s drivers and whacked them into shape to link into OpenBSD. The snapper0 and audio0 drivers attach, but the kernel panics in the DMA code when trying to play audio.

My iMic finally arrived, so I kind of stopped working on making the internal snapper work. With functioning sound, I've been able to boot into OpenBSD at work. konq-e sucks, though, but Mozilla doesn't work so I'm stuck with it for now.

So now that X works on my PowerBook, I've been running OpenBSD when I get home from work to continue making other things work so I can eventually run OpenBSD all the time. The awacs audio driver seems to be for older chipsets and doesn't support the new "snapper" chip on my machine, so I'll need to port something from Linux or use an external USB audio system. Neither sound appealing.

While playing around in OpenBSD, I've found the keyboard to be very annoying. At random times a key will appear to be stuck and continue repeating until some other keys are mashed to get it to stop. I was rdesktop'd into a Windows machine when this happened with the Enter key, so after clicking on the Start Menu, it immediately selected "Shut down" and then hit Enter on the confirmation screen. Luckily the drop down was on "Reboot" and not "Shut down"

Continue reading 438 words...

I finally got X working on my PowerBook!

After reviewing Linux kernel and XFree86 code for weeks, hacking the hell out of radeon_base.c adding random debugging everywhere, searching mailing lists for clues, and lots of guessing, I finally did the make && startx that resulted in a clean display coming up.

Continue reading 164 words...

Someone e-mailed me asking for a review of my 15" PowerBook, so here she be. I tried to write it like a magazine columnist, using many "colorful words" and over-analyzing everything.

Continue reading 1,234 words...