Ronald S. Bultje

As previously, the newly released 0.1.0-d update (patch, tarball) contains support for two more firmware versions, those with sha1sum c6c94dd77b864f8bd231abf3cb2de4c9d139e1bf and sha1sum 01e291d529e7c18deea2eba252d18114e096276e (provided in the latest OS X 10.4.8). This should make it work again for everyone.

If your firmware is not recognized, please do not just say that it is not recognized. Please send me a copy of your firmware file so I can make it work. Eventually, I hope to be able to redistribute the relevant part of the firmware so I don’t need to jump through those hoops, but right now, this is the only way that I can think of to make it work without getting in big legal trouble.

Dobey, you have some interesting remarks. However, in the end, you are wrong. You are saying that not DRM, but iTunes (or insert some other term here) prevents me from using my music the way I want it to. This is blatantly false.

A gun is meant to shoot people. Not to be used as a teddybear replacement, try it, your son will shoot himself eventually. Similarly, DRM can be argued to not be restrictive, but that is purely theoretical. For all practical purposes, mostly due to political blabla such as laws preventing circumvention and explicit denials to remove DRM from said music, DRM is restrictive. I cannot copy my iTunes-purchased Britney Spears song to my mp3 player because of DRM and its politics. This is not just a flaw in iTunes, but a flaw in the business model. A serious flaw which makes us worry about DRM and its surrounding politics.

And now don’t say that it is not because of DRM, because without those politics, DRM would not be pressed upon us by the industry and would thus not exist.

(See here for the full story so far.) I’ve uploaded a new Apple iSight driver (0.1.0-c, patch) this morning.

• This new release supports the iMac20, and possibly other iMacs (please let me know!), thanks to a contribution by Sylvain Foret. Those devices use a slightly odd format identifier, which is different from the one on the Macbook cameras, even though the byte-format of the camera output is indistinguishably similar (both are UYVY).
• It also supports the firmware found on Leopard (sha1sum: a14c159b176d27a6e98dcb5dea5d78b81e15ad41), in addition to the firmware supported by previous versions (sha1sum: 86430c04f9b67c5c3d84409138a7679827025ec2).

The firmware loading could still use some work to be better integrated into the rest of the USB subsystem. Most importantly, firmware loading should be automatic for anyone installing a shiny new Ubuntu on his shiny new Macbook (of course, installing Fedora on your iMac20 should work also, but that’s not the point here). I hope to get some work done in that area at some point in the future, but have some other projects running also. If you’re interested in helping me with this, please contact me.

Edit: link updated (9/27/’06).

Today, in an electronic store, I ran into one of these PIX live mp3/wma players. The advertisement on the side of the box stated:

“Digital Rights Management – This device will play music from legal download sites“

This label is misleading: DRM is not required to play legal music from download sites. See this website for more information.

For all dutch readers (and anyone else), please copy this message in your blog (either in english or dutch) and have all your friends and family members know about it: DRM is defective by design
If they don’t get it, just buy them a decent mp3 player (possibly even one with Ogg/Vorbis support) without WMA/DRM support for their birthday and christmas, just so they don’t have the chance of accidently getting infected with one of those defectively designed right restriction devices. You, your friends and family deserve so much better.

To celebrate the release of the awesome GNOME 2.16, GNOME-NL is organizing a release party tomorrow, Tuesday 9/12, starting somewhere between 16:00 and 17:00 in Stairways to Heaven, Utrecht. Everyone interested is invited to come and have a drink.

Please let us know on the gnome-nl-list @at@ gnome .dot. org if you intend to show up. See you there! Many of the long-time GNOME contributors, many interested contributors and users will show up. If you are interested in GNOME, please come and join us in this happy celebration.

Vacation

In other news, I’m on vacation in the Netherlands for a few days. Good to see some friends and my family again. Next week, heavy labwork in Manhattan starts again.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that sound didn’t work on the new Macbook Pro. A helpful reader sent me in the remarkably simple solution: just show and unmute the “surround” channel in gnome-volume-control (and then file a bug). I also made the gnome-volume-applet use both the surround and the headphone channel, so that it works both with headphones and with speakers. This way, the device works flawlessly (I didn’t test microphone or line-in yet, but that most likely works just fine, also). I’m suspecting the surround channel should be renamed (to speakers) for this specific card type using the hda-intel chipset, and that the other surround-channels and surround-related channels (e.g. to make line-in and mic outputs and have them be used for LFE and for surround sound) should be disabled.

With Ryan Lortie‘s mention on how to setup the remote control to work using appleIR, this means all hardware and features of the device appear to work reasonably well under Linux (including wireless, suspend/resume and such).

Now back to real programming!

As previously stated, I’ve been working on a Linux driver for the iSight built-in in the Macbook Pro. Today, at the DDC in Ottawa (Canada), I got it working in a good enough state to call it useful. I’ll test it in various applications to make sure all ioctls behave correctly, but that should be minor work. This would complete phase I.

The Apple iSight is, on closer look, not UVC-compliant. Format querying (to query which framerates, sizes and pixelformats the device supports) is UVC-style, but data transfer is different. It took me a while to figure out how to get a full image out of those datadumps, but hexedit came to the rescue. The main problem with the driver right now is that it requires you to boot Mac OS X before starting Linux. OS X appears to initialize the device in some way (before that, it is recognized as a vendor-specific device and it doesn’t really do anything), and I don’t know how. Anybody with experience in USB bus sniffing under OS X (or who has this device and is willing to do that for me under OS X or WinXP), please contact me (or leave a message in the comments).

(See this blogpost for history.)

After some trying out, some hangs (“do not write into NULL pointers in the kernel, Ronald, do not write into NULL pointers in the kernel *argh* too late“), some fixing and some more stuff, I can now get a semi-recognizeable picture. Not good enough for a hackergotchi yet, but I’ll probably be able to fix that up soon. After that, I’ll post a patch.

Previously, I write about my Macbook Pro and Linux installation. Most of this works fine now, so time to get the hardware working.

I decided to start with the iSight. Apparently, this is a USB device which shows up in lsusb -v output as the top-most device. What’s better, it implements the new USB Video Class standard, of which a basic Linux implementation exists. Unfortunately, it doesn’t load by default, it errors out early in the initialization process with an error about not being able to retrieve the current palette.

[17186281.868000] usbcore: deregistering driver uvcvideo
[17186287.236000] Linux video capture interface: v1.00
[17186287.240000] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Built-in iSight (05ac:8501)
[17186287.240000] uvcvideo: Failed to query (135) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : -32.
[17186287.240000] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[17186287.240000] usbcore: registered new driver uvcvideo

I of course went on to debug it, and somewhere in this process, I crashed my kernel (oops ). However, after a restart, I cannot see the device in lsusb output anymore. A quick touch upon the back of my laptop suggests that the whole machine is highly overheated. So here’s my real two questions:

• Has anyone played with the UVC driver to get the built-in iSight to work?
• Has anyone found that his Macbook overheats under Linux? How do I get the fan to turn on automatically (or manually, if I really have to)?

Also, anyone familiar with the USB Video Class or the USB stack on Linux (and with some spare time), please contact me on IRC (#gnome-hackers), I’d love to debug this thing with someone more familiar with the standard than I am.

Edit: apparently, after a reboot into MacOS X and back into Linux, it is recognized again. It appears some of the (read-only?) fields in the device have to be specifically initialized. This may imply the device is not 100% UVC-compatible. Anyway, it works again, let’s see how it works.

Recently, I decided to buy a new laptop. After some thinking, I figured: why not a Mac? Makes the OS (commonly referred to as MS tax) that they shove in your ass with new laptops actually useful. And still allows me to run MS Office, crucial for university/research work (and OO.o is useless).

The first interesting thing is to go to a Mac store. The sales people there will quickly and happily talk to you, they’re actually nice guys, until you get to the actual act of buying. “Do you want a dot-Mac account?” and “You’re a student? If you just want to use MS Office and send some email, a regular MacBook may be just as good a choice, and it’s much cheaper”. I bought the 15″ MacBook pro.

Getting Linux to run
OS X is beautiful, with some rough edges. Obviously, I’d eventually want to run a dualboot. After seeing many people be enthousiastic about Ubuntu and getting sick of Fedora (die, yum, die!) small oddities, I followed this howto to get it all to work, and it mostly just worked out-of-the-box. I also like how universe can be added in a single click (somehow, I wish synaptic would always start in advanced mode; how do I do that?). Other distros should learn from this. Yum may theoretically be correct (?), but I don’t give a damn. Ubuntu’s package management really is a bliss.

Not all is fine:

• Ubuntu’s live-CD installer gives me the nerves. The worst part was where I manually partitioned the hard-disk (to make sure it wouldn’t destroy my HFS+ partition, but just use the partition set aside for “WinXP” using bootcamp). After endless trying, the thing was convinced to either use my swap partition as ext3 and my ext3 partition as swap, or both as swap, that choice apparently depending on airwaves instead of the selection I made two dialogs back. It crashed on me three times, once while pressing forward/back in the partitioning tool, once between formatting/installation and once after the installation after it fails to install grub. Reminds me of old horrible Fedora times. Fortunately, restarting the installer from the live-CD is a lot faster than having to restart the whole Fedora installer process. Also, even though I selected the HFS+ partition to be mounted as /mnt/mac, I had to manually add it to /etc/fstab, and my normal Ubuntu user cannot access documents in /mnt/mac/Users/[my apple user ID]/ (permission denied). Lazyweb, how do I fix that? (Edit: one helpful reader told me to use the same UID for my Apple/Ubuntu user.)
• sound doesn’t work with Ubuntu’s 2.6.15-23 kernel. With 2.6.15-25 (which contains an upstream alsa-patch for hda-intel merged in), I can only get sound through the Microphone jack (?). Speakers and line-in/out are silent, as also reporter here. Sound appears to be fine on the 17″, so I guess I’ll need to look through some PCI / gpio dumps to get this to work properly.
• I decided to see how multimedia on the desktop was going. Banshee (which everybody loves, and which should have great iPod support) just crashes when loading /tmp. Rhytmbox actually works after that, but even after installing gst-ugly, -bad, -disgusting, -awful and other such modules, I still couldn’t get my iTunes-ripped m4a files to play. The totem-mozilla plugin didn’t play anything and gave cryptic warnings about “fd://0” that reminded me of ancient history. It probably doesn’t support asf playlists, which is what all big sites serve (no, nobody uses Theora). What a waste. Installing totem-xine lead me into this bug. With the workaround, totem-xine sometimes works, but the mozilla plugin still crashes (only with flgrx, not with vesa). No wonder people use mplayer. Geez. (Note that the Windows Media Player Flip4mac additions for OS X – to get support for WMV/WMA in Quicktime – also don’t work yet on MacIntels, but that’s barely a valid excuse). (Edit: As one reader pointed out, this should read flip4mac, not WMP, of course. Apparently, those are in beta and will come out “soon”.)
• People tell me suspend/resume on this thing should work. How? There’s only a hibernate button in the session-quit dialog, and IIRC, that is software suspend. Lazyweb, anyone?

All in all, not so bad. Next step: buy a (cheap!) huge USB disk (as recommended by the MacStore sales people), find some decent IDE (Anjuta looks promising) and go do something again.