I’ve been taking another stab at dualbooting my Macbook1,1 with the release of Ubuntu 9.04. As a mostly-happy Macophile, why dualboot you might ask? A couple of things – a weakness for playing around with Unix operating systems (a bad habit I picked up in college) and freakin Java 1.6. The problem is Apple decided not to release a 32bit version for 1.6 and my Macbook is the older Core Duo version and thus not supported. Now, normal people might sigh and stick to 1.5 or take this as an opportunity to buy a new laptop. The slightly more practical (or cheap) who refuse to give up probably turn to soylatte, the port of BSD to OS X (Metal L&F only – no pretty Mac L&F). I, however, with more disk space than sense, turned to rEFIt to set up a dual OS X/Linux setup.

I won’t detail how to setup a dualboot system, there are enough tutorials out there if one searches for them. When I first setup my laptop I installed ubuntu  8.10 and quickly ran into  two annoyances  – an error message about my keyboard layout and the fact that by default the machine is very hard to use since the touchpad causes the cursor to jump around randomly while typing. Not in a mood to research them at the time, I got distracted and sadly it wasn’t until 9.04 that I tried again. Both these problems persist with Jaunty so if you want to run it on your it on your macbook, you are going to run into them.

The first issue manifests itself as an error message stating “Error activating XKB configuration” everytime you log into X. This is related to xorg not apparently knowing what to do with the macbook keyboard variant – there is an umbrella bug ubuntu uses to capture all these types of errors you can find here. The solution is to modify your xorg.conf file to give X more information however I haven’t dinked around with this yet since its just a minor annoyance.

The issue with the trackpad just about renders the machine unusable for anything but the most simplist tasks however its luckily easy to fix (or at least mitigate). In Jaunty, just add a startup application that looks like this:

syndaemon -d

This will start up a program in the background every time you login that will disable the trackpad while you type, preventing it from causing the cursor to jump all over the screen. Syndaemon has a couple more options you can play with such as how long to disable the trackpad for but so far I’m finding the default settings to work ok.

A couple more random hints:

• If you upgraded Jaunty and are now having problems with flash sites like Hulu telling you need flash 9 when you _know_ you had flash installed, try using synaptic to complete remove and then reinstall the flash-installer package – thats what it took for me  to get it working again on my living room media box.

• If you are a quicksilver addict, check out Gnome Do – very slick and the keyboard shortcuts are even the same by default.

I used to run Knoppmyth on my home theater PC since it made the setting up and installation of MythTV a breeze, especially on my old VIA EPIA box. I recently retired that box and decided get everything set up on a AMD64 based shuttle pc.
I wanted to go back to using a full blown distro since I use the box for a lot more than MythTV. I had good experience with Ubuntu in the past so grabbed the latest Dapper install iso and proceeded to get everything set up. I quickly ran into a complication – I wanted to reuse the mysql database from my previous installation so that my new box knew about what shows I had seen already and what I had recorded but had yet to watch. The version of KnoppMyth I was using was based on MythTV 19.0 but the only version in the Ubuntu repositories was 18.1 and the database schemas are not compatible. <sigh>
Looking over the Ubuntu forums I was able to find someone who had packaged up 19 and proceed to get everything installed just fine. Or at least it appeared, turns out the version I’m using has a problem where MythTV occasionally forgets about upcoming recordings. Restarting the backend solves the problem but I don’t want to force restart the backend every 30 minutes since it would create annoying gaps if I restarted the backend while I was recording something. I thought about jumping through all the hoops required to rebuild MythTV from scratch myself but I didn’t feel like going through the trouble right now so I came up with a short term hack.
I grabbed the latest version of mythweb and copied it into my apache2 root directory. Getting it working was as simple as creating a symlink to enable mod_rewrite and uncommenting a line in my PHP config to enable the mysql library. Once that was in place I wrote a simple script to wget the upcoming recordings, test to see if there was anything upcoming, and kick the backend if there wasn’t. I then hooked it into a cron job to run at 5 minutes before every half hour. Its a band aid that should hold me until they get 19 into the tree.
#!/bin/bash
wget -q -O- http://192.168.1.5/mythweb/tv/upcoming | grep -q list_separator
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend restart
fi