[Leaplist] ubuntu questions

[John Simpson]

howdy-

i've got kubuntu running on my laptop, a mac powerbook g4. the  
installer didn't work perfectly, but it was "pretty close"... two  
problems left:

(1) the video is a little bit "off", in that some of the graphic  
images that came with it have entirely the wrong colours in them, and  
some of the fonts (particularly the font that "konsole" uses) have  
extra pixels turned on.

at first i figured some of the files had been corrupted during the  
install, so i re-installed from scratch, this time using the beta-3  
release of "feisty", and had the exact same issues.

then i noticed that in the "colour chooser", some of the actual  
colour mappings were wrong- so it wasn't the graphics or the fonts,  
but the colour map.

i went into their "system settings" widget and noticed that it just  
had "ati" as the graphics card, and "unknown monitor". i explicitly  
told it what kind of video card and display i have, saved the  
settings, and did control-alt-backspace to restart the X server...  
and it came up with the colours looking perfect.

however, this change apparently wasn't saved where the system uses it  
when it boots up, because after a reboot the speckled graphics come  
back.

i haven't looked at what it actually did, if it wrote a new X.conf or  
something, and if the old version is copied back into place on reboot  
for some reason... if anybody can shed some light here i would  
appreciate it.

(2) no sound. a google search reveals that the module for this  
laptop's sound hardware is called "snd-powermac", and indeed running  
"sudo modprobe snd-powermac" and then restarting "kmix" made the  
sound hardware start working.

i've gotten around this by adding "modprobe snd-powermac" to the "/ 
etc/rc.local" script, however this is "less than optimal". i know  
there should be a way to add it into a file somewhere under the /etc/ 
modprobe.d directory, however i haven't played with kernel modules  
since the days of /etc/modules.conf, and even then i wasn't 100% sure  
what i was doing. can somebody can tell me where to add something so  
that the module loader knows to load this module during its normal  
boot process (rather than at the very end, where rc.local runs)?

basically, i would prefer the challenge of debugging these issues and  
fixing them for myself- but the truth is that i don't really have the  
time right now. my plan is to have my laptop on the table at  
hamcation, to show people that macs can run linux, and in fact can do  
"ham radio stuff" under both linux and OSX. i did figure out how to  
add the "universe" repository to my system's sources.list file, and  
there were powerpc binary packages of the ham programs i wanted to  
try- i've downloaded all but one of the PSK31 programs but none of  
them seem to work very well (but that's a separate issue.)

ALSO. tom, if you can send me detailed directions on how to build a  
custom kubuntu CD and list of what changes you made, i would like to  
try my hand at making a powerpc version of your custom ham CD. no  
guarantees, but i figure it couldn't hurt to have about 25 each of  
the ham CDs and the normal kubuntu CDs for mac.

----------------------------------------------------------------
| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
----------------------------------------------------------------
| http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4312730277175242198 |
----------------------------------------------------------------


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.leap-cf.org/pipermail/leaplist/attachments/20070206/0d4f01e5/PGP.bin