Miscellaneous musings in beta

Saw Hardware again today. I first saw it when it first came out – I was working in London back then – and it made quite an impression on me. The movie wasn’t quite what I expected to see. At all. But the amazing soundtrack and some stunning images stuck with me. I guess they somehow struck a cord.

When I got to see it again, thanks to Youtube, I noticed something I didn’t catch the first time. The Cyberpunk atmosphere is somehow weirdly analog and organic. Not digital. And that goes for a lot of other movies from the Eighties. Bladerunner and Max Headroom has the same images.

I think it’s because of the phone displays and video monitors showing all kinds of static and background interferences. There are messy wires like arteries escaping casing all over the place. The white noise gives the movies a very analog touch. It does not have the crisp mosaic digital artifacts of the future, as it turned out.

Weird how the organic feel and white noise became so used by directors of science fiction in the Eighties. Like Star Wars introduced the nitty-gritty, dirty and rundown future technology in the Seventies, could white noise be the sign of technology in the Eighties? Where the organic and analog finally becomes part of digital technology itself?

I guess that’s why they called it Cyberpunk.

When installing Debian on your MacBook Pro, the touchpad doesn’t work really well. To be honest you’re left with only the most rudimentary of functions. On Debian there’s no easy way of fixing this. There is, however, one very good alternative. Ubuntu has the Mactel project, which makes many things a lot easier. Among them is the touchpad.

The packages needed from the Mactel project is bcm5974 and usbhid. I’m using bcm5974-dkms_1.1.3_all.tar.gz and usbhid-dkms_0.11.2_all.tar.gz. Both for Ubuntu Jaunty. But there’s a slight issue: You have to make the debs yourself. For that you’ll need the DKMS package from the Debian Lenny testing repository. It’s a dynamic kernel module support framework that make a lot of module work easier.

After installing DKMS using standard procudure, unpack the packages, go to both folders and type:

make bump
dpkg-buildpackage

After that you should have two debs to install:

sudo dpkg -i bcm5974-dkms_1.1.3_all.deb usbhid-dkms_0.11.2_all.deb

Right now I’m using synaptics from the repository and this addition in my Xorg.conf. Of course your preferences may differ:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Option "New AccelFactor" "0.03"
Option "LeftEdge" "0"
Option "RightEdge" "1280"
Option "TopEdge" "0"
Option "BottomEdge" "800"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.94"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.0015"
#tapping
Option "FingerHigh" "80"
Option "FingerLow" "16"
Option "MaxTapMove" "25"
Option "MaxTapTime" "223"
Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "200"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
#edge scroll
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "5"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
#two finger scroll
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
EndSection

When installing Debian on a Macbook Pro, ALSA and sound doesn’t work right away. The soundcard in Macbook Pro 5.3, a snd-hda-intel, needs some work.

After quite a bit of pain following a lot of tutotials and a lot of make installs, I decided to try something different. First I included Lenny squeeze in the Package Manager and installed the source for ALSA version 1.0.21. Then I typed:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure alsa-source

and selected the hda-intel card. After the added card parameter I let the module assistant install the source code by typing:

module-assistant a-i alsa-source

If all goes well, you too should have sound after a reboot and unmuting the sound in alsamixer.

Unfortunately Debian doesn’t support the wireless built into Macbook Pro 5.3 out of the box. Some work needs to be done.

On the net I have seen many ways of solving this. Most solutions involve ndiswrapper and the Windows .exe driver available on the Mac OS DVD for the Broadcom wireless card. I found another solution, that worked for me.

I downloaded Broadcom’s own Linux driver available here and followed the directions in the readme. After the make the resulting wl.ko is to be placed at /lib/modules/<kernel_version>/kernel/net/wireless. And after doing a modprobe wl, it should work right away. Even when using WPA2.