Category Archives: OpenDarwin

Amazing! OpenDarwin bug progress

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Wow … I just recevied an e-mail from the bugzilla system for OpenDarwin … one of the OpenDarwin bugs
that I reported has been assigned!  This particular bug is related
to a real-time clock issue when running OpenDarwin within Virtual PC.

I’m actually happy to hear this since I have stopped experimenting with
OpenDarwin for a bit while some things like this get sorted out. 
If they get this one fixed, it will make many things work much
better.  On my installation right now, every second of computer
time is somehow being stretched to be ~45 seconds of real time … so
things run REAL slow on my OpenDarwin installation.

I’m looking forward to seeing what is done … I’d love to see this resolved!

Darwin slow down

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I’ve stopped working with Darwin and OpenDarwin again … at least
for a while.  It’s funny, but I report various bugs and problems
and I get that there just in not much interest from the community – or
Apple – in fixing them.  No big deal … although I really think
they would gain from making sure that these distros worked in more
environments.

I’m getting things working in Virtual PC 2004, but with a lot of
effort.  And then I hit some roadblock … like I have right
now.  So I lost interest again for now … I’ll pick it back up in
a while when I have some time to play around.

Getting Mozilla on OpenDarwin

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I’m now using WindowMaker as my window manager, and starting to install
some other applications.  A browser would be nice … so I used
Darwinports to install Mozilla, but it was still running this morning
trying to build the thing.

I then remembered that I could maybe go and grab an RPM from here.  I’m downloading the Mozilla RPM now and will give it a try later today.

WindowMaker is working on OpenDarwin!

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During the night last night, Darwinports completed the download and installation of WindowMaker and all of it’s dependancies … my first experience at something other than twm on OpenDarwin.

I had to do a quick update to my .xinitrc file in my home directory, changing it to:

#!/bin/sh
exec wmaker

… and then run ‘startx’ … and it all came up working!  Very cool … now I’m going to see about grabbing KDE!

Alternate Window Managers

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I was looking for an alternate window manager for OpenDarwin. 
I’ve been using twm and it is just too minimal for me.  I started
to see if I could get Gnome from Darwinports, but the installation
failed when trying to install Perl 5.8 … which I already have.

I started to look at AfterStep, and then saw mention of WindowMaker in
an article that claimed a complete successful installation using
Darwinports.  So I started the installation hours ago and it is
slowly bringing down the various dependancies, building, and installing
them.  I’m going to give this a try … and then I found a few
alternate directions.

One thing that I hadn’t thought of is that the KDE environment is
‘stronger’ in this market with the Apple use of KDE components. 
I’ll see what I can do with KDE, after I complete my experiment with
WindowMaker.

Documenting my progress

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I spent time today working on OpenDarwin again. Now that I have
a working network driver, it’s a lot more fun! I can now start to
download and install a wide range of Open Source to make it a more
complete and usable system.

One thing that I’ve been doing is spending some of the time documenting the work that I am doing to the OpenDarwin Wiki. They are running a copy of the MediaWiki
and I have to admit that I am very impressed with the
functionality. I’m just learning the interface and capabilities,
but it appears to be a very rich wiki with a lot of
functionality. I ended up writing this page today on Installing OpenDarwin x86 on Virtual PC 2004. I still have a lot to add, but it’s a good start.

I’m going to see if I can complete my CD ROM image tonight that will
contain the network driver and some other tools. I’m still
working through some details. I’ll keep documenting.

Problems with DNS and the clock

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I’m not sure why, but this morning the DNS or network had died on my
OpenDarwin installation.  In addition, the clock had “stopped”
… or was going *extremely* slow.  I ended up having to
reboot.  At first I was thinking it was a Darwinports issue …
or a repository issue … since I was getting errors trying to fetch
the most basic packages.  When I went to grab a copy of Fink
curl failed to resolve the DNS name.  That’s about when I rebooted.

When I got logged in then I could begin the download of Fink, and I
went back to Darwinports and began the process of installing Gnome
again … not sure if it’s going to work … but it’s installing!

OpenDarwin 7.2.1 – Setting the default boot device

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When you first boot OpenDarwin 7.2.1 (x86) I found that on Virtual PC,
I have to hit enter to get to the boot prompt, and then manually
specify the boot device. The format of this command is:

  • rd=disk0s1 -v

Now the specific device might vary on your installation so you’ll have
to possible put different values for the channel and device (e.g.
disk#s#). The ‘-v’ is the switch for verbose mode.

After completing an installation, you can go and edit the preferences
file:

  • /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

Look for the ‘Kernel Flags’ key tag and enter the same string that you used above (e.g.
rd=disk0s1) within the string tags following it. This will set your default boot device.

Darwinports installed!

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As of this morning, I was able to get Darwinports installed on my
Darwin installation on Virtual PC 2004.  I followed the
instructions on the Darwinports web site.  The cvs checkout
worked, the configure worked, and the install worked.  For some
reason the ‘port’ command didn’t get installed into my path … I’ll do
that manually and then give it a try … and see if I can grab a better
window manager!