Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Software compatibility with Leopard

2007.11.05 – 17.50 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Making Camino look like a Leopard app

Having used Mac OS X Leopard now for just over a week I can safely say I’ve had a fairly painless experience using software that was released in the Tiger era, though there have been a few gotchas. In case it’s useful to someone I’m posting information on some of the applications I’ve had minor troubles with.

This is by no means an authoritative study, and it is possible that the software problems I’ve posted here might be a result of my own unique computer configuration or even misunderstanding on my own part, in which case feel free to correct me by posting a comment :).

X11.app

X11 to me feels like it’s exactly the same in Leopard as it was in Tiger; the title bars and bundled apps are exactly the same. I remember reading somewhere that Leopard was going to be bundled with an Xorg distribution instead of XFree86.

Anyway those issues aside, the problem I seem to have is that even though I move the X11.app icon to the Dock from the Utilities folder, whenever I launch an application that uses X11, another identical X11 icon appears at the end of the dock and the first one that I placed there crashes. This has happened on two wipes and reinstalls of Leopard.

The other issue I have is that X11 doesn’t respect the space limits imposed by the Apple menu. If you try and move any normal window on OS X above the Apple menu it doesn’t work, but X11 apps are more than happy to creep behind the menu which makes them that much harder to grab and bring back down again:

Inkscape.app

For some reason when I try and launch Inkscape it informs me that I don’t have an X11 compatible environment installed and promptly quits. To work around this, I launch X11 first then Inkscape and it works. Pain in the arse though to have to launch two apps just to use one.

Inkscape error in Leopard

Last.fm.app

The official LastFM client is really spotty for me in Leopard. Just like X11 when I launch LastFM it launches two concurrent versions of it, one of which instantly crashes.

Last.fm Leopard error

Force quitting the one that’s stuffed up leaves the other working just fine though. Just a small pain to have to deal with every time.

The Good News!

With all those issues you’d think I’ve been having a terrible time in Leopard with third party applications: fortunately the ones that work far outweigh the ones that don’t.

This is my current list of apps I’ve used in Leopard that work just fine: Quicksilver, VMware Fusion (1.0 and 1.1 Beta), Camino (1.5.2 and 1.5.3), Thunderbird (2.0.0.6), iSquint, NeoOffice, VLC, TextMate, Flickr Uploadr, Xee, the MAMP web server, Snitter and Cyberduck.

Categories: apple, mac os x, screenshots, software, x11
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Modular Xorg on NetBSD from scratch

2007.08.23 – 01.43 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

NetBSD Xorg Orange
That’s a lot of orange! That reminds me, I need more F&N… Orange

NetBSD is one of the last Unix-like operating systems still shipping by default with the XFree86 X Window Server as opposed to the new de facto Xorg distribution. From what I’ve been able to find out doing a quick Google around is that given the system’s strict requirement for portability it’s going to take a lot of work to get Xorg working on every port. I respect that.

So enter pkgsrc and modular Xorg! Modular Xorg is an exciting new way of distributing Xorg because it allows you to cherry pick only the drivers, applications and other whatnot that you want instead of installing one huge package.

For me, I’m using a fresh install of NetBSD 3.1 in a VMware Fusion virtual machine, so you’ll obviously have to take these steps as a guide for your own system.

During the initial install I chose the Custom Installation option and de-selected the X11 Distribution Set. This means I avoided any mess right from the beginning, just as I did when I changed from Monolithic Xorg to Modular Xorg on FreeBSD.

Once you’ve installed NetBSD, do your usual configuration of /etc/rc.conf to enable your network, and add X11_TYPE=modular to your /etc/mk.conf file. DON’T add a X11BASE line!

Then go grab yourself the latest pkgsrc tree and update it.

Now it’s just a matter of make install clean clean-depends -ing each package we want. If you really wanted to, you could just install all the meta-packages:

… but that really defeats the purpose of going modular! For me, I installed the base server, the entire fonts meta-package, only the drivers I needed, and the minimum required apps:

Obviously when I said minimal I wasn’t kidding! These packages are enough to get an X session started, but that’s about it. If you’re installing a desktop environment such as KDE, Xfce or GNOME you can go right ahead and install their respective packages, but if you’re using a vanilla window manager such as OpenBox you’ll really need to install at the very least a terminal emulator. I like urxvt.

It is defintely more work to install modular Xorg, and in many cases the default XFree86 distribution Is Good Enough™, but I like the added control this gives me, plus then I have the added convenience of using similar software on my other BSD and Linux machines. Right Mai?

Is she pissed off or distracted somehow? I don’t know. Maybe she runs OpenBSD instead. It’s 01:52, maybe I actually need to go to sleep now.

Categories: bsd, free and open source, how-to, software, technology, virtualisation, x11
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