CorePlayer file association icons


Now that CorePlayer has been in the wild for a few weeks, I'm sure you have noticed that its file association icon is the default blank one, which has no personality at all.

Well, an app this efficient deserves to have better than a blank file association icon, and thanks to Adam Albrec, the maker of PPC Media Center, it now has two custom icons.



 


   




Here is the readme file contents, for your convenience.  You need the first icon .dmg for the .plist file, even if only using the second.  If only interested in the first one, then you don't need the second.

Copy the cpDocument.icns file to the Resources folder within the CorePlayer package contents.

Then copy the new Info.plist to the Contents folder within CorePlayer.

Next copy CorePlayer to a new location and then back to re-initialize it.

When you restart, or relaunch Finder, all documents assigned to use CorePlayer will now have the custom icon.

If you wish to make your own icon, feel free and just give it the same file name as above and install as directed.


Feel free to leave any comments for Adam here.

Thanks again, Adam!

New admin


In the spirit of this blog always growing and staying around, I have decided we needed another admin here, and Mark (fiftysixk) is the natural choice as the longest member of the team after me, and the guy works for freaking NASA.  Do I really need to say more?  I didn't think so...

Life is a delicate thing, and if anything ever happened to me I want another admin around to take care of the place.  Mark is that guy.

Mark is at the exact same level of power and control that I am, and by Blogger's guidelines and rules, this also makes him a part-owner of the blog now.  He deserves it for his dedication.

So please join me in welcoming the new admin to his new role here.

CorePlayer and the guy who proved me wrong, so I asked him to join us


As I'm sure many of you know already, CorePlayer was cracked by a man named Lotvai, and after me claiming this was "impossible".  You see...  I was basing this on the basis of code, and how it is virtually impossible to truly alter closed software.  This, added with the fact that I'm certainly no Mac developer, and never have been, caused me to make a judgement on fundamental fact, rather than outside the box thinking.

I was wrong... period, and I own that.  I am a BSD coder, always have been, and have never had enough motivation to ever do anything with Mac software, and in turn have deprived myself of a truly vast understanding of the limits.  Lotvai's Mac OS kung-fu is the best I have ever seen, and he deserves credit for being so gifted.

Lotvai is so gifted in fact, that I offered him an author account here, and he accepted.  So the guy that proved me wrong and brought all of you CorePlayer is now part of this blog, and I am honoured to have him here.

He explained to me how it was done, and while I will let him explain it in his first post here, I just want to say it was extremely creative.  I wouldn't call it simple, certainly not, but i bet it's a lot simpler than many would have thought; like me.

So please join me in welcoming Lotvai, then sit back and heed his CorePlayer slaying words.  He is officially PowerPC royalty now.

Parts exchange is up


A very early and primitive version of the parts exchange is now online here.

This is something we will be making up as we go.  As of now there are few guidelines, because we need to figure out what they should be.

Feel free to leave feedback here, or on the PowerPC Parts Exchange page.

Happy exchanging!

G5: Nouveau & 3D Acceleration


UPDATE 1: Updated glxgears output after running it not synced to vsync

As many of our readers may already be aware, both 2D and now 3D acceleration are working with the nouveau driver on PPC!  However, with a couple of hopefully temporary caveats that should hopefully disappear over time.  The caveats include the following:

1. You can only try/test this out by upgrading your system to Stretch (the next stable release of Debian still in development/testing) or Sid ( forever unstable). Eventually Stretch will become the next stable release (sometime early 2017) and by then let us hope that whatever version of mesa and its related libraries  included in the release still has working 3D and 2D acceleration with nouveau.

You could also try to compile the latest versions yourself using the instructions here, but keep in mind this route is difficult even for more experienced Linux users.

2. As exciting as this news is, the current performance is still lacking, but with regards to G5 machines, this should also be improved with the move to 64 KB page sizes in the future among many other things relevant to just nouveau and PPC development in general. Sadly, still no update on the 64 KB page size mapping bug yet either, but I am trying to keep in touch with the developers.

As first reported, by again, Peter Saisanas, in a comment from my last post, it appears the fix was included in Mesa's 11.0.3 release back in November.  He has also posted about his testing on the Debian PPC mailing list here.  One of the included fixes that may have resolved the remaining issues with 3D acceleration with nouveau on PPC in that release by Mesa developer Ilia Mirkin was "nv30: always go through translate module on big-endian."  That is the current theory anyways as looking through the rest of the fixes over that same release as well other recent releases, this one appears to be the most relevant.

I figured I would conduct my own testing as well by first upgrading to Stretch from Jessie (8.3) to Stretch.  I skipped backing up my current install as nothing on it is all that crucial. Most of my crucial files and configurations live on my G4 QS at the current time.  Since Stretch or Sid can be (is) unstable at times, you may not want to use it on a production system.  Choose your set up wisely.  I plan to eventually either partition my current SSD to host both Jessie and Stretch on separate dedicated partitions or use a drive in each available drive bay to host each release of Debian (one for testing and one for stable) so I can always fall back to one or the other in case something breaks.

Speaking of instability, there are issues when doing upgrades to or fresh installs of Stretch as the current kernel included with the release is broken on PPC. So you if you want to test this out, I would highly recommend first instaling Jessie and then downloading and installing one of the pre-built kernels available from Peter's Google Drive before doing the upgrade. I opted to use his latest kernel (at the time of this writing) 4.5.0-rc2. Just download the kernel-image deb and install it using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i  linux-image-4.5.0-rc2-powerpc64_2_powerpc.deb

With that out of the way, you will want to update your /etc/yaboot.conf file to either contain a new entry for the newly installed kernel or replace your existing one.

Here is an excerpt from my yaboot.conf file with the new kernel configuration:
image=/vmlinux-4.5.0-rc2-powerpc64
    label=Linux
    read-only
    initrd=/initrd.img-4.5.0-rc2-powerpc64


Save your changes and run the following:
sudo ybin -v

Next, go ahead reboot to the new kernel using whatever label you assigned to it in your yaboot configuration.
 
The kernels he has available work with a wide range of G5 towers and nVidia cards but if you are curious to see what has worked for others up to this point, see this post on the Debian PPC mailing list.

Once that is out of the way, upgrading to Stretch was simple enough as all it requires is editing your /etc/apt/sources.list file by replacing all occurrences of the word Jessie with Stretch.  If you are using vim for your text editing tool you can use the following trick once you have the file opened for editing:

:%s/jessie/stretch/

The %s basically means every occurrence of the string jessie with the string stretch.  Easy enough.  Save your changes run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade per usual. This will update the list of packages from the stretch repositories and start the upgrade to testing.

Once the upgrade is complete, I would recommend rebooting one more time for good measure.  Once logged in, make sure mesa-utils or hardinfo (if you prefer a GUI to view what currently active renderer) is installed. Here is the output from my system:

br0c0l1@TheMaster:~$ glxinfo | grep -i renderer
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
    GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV47

As you can see we are using version 0.4 of Gallium on NV47 (my G5 machine's Quadro 4500FX nVidia card) to provide graphics rendering.

Here is the output when running glxgears:

br0c0l1@TheMaster:~$ vblank_mode=0 glxgears
ATTENTION: default value of option vblank_mode overridden by environment.
1840 frames in 5.0 seconds = 367.913 FPS
1861 frames in 5.0 seconds = 372.069 FPS
1828 frames in 5.0 seconds = 365.374 FPS
1823 frames in 5.0 seconds = 364.437 FPS

So again, not spectacular in terms of performance, but it is definitely a worthy start.  It is comforting and exciting to know we have made it this far. One thing I think I should make clear is that having 3D acceleration does not improve video playback performance as that is already optimized to its fullest with 2D acceleration.  3D acceleration helps considerably though if you are into gaming and OpenGL/WebGl projects.

I cannot thank Peter Saisanas enough for the work he puts into nouvea and PPC and kudos to the nouveau developers for not leaving us PPC users in the dust! 

I encourage you to try this out and report your findings with either 3D acceleration on nouvea and/or Peter's pre-built G5 kernels either here in the comments or on the Debian PowerPC mailing list.

And finally, as I always say, let the rest of us due our due diligence and report bugs!

Parts exchange brainstorm


After getting lots of interest from an earlier post about starting a parts exchange here - it is now time to start figuring out how to set it up best for everyone that desires to potentially use it one day.

Tell me what you would like it to both include and exclude, and any other details you can think of to create an exchange system that is efficient and beneficial to all.

This is for you guys...  all the PowerPC users that need help getting certain parts, whether the reason be geography or lack of money.  Lets make it the best it can be.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that you won't have to post personal details like address or full name to anyone but the person you're sending or receiving parts with.

Now lets fill the comments up with great ideas!