When I set out to build a new desktop system for design, I wasn’t planning to build a Mac. However, as this is a design machine—and all design software is built for Mac and hacked onto Windows—it made sense to kill the initial Windows 7 install and switch over.

What to buy

The Hackintosh “Mac” we’re going to build requires the following parts. I have included NewEgg links for estadounidenses who want to follow along with this entry:

• SPARK ATOM-GM1-N330 motherboard, 610 yuan (US $94.99) *
• Kingston 2GB DDR2 SDRAM PC2 6400, 120 each (US $24.99)
• Seagate Barracuda ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM hard disk, 360 yuan (US $54.99)
• TP-LINK TL-WN550G WiFi adapter, 90 yuan (US $13.99)
• Hanns•G HB-191DPB Black 19″ LCD monitor, 770 yuan) (US $119.99)
• Cheap case and ATX power supply (80 yuan)
• Cheap keyboard and mouse (10 yuan)
• IDE DVD-ROM drive for installing

Total cost: 2,160 yuan (save 770 yuan if you already have a monitor)

*The SPARK motherboard brand is marketed as JetWay in the US. The equivalent board is a JATOM-GM1-330-LF.

As you may already know, Atoms are sold only to OEMs, and the chips come welded to the board. You will not be able to upgrade the CPU on this board. Also notable is that the only fan is on the northbridge GPU, meaning for the first time since the flawed Pentium 90 we have an tower motherboard whose CPU does not need a fan.

The Atom is most often described as “not a real CPU” or “just for embedded devices.” In the case of the early Atom chips, I wholeheartedly agree. But this board comes with an Atom 330.

‘Green’ with envy

Meet the reason I need an Atom:

The DDY200D3K power meter, affectionately known as “DIDDY.” He entered service in 1999 and has ruled the power in my hallway with an iron fist ever since. He decides when my lights don’t turn on anymore.

At the time of this picture, DIDDY was informing me I have 80 units until my apartment fades to black. You probably cannot see the 80, because I needed a flash to take this photo. I needed a flash because the lighting in our hallways was donated by the stage crew of Hostel.

But back to the topic: DIDDY is a dick. I hate him to begin with, but I hate him even more because only one electric card on Earth is capable of feeding him. That electric card has never been in my possession.

Enter the Atom.

The Intel Core series is a family of powerhouse CPUs. Unfortunately, powerhouse CPUs eat wattage, throw heat and make DIDDY angry. The current Wolfdale-3M series, manufactured on a 45nm process, gobbles 65 watts. The 45nm Atom 330, by contrast, gobbles a peak of 8 watts. The Hanns•G monitor we’re using draws a peak 50 watts.

With a sufficiently empty case, we should be able to put together a very power friendly system. Let’s check out the specs:

Intel Atom 330 CPU

• Clockspeed: 1.6GHz (overclockable to 1.91GHz)
• Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, Intel64, XD bit
• Cores: 2
• Hyperthreading: Yes
• L1 Instruction Cache: 2x 32KB (64KB)
• L1 Data Cache: 2x 24KB (48KB)
• L2 Cache: 2x 512KB (1MB)
• FSB: 533 MT/s
• Voltage: 0.9V

Intel 945GC Northbridge

• Controller: Integrated GMA950 video
• Supports: DirectX9, OpenGL 1.4, Shader Model 2.0

Intel 82801G Southbridge (ICH7)

• Network: Realtek RTL8102EL 10/100 adapter
• Audio: Realtek ALC662 HD Audio device
• Quality: 6-channel 3D sound

Available Slots/Ports

• PCI-Express: 1
• PCI: 2
• USB 2.0: 8
• VGA: 1
• PS/2: 2
• Serial: 1
• SATA II: 2
• ATA IDE: 1
• Floppy: 1
• Parallel: 1 (requires case hookup)

And now for an overview of power consumption:

• Atom 330 CPU: 8 watts
• Intel 945GC: 22.2 watts
• Intel 82801G: 3.3 watts
• Kingston 2GB DDR2 SDRAM: 2.25 watts per stick
• Seagate Barracuda ST3250410AS: 8.5 watts
• Hanns•G 191DPB: 50 watts

Just over 96 watts at peak operation of all parts. That means the entire computer draws less power than the Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU.

Thousands of tenants

Two hours in BIOS with no SpeedStep gave a case temperature of 34 C. This is cool, because my case is … ghetto. You see, my apartment has a history of cockroach problems. It’s important that I describe how bad the problem is so you can understand why I did what I did to my case.

Yes, that is duct tape.

Last year, before going home for vacation for two weeks, my piped gas heating was cutting out every day. This meant I was taking cold showers. Getting the company out to rip it open was a big task, and unfortunately, only the company had the keys. My fiancée’s mom decided to do it while we were in the US.

Days later we heard a panicked tale.

Apparently the man came and found all the connections were right and the gas was coming out, but he couldn’t explain why the pilot would not fire up. In desperation, he opened up the deepest part of the furnace. Four grocery bags of crispy cockroaches came rolling out of the wall and onto the kitchen floor like black tide of rot.

Apparently, some roaches were trying to come in through the gas pipes. Then the pilot came on. This led to more roaches thinking, “Hey … barbecue! Yummy!” So roaches came to feast on their crispy friends and ended up joining them the next time I took a shower. This cycle continued for … years.

We are moving in September, and I would rather not have any travelers coming in my hardware. This is why I sealed every single opening on the case with industrial duct tape and patched the empty fan vents with card paper. The only fan is on the PSU—temporarily—and the only way a roach is getting through there is if Sean Connery is leading him like in The Rock.

So even in a closed system, the case temperature is 35 C.

The last of the BIOS options revealed an option to adjust the FSB. I’ll save you the trouble of experimenting and tell you that 159 is the magic entry, and it will take the chip safely from 1.6GHz to 1.91GHz: the penalty is a 3-degree CPU heat leap to 41 C.

This clockspeed is exceedingly good for a Diamondville Atom. Intel’s newest Silverthone (Z550) is hitting 2GHz, but it is a 32-bit chip only.

If you want to install Mac OSX Leopard on the machine, then follow along. Otherwise you can skip to the end for benchmarks.

Making a Hackintosh

If you do not need WiFi, you may want to leave out the TP-LINK card: getting that to work was the hardest part of this project. You will need a Mac OSX 10.5.6 PPF5 ISO burned to a DVD-ROM. Be creative in how you obtain this file.

PPF5 is patched to include the Voodoo Kernel 9.5.0, which you will need, and all hardware patches.

WARNING! Before installing, make sure your DVD-ROM is plugged into the ATA IDE port and your hard disk is in the first SATA port. The installer burns in Hell if you run it from a USB or SATA DVD-ROM device, and also crashes if your hard disk is on an ATA IDE chain. It will make your screen do something very bad, and it will keep doing it until you rip out the power plug!

Now that you have plugged the right shit in the right ports, boot from the CD and wait 15 minutes while the Mac installer initializes. Use the menu bar to open the Disk Utility and partition your hard disk. Continue with the install and select the partition. Before continuing, you must click the Customize option!

This is important. Every OSx86 tutorial says to do this. I did not do this the first time. Needless to say I spent a lot of time wondering why my system was trapped in an endless series of reboots.

Make sure you check the following options, in addition to whichever languages you want:

• Kernel > Voodoo kernel 9.5.0
• Drivers > Time Machine patch
• Drivers > Video > Intel GMA950 patch
• Drivers > PCI > Intel ICx patch
• Drivers > Audio > Azalea ALC662 patch
• Drivers > Wired > Realtek R1000 patch
• Drivers > Other > USB 2.0 patch
• Fixes > PS/2 keyboard and mouse fix
• Fixes > Seatbelt fix
• OSx86 Tool (needed for kext files later)

When the installer is finished, press any key at the boot menu and type “-f” as a boot flag. This flushes the drivers. The machine will not boot until you do this.

Create an account. If you are using a wired network, then now is the time to set it up. Otherwise say you have no Internet connection. Once you are up to the desktop, open Finder > Applications > OSx86 Tool.

If you installed the TP-LINK card, you will need to add these kext files: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G6TQMEVG.

Regardless, you will need this kext so About this Mac stops crashing: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=34ZHWXTN.

Reboot. If you installed the TP-LINK card, then now is the time to run Appicaltions > System Preferences > network and add a new AirPort device. Use the wizard to connect to your local network and you will be all set. You must make a new AirPort device: the one added by default will never recognize or connect to your wireless network.

Congrats! You now made a Mac, and it’s damn near as powerful as the high-end MacBook Air—but which runs literally half as hot and much quieter.

For the finishing touch, rip off your Alt and Win keys and swap them for a more Mac’ish keyboard.

Not quite a powerhouse, but …

Let’s start off with a quick look at glxgears, since these are numbers that will be easily understood by Mac and Linux users. Mind you, these numbers are from onboard video. You could easily add a fancy PCI-Express card, but that would kill the budget for this project.

Soshette:~ d$ uname –a
Darwin Soshette.local 9.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Sat Dec 6 19:39:54 IST 2008; Voodoo; Release 1.0 nu-1228.7.58/BUILD/obj/RELEASE_I386 i386
Soshette:~ d$ glxgears
11213 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2242.600 FPS
11968 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2393.600 FPS
11977 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2395.400 FPS
11983 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2396.600 FPS
11979 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2395.800 FPS
11985 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2397.000 FPS
11974 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2394.800 FPS


Not bad! In fact, it’s much faster than my old Pentium M 2GHz running with an ATI Radeon Mobility X600.

Now for the Mac fags, we’ll run Xbench. I don’t expect very high numbers here, because Xbench is heavily weighted to single-thread, 32-bit processing. It’s no secret that, when you’re talking about single-threaded software, the Atom sucks balls like a drunken cheerleader.

Results 65.47

CPU Test: 34.52

• GCD Loop: 74.42 3.92 Mops/sec
• Floating Point Basic: 22.47 533.99 Mflop/sec
• vecLib FFT: 29.02 957.48 Mflop/sec
• Floating Point Library: 42.55 7.41 Mops/sec

Thread Test: 119.36

• Computation: 105.42 2.14 Mops/sec, 4 threads
• Lock Contention: 137.55 5.92 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads

Memory Test 85.51

• System: 69.37
  • Allocate: 65.76 241.50 Kalloc/sec
  • Fill: 102.66 4991.43 MB/sec
  • Copy: 54.65 1128.76 MB/sec
• Stream: 111.43
  • Copy: 113.20 2338.17 MB/sec
  • Scale: 106.21 2194.32 MB/sec
  • Add: 131.09 2792.48 MB/sec
  • Triad: 99.80 2134.94 MB/sec

Quartz Graphics Test 71.04

• Line: 73.06 4.86 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
• Rectangle 75.24 22.46 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
• Circle 66.50 5.42 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
• Bezier 71.36 1.80 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
• Text 69.67 4.36 Kchars/sec

OpenGL Graphics Test 107.27

• Spinning Squares: 107.27 136.08 frames/sec
• User Interface Test 52.08
• Elements 52.08 239.02 refresh/sec

Frankly, these are abysmal numbers. The CPU was shamed in its floating point and vector math scores, while the onboard video was extremely competent in its handling of Quartz and OpenGL graphics.

But the system handles far, far too snappy for it to suck this bad. Let’s see if a more accurate tester, like GeekBench, can deliver an explanation about what is going on here. You can see the GeekBench score in its database.

KEY:
STS = single-threaded scalar
MTS = multi-threaded scalar
STV = single-threaded vector
MTV = multi-threaded vector

Overall Score: 1748

• Processor integer performance: 1607
• Processor floating point performance: 2333
• Memory performance: 1206
• Memory bandwidth performance: 1281

Integer Performance: 1607

• Blowfish STS: 930 40.9 MB/sec
  Blowfish MTS: 2605 106.8 MB/sec
• Text Compress STS: 867 2.77 MB/sec
  Text Compress MTS: 2383 7.82 MB/sec
• Text Decompress STS: 960 3.95 MB/sec
  Text Decompress MTS: 2743 10.9 MB/sec
• Image Compress STS: 766 6.34 Mpixels/sec
  Image Compress MTS: 2193 18.5 Mpixels/sec
• Image Decompress STS: 577 9.69 Mpixels/sec
  Image Decompress MTS: 1609 26.3 Mpixels/sec
• Lua STS: 965 371.7 Knodes/sec
  Lua MTS: 2686 1.03 Mnodes/sec

Floating Point Performance: 2333

• Mandelbrot STS: 656 436.7 Mflops
  Mandelbrot MTS: 2463 1.61 Gflops
• Dot Product STS: 1308 632.3 Mflops
  Dot Product MTS: 3933 1.79 Gflops
• Dot Product STV: 1043 1.25 Gflops
  Dot Product MTV: 4673 4.86 Gflops
• LU Decomposition STS: 346 308.0 Mflops
  LU Decomposition MTS: 1263 1.11 Gflops
• Primality Test STS: 1224 182.9 Mflops
  Primality Test MTS: 2932 544.2 Mflops
• Sharpen Image STS: 1211 2.83 Mpixels/sec
  Sharpen Image MTS: 4113 9.48 Mpixels/sec
• Blur Image STS: 1772 1.40 Mpixels/sec
  Blur Image MTS: 5729 4.51 Mpixels/sec

Memory Performance: 1206

• Read Sequential STS: 1457 1.78 GB/sec
• Write Sequential STS: 1529 1.05 GB/sec
• Stdlib Allocate STS: 500 1.87 Mallocs/sec
• Stdlib Write STS: 1469 3.04 GB/sec
• Stdlib Copy STS: 1079 1.11 GB/sec

Stream Performance: 1281

• Stream Copy STS: 1079 1.48 GB/sec
  Stream Copy STV: 1713 2.22 GB/sec
• Stream Scale STS: 841 1.09 GB/sec
  Stream Scale STV: 1631 2.20 GB/sec
• Stream Add STS: 942 1.42 GB/sec
  Stream Add STV: 1860 2.59 GB/sec
• Stream Triad STS: 800 1.11 GB/sec
  Stream Triad STV: 1384 2.59 GB/sec

Now there’s some real numbers. As expected, memory operations are still a little slow. However, multi-threaded performance sees a massive boost of four or more times over the single threaded operations, which seem more in line with the Xbench scores.

Floating point math is considered one of the Atom’s weakest points, but according to these tests results an overclocked Atom 330 can keep step with an Intel Core 2 Duo P7500, as seen in the MacBook Air. In fact, it beats out the P7700 and falls shy of a proper 64-bit run on the P7500 (the high score in this test is due to better memory performance).

Yes, for the low price of 2,160 yuan (US $315 as the peso rises) you too can build an ultra low-power desktop system that can compete toe to toe with a MacBook Air.

Mind you, this setup has nothing on an 8-core Mac Pro (US $3,300), but for less than a tenth of the price you should not expect it to. This is a very respectable, silent (with a better power supply) little machine for photo and design work, and that’s all it is supposed to be.

A major in programming does nothing to prepare you for making games, and nearly every graduate dreaming of being paid to make games never gets to.

It was by sheer accident I ended up being called to work on a game—and I’m sure that chaps the collective asses of many would-have-been-colleagues.

In 2003, Brandon Cobb of Super Fighter Team ran across my work. He sent me an email to tell me his company was working on a C&E Soft game called Beggar Prince and needed a programmer to develop the tools to handle the text side of translation.

By that time, I had been working on game translations for seven years, so I accepted.

The game would be more accurately titled The New Prince & the Pauper, given the Chinese title is 新乞丐王子, a common Chinese rendering of Mark Twain’s famous novel, but that wasn’t the trademark his company had registered. Ah well.

Either way, it was better than C&E’s official name for the game: Myth on Light.

My job was to write a text inserter and an extractor to handle the script. Luckily, the Sega Megadrive tends to use 32-bit addressing, which made finding text locations quite easy. I wrote tools to use the script as a lookup point to track down code blocks that called string addresses. I also wrote some simple tools to work with the graphics.

There were a lot of difficulties with the pointer lookup method, and things got more and more complicated toward the end when English text flowed beyond the limited buffer to overwrite program code.

The English translation was handled by Yu “Techmaster” Chen-shih, a Chinese guy from Taiwan who lives in Ontario, Canada. He did a good job on the script, but Cobb had to do a lot of rewriting. Like most RPGs from that era, especially the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy, it had a fantastically flat, terrible script.

If you ever complained about games being rewritten for US release, count your blessings that you cannot read Japanese. “Woolseyisms” were the only things making Square’s later Super Nintendo releases readable.

Beggar Prince took two years to pull together, and it was released for sale in early 2006. It was the first official Sega Megadrive release in the US and Europe in at least six years, and completely sold out three runs of cartridges, with the final cartridge sold on June 19, 2007.

The second run of cartridges fixes a bug which causes the Save Game option to fail on Sega Nomad units.

If you own the game and finish it, watch for my name in the credits. I appear as the first name in the “Programming” section.

I made this!

This post replaces a section which used to be filed under my professional work.

Is this one a coincidence or spelling error?

“Sarks” sightings:

I’m still waiting to meet Frank.

Frank’s in the backyard of the game arcade, thinking about peace and love.

http://derricksobodash.com/

Let me know what you think of it so far. I tried to keep it as minimalist as possible so lazy HR people with ADD will be able to see everything.

I highly recommend not disabling Javascript. This is a portfolio, and that means it is requires a visual medium. I’ll leave the resume-only pages to Gopherspace …

I am attempting to whittle down some of the last three years of photos to prepare a selection for my potfolio. This is not easy, because I have a lot of photos.

Here’s your chance to tell me what you think sucks and what you think rocks. You don’t need to be a professional photographer, because professional photographers are usually not hiring photographers. I am looking for man-on-the-street feedback.

However, I do have a few guidelines. Selections should be interesting, or should have some impact. Don’t simply pick pretty colors, and don’t be caught up in HDR where it is used. Especially if a picture uses HDR (such as those in my HDR set), consider whether the use of HDR really makes it a better picture.

You can look through what I shortlisted at www.flickr.com/photos/dsobodash/sets/72157614832630128/.

Please select 10 to 20 photos you like. You can either reply to the photos on Flickr, or send me a list of Flickr photo IDs. If you look in your URL bar while viewing a photo, you will see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsobodash/3021835268/

That number in bold is the photo’s ID number. Please submit only that piece. If you give the photo names or try to describe them, it could be difficult to find. You can either reply to this post with your list or mail it to derrick (at) cinnamonpirate (circle thingy) com.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Let me tell you the tale of “duo mao mao.”

Our story begins with Li Qiaoming, a 24-year-old resident of Yuxi, Yunnan Province. On January 30, Li was wandering about the fine southern forests when he decided to emulate the American icon Paul Bunyon and engage in some illegal logging. Apparently the sound of gigantic old trees crashing into the forest floor alerted authorities something was up, and the fuzz came to confiscate his flannel and hatchet.

Li was taken to a detainment facility in Jinning, and nine days later he emerged: this time bound for the ER. He died fast, and the doctors said it was due to multiple blows and kicks sustained all over his body.

How did he sustain these fatal blows? By playing the most dangerous game that every proper American parent wants to see banned from elementary school: hide and seek.

Well, technically it could be blind man’s bluff, depending on who translates “duo mao mao,” but you get the idea. The point is that he most certainly was not abused in any way by the fine and upstanding prison guards—a career known world over for attracting nothing but paragons of virtue. They would never violate a prisoner’s rights.

But Li isn’t a prisoner.

Now, the thing to remember is that jail here is … weird.

See, this loops back into international agreements, and as far as technicalities go, this country has a fantastic record for protecting prisoners’ rights.

The operative word is “prisoner.”

Much as a US cop slapping cuffs on you does not grant you your phone call, being detained or otherwise jailed doesn’t quite make you a prisoner: neither does a one- to twelve-month stint in a re-education through labor camp. This isn’t office space, and there is no “federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison”—the ones under long-term lockup are the best protected.

And so knowing their infamous reputation localy, it is hard to imagine that in a common jail Mr. Li perished game of hiding from cats.

Here is this week’s lesson: if you are going to lie to everyone, make sure it’s believable. Or at least forge some evidence to make it believeable.

When you get right down to it, humans do not give a shit about the truth. Not even enough to push out a turtle head.

We grasp are a few flimsy pieces of evidence which validate said story, then say, “Sure, that sounds right to me. A camel pulling a rocket? I guess Saddam really had weapons of mass destruction.”

Sadly, Americans never received their iconic photograph of that fateful glow-in-the-dark camel outside a weapons plant because the government didn’t care enough to give a couple college kids a copy of Photoshop CS 2.0 and a chance at extra credit.

And the Chinese people never got their security footage.

Back up.

You see, in order to back up its hide-and-seek story, the Jining Police and the Yunnan Provincial Information Department—whose name I changed from “propaganda department” to match standards in the US and UK—invited in an independent team of 15 investigators led by two political bloggers to check out the story.

The team was shown to the site where that fateful kick happened, but said there was no security footage of Li’s injuries because the jail didn’t have a security system.

The. Jail. Did. Not. Have. Security.

All it takes is a beat-up 10-year-old computer with a USB port—of which I’m sure every local landfill and electronics stripping site has dozens—and a 50-yuan USB camera. You mount the camera, run the wire and click fucking “Record.” Do it in shit-resolution black and white, grabbing every 5 seconds, and you would have Radio Shack’s security system, which still runs off a Trash-80 with a tape backup drive.

How are the guards getting paid in a jail that can’t afford a security system? Isn’t the jail the one place in town that really should have a security system? Now this is a news story worth covering.

In my mind, I picture this Jinning jail as being like the “honor system” jail from El Mariachi, where prisoners come and go as they please and conduct business on a cell phone wired into a car battery.

But beyond this implausibility, let’s consider another point.

Criminals were out of their cells playing hide and seek somewhere the guards could not see them.

Try to visualize it. These strapping, angry men with their shaved heads, muscles and tattoos. These men who guard their food with their forearms before heading over to the weight pile to decide who to make their bitch today. These men, when released from their cells—beyond the watch of the guards mind you—would choose to organize into teams for a game of hide-and-seek.

Red Rover, Red Rover, send reality right over.

The world is not that harmonious.

The only way I could see prisoners taking hide and seek or blind man’s bluff so seriously is if they were told whoever wins can get out of prison a day earlier.

In prison, the most valuable thing is less time in prison. That’s why there was such a big brouhaha last year when the press learned US prisons were giving inmates time off in exchange for donating their organs.

Consider it “good behavior.” Squared.

That’s not much of a choice. If a man is in prison sitting on a dime—watching his child grow up in photos and knowing he will miss out on more than half of his chance to be a dad—and you tell him he can take a nickel off his bid by giving up a kidney, chances are he’s going to jump on it.

Even if he doesn’t have a kid, it might mean five less years of getting tagged from behind.

But really, prisoners are the last place any country should be going to source organs. I’ve written on it before, but based on simple addition, the homeless population can provide more guts with less fuss.

Besides, if you don’t pounce on him for parts, Crazy Jesus of the Woods will just end up frozen to death, face down and ass up, in a rain barrel as the other contestants in the Richard Stallman look-alike competition debate which cuts are the most perishable, and when they should have the Holy Roast.

But I’ve wandered off topic.

The point is, I cannot imagine a hardened criminal will voluntarily play hide-and-seek, ring around the Rosie or pin the tail on the donkey: unless the tail is his balls, the pin is his cock and the donkey is his cellmate’s asshole.

That still leaves us one seriously beaten man, who the police would have us believe was blindfolded and beaten as he tried to find people, or was roundhoused in the face by someone whose hiding place he found, or who did not want to share his hiding place.

Meanwhile, we’re still looking for a nuclear camel.

Don’t look to authority for honesty, because no matter in which country you live there is none to be had. For all the bullshit that separates us around the world, we citizens of the universe can be united in that the people in charge will always be up to their ears in shit.

No wonder that’s all they give us.

Personally, I like my shit shaped, breaded and deep fried like a KFC drumstick.

Well, maybe not that extreme, but I’ve certainly been far more productive than the site would suggest.

First off, I owe a huge apology to Jan Ask, who made a very generous WineLocale donation last month. I have been feeling extremely guilty about not having the beta out yet. Jan, I hope you’ll forgive me for that one.

What happened was my laptop. And then the laptop. And then the Linux group. And then the laptop again.

The repository

The answer to what I’ve been doing can be found at http://medan.cinnamonpirate.com/, my new repository and one of the first few independent ones for Loongson packages. I’ve been working hard on resolving compile issues and contacting authors when I fail to, to fill in the blanks in Debian’s offerings.

These packages are all compiled in gcc 4.3 with code profiling, so they are the fastest you can get until gcc 4.4 goes stable. gcc 4.4 will add mtune and march flags for the Loongson 2F CPU, as well as adding support for Loongson’s media opcodes, which are not supported in gcc 4.3.

Patches and fixes

The media opcodes interest me, because I’ve had to fork the second revision of Lemote’s SiliconMotion Xorg driver, since gcc 4.3 can’t deal with the new inline assembler optimizations present in revision 3. The fork fixes a driver problem which has been present since 2003: red and blue are backwards, and the driver fails to report any of the XvImage modes it supports to xvinfo.

I also released a new kernel image based on Lemote’s 2.6.27.1-yeeloong. It adds static support for SquashFS and UnionFS, which are essential for bringing up the system on a Yeeloong 8089A, which has only 2GB of flash disk space–1.8GB after formatting it to carry an ext3 journal. The kernel also steps up the interrupt cycles to 1000Hz, which brings it in line with Lemote’s choice to enable full kernel preemption.

I separately packaged a few necessary extra modules which were built out of tree: these modules create necessary /proc/ devices for APM so battery meters will work, add the r8187 driver from Lemote to replace the broken rtl8187 in-kernel Wifi driver and “oc,” an overclocking modules by which users can increase their FSB speed in userspace.

Emulators

With the help of byuu and the Mednafen author, I have packaged a hacked Dosbox which allows the emulator to use a YUY2 overlay instead of the default UYUV overlay. This allows full-screen scaling of games with no speed loss. There is one fluke, and that is Dosbox writes YUV4:2:2 as two pixels instead of writing the YV on top of the YU as one pixel. This doubles the display width making it impossible to see the far right side of the command prompt when using overlay mode. I mentioned this to the authors, but the glitch sounds intentional.

As for other emulators, I have released packages for Xnp2, a PC-9801 emulator; quasi88, a PC-8801 emulator; bsnes, byuu’s Super Famicom emulator; snes9x-gtk, a Snes9x overlay by Bearoso which gives the emulator a very nice GUI; mednafen, the multi-system emulator; and xmame-x, in which I used code profiling to improve the performance in quite a few game drivers.

Regarding performance, everything runs at full speed except bsnes and the PC-FX emulation in mednafen. I get slight lag in Salamander 2 in xmame, and Daraku Tenshi is too slow to play, however CPS1/2 and Neo-Geo games work fantastic. I compiled gxmame to provide a quality frontend to it.

As for scaling, mednafen, Xnp2 and quasi88 cannot go full screen. Because all current Loongson systems rely on SiliconMotion graphics adapters, and because SiliconMotion cards lack 3D acceleration, the only overlay available is Xv. mednafen is getting an SDL overlay in its work in progress build, so the next release should be able to operate at full screen. Gameboy, Gamboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo Pocket, Wonderswan, Famicom, PC-Engine, Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear run full speed when unscaled in x11 surface writing, so there is no reason to suspect these will not run full speed in full screen once the new overlay option is available.

I have not mentioned MSX. The only MSX emulator that is any good on Linux is OpenMSX, which does run at full speed if scaling is off. Unfortunately, the authors do not support an SDL overlay–only OpenGL–so playing full screen is impossible.

Beta desktop

Also of interest is the Xfce 4.6 beta, which I built for Loongson using the source code packages from Corsac, the Xfce package maintainer for Debian. The new Xfce is light and snappy, with a configuration system more similar to Gnome’s. It also brings in its own battery manager so you can remove another Gnome program.

The desktop also underwent many improvements, including a draggable selection box like you would find in Thunar. Still no SVG wallpaper, though it has some other neat features.

Possibly the most dramatic change is to the configuration, which is now handled by a daemon that programs can query. It’s a little similar to how Gnome works with its gconf system, which is itself rather similar to the Windows Registry.

I have packaged the gnome2-globalmenu, since lots of people love it and 600 vertical pixels is a pitiful amount for any LCD. Using a globalmenu saves lots of screen space. To avoid unwanted configurations for opposing window managers, I made two packages: gnome2-globalmenu an xfce4-globalmenu. You can grab whichever fits your system.

The distribution

Earlier in the month, I released a distribution image for the Lemote Yeeloong 8089A. This was the first Linux image to work on the system aside from Lemote’s own. If you want to try it, you can get the torrent from linuxtracker.org.

One of the primary concerns in preparing a disk image for the 8089A is capacity. With only 2GB available, you need some tricks and smart choices. My image provides a full system with development headers, my kernel, all extra modules, Abiword and Gnumeric (to avoid the OpenOffice.org payload) and more while leaving the user about 650MB free–far more than Lemote Loonux did.

The disc image lacks an installation system. At the moment, the best way to install it is to format a 4GB USB stick to ext2, untar the OS to it, then copy the tarball itself to root.

Boot the Yeeloong or Gdmium with your USB stick inserted and get to the pmon prompt. Enter these commands:


load /dev/fs/ext2@usb0/vmlinux-2.6.27.1-medan
g console=tty root=/dev/sda1 no_auto_cmd


When it boots up you will be in Gnome. All passwords are set to “loongson” by default. To install the image, run gparted and delete all your partitions on /dev/hda. Make one new partition, then mount it like `mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1`, then untar the tarball from root to that path.

It is critical you do not untar in another folder and attempt to move the files: the system will not be able to boot.

Assuming you haven’t already mangled pmon’s auto-start features, the new OS will come up immediately in place of Lemote Loonux. The new boot.cfg adds an entry for booting a vmlinux off your USB device.

No, you cannot do this with an SD card: pmon does not support booting from SD cards.

Odds and ends

Other packages of interest include byuu’s bview, for looking at binary graphics; tsukuyomi, for applying and creating UPS patches; and xkas, his assembler for the Super Famicom.

You may also want ucon64, which applies IPS and PPF patches, as well as doing many other things to ROM images.

The epiphany-gecko package supplied includes some patches from ArchLinux which force pop-ups to open in new tabs as they do in Google Chrome. This is nice for a laptop, since you cannot middle click to open in a tab from your Synaptic touchpad.

For art fans, I made some SVG images of the Longmeng and Loongson logos, as well as an Loongson-branded SVG wallpaper for Gnome. All can be found at the bottom of the repository.

Lastly, I packaged ChibiTracker which is a fantastic little ImpulseTracker clone.

Enjoy! And now it’s time for me to work on WineLocale.

That was until this month. The laptop I ordered two years ago finally arrived, now in the shape of a netbook bearing the latest Loongson 2F CPU. I’ve spent a week hacking on it, and have come to the conclusion that this is a really fun computer to own. It’s stable, passes the drop test, and is open enough where you can do … basically anything.

This laptop has an open source BIOS based on a souped-up pmon, which allows the user total access to the memory map. If you have the patience, you can go right in there and cause some trouble.

No matter how fun it is, this is not a laptop for regular users, and I believe Lemote is doing itself and incredibly disservice by marketing it as such. At first glance, it looks like something for the trash bin, but that’s until you start hacking.

Origins of the chip

Hu Weiwu began to develop the Loongson in 2002 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Well, actually at the Institute of Computing Technology, but those are kind of attached. The first generation chip, a 32-bit almost-MIPS-compatible, was put into a handful of computers for rural children in Sichuan in 2006: the Sinomanic Tianhua GX series. These systems were similar to a Commodore64 and were basically keyboards that plugged into a TV and ran a bare bones Linux OS.

The first serious attempt at a Loongson-based PC was released by Lemote during Spring Festival 2007: the Fulong box. The Fulong is a super-compact computer in a box about the same size as a 5.25″ CD-ROM enclosure. The first box, the 2E, came with a 667MHz 64-bit Loongon CPU with a VIA southbridge and 256MB of RAM.

Lemote, a joint venture corporate arm made by the ICT to sell its chips, began to promote a new laptop that would use its Loongson 2E chip in fall 2007. I jumped on the pre-order opportunity but heard nothing until early 2008. After Asus launched its EeePC series, Lemote went back to the drawing board.

Last November, the company released a new Fulong box with a 1GHz Loongson 2F CPU running the new Xinhua Hualay RAYS 2.0 system, a Debian derivative produced for the Loongson.

We got a call the first week of January that my laptop, ordered so long ago, was now a netbook and I would have to come pick it up. Lemote only offers delivery to people who live in provinces in which it does not have a distribution house.

On a cold and gray Beijing morning I bundled up for the trek to go get my Loongson.

The Lemote store

Lemote’s Beijing office is located on 10 Kexueyuan Nan Li in Zhongguancun. That’s Haidian district. Great if you are a student, but sucks when you work in Chaoyang. The subway commute was one hour each way. Thankfully we have a new line: last year it would have been a two to three-hour bus trip.

I took the line from its second station to almost its last. After tying my shoes, I headed out the tunnel and into a neighborhood I had never seen before. Lemote’s storefront is on the east side of the street on the first floor of a small office building. Zhongguancun is full of these kinds of offices—they are where most IT companies house their service centers.

I didn’t get any photos inside the Lemote store because, well, I couldn’t. I only brought a fixed 50mm lens, and the store was so small I could not get back far enough to photograph anything meaningful.

The front windows have a series of displays showing off Loongson motherboards produced by Lemote, and also have some empty plastic imitations of the new netbook I was there to buy: the 8089-series Yeeloong. The 8089A, which I purchased for 2,110 yuan, is a 900MHz Loongson 2F with 512MB RAM and a 2GB SLC solid state drive. The alternative was an 8089B, the more popular model, which ups the RAM to 1GB and swaps the solid state drive with a bulky 160GB laptop hard disk. It also adds one USB port and a Web cam for 2,899 yuan.

On the left were two desks in front of the display shelf. The shelf showed off every Loongson motherboard produced in a series of black cubbyholes. The tables had five display computers.

The farthest left computer was a Fulong 2F box hooked up to a very large LCD screen. It was running RAYS as advertised, and was a lot of fun to play with. The other four computers were all black laptops. It turns out that the advertised laptops—the ones that came in black and white with paintings of bamboo on their covers—weren’t even made yet.

Ouch.

Not one to wait, I decided to get the black 8089A. The box said it was a 2GB SLC/8GB MLC, but I would find out later it was just 2GB. Ouch again, but at least it wasn’t a 2GB MLC. Single-Level Cell disks are much, much faster and much less prone to errors. I had a crisis once when using ReiserFS on my EeePC and learned my lesson.

Back to Marketing 101

If all you ever see is the Lemote Yeeloong as shipped by the company, then yes, it is a disappointing product.

First off, it is ugly like Brian Peppers. Uglier, in fact. At first glance, it looks like it is running KDE. That scared me, because running KDE on anything but the best hardware is madness. The window manager is a bloated mess, and the look of KDE 3.0 went out of fashion in 2002. Yet Everaldo’s Crystal icons, smiling up at me from a panel.

Well, I thought it was a panel.

It had Konqueror. It had Kterm. Everything except OpenOffice had a K in front of it. But then there was IceWeasel, which threw everything off. The setup is a bad mix of Gtk and Qt software, both totally unthemed.

The panel, I would also discover, was IceWM, which Lemote used to apply very cheap Luna borders to the windows. I will never understand the fetish Chinese developers have for Luna. Even my Lenovo cell phone had one truly ugly theme that looked like a hacked up “Luna for mobiles.”

As you might expect from this bad mash up, things
ran—to put it kindly—clunky. Windows dragged poorly, everything was slow, and the system was badly, badly crippled. Intentionally.

Lemote broke apt. They also broke dpkg. The filesystem is read only, which is probably why they weren’t too concerned about making the only possible user account “root.”

This disaster of a Debian setup is called “Lemote Loonux,” according to the boot menu.

While I was there, an old man was cursing about how he couldn’t watch movies on Youku because there was no Flash. It may be a bit of a leap, but I think it has something to do with the Luna theme. If you make something look too much like another product, people will expect it to function like that product. I anticipate this will disappoint a lot of Loongson users.

Service with a smile

The sales staff was exceptionally nice. I think Lemote knows that some of the people most interested in its products are foreigners. They got the box for me and walked me through filling out all the warranty cards.

On my way out, two somewhat geeky guys came in asking “Where are the new Loongsons!?” I thought to myself that these are the users Lemote should be trying to target: technically savvy users looking for a hobby system on which to hack.

I took the subway home and cracked open the box.

• Loongson 2F CPU at 900MHz (LIES! cpufreq reports a max of 797MHz, it’s the EeePC all over again!)
• 512KB L2 cache
• Loongson on-chip northbridge
• AMD CS5536 integrated controller (ISA, IDE, USB audio)
• 512MB DDRII RAM (what’s the max?)
• 2GB SLC solid state disk
• 8.9″ WSVGA LCD screen (1024×600)
• Silicon Motion SM712 LynxEM+ audio controller
• Realtek 8139 10/100 ethernet controller
• 802.11a/b/g Wifi adapter
• SD card reader
• 2x USB 2.0 ports
• VGA, speaker and mic output jacks
• 3-cell battery
• measures 25.5×18.8×2.5cm
• weighs 1kg (1.1kg with battery)

The computer comes with an extremely clear instruction manual, the netbook, a battery, power cord and power supply. The keyboard is snappy and responsive, thought I wish they had put the Fn key between CTRL and ALT instead of on the edge. It conflicts with the typing habits I acquired on my EeePC where it is now.

The plastic is very light, not as rubberized as the EeePC’s. It kind of has a “hollow” feeling to it that makes the laptop seem lighter even though it’s not.

The bottom has one large panel that unscrews to give easy access to the ram and hard disk in one shot. On my 8089A the bay is entirely empty except for the tiny SSD card soldered to a board with some IC chips and a female 2.5″ hard disk connector. The IC is a SM223TF, the same one used in the EeePC’s SSD, and the flash memory is produced by Hynix.

When you plug it in and fire it up, a Lemote BIOS screen comes up. The custom BIOS is based on pmon and has basically two options. It has an incredible debug mode that allows you to manually push files into the RAM and get a tty to their position. It attempts to find a “/boot/boot.cfg” on /dev/hda1 and uses it to create a boot menu. There is only one option in the menu: Lemote Loonux.

Marketing lessons

Lemote, in my opinion, really blew it on this package. They really should have taken a lesson from Apple, who long ago proved that all you need is creative branding to sell low-end hardware.

They had a big opportunity. New hardware. The first system from China. Lots of foreign geeks watching closely.

If they had rolled out Lemote Loonux with a look all their own, it could have really grabbed a niche in the hobbyist market. For an example of a distribution with successful branding, one needs look no further than Cannonical. Their Ubuntu began as nothing but a Debian hack, but its successful branding has over shadowed its parent among average users. Dell is even shipping it on its laptops.

There is no official Lemote or Loongson wallpaper. No unique colors or icons. Not even a consistent software offering. Why did they put on so many KDE applications when RAYS is mostly Gtk? It can’t be because of Chinese support, because IceWeasel is not Qt. I can think of few places Chinese input is more important than in a Web browser.

This laptop should have shipped with RAYS with a custom Lemote theme. This would give all Lemote products a similar look and feel—they already run on the same Debian packages. They also should have unlocked the filesystem to facilitate upgrades.

I kept Lemote’s OS for five hours before destroying it to start on my own using a Debian image. I’ve attached a few screenshots of my current setup to show just how much better this could have looked. I have twice as much software as the computer came with and almost every development header, and I still have 800MB of disk space free compared to the 320MB Lemote Loonux gave me.

To sum up my Yeeloong experience: I love the hardware, but hate the software. If you want a fun, non-x86 system to hack at, then Loongson is perfect for you.

Each wallpaper package is available as a ZIP on my deviantArt page. The packages contains PNG format graphics at 800×480, 1024×600, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200 and 2560×1600.

Windows users may need to enable Web content on their desktop or save the graphics in Microsoft BMP format.

Dan and I had talked about this in email, and it was originally suggested that WineLocale add locale support in this way. It’s probably for the best, because it makes WineLocale feel more “integrated.” To save space and download time, you can just add the language’s IME support or something similar from the expander rather than the numerous translation files.

On the down side, I won’t have enough time to get the beta out this week. Work just dropped on us some news that we have to put on a presentation at a company party this Friday, so all my free time must be routed to that project. Sorry for the let-down.

I will be back to work on WineLocale on Saturday, and with any luck will have an early working beta by Sunday or Monday.

I could use more UI localizations. I believe ^Skeud^ may do a French UI file. I’ve received files for Portuguese (Brasil) and Simplified Chinese from gamer_boy and Jacky Waiss. If you want to see WineLocale in your language, translate this file and email it to me.

Please be sure to change the “language=” line to the name for your language in your language. In other words, if you are sending me a Japanese file, it should say “日本語,” not “Japanese.” Credit yourself by writing whatever name you would like to be called in the “translator=” line.

Thanks in advance to anyone who sends in new languages.