[slackintosh-users] Re: Eject PC Cards and Play Audio CD's

Joost,

Thanks for your speedy reply!

My reply is below.


From: Joost Kremers <joostkremers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: slackintosh-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: slackintosh-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [slackintosh-users] Re: Eject PC Cards and Play Audio CD's
Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 00:45:40 +0200

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 08:52:02PM +0000, Edward Felberbaum wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a happy user of Slackintosh 10.2 on an Apple G3 Wallstreet.
>
> Things generally work very well.
>
> I do have two issues I'd like to resolve.
>
> 1) I can't physically eject a PC Card while in Slackintosh.
>
> I've tried pbbuttons but all that does is issue cardctl eject.  I tried
> pccardctl eject that only seems to logically eject the card but NOT
> physically eject the card. Currently I have to either turn off the machine 
> so I can press the PC card eject button or boot into Mac OS 9 to *E the
> card.

but if the card is logically ejected, and you have a button to physically
eject it (which i assume you do, since you can eject it when the machine is
turned off), shouldn't you be able to safely press that button?
The Apple G3 Wallstreet does not have buttons to mechanically eject a PC Card. It has two button switches attached to a ribbon cable that electrically signal that the associated slot eject the card. It seems that there is a spring loaded mechanism for each slot that is put under tension when a card is inserted and a motor that delatches the spring that will forcefully eject the card.
When I have pbbuttonsd/gtkpbbuttons running, when I pust the PC Card eject switch I see a message from pbbuttons that it couldn't find "cardctl eject". I'm using pccardctl eject as recommended elsewhere. THAT only logically ejects the card. The card remains in the slot until I shutdown or reboot into Mac OS 9.
Again I'm looking for a way to have Slackintosh eject PC Cards while in Slackintosh Linux as Mac OS 9 does. Currently I have to reboot the Apple to do this. 



> 2) I can't play Audio CD's while in Slackintosh.
>
> I can read data CD's but when I try something like Workbone, it returns
> immediately. No error message. It's been a while since I was looking at > Workbone code but I thought that maybe the IOCTL to play an audio CD has a 
> problem.  I really don't know what the problem is.

the problem is probably that there is no cable from the cd-drive to the
sound card. standard pc's have such a cable, which basically turns the
cd-drive into a cd-player: the sound is sent directly from the cd-drive to
the sound card, without intervention from the cpu. workbone and such
programs basically just instruct the cd-drive to do this. but on macintosh
computers this generally doesn't work, because apple have decided not to
connect the cd-drive to the sound card.

so if you want to play audio cd's on a mac, you need a program that does
all the hard work itself: read the audio data, convert it and send it to
the sound card. i haven't been successful at this yet... xmms is supposed
to be able to do this, but i didn't manage to get it to work. IIUC you have
to set the cd-audio plugin (libcdaudio or something) to "digital mode" in
the preferences (the other option, "analogue mode" being the one where the
cd-drive is supposed to send the audio data directly to the sound card),
but in my case xmms still only played the first few seconds of a cd, after
which no more sound came out of the speakers.
That's disappointing and ANOTHER design shortcoming in the Apple G3 Powerbook. The other shortcoming I discovered is that the date/time clock on the Wallstreet does not use a battery to keep the clock running for days while not connected to AC power. The Powerbook expects a charged main battery (mine won't hold a charge). A new main battery is at least $80. There is a PRAM battery that only maintains the clock and RAM contents for 5 hours, enough time to swap main batteries.
When I was running Mac OS 9 and playing an Audio CD I dd notice that the audio would stop momentarily when I ran a CPU intensive program like starting Internet Explorer for the Mac.
I can live without playing Audio CD's because I can RIP 'em. Getting the PC Card Eject function working would be great however. 

Do you have any other suggestions?  Should I contact Benjamin Herrenschmidt?

Thanks again for your time,
Eddie




--
Joost Kremers, PhD
University of Cologne
Institute for German Language and Literature
Albertus Magnus Platz
50923 Cologne, Germany
Tel. +49 221 / 4703807



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