OpenBSD - Understanding macppc Users

Traditional Apple mice have only one mouse button. If you try to use the X Window System on a macppc machine, you might be unable to middle-click or right-click anything. The solution is to find and use a USB mouse with three buttons. A new mouse might cost around USD 20.

The macppc machines have other quirks that require users to think differently...

There are five types of Macintosh machines.

So far, Apple Macintosh computers come in five different machine architectures.

1. 68k Macintosh (mac68k)
2. NuBus PowerPC Macintosh
3. "Old World" PowerPC Macintosh
4. "New World" PowerPC Macintosh (macppc)
5. Intel-based Macintosh (i386)

The oldest 68k Macintosh and the newest Intel-based Macintosh are not PowerPC machines. The NuBus PowerPC Macintosh is a mostly forgetten class of slow and low-end machines that can only boot Classic Mac OS, MkLinux (a variant of Linux 2.0) or NuBus Linux/PPC (a variant of Linux 2.4).

The remainder of, and vast majority of, PowerPC Macintosh hardware are Old World or New World machines. The Old World represents computers before the iMac, while the New World represents the iMac and later machines. Both classes of machines contain a PCI bus and use Open Firmware to locate devices and boot the OS. Classic Mac OS, Linux, and NetBSD boot on most Old World and New World machines. Mac OS X and OpenBSD boot only New World machines. (OpenBSD 4.1/macppc can boot some Old World machines, but officially supports only New World machines.)

There is no MIDI device.

A Macintosh does not have a midi(4) device. In actual practice, some programs will try to play a MIDI file through a midi(4) device, and this will fail.

The correct way to handle a MIDI file is to use a software synthesizer and instrument set to convert MIDI files to an audio format, such as Ogg Vorbis. One such converter is TiMidity++. There is an OpenBSD port in /usr/ports/audio/timidity but it uses an instrument set with "copyrighted patches", thus there is no package in FTP. One must use ports (not packages) to install TiMidity++.

Mac OS provides a software synthesizer and instrument set in QuickTime.

The Macintosh has no bell nor beep.

Traditionally, each terminal either had a visual bell, or an audible bell on the keyboard device. An application would beep by writing an ASCII bell character to the terminal. This is why wscons(4) layer in the OpenBSD kernel uses the keyboard driver to handle the bell (or beep).

ADB keyboards and USB keyboards do not have a bell (or beep). When using OpenBSD/macppc, neither the console server nor the X server can ring the bell (beep). Presently, both the akbd(4) and ukbd(4) drivers completely ignore any beeps.

Some OpenBSD/i386 machines can beep through the pcppi(4) driver. This hack only works with pckbd(4) keyboards. Linux seems to have solved the problems. I have observed Linux machines that beep through the audio device. Mac OS traditionally beeps through the audio device, and the Mac OS "Simple Beep" is already more than the flat note of other systems.

I should mention that OpenBSD applications almost never ring the bell, so the benefit of providing a bell (or beep) is negligible.

The text of this wiki page is in the PublicDomain.