Release Notes

Thank you for downloading Copland Community Preview. I hope you'll find this project worthy of your continued attention and input. As you may already be aware, the purpose of this release is to secure developers to bring my dream to life... of a powerful, community-based distribution specifically for PowerPC and former Mac users.

System Requirements

Any "New-world" PowerPC-based Macintosh computer (i.e. a "Bondi-Blue" iMac or later).

128 megabytes of RAM (192 megabytes recommended)

1.5 gigabytes of hard disk space for installation

Bootable CD-ROM drive

You will need more memory plus a copy of the Mac OS in order to use the Mac-On-Linux virtualisation.

Quickstart

Burn the .iso file to a CD; remember, you must burn it as a disc image, not just as an ordinary file. Burn at 8x or slower. Users with tray-load iMacs, I suggest you use a CD-RW or a "music" CD-R. The disc can be burnt on a PC or another Linux machine if necessary.

Insert the CD into your drive, restart the Mac and hold down the C key. Press Enter at the prompt. Some grey scrolling text will come up your screen to tell you exactly what is loading. When it has all finished loading, you will get a grey login screen with the Copland logo.

Username is ubuntu

There is no password.

Changes from Xubuntu 6.10 (Copland's base distribution)

1. New, classic Mac-like configuration for the XFCE desktop environment

2. Aiff Interchange, a program that allows the conversion of AIFF audio files to WAV or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

3. Hfs Browser, a program that helps you browse HFS and HFS+ removable disks.

4. Higher brightness setting as many iMacs display images too dark on Linux.

5. Removing of nonessential packages and language packs to keep the download and memory requirements low. Replacement of certain system software with faster/more functional equivilants.

6. Mac-On-Linux virtualisation software

7. Free-as-in-beer codecs

8. New artwork and theme.

9. Airport Extreme driver

10. New software added:

VLC movie player

Quod Libet music manager

Ex Falso ID3 tag editor

Font Forge (can be used to convert Mac fonts to Linux ones)

Fish - Friendly Interactive SHell.

Gnash 0.9.7

Pidgin 2 beta 6

Essential packages for compiling software and creating Debian packages of them

GTKpod iPod manager

HFS command-line tools

TkChooser - a familiar interface for various network tasks

11. New options in the XFCE menu for Administrator Terminal and Administrator File Manager

12. Whenever your password is needed, an explanation is given.

Known Bugs

Unfortunately, with a young project, there are likely to be many unknown bugs! But here are the ones observed so far:

0. Ubiquity (the installer) is broken and does not start up. We are working on a fix.

1. Xorg display does not configure correctly for certain computers, leaving you at a blank screen like your monitor has turned off (upstream issue):

Press Control-Alt-F2 and type sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. Follow the prompts, and when all is finished, type "sudo killall Xorg" then "sudo /etc/init.d/xdm restart".

2. No thermal control on certain G5 Macs - fans run at full speed (upstream issue)

The next version of Copland will have correct thermal support.

3. XFCE panel and/or desktop may not start under certain conditions (upstream issue?):

If this happens to you, press Option-F2 and type "xfce4-panel" for the panel, or "xfdesktop" for the desktop.

4. Restarting and shutting down graphically may not work:

If this happens to you, switch to a virtual terminal by pressing Control-Option-F2 and typing "sudo halt" for shut down, or "sudo reboot" for restarting.

5. Semi-automatic drive mounting in XFCE/Thunar does not work.

There is some kind of bug which prevents Thunar from mounting drives on demand; it gives an error message about mount points. Unfortunately, if you get this error, it means you will have to mount your drive manually.

For those of you who don't know, open the Administrator Terminal (Copland > System > Administrator Terminal) and type the following:

{{{fdisk -l (this lists all available drives and partitions, so you can find the device name; e.g. /dev/sdf1)

mkdir /media/usbdisk

mount /dev/sdf1 /media/usbdisk -o users}}}

Then go to Copland > System > Thunar File Manager and double click on "usbdisk" in the left pane.

6. Flash movies play very slowly, incorrectly or not at all:

This is unfortunately due to the reverse-engineered Flash support - it is not perfect. Adobe has chosen not to make a version of Flash Player for the PowerPC Linux platform, nor to make this software open-source so it can be ported. If you would prefer to completely disable Flash, type the following on the command-line:

'sudo apt-get remove --purge gnash'

7. The installer crashes or does not open

There does not seem to be a solution to this at the moment. If you can find out some information about why the installer doesn't work, please notify the developers.

8. Certain audio and video formats do not work

This isn't actually a bug, but I thought it best to include mention of this in the release notes. Fluendo (http://shop.fluendo.com) offers Windows Media codecs for PowerPC; these have not been tested on Copland yet, and there are no guarantees they will work - but I can see no reason why they wouldn't. Make sure you download the ones marked Linux/PPC. All the same, there will be some formats which will not work. Please encourage content creators to use open formats such as Vorbis, Speex, Theora or XviD.

9. The HP Linux control panel gives an error on startup

To ensure that the CD image remains small, not everything necessary for the control panel has been installed by default. Go to a terminal and type: sudo apt-get install python-qt3. This will use your internet connection to fetch the package that HPLIP needs.

Things to note:

By default, you do not have write access to things outside your home directory (and mounted drives). If you need to modify a file in the filesystem, for instance /etc/X11/xorg.conf, you can go Copland > System > Administration File Manager. Use this file manager with caution - inside it you have ultimate power over your computer, and can mess up your system if you fiddle with the wrong things. Don't use it for everyday tasks, as this will create inconvenient permissions on your files.

Copland supports use of the middle and right mouse buttons. Mac mouse usually don't come with more than one button; so if you have a Mac mouse and you want to right-click, press F12; and middle-clicking can be accomplished through F11. I recommend buying a cheap PC USB mouse - the basic functions of these will all work on Copland, you will no longer have to reach for the keyboard to use contextual menus, and you'll also get a scroll wheel. On the Mac OS, it will behave just like an ordinary Mac mouse.

If you have a low amount of physical memory in your computer (under 256 megabytes) and you are running Copland from CD, your system will undoubtedly be running quite slowly. You can speed it up by creating a "swap partition"; this is what the Mac OS calls Virtual Memory. Use the GParted program (Copland > System > GNOME Partition Editor) to format an existing hard disk partition or USB flash drive as "linux-swap". Make a note of the device name (it starts with /dev/), and run the following command in the terminal: 'sudo swapon devicename'. For example, if you formatted /dev/hda10 as swap, the command would be 'sudo swapon /dev/hda10'.

Support for drag 'n' drop isn't as good as on the Mac OS, but you can drag files from the Thunar file manager or the desktop onto most Open and Save dialogs.

Fish - the FRiendly Interactive Shell is installed. If you are just starting out with the terminal, or are a pro wanting to increase your productivity, type "fish" at the command prompt to start it. Fish provides code colouring and advanced tab-completion (i.e. press Tab), among other things. If Fish gives you problems, type "exit" to get back to the normal shell (Bash).

Contributing

You are encouraged to contribute to the Copland project, especially through documentation, distro hacking and programming GUIs. Any enquiries about getting involved should be directed to christopher_lees at iprimus dot com dot au for the moment until a proper website is set up.

Please enjoy using Copland. You are free to use it for however long you want and for whatever purpose, distributing and making changes, as long as you remember that this software has no warranty, and that it is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). For a full text of the license, type man gpl into the terminal.

Copland is finally here!

Christopher Lees

Main developer of Copland