MOL 0.69 works with ALSA sound finally !

[Chen Peng]

Dear all,

For 2-3 weeks, "Mac on Linux" works silently. The sound always refuses 
to work with the error "Incompatible MOLAudio Version!".

After several days analyze the booting procedure of MOL, I realized that 
during bootup, MOL at first check the kernel extension version installed 
on MacOSX for MOLAudio. If the version does not match the API/Driver 
version defined in MOL (src/drivers/include/sound_sh.h), which runs in 
Linux PPC, it starts with error "Incompatible MOLAudio Version".

The current MOLAudio kernel extension download by "make libimport" was 
made in Feb 2003 and it is version 1.1. However, the MOL main program 
has already progressed to version 1.2. That's why I already get 
incompatible version problem. (Samuel has promised to upload updated 
binary this week, I just can not wait .. ;) )

What I did to solve the problem is to download the osx-driver source 
code from MOL bitkeeper tree (this code is not available in rsync tree). 
The osx-driver has to be compiled on Mac-osx machine with development CD 
installed. The compilation is smooth with the instructions in BUILDING 
file. At the end of the compilation, one MOLPackage.pkg folder is 
genearted and it contains the version 1.2 MOLAudio drivers.

I copied this package to my OSX box and installed it. God, it works 
perfectly! As there has no successful stories on making Gentoo+ALSA 
working with MOL with sound, i am so happy to announce this.

The sound quality is very good, almost as the same as I can sense in 
native osx. MOL performs well, only lacking hardware graphic 
acceleration. But it is enough for daily use for work (office, music, 
web development etc.)

-- 
Chen Peng <chenpeng@tll.org.sg>
System Engineer
Computational Biology
Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory