MOL tips -- keyboard, virt. terminals,

[Tommy Trussell]

[I've been having so much success with MOL in the last couple of days, I
want to share some experiences that might help someone else. Maybe these
are already in a FAQ somewhere? Please let me know. --twt]

First a little context -- I have a bunch of "legacy" Mac OS 9 compatible
apps, and quite a bit of hardware too old to run OS X. I wanted to
extend the life of my older hardware but also be able to run some newer
software (such as Firefox and Thunderbird). So I installed Debian with
the 2.6.8-powerpc stock kernel. I'm running the latest MOL in Debian
"testing" along with the appropriate kernel modules. And I'm using MOL
to boot Mac OS 9.2.2.

KEYBOARD

Switching between MOL, "native" Mac OS, and linux was making me batty
because the keystrokes are different and I was constantly pausing to
think whether I should be pressing "control-v" to paste or "command-v"
to paste, plus finding that the Mac's option key never seemed to do the
expected thing at all. 

KDE has it covered! Open the KDE Keyboard Shortcuts application (under
Regional and Accessibility in the Control Center) and click on the
Modifier Keys tab. Turn on "Macintosh Keyboard" and "MacOS-style
modifier usage" and re-train your brain to press the command key when
you mean control. It even works as you would want (not switched) in MOL!

(If anyone uses MOL under Gnome, maybe you can tell me if it has a
similar utility, or possibly the KDE Keyboard Shortcuts utility works
under Gnome -- though I would be very surprised if it does.)

MOL & VIRTUAL TERMINALS

It took me awhile to realize what virtual terminals are. I've been using
various forms of UNIX and linux for years, so I saw them mentioned
various places, but I never tried them, I guess. They're extremely
useful!

On most linux distros, you usually have several virtual terminals
available on the console, meaning you can have up to however many
terminal sessions going at once using the same screen.

If you're running linux you can get to the first virtual terminal now
(BUT DON'T DO IT UNTIL YOU KNOW HOW TO SWITCH BACK!) using
Control-Alt-F1. The second virtual terminal is at Control-Alt-F2, etc.
On each you'll get a textual login prompt. To switch back, you have to
know that your graphical display manager (GDM, KDM, XDM) is probably
running on Virtual Terminal 7. So NOW try it -- switch to virtual
terminal 1 and then back to 7. You can have sessions running separate
things on any of the virtual terminals at the same time.

MOL by default uses Virtual Terminal 9. On my system molvconfig doesn't
know how to make my laptop screen go into 800x600 or 640x480, so I
thought I couldn't run MOL at full screen because Virtual Terminal 7 was
always blank. It turns out I can use it -- I just have to boot the Mac
OS FIRST set the resolution to the screen size and THEN switch to
Virtual terminal 9. (I have MOL set to open a window at 800x600 because
MOL doesn't put scroll bars on the edges, making it hard to deal with a
1024x768 Mac window on a 1024x768 screen.)

One unfortunate side effect of setting the keyboard to Mac style
modifiers in KDE (as described above) is that to switch to V.T.9 you
would use command-alt-F7 but control-alt-F7 to switch back. Oh, well --
I use those keys MUCH less than copy and paste!