I’ve been taking a look at running Direwolf on my Mac to use my new FTX-1 for some Packet Radio. I’m currently stuck trying to diagnose whether Direwolf is getting any audio or not – it’s not decoding anything so I’m suspecting it’s not. The FTX-1 over USB is working flawlessly with WSJT-X so I know audio over USB is reaching the Mac, I’m just not sure what’s going on with Direwolf yet, despite configuring it to use the same “USB Audio Device” as input and output.
I’ve spent a lot of time using Direwolf on the Raspberry Pi – it’s interesting that my previous summary of steps to build and install Direwolf from source still work perfectly.
I’ve been running El Capitan, the last officially supported MacOS version on my 2008 Mac Pro for several years. A couple of years back I dipped a toe into using OpenCore Legacy Patcher‘s boot picker to dual boot Proxmox from a separate drive, which has worked well.
It hasn’t been without some GPU related stress though, as at some point between changing monitors (I no longer have the previous monitor to go back to), it was outputting a resolution that wasn’t supported by my new 4k monitor and I couldn’t get a boot screen to appear to be able to select between MacOS or Proxmox, so it was stuck booting Proxmox by default and I ran it headless. This wasn’t too much of an issue as I mainly use the machine for running dev/test VMs and use it as my locally hosted GitLab server.
I did manage to get the resolution issue fixed by remote VNC’ing into the machine while there was no monitor output and change the resolution. Note to self, make sure you have ssh and VNC installed when working with temperamental old hardware.
The only other issue that’s been bothering me for a while is the discontinued support for Chrome updates on old MacOS versions:
10.13 is High Sierra. If I’m going to do something drastic and go for a major unsupported upgrade, I might as well go for the latest version I can install with it still be usable. Opinions vary for the Mac Pro 3,1 but I decided to go with 11, Big Sur:
Fingers crossed. I do have 2 bootable drives with MacOS in this Mac, so if the OpenCore boot picker doesn’t get hosed, I should be at least able to boot El Cap from a second drive and recover from there if needed:
ssd 1: El Cap: this is the one I’ll reinstall with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Big Sur
ssd 2: Proxmox
hdd 1: El Cap
Hopefully the next update I’ll be able to comment on how successful the install went …
After upgrading to Sequoia a number of my installed apps sometime after the first boot popped up a prompt to ‘Allow [app name] to find devices on local network?’. Thinking this was odd I answered no for each of these and didn’t think any more of it. A couple of days later I realized I couldn’t access any websites running locally on my network, for example services running in containers on my Proxmox server. I could still ping their ips and get a response, but Chrome was saying ‘No route to host’.
After some Googling I found some posts with the same issue and it’s related to this prompt for accessing local devices. To enable the access after you’ve already answered no to the popup, go to System Settings, Privacy and Security, Local Network and enable access for any apps that need it:
Following Broadcom’s buyout of VMWare, many home users of virtualization software such as VMWare’s ESXi were disappointed that the free personal use was discontinued.
News today however is more promising: from today you can download Fusion Pro for MacOS and Workstation Pro for Windows free for personal use. You need to sign up for an account at support.broadcom.com and then search for either product to download. More details here.
