Where OSX are kernel modules located?

The OSX uses loadable kernel (like BSD and Linux) modules (or kexts) - each one is stored in its own directory (e.g. Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext ) and these are mostly stored in a couple of directories:

/Library/Extensions
/System/Library/Extensions/

Though some others are stored in some other directories (e.g.  /Library/StartupItems/). You can list the currently loaded kernel modules using the kextstat command.

There also some info more info another post of mine on tracking down problem kernel modules in osx.

Ubuntu 10.04 USB Mouse keyboard problems - fixed

After the problems I had after 9.10 upgrade I held off on upgrading to Ubuntu's latest 10.04 (Lucid something-or-other), with kernel 2.6.32-21. Sadly it was another disaster - after upgrade neither my mouse nor keyboard worked beyond the Grub screen.

I looked into it; initially I thought it was an X thing with their new nouveau Nvidia driver but it wasn't that. I then noticed that the devices weren't actually being seen by the system on the USB bus - i.e. when I ran lsusb I only saw a couple of USB hubs (no mouse or keyboard listed) where normally I saw about 6 USB devices - yes they were plugged in and were recognised fine by an older kernel (9.10). I messed about with usbhid kernel module to no avail. I then tried 10.04 live CD and it worked ok with exact same USB setup?! I dumped the output from dmesg and then compared it with dmesg from my machine running the installed version on the exact same kernel version. It seemed that my installed version was failing to recognise the actual PCI USB host controllers on bootup - WTF?! It seems that the ehci-hcd module was not finding the USB hardware.... Smells like a kernel bug.

Finally I tried altering various boot args for the kernel in /boot/grub/menu.lst which didn't work initially, but then I hit upon the right one: pci=noacpi. It now works though my fans seem to be going full speed at all times...

[updated: 21aug10] Unfortunately after the kernel latest update (2.6.32-24) it seems to be totally broken and my fix doesn't work so I've had to revert to using 2.6.32-21 - If you run any DKMS modules (e.g. nvidia) you'll need to have the kernel header files installed that kernel.

Another BIG waste of time....I really am having my doubts about Ubuntu.

Robots doing their thing

So those robots have been busy - Live + SD84(Servo Controller) + Python glue:

Don't bother: iOS4 on iphone 3G

Yeah the move to iOS4 has not been good:
1) The install process sucked; The 'backup' stage of the upgrade took forever - so instead I ended up using the 'restore' function from iTunes (once I'd got iOS4 downloaded in iTune 9.2). It still took HOURS.
2) The number new features on the 3G is hardly worth it (Folders, Spell checker, Threaded mail,...)
3) It seems less stable and slower than iOS 3.2.x - have to reboot it more
4) A number of my apps crash ALOT like MobileRSS, OffMaps - not handy. (though I guess they probably need to be updated...)
5) Quite a few Apps aren't iOS4 ready - e.g. Skype

Maybe 4.x will help but who knows when that's due......

[5nov10]: 4.1 definitely improves things (and the relevant apps have mostly been updated)