Bored? You know your system inside out? Everything is just working? No more hacking required if not screwing up the system on purpose yourself? Even the unstable and experimental branches of your distro don’t bare challenges anymore? Here’s the solution: Switch $ARCH(tm)!

OK, it wasn’t that bad. This is my first entry using BloGTK (No, no Fink involved) under Ubuntu / Gnome 2.10 (Spare it, for this one I’ve been accused of heresy already). After some time figuring out what is needed to run Linux on a PowerBook properly, it’s up and running pretty well. Of course, there’s room for improvement but my basic needs are covered. Here’s the progress so far:

• Custom Kernel for you just can’t run a stock-kernel, can you? Current kernels don’t support sound on new PowerBooks. Benjamin posted a patch to the debian-powerpc mailing list which is included in 2.6.12-rc3 which is what is running here currently. Unfortunately, CPUfreq refused to build. Colin released two patches fixing that issue. On a side note: if you plan to do without an initial ramdisk, make sure that besides the filesystem drivers of your root partition the IDE drivers are compiled in.. that one took me a while.
• With the patches mentioned above, CPU frequency scaling works flawlessly. Testing on the battery life to come.
• Trackpad. Current PowerBooks seem to use USB for the keyboard and trackpad so the ADB drivers won’t work anymore. The keyboard works fine, for the Trackpad, Johannes wrote a driver, providing kernel-module and an userspace driver. It’s a little bit bitchy from time to time and has some limitations (no clicking by tapping the pad or scrolling), but works fine besides that. There’s also a working USB mouse here, just in case.
• USB and Firewire storage devices work out-of-the-box. The gnome volume manager seems to have problems handling multiple devices at once, though.
• My D-Link DWL-122 WiFi USB stick works fine using the latest linux-wlan-ng drivers, hotpluggable and WEP enabled. Screw Broadcom.
• Wired connectivity required? Internal ethernet works out-of-the-box.
• The special keys are also working mostly, that is volume, mute and eject using pbbuttons. Brightness control does not but I haven’t looked into this, yet.
• For nvidia won’t release drivers for ppc, I’m stuck with x.org’s nv driver. No 3D acceleration and therefore no advanced composite eyecandy, at least not with decent speed. Connecting an external monitor might also be a no-go.

Putting some problems with uber-proprietary stuff aside, the PowerBook turns out to be a formidable platform to run GNU/Linux on if you have some basic knowledge. Well, enough for now, more to come..

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 1:39 and is filed under GNU/Linux, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.