In case you have an ext2/3 formated partition you have to access from OS X, don’t upgrade to 10.4, yet. ext2fsx v1.3 isn’t compatible to Tiger and the cat just won’t show the appropriate partitions. Well, I had to fill every single free MB on my desktop, the powerbook, my mp3-player and some old harddrives nearly forgotten in some corner, to empty my external, 250GB capacity, ext3 formatted storage device, for I needed to change the filesystem. Linux seems to support HFS+ way better than OS X supports Linux’ filesystems and therefore I’m probably better off with OS X’ native fs. I am just in the process of refilling that thing again.

Errrr, that have been some bytes being pushed around here using all available interfaces and devices: Wi-Fi, twisted pair, USB, FireWire, 2.5″ HDD to standard IDE converter, DVD-Writer and I don’t know what else. Guess the only devices I didn’t use are my Digicam, my 128MB flash-stick and various devices usually hanging out in my kitchen. If my band would be a little bit broader I even might have considered uploading that stuff.. wasn’t there a saying involving backups, uploading to FTP and real men?

Haven’t even had too much time to play around with Tiger. Besides the obvious, Mail’s extended IMAP functionality and iChat’s Jabber-support come to mind.

Regarding the new LCD, it’s just amazing. While the picture of my old Dell 1800FP is also great, this definitely is a new definition of desktop workspace. Two minor drawbacks, though: For one the display seems to stress the powerbook pretty much for the fan is spinning all the time when connected. Addressing all those threemillionthreehundredandfourthousand pixels appears to be hard job to do. At least the powerbook can handle the 1920×1200 resolution. On my desktop, it doesn’t seem to be that smooth. On a glance, neither my FX5200 nor my FX5900XT have been able to drive the display correctly. Haven’t looked into it, yet, but according to a friend that might be a real problem for he also isn’t able to run the display with full res using DVI with his FX5200 and web searches are bringing up tons of of issues regarding that topic..

really:

• Grabbed my copy of Mac OS X 10.4 from the local mac-shop
• Got a second skin for my powerbook at the same store
• Finally received my Dell 2405FPW 24″ LCD (review). This thing is so huge and actually I really haven’t wasted a thought about where to place it, yet. Well, I guess I can figure that one out.

Let’s see, where to start..?

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..

Like I’ve written here, Finder’s lack of FTP-uploading capability bothers me. KDE’s FTP-KIO-Slave enables me to do the following:

• Browse to the appropriate directory on my FTP-server using Konqueror.
• Open the desired file with Kate, KDE’s Advanced Text Editor.
• Edit the file and save it back to the FTP-server. Directly. No local copy and manual FTP-uploading required.

This is a very handy feature and I’m somewhat used to it. Is there any feasible way of doing so using OS X? Will Tiger’s Finder support such functionality or at least FTP-uploading? Guess I’ll have to wait and see. Anyhow, I’m open to suggestions and no, I don’t have SSH access to my FTP-site.

Yesterday I posted that I have to pay the full price for an update to Tiger for I came too early. Six days. Vic commented that I should try contacting Apple and so I did.

Obviously I’ve been not the 1st caller today bringing up the ‘Tiger-update-topic’ and we went right into business. After mentioning that I might as well return my box and reorder with the only drawback beeing that I wouldn’t have a nice PowerBook on my table for some days (which _would_ have been a horrible for me, but I didn’t tell them ), the friendly guy on the other end offered me 50€ discount. Understandable. Apple would have to pay for both, my shipment back and resending a new PB, QA on the one I send back, repackaging, paperwork and I don’t know what else.

Anyhow, I wasn’t satisfied for that would be still 79€. I mumbled something about fair dealing, market share, reputation and evil competitors and the friendly guy put me on hold. On a side note: they have some nice music playing in Apple’s waiting loops. Somehow I imagined the Apple employee dancing around his desk to exactly that tune, checking his watch for 1 minutes and 26 second to go by just to tell me “sorry, that’s all we have to offer”. Just he didn’t do that.

He came back on the line telling me that he has permission to grant me a credit to my account worth 100€. 29€ to go! Well, I didn’t push it any further although I had the feeling it probably would’ve worked out to get Tiger for the ~10€ they charge for shipping for those with hardware bought after April, 12th.

Anyhow, I’m not greedy and they obviously _did_ understand my point of view or at least consider the effort of all that refund/resending, and they did not even try to talk themselves out of it. Besides that I knew that OS X.4 was going to be announced anytime soon, so I could have been patient as well. Which of course, I can’t be when it comes to new toys. All in all, fair deal for me. Ten minutes later I had a confirming mail in my inbox.

There’s also lots of discussion on this topic on the announcement on /.