Hi Thomas, I have a Powerbook G4 (867 MHz/15")
I'm actually a i386 user as you are, and I was forced to learn Linux newly on a powerpc environment. I had to learn because some months ago I bought a Powerbook (867 MHz/ 15"). I admit I bought it because this machine is looking better than all the others I know .... :) Short version: I'm glad I installed Debian on this machine. If I had to make the decision again I'd definitely do this install again ... So I have now successfully running Debian Linux and Mac OS X (10.2.8, IIRC) on this machine (more on the caveats later) Detailed version: After getting the machine I was playing for 3 or 4 months with Mac OS X (10.2.*) only and in the end was a bit fed up by various issues on that OS: IIRC I never got the XFree virtual desktop working on it (I think it was because fink had problems downloading the XFree stuff; or I made a mistake when trying that: Not being sure on that ...); I had problems getting bash working as smoothly as I wanted it: at this time tcsh was the default shell on OS X, which I neither wanted, nor did I like it at all. But IIRC Panther has bash now as the default shell ... I *never* found out the keys on OS X to scroll down to the end of a page in bash with one single key stroke: I had to do this consecutively, page after page; which can be quite frustrating if one does that in 'man bash' for example ... :) Mac OS X Unix seems to be organized in 2 ways: via netinfo and the (more or less) default Unix routine as I knew it from Linux. Which, as it seems to me, made it difficult for me to set up sendmail. In the end I got sendmail working, but only occasional with errors. <http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/darwin/src/modules/sendmail/> My feel was Apple doesn't know what they want: Do they want a Unix system (which OS X actually is), or something else. After about 3 or 4 months I was simply fed up with all the problems this system made from time to time, and I installed Linux, which so far probably was my best decision ever regarding the Titanium: I had to learn newly the installation routines on Debian (apt-get, etc.), which are different from the rpm routines I knew from RedHat Linux: In the beginning the Debian way was a bit hard: it has several tools for package management, whereas RedHat has simply one, namely RPM. So new on Debian, I didn't even know which were the tools for package management. As I said: I had to learn again, which took me quite some time. But in the end it was (and still is) worth the extra time. When I had problems, or didn't understand, I came here to the list and, most of the time, got help. Which was very important for me. I'll stop it here, as I could go on for pages .... :) Just this: If you install OS X together with Linux on a Powerbook it'd probably a good idea to reckon with problems after OS X upgrades: there were numerous cases on this list over the last weeks where dual boot machines (Debian/OS X) didn't boot to Linux again after an OS X upgrade. You might want to read the archives on it: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2003/debian-powerpc-200310/threads.html> Pages to help installing and configuring Debian on Powerbooks, some of them might be outdated, some of them not necessarily for Powerbooks. I wouldn't follow everything I find on them: For example you probably still find pages saying that Powerbooks have no power management to put the machine into sleep mode; which is not true any more, at least not for the machine I have (running with a 2.4.22-ben2 kernel). This page helped me on that: http://spacepants.org/hw/tibook/ Other pages: <http://linux-on-laptops.com/apple.html> <http://cattlegrid.net/~christophe/titanium/> <http://users.linpro.no/janl/tibook.html> <http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~schmidtm/apple/powerbook.en.php> <http://www.themoes.org/linux/ydl/> <http://homepage.mac.com/pauljlucas/personal/powerbook/> <http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/> <http://www.hispalinux.es/~data/ibook/> <http://www.intevation.de/~bernhard/ppc/titanium_installation/base_system.html> <http://www.thecodefactory.org/neillm/debianppc.php3> <http://www.morlug.org/radeon> <http://www.rietman.biz/~wijnand/linux/mac/index.html?main> <http://www.staikos.net/~staikos/tibook/> <http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/solutions/ydl_general/pmud.shtml> <http://www.flamingspork.com/linux/ibook/> <http://www.geocities.com/haihui_huang/iBook/iBook2-600-install.html> In German: <http://www.pl-berichte.de/t_system/ibook-debian/part1.html> The following one was *very* important for me to get the partioning for the hard disk done: <http://people.debian.org/~branden/ibook/> And I took the lazy install road to Debian: I simply burned myself the first 2 Powerpc Debian Install CD'S (actually one probably only needs the first one on a machine with Internet access) and held down the c key when booting the powerbook with the Debian install CD. :) But I don't know whether this still works for your machine. Hint: If you want a 2.4 kernel for the install: If I recall correctly the necessary option to choose for this is: install24 Hoping it helps. Best Regards, Wolfgang > > Thomas Nyman wrote: > > > Hi > > > > [ ... ] > > > > I am basically an i386 guy however recently I have become very > > interested in Apples Powerbook G4 17" (1,33 GHz PowerPC G4) > > model nr M9110*/A. > > > > It looks very nice and seems to have some neat capabilities such as > > the backlit keyboard and dvd-burning capabilities. > > > > Anyway, I was wondering if you could give some feedback on the > > machine, speed , battery-life and just general comments on how it > > works and what you think of OS-X ( i would be getting Panther). But > > even more interesting is find out how your attempts at installing > > debian have progressed. Have you been able to get debian working as a > > dual-boot on the machine? Are there some things that do not work in > > debian? I seem to have read that the airport extreme wlan card might > > not work in debian..have You been able to get it to work? > > > > Once again, this is a shot in the dark, and if You dont have the time > > or the inclination then just disregard this email. I am however very > > interested in all information on how well the 17" works with debian etc. > > > > Best regards > > Thomas Nyman > > > > > > > > > > -- Profile, Links: http://profiles.yahoo.com/wolfgangpfeiffer
