Here's a follow-up to our exchanges a few weeks ago about the 800 Mhz iBooks from PC World. I don't know how many people on this list are aware of the 'Open Firmware' hack that allows the iBook to do monitor spanning (like Powerbooks do...), not just mirroring? Here's a link to the page of the guy who created it:-
http://macparts.de/ibook/
Click on the 'Screen Spanning Doctor 0.3.2' link to download the program. It's an AppleScript-generated .app program, so no need to mess about in firmware mode itself.
Also. here's a link to a page with warnings about problems that have occurred on older iBooks:-
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/ibook_dual_display_mods.html#storytop
Anyway, the point of this email is just to report that I have run this hack on the 800 Mhz G3 iBook, and it works perfectly in Jaguar - I can now 'turn off mirroring' in Display, set the VGA screen to the resolution I want (1280 x 1024 in my case), and rearrange the screens so that the VGA screen holds the menu bar. Brilliant!
This hack also works on the G4 iBooks; well, the immediately-previous ones, the brand new ones aren't available yet so it hasn't been tested on them. But there's no reason to believe that it won't work on the new ones; the point about the firmware hack is the iBook graphics chip natively possesses these capabilities but that Apple have disabled them to create a distinction between iBooks and Powerbooks; the hack just reverses Apple's disabling.
Given this, there's not a lot of difference between the new 12" 1 Ghz iBook (costing �800) and the new 12" Powerbook (costing �1150).
Tom Burke
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