[TriLUG] My Experiences With Linux on PPC

Benjamin Reed ranger at befunk.com
Sat Dec 8 18:51:32 EST 2001


I was looking to get a new laptop, and realized that over the
last six months I've moved almost completely away from using
Windows, so my search for hardware had expanded as architecture
no longer matters.  As they're sexy hardware and relatively
inexpensive (especially for Apple hardware), I decided on the
new iBook...

I have now installed Mandrake 8.0 and Yellow Dog 2.1 on it and
I must say, other than the single-button trackpad, it's
*completely* comfortable (and the single mouse button doesn't
bother me as much as I had expected it would).

I have decided on Yellow Dog, just for familiarity.  Yellow Dog
2.1 is a port of RedHat 7.1 to PPC, and is immediately usable
if you've worked with RedHat or any of it's derivatives.  The
only gotchas were things I had to learn having never worked in
any serious way with mac hardware or software before.

Mandrake worked fine too (the install is a little better) but
I would have had to go through a lot of work to get it up to
the level of cooker if I wanted to tinker.

So here's the nitty gritty.

Good
----

The iBook is sleek and relatively fast, and is just plain fun
to play with.  I've got MacOSX, MacOS 9, and YDL 2.1 triple-
booted and I can run OS9 from Linux using MOL (Mac-On-Linux,
a thin emulation layer derivative of SheepShaver for BeOS,
closer to win4lin than VMWare).  I've still gotta get the
developer tools in OSX to play with installing some of my
favorite stuff there, but it's not a high priority since I've
got Linux going now.  =)

Everything works just as it did on x86 hardware, it's really
no different than having an intel laptop other than some
differences in installation, so you can consider everything but
the caveats below in "Bad" as good.  It's mostly been a breeze,
and when it hasn't, it's still been a fun learning experience.

Bad
---

If you've not worked with macs before, you'll have a bit of a
learning curve to know enough about OpenFirmware, the correct
order to install OSes to keep things from being difficult,
that kind of thing.  It wasn't too bad at all, but it will
take a little work just to get the hang of it.

There is a bug in the power management daemon that comes with
YDL 2.1 that if you close the shell and reopen it, the mouse
control gets really weird.  If I hadn't posted to the mailing
list I would have never found the fix.

Also, the touchpad is so big that it's a bit close to the space,
and I end up bumping it with my thumbs once in a while.  It's
mostly due to lazy typing I think.  =)

Getting to virtual consoles is a little weird because you also
need to use the "Function" key to get to the F-keys correctly,
so you end up holding down:

  Control+Option+Function+F1-F12

...to switch VTs.  A little annoying, but I've already gotten
used to slamming them all down with my 3 middle fingers (no,
not 3 "middle fingers", just everything but the pinky and the
thumb =) and then hitting the f-key with my other hand.

Sound on the iBook2 is not supported correctly in the stock
kernel yet (even in 2.2.16), I've had to go to the latest ppc
devel kernel tree to build a custom kernel instead of just using
the regular kernel.org source.

I haven't tried getting 3D working yet, but the video is a
Rage128 mobile, and supposedly the DRI support works on apples
too.  I'll post if I have any problems, but I don't play many
games so I'm not in a huge hurry.

Conclusion
----------

The iBook2 is a great laptop to run Linux on.  There are only a
couple of small caveats, and they pretty much have workarounds.
At $1200 (right now, they have a $100 off deal) for the entry
level, it's cheap enough to think about playing with...  Just
don't order RAM from apple when you get the laptop, they'll slam
you on the pricing.  I got a 512MB SODIMM from Crucial for about
$120 instead.

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger at befunk.com)
http://defiance.dyndns.org/ / http://radio.scenespot.org/
Frankenstein was the creator -- not the monster.  It's a common
misconception, held by all truly stupid people. -- Kryten



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