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iBook G4 running Ubuntu Karmic Koala

Sat, 01/23/2010 - 22:37 — Holger

A few days ago I managed to connect a new power adapter to the iBook to reanimate it after more than a year of deep freeze.
I soon realized that the installed MacOS is now really out of date including many of the applications (e.g. Safari, Firefox 2, iPhoto, ...). Since an upgrade would not only cost some money, but the latest MacOS releases are also just not available for this architecture, I downloaded the unofficial Ubuntu PPC release.

It's just good to know, you can test it first before switching from an outdated but working MacOS to Ubuntu. But I ran only into some minor issues and the iBook is now running Karmic Koala:

  • Keyboard is working, using Fn+Alt for AltGr keys (release Fn key before pressing AltGr-keys on the right hand side, since it overlaps with numeric keypad feature). My keyboard setup is named Germany Macintosh, eliminate dead keys.
  • Wired networking is working out of the box.
  • Wireless networking is working after installation of b43-fwcutter package. So just use wired networking first to install the package, which will download the necessary data for the firmware. If you don't want to reboot to get wireless running, just reload the b43 module on the command liine (sudo modprobe -r b43; sudo modprobe b43).
  • Load pmu_battery to get battery feedback. Gnome will detect the new feature within seconds, providing a graphical view on the battery state. Since the iBook was subject to a battery change only 3 years ago and the new battery was not used very frequently, the capacity is still fairly ok.
  • Using the trackpad command from the powerpc-utils package, you can choose the setup of the touchpad, e.g. trackpad drag provides drag & drop.
  • Setting TPMode = drag in configuration file /etc/pbbuttonsd.conf (package pbbuttonsd) will setup the drag mode for the trackpad automatically.

Thanks to all the people still providing an up-to-date Ubuntu release and all the discussions and howtos, that help me fix the issues in no time.

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Comments

Tue, 02/16/2010 - 06:24 — Anonymous

Suspend

The command (sudo modprobe -r b43; sudo modprobe b4) helped me out with getting wireless back up after suspend.

Thu, 02/25/2010 - 00:19 — Holger

iBook Power-Driven Hibernate

Just a few minutes ago a wake-up after hibernate because of low energy really worked.
I am still not sure if it was hibernation (memory to swap, normal boot) or some kind of suspend, since the wake-up was far too fast for a full reboot, but at least it was called "hibernate".

Sat, 02/20/2010 - 21:49 — Holger

iBook/Ubuntu and b43 Module

I already realized, that the b43 module is not good for a proper shutdown. In the meantime, I implemented this by writing an init script, linking that to run level 0 and 6:
update-rc.d disable-b43 stop 20 0 1 6 .

Sun, 01/24/2010 - 01:58 — Holger

Pending

Yes, there are still open issues:

  • Hibernate does not really work, i.e. after wakeup the screen does not recover. I already tried to improve this by installing the package uswsusp, but that leads just to a crashing kernel.
  • I got no flash in Firefox, gnash does not work, but just emits Segmentation Faults on the command line and leaving defunct processes while used as Firefox plugin.
  • If wireless is enabled, i.e. module b43 is loaded, the shutdown process will freeze! This will probably be fixed in the next kernel release (2.6.32).
Sun, 03/14/2010 - 14:46 — Anonymous

Wakeup from Suspend

On my iBook G3, I had to do two things to make the screen recover on wakeup: The wireless modules (orinoco and airport) have to be unloaded on suspand, and also the display has to switch to a text console on suspend, and then back to X afterward.

Sun, 03/28/2010 - 21:05 — Holger

Suspend is working now.

I already tried the VT changing with no success in the past. But for 2 weeks suspend is working. I don't really know why it does all of a sudden, perhaps it's related to an Ubuntu kernel update in release 9.10.
I just need to reload the b43 wireless module to get networking up and running after resume, but that is now triggered by /etc/pm/config.d/suspend-modules:
SUSPEND_MODULES="b43"

Tue, 02/16/2010 - 00:20 — Anonymous

gnash

yep, same here. i've been searching several times now, but there seems to be no working solution, at least not for me (G4 iBook).

you may try http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/QEMU, though, but for me this is way out of line, unfortunately :(

=> http://www.petitiononline.com/fla4lppc/petition.html

Sat, 02/20/2010 - 21:42 — Holger

Flash for Linux/PPC

I signed the petition, because I also think, that Qemu is not an option :-).