iBook G4 running Ubuntu Karmic Koala
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I soon realized that the installed MacOS is now really out of date including many of the applications (e.g. Safari, Firefox 2, iPhoto, ...).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It's just good to know, you can test it first before switching from an outdated but working MacOS to Ubuntu.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-fwcutterpackage. 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_batteryto 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
trackpadcommand from thepowerpc-utilspackage, you can choose the setup of the touchpad, e.g.trackpad dragprovides drag & drop. - Setting
TPMode = dragin configuration file/etc/pbbuttonsd.conf(packagepbbuttonsd) 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.
February 16th, 2010 - 00:20
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
January 24th, 2010 - 01:58
Yes, there are still open issues:
uswsusp, but that leads just to a crashing kernel.March 14th, 2010 - 14:46
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.
February 16th, 2010 - 06:24
The command (sudo modprobe -r b43; sudo modprobe b4) helped me out with getting wireless back up after suspend.
February 20th, 2010 - 21:49
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:
February 25th, 2010 - 00:19
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”.
March 28th, 2010 - 22:05
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:February 20th, 2010 - 21:42
I signed the petition, because I also think, that Qemu is not an option
.