jcm's blog

Screenshot: Ubuntu Dapper Drake on a 2005 12″ Powerbook (6,8), also known as maple. Here you can see Mac OS X Panther running within Mac-On-Linux.

[ This is an evolving article. Stay tuned for updates. It'll get less crap with time. ]

So. I got this 12″ Powerbook a couple of days ago. In that time, I’ve managed to get both OSX and Dappy Dapper Drake installed, though there’s more work left to be done overall. I partitioned the 80GB disk it is provided with into 7 partitions. Some have GNU/Linux, some have swap or other stuff (not to mention the extra crappy Apple driver partitions OSX Drive Utility creates even if you don’t want them and the wasted space it leaves around):

• 1GB – swap
• 100MB – yaboot
• 20GB – Ubuntu
• 15GB – Mac OS X
• 10GB – Fedora
• 10GB – YDL
• Rest – Data

Installing Breezy was reasonably straightforward and it booted afterwards. With the vendor kernel, I was able to boot into Ubuntu and connect to my network most of the time. Suspend to disk also kind of worked, once I had fiddled quite a bit with things, although there were various problems. I decided to upgrade to Dapper Drake to get access to the bleeding edge.

An dist-upgrade to dapper does work. The system boots and runs up, but it has obvious problems related to the Ubuntu kernel and the synaptics touchpad driver is now too insensitive in the default Ubuntu Xorg config. Suspend-to-disk doesn’t work and things just aren’t polished enough. But, that’s what I expect from Debian/Ubuntu kernels and hardware support. I’m not trying to be offensive, but I’ve never liked any Debian kernel enough to hang onto it (either stable or unstable) for more than a reboot or two.

Having booted my own 2.6.15 stock kernel, things started to get better. I was able to suspend the laptop (albeit with a few issues on occasion) and generally felt somewhat happier. Next, I configured power management to have the userspace governor (the governator) set my cpufreq dynamically according to system load. Then, I installed the bcm43xx experimental (though pretty much fully working) wireless driver. I extracted the firmware from one of the ones online but that didn’t give me working WEP so I borrowed one from a friend. The Ubuntu networking scripts need some modification (/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/bcm43xx):

#!/bin/sh

#FIXME
IFACE=eth1

modprobe -r bcm43xx
modprobe bcm43xx
#iwconfig $IFACE rate 11MBit
ifconfig $IFACE up
iwlist $IFACE scan

This forces the (nasty unsupportable, vendor no-supplyee-drivers-or-specs) Broadcom driver to scan for my home wifi and then allows the regular scripts to connect to it in the normal fashion.

To get the suspend-to-disk working with the bcm43xx driver and a few other PCI quirks affecting the box necessitated the following script (/usr/local/bin/maple_suspend.sh):

#!/bin/sh

chvt 1

sync

ifdown eth1
ifconfig eth1 down
ifdown eth1
modprobe -r bcm43xx ieee80211softmac ieee80211

if (lsmod|grep bcm43xx >/dev/null 2>&1);
then
        ################################################
        echo "Cannot unload bcm driver. Not suspending."
        ################################################
        exit 1
fi

modprobe -r ohci1394 sbp2 ieee1394 \
yenta_socket rsrc_nonstatic pcmcia_core

modprobe -r genrtc

echo disk > /sys/power/state

chvt 7

modprobe ohci1394
modprobe ieee1394
modprobe sbp2

modprobe genrtc
sleep 1
hwclock --hctosys

ifup eth1

I am using the latest prerelease of mol which supports Panther, as you can see in the screenshot. More on that when I have the time to document it. Not everything on this Powerbook is working perfectly, especially the nvidia FB driver (display has some updating issues) but it’s getting there.

Jon.

* Note that the Ubuntu documentation repeatedly fails to note that you’ll need room for yaboot on a PowerPC install, so just bear that in mind.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 8:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.