We are the owners of a powerPC 12″ iBook G3 dual usb. Cosmetically and operationally a perfect machine.

Apple’s upgrade treadmill leaves older machines like this behind on software. It’s hard to get GPL software to build on it because most projects are 10.5 x86 and later. It’s even harder to get commercial software to work.

Debian’s PPC distro addresses Apple’s shortcomings very well.  The Lenny desktop is plenty fast.  Openoffice.org is slow to load, but it’s faster than it is in a Mac and the version available is much more current.  Browsing the web is fine.  Game playing is great because the laptop has full graphics acelleration.

At the time I’m writing this, (March 2010) everything in Lenny (stable) works with the exception of Xorg not working exactly right. In Squeeze(testing) there are substantial desktop issues with acceleration (DRI, GLX) that render the iBook s-l-o-w. In both cases, you need to generate an xorg.conf file to get the display working.

In both cases, the installer worked perfectly when installing everything to a single partition.

Lenny/Squeeze xorg.conf file

I’m leaving out a bunch of details here.  You need to do the below steps on the command line.  It’s up to you to get there and have root privileges.  As a hint, some display managers allow you to switch to console. (kdm, gdm??)

1. As any user run Xorg -configure.
2. This creates an xorg.conf file in your current working directory.
3. Copy the xorg.conf file to /etc/X11 (you’ll need root privileges)
4. nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
5. My Lenny install did not detect the video chip as an r128.  So change the driver to r128.
6. Under the section “Monitor” you must have two new stanzas, “HorizSync 30-82″  “VertRefresh 56-75″ each on their own lines.
7. Save (Ctrl 0) xorg.conf and exit (Ctrl x)

If you are on the command line with a full desktop install and Xorg not running, you can test the desktop with “xinit — :1″.  You should get the display drawn correctly now in super-primitive xorg.  Just type exit in the open terminal.  If not, leave me a comment and I’ll add the Modes options.

Restart your Display Manager and you are good to go!

Squeeze Issues

As of March, 2010 I did not get GLX or DRI working at all and the iBook locked up when starting the display manager.  Even after getting an Xorg desktop, there’s no acceleration.  In order to get a barely functioning desktop you need to do the following.

1. When booting the machine, type Linux single at the second boot screen.
2. Enter root password when the init stops.
3. apt-get install rcconf (ignore the errors)  Alternatively, you can monkey around with the symlinks in the /etc/rc.X directories, but rcconf works for me.
4. enter rcconf on the command line.  Disable your display manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, etc) Exit rcconf
5. Type ‘exit’ on the command line.  The system should then finish booting in multiuser mode, on the command line.
6. Follow the xorg.conf instructions above for Lenny until #6.  In Squeeze, the r128 driver was detected.
7. Comment out the enable “glx” with a # at the beginning of the line. Start a new line and enter disable “glx”.
8. Save and exit nano.

At this point, you should be able to test with “xinit — :1″ and get Xorg working.  If not, try disabling DRI and DRI2.  Leave comments  if this doesn’t get you working.

Finally, use rcconf again to re-enable your display manager.  When you reboot the machine, you should go straight to the display manager.  Worse case scenario, you’ll end up on the command line.  Re-run rcconf to get your display manager working.

Comments welcome!