[clug] Powerbook G4

Fergus McKenzie-Kay Fergus.McKenzie-Kay at nicta.com.au
Wed Dec 1 22:04:26 GMT 2004


On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 06:58, Nathan Robertson wrote:
> On 01/12/2004, at 8:38 PM, Michael Carden wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 08:20 pm, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> >> subsequently got corrupted by MacOS X and am
> >> more or less happily running MacOS X on it instead. I was intending 
> >> to make
> >> it primarily a Linux laptop until I discovered how badly Linux 
> >> supported
> >> it, and how nice MacOS X was. I feel so dirty...
> 
> [...]
> > I too have enjoyed the OSX experience enough to leave it there and 
> > defer a
> > Debian crossover until I see a pressing need. It, um, just *works*. 
> > And it's
> > pretty. Sure, some of the system level stuff I'm accustomed to doing 
> > on a
> > Linux box is not there, but on the whole I don't actually need it. 
> > Some of
> > the paradigms require a brain-shift, but not a painful one.
> 
> Agreed. For a long time, Yellow Dog* (http://www.yellowdoglinux.com) 
> were warning not to use the 17" PowerBook with Linux, because power 
> management didn't work (meaning the laptop could fry itself). The 15" 
> and 12" were ok, from what I heard.
> 
> If you haven't seen it, check out "Mac OS X for UNIX Geeks" (O'Reilly), 
> which gives you the essentials of the differences. I think there is a 
> later edition than the one I have, but I found it incredibly useful for 
> things like NetInfo.

Sounds like I'll have to check it out... but can I play with the kernel?


> > Forgive me Linus, for I have sinned....
> 
> Agreed. I just couldn't find another 3kg 17" laptop with a 3 year 
> warranty that would be guaranteed to run *a* UNIX without glitches. You 
> lose a good 10% performance vs. Linux on PPC (I ran Linux on my 15" 
> Titanium PowerBook for a fair while, and my 12" iBook G3 before that).

I don't think performance is my biggest worry.  I have a desktop that I
can run anything that is cpu or memory hungry.

> For those worried about the wireless not working, 15" and 17" PowerBook 
> have a PCMCIA slot, and I've heard of people using PC-sourced PCMCIA 
> wireless NICs before in these things under Linux. Never tried myself, 
> but I'm told that does the job.

I'll try it out.. if it doesn't work I'll move on.

> 
> Regards,
> Nathan.
> 
> * Yellow Dog is a Fedora Core / Red Hat knock-off distribution for PPC. 
> They have a good "Hardware" section, which tells you pretty much what 
> will and won't work about any given Apple hardware with their 
> distribution.
-- 
 
Fergus McKenzie-Kay
System Support Engineer
National ICT Australia Limited
  
PH: (02) 6125 8638
Mob: 0419 272 191
Fax: (02) 6125 8623
Fergus.McKenzie-Kay at nicta.com.au
http://www.nicta.com.au



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