Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: RickBuitenman

• Make: Apple
• Brand: Powerbook
• Model: G4 / 1.25Ghz / Superdrive / 60Gb (*1)

• Website: http://www.apple.com

Current Issues

• No support for Airport Extreme (*2)
• No support for svideo-out (*3)
• Some wake-up from sleep issues (*4)
• No keyboard backlight (*9)

Hardware details

Notes

• Previous Linux on this laptop was Gentoo. Some stuff that worked there is still untested with Breezy, but should work.
• Using the Sleep-LED as HD-LED is not default on Breezy. Gonna try to make it work if and when I have a good reason to recompile the kernel... This is a very handy (and cool) little feature.
• Had customized Gentoo / pbbuttonsd /gtkpbbuttons to give visual feedback on brightness/sound/eject (OSX-style). Breezy only gives OSD-feedback on sound. Installed gtkpbuttons, which works like a charm, but now I can't seem to get rid of the old Breezy/Gnome OSD feedback.
• Default changes in brightness and sound-level in Breezy is not very smooth. Response seems to be sluggish. Some tweaking of pbbuttons may be required.

• 1) 80Gb now, since the harddisk died. Shouldn't make any difference.

• 2) Broadcom won't release specs for the chipset used in Airport Extreme. There is an experimental workaround via MOL (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-365647.html), and a reverse engineering effort going on (http://linux-bcom4301.sourceforge.net/).

• 3) Proprietary Ati-drivers are x86 only, Xorg drivers don't support tv-out.
• 4) Basically two issues:

  • Don't plug in or unplug USB-devices while it's sleeping. It will most likely crash on wake-up.

  • Screen is sometimes scrambled on wakeup, or doesn't seem to sync properly. Putting it back to sleep and waking up again usually solves the issue (sometimes it takes a few tries). No reproducable cause.

  • Note: Had this baby crash on wake-up three times in two weeks without any obvious cause. This was extremely rare with my old Gentoo install, something to keep an eye on.

• 5) All works fine with MergedFB. D-Sub works normally, DVI only seems to work after a reboot with DVI-cable plugged in. What's more annoying, it also requires a reboot after wake up from sleep.
• 6) Stuff that worked with Gentoo, not expecting any trouble here.
• 7) Some tweaking with alsamixer may be required.
• 8) SMC EZ Connect g SMC2835W with prism54 chipset. Worked out-of-the-box.
• 9) Keyboard backlight worked fine for over a year on Gentoo, not working out-of-the-box on Breezy. Tweaking /etc/pbbuttons.conf sofar hasn't worked, pbbuttons doesn't acknowledge that this machine has keyboard backlighting, so it's probably a kernel/module issue.

• 10) Don't really have a decent bluetooth device to test with, except my totally incompatible phone. But it seems to work, and others report working bluetooth on similar AlBooks.

At this moment there are two other pre-2005 15" Powerbooks, the 1.0 and 1.33 and Ghz, in the LapTopTestingTeam that are virtually identical.

As somebody suggested, /proc/cpuinfo is the most obvious way to identify the various versions of the Alu-Powerbook. So here's mine:

processor       : 0
cpu             : 7447/7457, altivec supported
clock           : 1249MHz
revision        : 0.1 (pvr 8002 0101)
bogomips        : 831.58
machine         : PowerBook5,2
motherboard     : PowerBook5,2 MacRISC3 Power Macintosh
detected as     : 287 (PowerBook G4 15")
pmac flags      : 0000001b
L2 cache        : 512K unified
memory          : 1024MB
pmac-generation : NewWorld