I have had some questions regarding my iBook G4 lately (and ever since I have gotten it) about certain features which I’m going to cover here for all those who wish to ask them again.
Airport Extreme
Will it work in Linux? Unless you reverse engineer it yourself… No. There is a project to reverse engineer one of the sister chips of the Airport Extreme, but it’s going slowly. If you want an AE driver for Linux, join the project and start RE’ing.
How do I get wireless, then? Well, I use a Netgear MA111 USB Adapter but if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t have gotten the Airport Extreme and instead bought the D-Link DWL-122 USB Adapter. Why you say? Because the D-Link works in MacOSX and in Linux (with the linux-wlan-ng drivers). It’s the best of both worlds. Of course, you’ll have something sticking out of the side of your iBook, but it’s a small price to pay (or, not to pay if you look at it from a fiscal standpoint) for wireless in both MacOSX and Linux.
Sleep
The iBook G4 does not sleep yet. The problem is that the Radeon 9200 M9+ doesn’t use the same wake up technique as the previous Radeon’s did, so when the iBook wakes up, it doesn’t show anything on the screen. Ben Herrenschmidt (I hope I spelled his name right) is working on decoding a log I dumped for him from the OSX ndriver for the card. It’s taking a while (you try going through a 1.5 MB log of register addresses with ATI’s specs and make some sense out of it), but when he finishes, we’ll have a native driver for the card.
Those are the two most common questions I get. If I get any more, I’ll update this blog entry.
Thanks for looking at the sleep/awake up issues. I took the easy road and don’t use sleep mode when in GNU/Linux on my iBook g4.
I haven’t opened up an ibook, but if the airport card is optional, rather than something on the motherboard, it may be attached via a mini-PCI port, in which case you could replace it with something supported under Linux. My old PC notebook gave direct access to the mini-PCI port via a panel on the bottom. If the ibook can be easily opened, you might wanna check it out. Make sure you get a card compatiblle with the case’s antenna conectors (if any).
The DWL-122 is a discontinued item. Office Max online still have a few in clearance for $30, before $10 rebate, though many stores are already sold out.
After about four hours of use, I would recommend against the DWL-122. Their OS-X driver crashes my Powerbook G4 after only a few minutes. Based on this <a href="http://www.macaddict.com/is... review</a> I’m not the only one seeing kernel panics. It might work great with LInux, but it’s not a solution for those of us who dual-boot.
penis
How do you get gif files to move on teh IBook? the animations do not move