pseudoberries random thoughts about life, hacking and open source

Ubuntu @ my PowerBook!

Right, so let's face it. I suck at blogging regularly. Sorry. Here comes an update.

Last night I installed Ubuntu on my PowerBook again after months of frustration over the slowness of OS X. And to my delight most of the hardware (which previously wasn't supported or required a lot of work to get going) now works out of the box! Well, everything except 3D acceleration (R300) and wireless (bcm43xx) which is a bit unstable.

Right, according to Johannes Berg he has 3D acceleration working on his identical post-February 2005 PowerBook. On Ubuntu Edgy, this is not the case. glxinfo reports that direct rendering is working, but glxgears only gives ~35fps and any GL application outputs the following:

libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b
*********************************WARN_ONCE*********************************
File r300_maos.c function r300EmitArrays line 546
Cannot handle offset bc302000 with stride 3, comp 3
***************************************************************************
Try R300_SPAN_DISABLE_LOCKING env var if this hangs.

A long chat in #xorg didn't solve this either, so I finally sent an email to Johannes Berg and asked him how he got it working. Hoping for a reply soon.

My Apple Airport Extreme (BCM4306) is now included in Edgy, though it required some firmware cutting to work. I do have some problems with it still though. The interface dies after a while and seems a bit unstable. I don't know what's causing this, but my kernel logs are flooded with the following:

TKIP: received packet without ExtIV flag from <some mac address>

TKIP: replay detected: STA=<AP> previous TSC 000000000b51 received TSC 000000000b51

Which leads me to believe this is a TKIP issue with wpa_supplicant. I'll have to investigate further...

Getting the touchpad to work as I wanted also required some tweaking with Synaptics, but it works fairly well now. Only problem is that it's not as sensitive as in OS X (i.e. I have to press harder on the pad) even though I've set the sensitivity from synaptics to max.

The keyboard now works surprisingly well - the fn-key works out of the box, aswell as num lock. Only thing is that there is no Alt Gr key on this keyboard which is required on Norwegian layouts. Also, the | and < keys were swapped. This could easily be fixed with a neat tool called xkeycaps.

Only thing I miss on my PowerBook now is Flash, which isn't available for Linux PowerPC (curses!) but I think I might get gnash working once I get 3D acceleration. Also, thanks to the folks at IBM, I have Java 1.5 working which wasn't previously available

In other news, we're doing a project for our Object Oriented Programming class which involves creating a game in Java. Geeks that we are we're starting out earlier than anyone else and aim at creating a game in 3D. The library we'll use is called JMonkeyEngine which is a game engine written in and for Java. We'll see how this turns out...

Ubuntu on a PowerBook G4

My old writeup on Ubuntu on a PowerBook G4 has been offline for some time due to us moving to another web host. I've uploaded the old site now (same URL, though I have omitted all my custom kernels because of their size.)

Note though, that the pages are a bit outdated (applies to Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy) so I don't know how relevant the information is on running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. Note also that I'm not running Linux any more on my PowerBook (mainly because of hardware incompatibilities and some commercial software which is unavailable on the PPC platform.)