Re: A few questions from an iMac G5 user...
> 1) Is it possible to enable either sleep or suspend functions for the
> iMac G5? I am currently running the 2.6.19 kernel, but I don't have
> the slightest clue how to enable suspend or sleep. These functions
> never worked in Ubuntu. Is this possible?
There is currently no sleep support for G5s.... Suspend To Disk should
be doable without too much pain though I didn't have time to do anything
about it, I remember some patches were posted at one point doing at
least part of the job.
As for Suspend To RAM... well... the iMac G5 is an SMU based machines. I
_think_ I know what command can be sent to the SMU to instruct it to put
the machine to sleep, though I haven't really tried doing it. The main
problem is that sleep will shut down the video chip and we currently
can't bring an nVIdia chip back.
It might be possiblea after a good deal of reverse engineering, or help
from nVidia (don't hold your breath on that), but not at the moment.
> 2) Is it a good idea to enable ESD? I was having a few system freezes
> when using multiple multimedia players (Totem Xine, Rhythmbox and
> VLC), and have since enabled esd (and installed gstreamer-esd and
> vlc-esd). Things seem to be fine, but I'm not really sure what is an
> ideal sound setup.
System freeze ? Or just application blocking because another one is
using the driver ?
> 3) How do I install java for running, eg. internet java applets? In
> Ubuntu we had to download from an IBM site. Currently, that site
> requires registration and even then told me that export laws (or
> something) would mean the download would be reviewed and I'd be
> notified when it was available. Of course, this never happened. So how
> else do ppc users get java installed? Alternatively, how long will it
> be before we see Adobe's recently released source code making its way
> into sid?
Weird, they might have changes something... I had no problem last time I
d/l the IBM Java. That's the best option at the moment. Now that Sun
Java is GPL, there is hope to have more options available though.
You can also use gij/gcj but they can't run quite as much things as the
IBM JVM can (at least IBM own internal expense report system :-) Though
I've been told they can run Eclipse.
There's also Kaffe but that's pretty outdated...
> 4) Is it possible to brighten the screen on an iMac G5. It looks
> darker and duller than OS X, but besides altering the gamma settings,
> there seems no way to brighten the screen.
Yes, there is a magic register and indeed, it looks like the value set
in there by nvidiafb might be slightly lower than what OS X does on this
machine....
The problem is that there are several machine models with similar nVidia
chips and they seem to require differnent "max" values there, though we
haven't quite figured how to properly identify which model needs what,
so we are stuck right now with what we think is a "safe" value (ie.
won't damage the display).
I have some contacts at nVidia that were supposed to enquire about that
but I had no reply over the past few monthes, I'll try to ask again.
Ben.
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