Re: apple hardware docs.
On Nov Thu 13 2003 19:46, Mick Weiss wrote:
> I asked Apple about their hardware documentation (I forwarded a thread from
> debianppc that talked about how they wouldn't release it), I got a very
> helpful reply from Apple.
Thanks for that!
> I would like to forward this:
>
> > All available documentation regarding Apple hardware can be found at the
> > website below:
> >
> > <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Hardware.html>
Yeah, well... I already knew this, but you see... what they give is a
detailed description of most hardware for "computer newbies", they
don't tell you most of the important low level stuff :-/
In any case, what is extremely ridiculous is that for many "stupid"
things like fans, thermal control or microphone/sound, they have *nix
stuff programmed, BUT they still don't release it under the GPL, so you
need a really good bunch of gurus to hack the stuff up.
(sound in a laptop cannot be "really" good anyway, so I added it to the
"silly things" list, specially the microphone thing, because it is
really annoying for me to have ALSA and not be able to use it...)
I understand that they want secrecy or whatever they want with their
business model regarding Quartz and their freaking cool "visual" stuff
("their X-windows", etc). But c'mon... we bought a $3000 laptop already!
We are running whatever we want in it, plus most of the time, MacOSX,
they already made _a lot_ of money from us! And they still make us run
"crippled hardware" because although the work of those gurus is amazing,
it is _obviously_ hard to match that of the engineers who designed the
piece of hardware milimeter by milimeter...
> > I hope you find this information useful. If you require any additional
> > info
> > rmation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> >
> > Damian Harney
> > Apple Developer Connection
> > Worldwide Developer Relations
>
> If anyone needs help with writing a device driver for anything Apple
> related, it seems like they would help out where they could.
>
> At least, thats the impression that I get. If I was better at writting
> low-level stuff I would attempt this. Can anyone suggest any docs?
Regarding the G4 Powerbook laptops, I found quite nice the stuff in
here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerBook_G4/index.html
and in pdf,
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerBook_G4/PowerBookG4.pdf
But, again, they are not (OBVIOUSLY) a detailed reference guide on the
electronics of the G4. I mean, I just took a course on microprocessors
and embedded systems, and the lab work was on a nifty ARM board
co-designed by the University of Manchester and the University of New
South Wales; well, not only _all_ of the ARM cross-compiling software,
EMULATION of the board, etc, was GPL software (ARM GNU tools and komodo
program for running the programs on the board plus emulating the board
too) but they gave us a CD with _ALL_ the low level docs of the board,
down to the microprocessor level (ARM7TDMI), I/O, IRQs, etc. Apple
cannot provide aaaaall that much detail, since I guess they want to
remain unique in their hardware design, but they could publish, at
least, either the source for the "silly parts" or more details on how to
write it.
> Best Regards,
>
> - Mick
Cheers
--
J. Javier Maestro
<jjmaestro@computer.org>
http://rigel.homelinux.com
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