Re: True state of support for 12" iBook G4
On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 13:37 +0000, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am considering purchasing a new 12" iBook from Apple. The intent is
> to use this with Debian. However, in researching the state of support
> for this unit, I've found wildly contradictory information. So I'm
> wondering if someone could help clear this up for me.
>
> 1. Sleep mode. According to [1], sleep doesn't work at all. However,
> others are not reporting any trouble with it (basically saying
> everything except the Airport Extreme works fine). Does sleep work
> on this unit?
Should work soon provided you get a machine with an ATI chip, that is
the iBook G4, not the 12" Aluminium PowerBook. The later has an nVidia
chip.
> 2. Video. Not only are there conflicting stories (ranging from
> "accelerated video will never be available on this unit" to
> "dri trunk already supports it fine"), but I've even seen a thread
> where people were debating whether the unit has NVidia or ATI
> graphics. What's the story here?
Accelerated 2D is there and works for all ATIs and nVidias. Accelerated
3D doesn't work on newer ATIs and nVidias, but the iBook has an M9,
which is an RV250 chipset, for which DRI should be supported.
> 3. The Airport Extreme. Everybody agrees that it doesn't work now.
> Some people are saying there are projects to reverse engineer it.
> But I've never found any solid info on any of these projects.
> Is there really any hope here, or should I just buy a USB
> device and be done with it? If I get a USB device, what do you
> recommend?
I didn't find any solid info neither, I think th x86 folks taht were
working on that got lazy and just use that infamous wrapper that loads
the Windoze driver in the linux kernel ... :(
Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
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