debian on iBook G4
Hello,
I am an old-time debian user and had debian installed on my iBook G4
since around 2007. However, something must have hit my head a couple
of months ago and I thought OSX might be more useful for this old
laptop, since I mainly use it for browsing anyway. So I wiped it clean
and put OSX on it. This didn't last very long though, and I decided I
wanted debian back, so I took the netinstall for powerpc testing and
installed that.
However, I noticed that gtkpbbuttons and powerprefs is no longer
maintained in the debian repos. I definitely still had gtkpbbuttons
installed when I wiped it clean, but I'm not sure about powerprefs.
I've always used pbbuttonsd, gtkpbbuttons and powerprefs on my ibook
and never had any complaints about it. It seems weird to me that
pbbuttonsd is still there and the other 2 were dropped. Hmm... looks
like pbbuttonsd has been orphaned...
Because of that, I wonder if there are any alternatives maintained for
those programs? I heard about pommed, but it's still not clear to me
if it's really an alternative for pbbuttonsd on powerpc machines.
Besides that, I also noticed that I no longer have 3d hardware
acceleration. I actually discovered that before I wiped the iBook and
it had to do with older drivers being dropped during the transition to
KMS. Anything changed on that topic? In any case, my glxinfo claims
I'm using the software rasterizer. Related to that, I also noticed
that the terminals become unreadable whenever I shutdown the display
manager... and become readable again as soon as I start a display
manager.. any tips on that? I don't know if this is important, but I
use lightdm as a display manager and i3wm as a window manager.
Also, I configured middle and right click as fn-ctrl and fn-option,
but it does not seem to work consistently. I enabled it with the
following in /etc/sysctl.conf. Any hints on that?
# enable mouse button emulation
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button_emulation = 1
Finally, I noticed that the ondemand governor on current kernels no
longer works with the G4. If I'm not mistaken, this did work with
older kernels, so I'm a bit surprised. Which kind of external tools
can be used to get similar behavior?
Hoping to get some advice from other people that are still using
iBooks/PowerBooks.
cheers,
Ruben
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