IBook G3 12"

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Powerbook 4,1 on Linux

I use a iBook G3 12" aka powerbook4,1 with Arch Linux PPC. The model was manufactured in 2001 and comes with a 500Mhz G3 750Cxe

[kth5@firefly ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : 750CXe
temperature     : 7 C (uncalibrated)
clock           : 499.999000MHz
revision        : 34.20 (pvr 0008 2214)
bogomips        : 33.15
timebase        : 16640000
platform        : PowerMac
machine         : PowerBook4,1
motherboard     : PowerBook4,1 PowerBook2,2 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
detected as     : 67 (iBook FireWire)
pmac flags      : 0000001f
L2 cache        : 256K unified
pmac-generation : NewWorld

Configuration: 576MB RAM, 40 GB HD, GPU Ati Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x,Audio, ethernet & airport. Usually I have a Terratec Aureon 5.1USB attached to it.

[kth5@firefly ~]$ lspci
00:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth/Pangea AGP
00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x (rev 02)
0001:10:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth/Pangea PCI
0001:10:17.0 Class ff00: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo/Pangea Mac I/O
0001:10:18.0 USB Controller: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo/Pangea USB
0001:10:19.0 USB Controller: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo/Pangea USB
0002:20:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth/Pangea Internal PCI
0002:20:0e.0 Class ffff: Illegal Vendor ID Unknown device ffff (rev ff)
0002:20:0f.0 Class ffff: Illegal Vendor ID Unknown device ffff (rev ff)

What works:

  • Display : ok, 3D Acceleration with r128
  • CPU frequency scaling : ok, 2 steps (500Mhz & 400Mhz)
  • Audio: works with snd-powermac
  • Firewire : ok, unused in my case
  • Ethernet sungem module
  • Wifi : airport. works with airport module
  • Suspend2RAM : out of the box with pbbuttonsd (broken again in 2.6.19-rc1-git9)

What doesn't:

  • Modem : completely unsupported, you may be able to get a driver from Linuxant though
  • Microphone : probably connected to the modem, Alsa doesn't detect it as input

Display

The GPU supports direct rendering, Xv and tons of other things. Then again, the very limited VRAM of 8MB makes serious 3D stuff impossible. As a resolution of 1024x768 is required to drive the TFT, DRI can only be achived putting down the colordepth to 16bpp. 24bit will work but you'll leave out any acceleration except for simple XAA. EXA is not supported but AIGLX seems to get initialized properly, which cannot be put to use right now (Oct. 2006)

If you don't plan to use 3D, you should disable DRI as it will not increase performance in 2D mode whatsoever and up the colordepth to 24bpp. This'll keep the machine from dithering videos in most cases which also would eat lots of CPU time. Disabling the double buffer extension might again speed things up and get you some more offscreen area for blitting but will of course impact fast movements on screen.


Install driver :

pacman -Sy xf86-video-ati

xorg.conf is available on Arch Linux PPC ftp:
ftp://ftp.archlinuxppc.org/other/misc/ibook/ibook-g3-12.xorg.conf

Audio

I use currently snd_powermac.

modprobe snd_powermac 

To have a good sound set PCM to 70 %.

amixer set PCM 70% unmute

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