Specs

  • 300 MHz Power PC G3 Processor
  • 32 MB SD-RAM upgraded with 256 MB for a total of 288 MB
  • 40 GB Hard Drive
  • 24x CD-ROM Drive
  • 12.1 inch TFT LCD Display (800x600)
  • 10/100 Ethernet, one USB port
  • 56k Hardware Modem
  • Airport Card

    I bought the Apple iBook-Clamshell from Voelker Research. I added in an Airport Card and 256 MB Memory. I also have an 800 MHz iBook as well.

    Within an hour of brining home the laptop, I loaded Linux and got rid of the default Mac OS 9.

    I loaded Yellow Dog 3.0 which was released in May 2003. Yellow Dog linux is aimed at the Apple Mac market.

    I upgraded to a 40 GB hard drive. I split the drive for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.22 and Linux. The Mac OS 9.22 partition is about 5 GB and Linux and Mac OS X is equally divded.

    When I had a 3 GB hard drive, due to the size of it, I had to be selective on what I loaded. I could not load the C Compiler. A bigger hard drive is being considered such as a 20 GB or putting a 60 GB on my new 800 MHz iBook and transferring the 30 GB to the old iBook.

    When Linux was loaded, everything worked by default including sound*, ethernet, and X11. The caveats are below.

    Sound

    Sound works by default. However, under KDE, the KDE CD Player (kscd) does not put out any sound. You have to use Audio Player (xmms). It works by default.

    Airport Card

    I encountered a problem that I did not encounter with my 800 MHz iBook and my Mac G4 - 450 MHz Desktop. The wireless could not quite hook up to my home wireless network. It worked perfectly under Mac OS 9. I swapped the card with the card on my G4. When I booted my G4, it loaded a new copy of the firmware to the card through an update from Apple Computer. and then I put it back in the iBook 300 MHz. It worked after that.

    Modem

    The modem is a hardware modem. It uses /dev/ttyS0 and/or /dev/cua0.

    PPP through Modem

    It took some work to get ppp working. I use Slackware Linux on my x86 computers and I took two scripts from it. They are ppp-go and ppp-off. I had problems getting ppp to work until I moved the /etc/hotplug directory to a different location. It caused problems when the connection was made.

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    Last Updated : Nov 24, 2004