Specs

  • 466 MHz Power PC G3 Processor
  • 256 MB SD-RAM
  • 30 GB Hard Drive
  • x DVD-ROM Drive
  • 12.1 inch TFT LCD Display (800x600)
  • 10/100 Ethernet, one USB port, one firewire port
  • 56k Hardware Modem
  • Airport Card

    I bought the Apple iBook-Clamshell from Mac of All Trades . I added in an Airport Card. I also have an 800 MHz iBook as well and a 300 MHz iBook

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

    I loaded Yellow Dog 4.0 which was released in Nov 2004. Yellow Dog linux is aimed at the Apple Mac market. The machine is set up as triple boot. I have it set for 12 GB Mac OS X, 5 GB for Mac OS 9.22 and 13 GB for Linux.

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

    Sound

    Sound works by default. There is an error message that comes up when going into KDE. There is no fix as of now. Sound does work but you must run "kmix" and set the volume accordingly. It is set to 0 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.

    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.

    DVD Playback

    I use Ogle to playback my DVD's. However, I had problems getting it to run until I found the solution on the Internet. Before you compile, you will need to do a

    The "--disable-xv" s optional and it allows you to take snapshots of the DVD image which before was a blue background. It is optional. Some of the downloads from the web site you can leave out since it is included in YellowDog such as JPG and XML2.

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    Last Updated : Oct 16, 2005