Linux on an Apple Powerbook G4
By Jochen Voss, last updated 2012-02-18
This text describes the adventures I encountered while installing Linux
on an
Apple Powerbook G4 (15″ version, 1.67GHz).
It seems that with Apple's numbering scheme the machine is a
PowerBook5,6. If you have questions or additional hints, feel
free to contact me.
The page was originally written in spring 2005, when the machine was
new on the market. After a while I got bored by the many difficulties
connected to running Linux on the machine and I switched to using
MacOS X. Recently I reinstalled the current Debian/unstable
distribution on the machine and was happy to notice that Linux support has
significantly improved.
Contents
Summary
I was able to install
Debian GNU/Linux on the machine. The
laptop has the hardware configuration
Apple introduced in February 2005.
Some information about my setup:
Installation
Nowadays Debian Linux can be installed on the machine from the usual
installation media. Initially, when the machine was still very new, I
followed the steps described at William R Sowerbutts'
Linux on the Mac Mini
page. I used the Debian Sarge installer RC2 netinstall image, and the
basic installation worked without any trouble.
Keyboard
The Powerbook keyboard needs getting used to: there are no keys for
page-up, page-down and the hash mark. Since I was unhappy with the
provided key-bindings under Linux, I finally wrote my own ones, aiming for
as much MacOS X compatibility as possible.
Originally the kernel produced key press events for the fn
key,
thus allowing it to be bound in the X Window system. For some reason
(which I never understood) this feature was removed in later kernels.
The keymaps in the remaining part of this section are from the time
when fn
could still be bound in keymaps. Nowadays they will
probably be less useful:
- a
Linux console keymap
for the British keyboard
- a set of files implementing
Xorg server key bindings
for British, French (thanks, Yves-Alexis Perez) and German keyboards,
using the XKB extension
- a set of files implementing
old XFree86 server key bindings
for the British and German (untested) keyboards, using the XKB extension
(eject key does not work due to a bug in XFree86)
Some notes about the key bindings:
- The apple keys (
command
in MacOS) act as meta keys. You can use
apple-tab
to cycle trough your windows and
ctrl-apple-F1
etc. to switch virtual consoles.
- The alt key (
option
in MacOS) acts as an AltGr
key. You can use it together with other keys to produce all sorts of funny
characters as in MacOS X: for the British keyboard
alt-3
gives the hash mark #
,
alt-s
gives the German sharp esszet, and
alt-u a
gives the German ä
umlaut character.
- The page-up and page-down keys are at
fn-up
and
fn-down
.
- Since X11 does not know the concept of an
eject
key, I just mapped the key to F13
. With this setting,
you can teach, for example, the Gnome desktop environment to treat
F13
as an eject key.
Bluetooth
BlueTooth does not work out of the box. I do not own any bluetooth
devices, so the following is unchecked. According to
Johannes Berg's message to debian-powerpc
the following error messages are related to bluetooth support. In the
posting he also explains how to get bluetooth working.
...
usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
hub 4-0:1.0: USB hub found
hub 4-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 4
...
Error -71 above stands for protocol error
(EPROTO),
error -5 for I/O error
(EIO).
Other Problems
- At shutdown the pdns daemon gives the following error message:
pdnsd[487]: Caught signal 15.
Exiting. pdnsd[492]: Failed to open socket: Bad file descriptor. Status
readback will be impossible
The problem does not occur on a
(otherwise similar) Intel machine.
- For some weird reason xterm does not work! It
opens a window but then dies immediately with the following error message.
xterm: fatal pty error 23 (errno=22) on tty /dev/pts/1
This is reported as
Debian bug 229566 and can be
worked around by using the following X resource settings:
xterm*eightBitInput: true
xterm*metaSendsEscape: true
- For some time my system clock was randomly reset after reboot and
after waking up the machine from sleep. The problem seems to mostly affect
only kernel version 2.6.12 to 2.6.12.2. I never saw this problem with
kernel 2.6.11. With 2.6.12 and 2.6.12.2 the clock was very often (approx.
one in three cases) very wrong (more than a year in a random direction).
With 2.6.12.3 the clock was off by approximately an hour for a few times.
References
Copyright © 2012 Jochen Voss.
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