Spank Ministry

Since the Airport Extreme drivers have been reverse engineered, I thought now would be the perfect time to finally install Linux on the ol’ PB. The popular distro of late is Ubuntu (Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning “I’m sick of waiting for Gentoo to finish compiling,” as the joke goes), so I thought I’d give it a try. Nothing against Gentoo, which is still my distro of choice for the desktop. Gentoo of course is named after a fast swimming species of penguin that preys primarily on small krill and n00bs who use binary-only distros. Since I’ve always been more fond of KDE than GNOME just as a matter of preference, I chose the Kubuntu flavor. Dapper Drake is the latest version of the distro, and it’s still in testing, but it had the kernel version and modules I needed (bleeding edge packages don’t hurt, either ^_^) The timing turned out to be fortuitous, since Dapper Drake release candidate 2 was just released to the public, so I grabbed myself a copy.

The install itself is far and away the least painful Linux install I have ever seen or heard of. I put the CD in, it detected things and went into a setup program, and presented me with some basic choices like language and keyboard setup. The partition setup screen had several options, one being a “suggested” partition table, one being a guided process, and one being the manual partition setup most of us are used to. At this point, I decided to let it choose for me, and it showed me what it was going to do, and asked to write the new partition table to disk. After that, the base system and related packages were all installed, which took about 20 minutes and a reboot or two, and that is basically it. Gentoo Linux has really great documentation about install and setup. Kubuntu? It doesn’t need documentation. After the progress bar hit 100% I had a Powerbook that:

• Booted straight into kdm/KDE 3.5
• Had OpenOffice installed

• Displayed battery status correctly in the panel
• Had ALSA sound working out of the box
• Touchpad worked great (had to tone down the sensitivity– cursor moved too fast)
• Frequency scaling enabled to prevent overheating
• Eject button worked to eject cds, provided they were not mounted

If Linux is going to seriously break into the desktop world, Ubuntu/Kubuntu is the distro to do it. After this, I went into the shortcuts and reassigned some functions to the Apple keys, went into KMix and mapped the volume control Powerbook buttons to work, and got wireless working. Dapper actually shipped with almost everything I needed to get Airport Extreme started. Google for fwcutter, it’s a utility you need to download, compile, and run on an Airport Extreme driver to extract the firmware, which it will then copy to the correct directory. After that, this is what I do to get my wireless connected:

sudo modprobe bcm43xx (this should also load the 80211_softmac module, if not, do it manually)
sudo ifconfig eth1 up (static IP goes here)

sudo route add default gateway (router IP, often 192.168.1.1)

sudo iwconfig eth1 essid (Wireless network name)

sudo iwconfig eth rate 11Mb

The reason for the last command is the driver currently only works for 802.11b. Another limitation is that the SoftMac layer is not complete. I read a post about devicescape, which is supposedly much more functional, though harder to get working. I’ll see if I can get more out of the wireless in terms of packet sniffing, etc. later. If the above doesn’t work for you, check the output of dmesg and see if your computer has successfully associated with the access point. I have also heard tell of WEP encryption working as well.

As for what remains to be done, the pbuttonsd that controls things like power button behavior, suspend-to-disk and so forth often seems to require reconfiguration to work properly on some Powerbooks vs. others. All in all, it was a painless experience. As is usually the case with Linux, not everything is sunshine and roses. There are projects under way to create an open source implementation of Flash, but it’s still in progress. If you want to play something that requires Flash 7+, forget about it. Macromedia does have a Linux binary available for download, but it’s x86 (The Man giveth, and The Man taketh away). So I can’t watch Google Video at the moment, but at least now I can save it to disk. There’s a petition for them to release a Linux ppc binary, but I’m not holding my breath. The petition for open sourced Airport Extreme drivers has been around for years since the first release of the product, and we’re only seeing results now because hardworking device driver people rolled up their sleeves and took matters into their own hands. And if you don’t understand, or at least respect that, I’m not sure why you’d want to run Linux in the first place.

Screenshots:

Gaim, Image Browing with Konq

Processor Stats (1Ghz processor frequency scaled to 66%)

Showing off Katapult, a KDE launcher application like the outstanding OS X app, Quicksilver