Ubuntu on an iBook G4
This describes an installation of Hardy Heron. The page is still under construction …
| Hardware/feature | Status | Notes |
| wifi | Works | Code needs to be compiled but there are good instructions. May look daunting at first but is actually straightforward. |
| UK keyboard layout | Works | One key needs to be corrected. |
| Touchpad | Works | Two function keys are used as middle and right mouse buttons. |
| Sleep/Hibernate/empty battery | Don’t know. | This doesn’t work out of the box and if the battery runs out the machine switches off. I haven’t even tried to set this up yet. It may be very easy. If you happen to encounter some good notes please drop me a line  |
| Movies! | Working - at least for one film! | Easy. Sound needs tuning though. |
Booting
- black screen issue
Booting off early power-pc Ubuntu CD’s has been no problem. A line pops up that says “boot:”, I hit enter and Ubuntu boots. With the more recent Hardy Heron, if I hit enter the screen goes black and the machine does nothing. The solution for me was to type “live-nosplash-powerpc” at the boot prompt. Here is the forum discussion that provided the answer. There are three variants so you might have to try a couple to find one that works for you.
Keyboard & Mouse
- Right click menu and middle click pasting
- No ~ or backtick
- Volume keys etc
Mouse: Middle click and right click can be done by pressing F11 and F12 respectively. I’d like to reclaim F12 as the CD eject button though so I’ll remap that sometime.
No ~ or backtick: My ~ and ` produced < and > respectively. This was in addition to the usual <> keys that worked as expected. Brief intro to keycodes: Keycodes are numbers that represent the buttons on the keyboard - not the pretty pictures on the button but the button itself - and we want to map them to the right characters. Twiddle ~ is just shift backtick, so they use the same button and we need to find only the keycode of that one button. I did this by running “sudo xev” and typing `, then control-C to quit. You may want to type some more and also run “sudo dumpkeys” to get a feel for keycodes. I then ran “man ascii” to find out the hex values of ` and ~ (0×60 and 0×7e) - yeah yeah I don’t know them off the top of my head, what a disgrace, I should feel thoroughly ashamed of myself (!) - or perhaps not. I then added this line to my ~/.xmodmap:
keycode 94 = 0x60 0x7E
To apply the modification instantly run:
xmodmap $HOME/.xmodmap
WiFi
The right way:
- b43, fwcutter and the nm-applet
The wrong way:
- ndiswrapper (definitely not applicable)
- wifi-radar (once the driver is working this shows networks but isn’t as good as nm-applet at getting connected)
First of all, find out what kind of wifi hardware you have by running
lspci
In my case I got:
0001:10:12.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
It seems that the right kernel module for this card on Hardy Heron is b43. There is a rub that these wireless cards have non-free firmware so one has to get the driver from Broadcom, cut out the relevant bit and use it. Thankfully someone clever has done the hard work for us and it’s all automated. All we need to do is to run the commands on this page: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43.
When that was done I prodded the internet connection icon on the Ubuntu taskbar, selected my local network, entered a password and all was fine and dandy.
Movies!
A lot of movie codecs are non-free so they are stored in an unclean multimedia repository called Medibuntu. To add it to your list of software repositories follow the instructions on the medibuntu website. Then run this in a terminal window:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
sudo apt-get install ppc-codecs libdvdcss2
# This next one is probably unnecessary but I ran it as well:
sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs
# Finally install a video player of your choice .. I like VLC:
sudo apt-get install vlc
I watched a Dutch film (Svartboek = Black Book) immediately after installing, but that’s all so I can’t claim this is well tested yet. The only part that didn’t run smoothly was the sound playback: I had to turn it down to almost zero in the player or else the volume was so high that the tiny ibook speakers couldn’t cope and made vicious hissing sounds at me. One can probably play with the gain control within VLC to fix this.
Still unresolved
- When I close the lid the screen doesn’t darken
- Hibernate untested