ibook G4 PPC OS X vs. Gentoo

2lt.chronic · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 52 Location: york.on.ca

For those of you who have been running gentoo/linux on your ibooks, I am curious to know whether you've noticed a significant speed improvement over OS X. My ibook is a 1.33ghz w/ 1.5G ram but still in OSX in very many situations it chugs along very slowly loading alot of simple things. I think most features have been worked out in the new kernels (suspend, airport, etc) but is there anything critical that still doesn't work? I have been running OS X since I got my ibook and itching to dump it and install gentoo for some time, let me hear some input from you guys.

davidgurvich · Veteran Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 1063

The only things that don't work on my system are

audio playback - distorted (no distortion on OS X)
flash - no flash on ppc/linux (flash works fine on OS X)
Various media codecs

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

No modem support either, but sound should definitely work fine on that model.
_________________
Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

bz31 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 108

mwallace · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 10:18 am Post subject:

The only thing that I miss here is airport. Let's hope that the development is making progress here.

Oh, well and maybe a little bit of improvement for the radeon DRM. But airport ist prio 1.

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

mwallace:

Airport should work fine, Airport Extreme should be more okay than not now too. What is the problem you're having with Airport? And Radeon DRM has been progressing really well imho, the open driver hardly ever crashes any more on my PB, which is a vast improvement over before. Blender works great as do most games I've tried (Tremulous, tomatoes, crack-attack). Again, what's the problem you're having with Radeon DRM?

bz31:
gnash still crashes a lot, it's really not ready for general use yet. There are additionally some Win32 codecs which aren't yet reverse engineered, so I'd tend to agree with davidgurvich that there are still media codecs missing compared to OSX (Windows Media comes to mind).
_________________
Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

mwallace · Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 8:33 am Post subject:

My Airport Extreme 4318 shows me the networks that are available, but I can not connect. Kernel: 2.6.17-gentoo-r7. Is this supposed to work or which version would you recommend?

You are right, Blender works quite well. I only had problems with celestia crashing. But that could also be a problem with the program itself.

AaronPPC · Guru Joined: 29 May 2005 Posts: 522 Location: Tucson, AZ

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

mwallace:
Get closer to the AP. The 4318 has issues with noise and transmission power. I would also always use the latest kernel (-rc7 right now) since it has fixes for bcm43xx.
_________________
Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

mwallace · Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 1:06 pm Post subject:

2.6.18-rc7 didn't improve the situation for me. Still no connection.

It also seems that Blender is not very stable here. I encounter crashes always after a few minutes of work. Which version do you use?
There is also a bugreport about another issue: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140826

johnson_steve · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 62

I've got an iBook G4 (1.2ghz 512Mb) dual boots gentoo and tiger. sound works great, Airport extreem (bcm4306) works great too. I almost never boot into osx anymore; gentoo is faster on my machine but this is probably because I run mostly light weight stuff (xfce4) If you ran kde or gnome you probably wouldn't get as noticeable of an improvement.