Back to Mac OS X!

Ok, I tried to install Debian on my iBook for fun during the winter break and I am now back to Mac OS X. You know I actually feel that it gets better every time I reinstall it :P And I just found the OpenOffice.org port to Mac OS X. No longer has to start X before starting OpenOffice.org... Oh, the port is not called OpenOffice.org, instead it is name NeoOffice/J. I thought "J" was for "Japanese" but it is apparently not :D It actually stands for Java. Ya, it uses the Java environment instead of X so it runs almost natively on Mac OS X(the start up time is a bit long... but usable...)

Well, although it is never complete but I would like to write a report on the experience with Debian linux on the iBook(G4/800MHz/318MB RAM/HDD 30GB/ATI Radeon 9200(?) Mobility). It was overall an interesting experience for me. I thought I have learned quite a lot about linux before I started the installation but I was wrong. I spent quite some time on making the "sleep" function to work properly when the lid is close. I recompiled the kernel(2.6.9) after applying Ben's sleep patch #7(thanks Ben :D) and rebooted just to find out that it wouldn't boot correctly complaining that it couldn't find the modules. So I tried to tweak the kernel config in any ways that I know(in fact I don't know many...) but it still didn't work. After a few times of recompilation, I noticed that the default kernel that came with Sarge had some other files(initrd.img, System-Map) other than the kernel image. So I started to study the man page of mkinitrd and finally successfully installed the patch. And it works flawlessly ever since! :)

Other than the above issue, I also managed to get the video-out to work properly. I applied a patch to XFree86 and editted the config file but later I heard that you don't have to patch XFree to get it to work. But anyway this works well, too. There were other small tweaks that took place but I have forgotten most of them. The above 2 issues took the longest time for me.

As a conclusion, though you need to spend some time to configure it to work, most of the functions work as expected and it is fun to install linux on a Macintosh machine. Next time I would like to try out NetBSD but at the moment I will stick to Mac OS X for a while.

Thanks for reading. :)

p/s The only thing that isn't supported under linux is the built-in modem since it is a software-driven modem.