PowerBook G4 Sound and WiFi

[Mark Walker]

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I got Debian (Lenny) installed on Annie's old G4 PPC, and after apt-get
upgrade and installing ALSA and PulseAudio, and as many HAL modules as I
could find, still it won't see the hardware for sound and WiFi.
Ethernet works fine, so if we have our own locally shared out wired
access to the WiFi network, maybe there'll be something we can download
and install to get it working on Linux. I'm pretty sure that machine
had working sound and WiFi on OS X, so it shouldn't be a bad hardware issue.

Haven't played with Debian for several years. FWIW, Debian and Yellow
Dog appear to be the only distros left that are still supporting the
PowerPC architecture in their current versions. (Just can't understand
why no one wants to support proprietary equipment with a continuously
diminishing equipment count.)

Anyway, it might be fun to try to troubleshoot this; that is whenever we
have any slow moments this Saturday (nah, that's not going to happen :-))

Mark

- --

Mark Caldwell Walker
Contact info at marwalk.tel
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[Annie Walker]

Maybe you should try Yellow Dog? According to this guy, he had no problems with wifi or sound.

http://users.linpro.no/janl/hardware/tibook.html

He also says that Yellow Dog specializes in PPC and Mac hardware and installed easier than Debian on his Powerbook (which is a model older than mine).

(Disclaimer: This is just after a quick Google search; I didn't research must farther than this page.)

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[Annie Walker]

Also, this link offers tips for getting the wifi and sound to work, although he installed Debian on a G4 iBook; might be worth a try:

http://box.matto.nl/linuxibook.html

[Mark Walker]

I think I will. Ha, it looked earlier like Debian would be easier.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Annie Walker <annie...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Mark Walker]

Am posting this from your old G4 running Yellow Dog Linux. Played
songs from Magnatune in Rhythmbox, so the original plan is back on to
use the G4 to play music (vice an MP3 player).

Haven't gotten the WiFi working on it, yet. But that's not essential
for SFD sound demos.

Nice second life for an old Mac :-)

On Sep 16, 8:52 am, Annie Walker <anniewa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe you should try Yellow Dog? According to this guy, he had no problems
> with wifi or sound.
>
> http://users.linpro.no/janl/hardware/tibook.html
>
> He also says that Yellow Dog specializes in PPC and Mac hardware and
> installed easier than Debian on his Powerbook (which is a model older than
> mine).
>
> (Disclaimer: This is just after a quick Google search; I didn't research
> must farther than this page.)
>

> > Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora -http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

>
> > iEYEARECAAYFAkyRcB8ACgkQfCKHDapILkaO6gCgnTMNThHSEopubkGfzi+wMucd
> > 5AsAoJWzr0iziUpCbrzQyyrCHUiLQb+t
> > =qplq
> > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "FredLUG" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to fre...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

> > fredlug+u...@googlegroups.com<fredlug%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

[Annie Walker]

Yay! For the wifi, did you try this tip from the first site?

Networking

Networking will work right away, almost. I did not find the YDL netconfig program too helpful for the Airport card on my home WIFI network (though it may work well on the builtin ethernet), so here is how to roll your own: Edit /etc/modules.conf, adding two lines:

alias eth0 sungem
alias eth1 airport

Don't switch them around, didn't work too well for me. Sungem is the 1Gibit ethernet chip set in all tibooks. In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts you want two files. ifcfg-eth0 should read like this:

NAME=localhost
DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=10.0.0.135
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=no
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.0.0.1
DNS1=10.0.0.1

Except for the obvious one line the ifcfg-eth1 file is identical. Change "dhcp" to "static" if you want it to have a statically assigned address.

Now you can run "ifup eth1" and "ifdown eth1", as root, to get your Airport card up and down.

If you want to be able to give the ifup and ifdown commands as your normal user you should look into consolehelper and look at how the /usr/bin/kbdrate program does it (two more hints: /etc/pam.d/kbdrate and /etc/security/console.apps).

By the way: kbdrate does not work on PowerBooks, but YDL installs it, and it's a good example for ifup and ifdown.

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[Mark Walker]

No, but looks like it makes sense to try. I wonder why one couldn't
just use ifconfig up/down, as I could list the interfaces with a
straight ifconfig. Lots of experimenting to do!