Reed’s Blog

I recently installed Debian Linux on an Apple iBook G3. In the interest of helping the Linux community I’m posting my experience with Linux on this laptop and how to improve yours.

I started by downloading and burning the stable Debian 4.0 installer to a CD. Turned the iBook on and held down the option key to show a choice of boot-able media.

After installing here is what worked and what didn’t:

• Airport wireless card, fully functional right away, Great!

• Screen: 640×480 by default, fixable.
• Keyboard: Fully functional
• Trackpad: Fully functional
• Sound: Didn’t work right away
• Built in Mic: Didn’t work right away
• CD Drive: the SONY CD-RW CRX800E was fully functional right out of the box

As for the screen I was able to fix it to display at 1024×768 by reconfiguring xorg by running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” as root.

I’m glad the Airport wireless card worked right away

I got the sound working by running alsa-conf as root.

The Built in Mic didn’t work right away and I have no plans for getting it working. Mostly because the only thing I really use a microphone for is Skype, and there is no PPC version of Skype.

Overall I think Debian is great and an excellent choice for the iBook G3.

Google has released new Google Labs improvements for GMail.

My favorite new feature is mouse gestures.  Dragging the mouse right or left while holding down the right button will move to the next or previous message, respectively.  Here’s a screenshot:

To enable mouse gestures, which currently work on Firefox 2+ and IE click “Settings” when signed into GMail then go to the labs tab on the right.  Scroll down to Mouse Gestures and click enable.  Be sure to click “Save changes” on the bottom or it woln’t work.  Dont’ forget to check out the other GMail Labs features!!