thinking about getting an ibook

[mightygerm]

Im thinking about getting a 12.1" 600mhz ibook for college use. I plan to have gentoo only (no mac os dual boot.) I jsut have a couple questions:

1. Power mangement, does it work, IE sleep, powersave, etc in gentoo. If so, what options do i need complied in the kernel.

2. Battery Life: how much can i except to get out of it, esp when doing processor intensive tasks. Will there be a battery status indicator in kde/gnome/flux

3. Video out - does it work with gentoo?

4. Applications. I was planning to use this as a word processing/entertainment machine. Does xine/mplayer compile and work correctly? How is the speed when watching DVD / divx ( ie not choppy)

5. Memory - how much is reccomended for running X/watching movies, typing, maybe some emulation (not heavy gaming).

6. Hard Drive - How much HD space does Gentoo/System take up. From what I know, mac HD have a completly different HD setup, so If i took the default 20gb drive, how much would I have left?

7. Any tips/reccomendations?

Thanks a lot, I've used gentoo on x86 and looking forward to the laptop.

mightygerm

[zojas]

You're in luck, on Friday my wife bought me a 14" ibook.

I'm putting up a page at http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc about the install. There I have various files from /etc as well as my complete kernel .config file.

specific answers to your questions:

1 & 2: power management works perfectly. configure the kernel like mine. emerge pmud, type "rc-update add pmud default" and "/etc/init.d/pmud start" and you will be able to suspend and resume.

Also the kernel has an option (which is turned on in my config) to create an emulated /proc/apm file, so all programs which use /proc/apm for power reporting should work fine. I've got wmapm running for now.

battery life: not quite sure yet. I can tell you though that I plugged it in before I went to bed last night. I unplugged it this morning at 7:30 and started a large emerge of gnumeric and mozilla. this also caused it to install all of the gnome stuff. at 10:15 I had to leave so I turned the screen off and left. After compiling for a full 2 hours 45 minutes on battery, the kernel was still reporting a 25% charge.

3. haven't tried video out yet.

4. mplayer is marked as not working for ppc. I haven't tried xine yet. I have read a post on the forum where someone had dvds playing in gentoo on an ibook. of course it works flawlessly in Mac OS X haha. I will be trying it in a few days. check back on my page above.

5. I have 256 mb ram. I will be getting a 512 mb dimm next paycheck for $90. (i have the link on my page, I'm too lazy to go find it and paste it). despite what the install guide says, I've barely used any swap at all so far.

6. Mine had the 28gb drive. I'll put up a df of my gentoo system at http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc/quasardf so you can see how much space I've used so far. I bet you could get by pretty easily with a 8/12gb split. use the larger chunk for whichever os you think you'll use the most.

7. tips: read my page.

[PimpNasty]

As far as I know, video out is not working on the iBooks with a Radeon Mobility.

[grendle]

Video out on my 500 mhz ibook (from september of 2001) does not work.. but then again i never really played with it that much...

Another thing to think about/check on is the modem. Somewhere along the line apple switched to using a softmodem in the ibooks, which at last time i know for sure was unsupported. I say "know for sure" because I remember reading in a post a while back that ben claimed the modem worked in his kernel tree. I don't know if this is true or not, but something to look into.

Other than that, the ibook is a great laptop, battery life is good, power management is great (I have had uptimes of months while moving from place to place throughout the summer) it is nice never having to shutdown

And gentoo rocks on it .