powerbook

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morpheus · Post by **morpheus** » Thu Nov 28, 2002 9:16 am

hi,

i'm thinking about bying one of these new powerbooks with a 867mhz-cpu. because this would be my first mac and i want to install gentoo, too, i have a few questions:

1) how is the performance compared to an athlon xp, i.e. when i compile kde?
2) what about opengl-performance under x? i'm developing a visualization app which needs opengl
3) how long can i work with it on battery? how can i stretch this time?
4) has anyone managed to get the softmodem working?

thanks

zhenlin · Post by **zhenlin** » Thu Nov 28, 2002 9:45 am

I wouldn't know, www.apple.com may have some [biased] statistics. I have an iMac 700, Mozilla is definitely slower under Mac OS X than it is under Linux/x86 1.5GHz, maybe it is the Aqua interface... I have been compiling some applications under it, like X and Gnome 1.4, it seems to be about the same or faster than the x86 I have.

Hasimir · Post by **Hasimir** » Thu Nov 28, 2002 1:15 pm

Compiling on a ppc is a pain in the ..., e.g. compiling samba-2.2.7 on an athlon-mp (1.66 real clock-speed, but using only 60% of one processor) takes around 25 minutes. On my iBook 600Mhz/640 MB this took almost 2hours. On average I would expect it to be thrice the time compared to an optimized athlon.
OpenGL works as good as on any pc I have tried.
About the expected battery life I can only guess since I have never been without electricity for more than 4 hours (meaning any newer powerbook should also endure more than 4 hours), but this may vary according to your power-savings-settings.

Gerk · Post by **Gerk** » Thu Nov 28, 2002 3:27 pm

I would have to say that opengl does not work as good on ppc, especially with the hardware you have proposed. DRI is barely working at all on radeon mobility chips (mostly due to drivers not being capable yet). There were recently dome big merges from the DRI project into the xfree trunk, but they have not been released yet (only in cvs versions). I also tried this and got mixed results on ppc radeon based machines, so your mileage may vary.

As for samba compile speeds, if it took that user 2 hours to compile samba there is defaintely a problem. On my Dual G4 450 it took around 20 minutes total, and on my G3 450 it took about 40 minutes.

morpheus · Post by **morpheus** » Thu Nov 28, 2002 4:10 pm

do you mean that i will get better opengl-performance with the cvs version of xfree? if i'm not wrong there will be a new xfree-version early next year. do you think xfree and opengl on ppc will get better with this version?

chromatic · Post by **chromatic** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 4:37 am

[quote="Gerk"] I also tried this and got mixed results on ppc radeon based machines, so your mileage may vary.[/quote]

I have a new PowerBook G4 with the Radeon Mobility 9000 chipset. Is it worth tracking XFree86 CVS to get this to work? I'm not having any luck with Xeasyconfig, so it's worth considering, if you think it'll help.

Thanks,
-- c

Gerk · Post by **Gerk** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 4:53 am

No, afaik there is no support for the radeon 9000/M9 stuffs at all yet for ppc. The only support I know for it was comitted to the benh kernel tree last night, and that is console support only, and it hasn't been confirmed that it even works yet.

If you want to try this kernel tree, it can be rsynced from rsync://rsync.penguinppc.org

Gerk

morpheus · Post by **morpheus** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 10:47 am

No, afaik there is no support for the radeon 9000/M9 stuffs at all yet for ppc.

what do you mean? does xfree not support the radeon 9000? what things can i expect not to work?

Gerk · Post by **Gerk** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 3:53 pm

xfree doesn't support the radeon 9000, you should be able to use fbdev driver, but nothing else, as far as when to expect it who knows. The radeon 9000 cards are _much_ newer than the latest xfree release, don't forget that part, and ATI has a bad habit of doing major changes to things on new versions of cards.

If you want to find out I suggest trying the xfree mailing lists, and don't forget to specify it's for ppc. ATI has recently released x86 only binary drivers (this is becoming a trend for these dmned video card makers), that as I read this morning only work with retail ATI video cards anyway (which the included ones in ppc hardware are not).

We _must_ find a way to prove to these video card makers that PPC Linux is a valid OS and needs their support.

axxackall · Post by **axxackall** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 6:02 pm

Gerk wrote:We _must_ find a way to prove to these video card makers that PPC Linux is a valid OS and needs their support.

A bit off the current topic, but are there any plans about it?

Let's say that kernel.org (orother site with kernel news) will have the page "Platform of week (month, day)", telling about the most interesting kernel progress specific to some (user chosen? moderated?) architectures.

Similar think can be done on the application side - "Linux Platform of the month" could tell about most interesting application developments (including porting) .

x86 wmay appear more ofte, but at least other architectures will be highlighted as well and introduced to x86-linux people.

We can ask Linux Gazette, or other architecture independent sites for such help.

Of course the effort should be in a support of all non-x86 Linux platforms, not only PPC. For example, I heard similar thoughts from people working with Alpha and Sparc Linux ports.

Another idea, how about "Linux Hall of Shame" moderated by the poll system to tell, which hardware and software linux vendors ignore Linux architecture concepts, inlcuding multiplatfomness.

Gerk · Post by **Gerk** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 6:20 pm

Well the first and formost thing in my eyes for PPC is that ATI makes the cards for Apple hardware (Apple is using nvidia much less again), and therefore I would say that 80% or better of the PPC machines running linux has ATI in them. As for sparc and alpha they are addon cards only afaik....

ATI does help with docs, to 2 (two) kernel developers only, and no official support (and the docs from what I understand are generally old and very limited). I think it would be a matter of convincing them that PPC linux is a viable platform somehow, which wil not be an easy task.

chromatic · Post by **chromatic** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 8:22 pm

Gerk wrote:We _must_ find a way to prove to these video card makers that PPC Linux is a valid OS and needs their support.

Working on it...

Gerk · Post by **Gerk** » Fri Nov 29, 2002 11:16 pm

excellent

I also do some writing, and I'll try and while up an article for my website this wekeend (http://macdiscussion.com)

maybe if we hit them in hords it may work

Gerk