The Fugue

I've done it—I've installed, configured, and used Ubuntu linux on my iBook. (gandalf) I made a checklist of things that I feel are important and will tell you how Ubuntu did out of the box, (which is the primary advantage of one distro over another), and whether I was able to get it working with effort (or saw the light in the tunnel).

The first category is power management. Decent power management, especially sleep, is essential for any laptop. First the good news: thermal control and battery/AC reporting work great out of the box with Ubuntu. So does cpufreq, although I haven't decided yet if it needs to be tweaked. The fan comes on more often than in OS X, but I've heard complaints of overheating in OS X so maybe it's doing the Right Thing™.

Now the bad news: sleep is out. It goes to sleep just fine, but it's more like a coma than sleep. When you go to wake it, it makes hard disk sounds and the caps lock light works, but there is no screen activity and apparently the kernel locks up. I hear rumors that this might work later, and that it does work now for some people. Sacrificing 3D acceleration is one thing people say works. I tried leaving X altogether and it still behaved the same.

The next category is network support. The ethernet card works out of the box. I haven't tried the modem. The @#!% Broadcom wireless card does not work, of course. There are affordable USB wireless adapters that work great though, so this is more an inconvenience, and one I was aware of when I bought the laptop.

Caps lock must be remapped to control. I've had no luck with that in linux yet, unhappily. (No, xmodmap doesn't work, although you can disable caps lock with xmodmap.) It must be possible though, because it works in OS X (even built into the preferences in Tiger), so eventually it will work in linux as well.

Sound support is decent. The ALSA mixer is a little confused about capture devices, but capture does work. Playback of course works, but there's only one channel (I've been spoiled in this area before). I fired up JACK and used the XMMS JACK plugin for a few songs—no xruns. That doesn't exactly comprise a stress test, but it is much better than some environments I've been in, so that's a good sign.

Video works out the box. No futzing with the X config. I assume there's 2D acceleration, and there definitely is 3D acceleration. This brings us to one of the most important reasons for me to dual-boot linux on my iBook: FlightGear. I just don't have the RAM (256MB) to run both FlightGear and OS X. FlightGear runs very well in linux, even with GNOME.

Video out didn't work when I plugged another monitor in. I think this is possible, but I haven't done the research on it. I was slightly disappointed that I didn't get mirror out of the box. I'm slightly excited about the supposed possibility for Xinerama.

DVD support works, although Totem player (the default GNOME action when you insert a DVD) does some very strange things indeed, none of which is actually play the DVD. It confuses the battery meter, which decides to tell me I have less than 5% battery life, when in reality the battery is at 85%. It causes the mouse to stutter, and in fact once killed the mouse altogether—I had to reboot to get it back. So that's a lose for Ubuntu. I installed ogle and it works well, although DVD playback isn't smooth like in OS X for some reason. All in all, when I watch DVDs I'll probably do it in OS X.

And now for the miscellany. HFS+, check (after loading the hfsplus module). USB, check. CDROM and CD writing, check.

Overall, support for the iBook in linux is great. As far as I can tell, the only component with a dismal outlook is the Airport Extreme, which is easily worked around. There's still a bit of fiddling that needs to take place to bring linux up to snuff with OS X, but it looks like it's all doable.