# laptop 4 gentoo

## heckler

hi 

plan to get me a laptop 4 to use with gentoo  :Smile: 

any suggestions would be great, as i seek for 100% kompatibility (or something close to that), but pls also tell me what dont work nicely  :Evil or Very Mad: 

(till now i used just debian on a pc, which worked fine, but i miss something like this forum here on that project)

thx a lot

th

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## EdSchouten

I guess Centrino's are quite good, because all the Centrino's share a common part of hardware  :Smile: 

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## magnet

gericom make cheap linux laptops.

everything , even winmodem worked on mine.

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## heckler

gericom's a nice idea, since i think they are even originally austrian (as me)   :Rolling Eyes: 

just kiddin, dont wanna be partiotic

but i guess they have a nice price-value /

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## magnet

they even sell laptops with linux pre installed.

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## ozonator

How about an Apple iBook?  It's small, light, good battery life (4+ hours is easy, I average about 4.5-4.75), well-designed, integrated wireless with the optional airport card (performance and reception are excellent), inexpensive (especially for a small/light laptop), and certainly fast enough.  And, best of all:  everything works in Linux, from the airport to the software modem, from video to sound, from CPU frequency scaling and other power saving stuff to the CD burner (if you get the one with the burner).

Only caveats:  no native Acroread or Flash player for PPC Linux, but the alternatives to the "official" binaries work well (I prefer xpdf to acroread anyway), and I haven't missed them at all.  Besides, you get a copy of OS X as a bonus, which not only has all those programs, it also works wonderfully with Mac-on-Linux, if you ever want them both running side-by-side.

BTW, if you want details of Linux support for the iBook, there are several web pages by people describing their experience setting up Linux, and Gentoo specifically, on an iBook.  The most frequently linked seems to be http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc/ (great page, the author of which posts regularly in these forums).

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## heckler

 *magnet wrote:*   

> they even sell laptops with linux pre installed.

 

will check that out, not that i wont suse or the like, but if that works i can also run deb or gentoo i guess

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## hook

seems like i'll have a trip just norht over the border to get myself a gericom then  :Very Happy: 

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## heckler

-just checked the gericom webpage and wonder whether 'one here can help me for: they sell the notebooks either wich internal modem+lan, or with isdn card, however i would need lan for the work and isdn for home, so i wonder what 2 do ?

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## heckler

 *ozonator wrote:*   

> How about an Apple iBook?  It's small, light, good battery life (4+ hours is easy, I average abo........

 

well i tried installing debian on a powerbookG4, and i wasnt quite satisfied, but maybe i's just too stupid

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## ozonator

 *heckler wrote:*   

>  *ozonator wrote:*   How about an Apple iBook?  It's small, light, good battery life (4+ hours is easy, I average abo........ 
> 
> well i tried installing debian on a powerbookG4, and i wasnt quite satisfied, but maybe i's just to stupid

 

I doubt it's because you're stupid!  There are a few subtle but significant differences between installing Linux on PPC and on x86 --  disk partitioning comes to mind -- as well as some other PPC-specific things (e.g., pmud instead of apmd for power management).  It's all pretty well documented, though; the web pages about installing Gentoo and Debian on iBooks were complete enough for me when I did my installing.

Otherwise, it may have been because Linux support for some of the current PowerBooks unfortunately isn't as good as it is for the iBook.  For example, some (not all) PowerBooks use nVidia graphics chips, and nVidia hasn't (won't?) release drivers for PPC Linux, even though they do for x86 Linux; there's an open-source xfree driver, but I don't think it does 3D well.  (All iBooks use ATI graphics.)  Another problem:  the newer airport extreme 802.11g wireless cards use a Broadcom chipset, which is notoriously unsupported in Linux (Broadcom won't release drivers or specs, for ppc or any other architecture).  (The iBook uses the 802.11b airport card, which is well-supported with an airport kernel module and the orinoco/hermes drivers.)  These sorts of problems are not unique to PPC (e.g., Centrino wireless cards don't have Linux drivers yet either, as far as I know), and, I'm sure, the sorts of things you want to avoid.

The only other thing I'd say is that PPC kernel support for hardware is continually improving, thanks to the fabulous work done by Benjamin Herrenschmidt, whose kernel tree is the basis for the 'ppc-sources' kernel in Gentoo.  Without knowing exactly what you ran into before, and which G4 you were using, it's hard to say what may have been the problems you had; I can only vouch for the fact that my iBook works well, and that if I needed info when setting it up, the support (particularly from posts I found in these forums) was helpful.

Of course, whenever I visit the friend of mine that has a ThinkPad X series laptop, I remember the struggle I had deciding between that and an iBook -- a Centrino-based X series would have been my second choice.  But then I remember his laptop cost about 80% more than my iBook (I got the one without the CD burner, since I can burn with my desktop machine), and I didn't pay a Windows tax.   :Smile: 

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## heckler

 *ozonator wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I doubt it's because you're stupid!  There are a few...

 

well, maybe the ibook is nice, maybe gentoo is ok 4 the pp g4 as well, but debian and pp g4 didnt fit. -> 

first though i booted from the cd it didnt recognize it (couldnt mount) when it was to copy the kernel. ok, i did that by ftp. next it didnt continue for it didnt find a floppy 4 to create a rescue disk. but only in 3 out of 4 tries, so i managed that hurd too. finally when i had to copy the device driver files again not possible from the cdrom, and it told me whatever ftp or http server i choose that files there were corrupt and the damn thing stalled. so no idea what was going on there, but as i experienced zero probs installing deb on 2 pcs (intel p2 and 4, completely different devices elsehow)  i guess it is not that stupid to get me an intel based notebook and not a mac one 

 :Wink: 

i m sure guyz and girlz developing whatever linux dists 4 macs  r doing a great job, however i guess development 4 intel based systems ist simply some lil time ahead

 :Question: 

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## EdSchouten

I WAS running Gentoo on my Mac, it all worked fine, but then I updated Mac OS to 10.2.8 and there was a motherboard update hidden in it, after that my IDE controller went nuts  :Very Happy: 

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## ozonator

 *heckler wrote:*   

> i guess it is not that stupid to get me an intel based notebook and not a mac one

 

Fair enough; nothing like bad experiences to turn a person off, and your computer is something you should be comfortable with.  As I said before, I've had no problem with my iBook.  Frankly, I've got my own set of horror stories that make me unreasonably cautious about some things -- and they all involve x86 hardware.     :Wink: 

 *EdSchouten wrote:*   

> I WAS running Gentoo on my Mac, it all worked fine, but then I updated Mac OS to 10.2.8 and there was a motherboard update hidden in it, after that my IDE controller went nuts 

 

Yes, saw the thread about this.  Definitely an unfortunate situation.  I, like others on that thread, didn't have any problem at all with 10.2.8, but I don't remember if there was any cause/solution found.

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