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debian on a Powerbook 15 inch, 1.5GHz processor, 1.25GHz ram, and a 160GB hard drive.

Submitted by orion on Tue, 2007-04-03 10:34. | | | | |

So I'm going to pick up the story after my hard drive crashed recently. At that point, the primary concern was the data loss, which was pretty annoying. However, it really has turned out that I have not lost that much, most stuff was - in one way or another - backed up. So then the emphasis turned to sorting out the computer. It was still under Apple Care Warrancy, which I had bought literally hours before my eligibility ran out. It has proved worthwhile, and I would do it again. First, I had to get it enabled: that involved telephoning the support line. But I had all the appropriate documentation still (original invoice, receipt, delivery notes, etc) so it was fine. Then, getting an appointment at the apple genius bar at the regent street store. The first time I went in, I was served by a real jerk of a guy who had obviously been told to learn the company style as his own would have been too bad. I'm sure there must have been complaints about him. Anyway, I got the manager who came over and offered to replace the screen and the top casing, which had worn away under the sweat from my wrists one hot summer in new york, but said i'd have to pay for the bottom casing and hard drive as there was clear evidence of damage. It was noted in the records - which I was only allowed to see at a strange angle after absolutely insisting - and I left.

I came back a few days later, having decided that I would have the cosmetic repairs done, but leave the hard drive. What a sensible decision that seems to have been! The big catch with apple was that if they replaced the hard drive, they would only do like for like (i.e an 80GB hard drive for another 80GB one) and they would keep the old, damaged one. That didn't seem fair, as it had all my data on it - albeit encrypted. Even so, I wanted to be able to attempt to get it off.

Today, I got the computer back. Went into the store and told you don't need to have an appointment, but it would be so much easier. There was some really dumb girl who was trying to server three people at once and clearly didn't even know how to serve one. Turned out lucky for me, though: I first asked for a firewire drive to boot off, so I could check out my screen, then I eventually signed the piece of paper as confirmation, noting that they had not charged me the thirty odd pounds for a new keyboard that I had first been warned about. So far, so good. By this point, the girl was well and truly flummoxed, and when she finally got around to ringing up the whole process in the 'register', she must have only read the first line, or skimmed the page or something. Anyway, she didn't notice a hundred and twenty pound charge, until after she'd closed it all down and printed it out etc. Then, she saw me standing there with my credit card and asked, "Oh, were you meant to pay something?" So I stayed silent. Then she asked for my copy of the receipt back, having looked at hers, compared the two and then ran off to find her manager whilst I was left standing there.

The result of it was that he told her that she couldn't charge me, so she didn't, looked confused - even more than she was - and just handed me the paperwork back. But this time she handed me back the copy that I had signed, so I could actually go into the store and try it all over again, I guess, although that probably wouldn't work too well.

Having saved first forty (for the keyboard) and then another one twenty (for the casing), I was pretty happy so resolved to pick up a hard drive on the way home. I'd been reading about seagate momentus 160GB 54000k drives with a 5 year warranty and good reviews. However, the shop was out of stock and so I ended up with a Hitachi Travelstar which also had reasonable reviews. That set me back just short of ninety quid, plus a T8 torx screwdriver, and then I was ready.

Best guide around is the ifixit one; however, it's also worth looking closely at the pictures on xlr8yourmac.com as they show clearly the clips which can be so confusing (wait until you try!). Doing it in reverse was simple, so don't worry about the fact that the documentation seems sparse. I also added in the extra 256MB ram I had lying around.

Now, having not done a successful debian X install on a powerpc before, I wanted to give myself the best opportunity to be successful, so I just followed the defaults. I downloaded a netinstall iso and burnt that to disc on another machine, then I booted from that in my (new!) mac and followed default compilations. Unfortunately, it ended up installing Sarge and not Etch, plus only gave me the option to insert one apt repository, but I'm just trying to prove a functional system is possible before I commit to it. We'll see how true that statement is in a couple of weeks, too.

Having logged in, I edited the /etc/apt/sources.list file and then installed Etch. This resulted in another hours delay, to download and install everything. In the meantime, nothing else really worked, primarily because Nautilus was broken. Reminds me why I was frustrated with it years ago.

...

Alright, so it's all done now: I've even rebooted once, but gonna do that again. Now is when I need to get down and really think about how and what I want this machine to be.

  1. it's going to be a main source of entertainment
  2. it's going to have all my work on it (but I'll make backups this time, promise!)
  3. it's going to be a source of communication to the world
  4. it's also going to provide with some substantial challenges over the coming months, I suspect

With that in mind, I need to think about how to sort it all out. This time around, I have twice the space I had before, with a 160GB drive. I'm also planning on installing heavier packages, tho, so may need larger partitions than I"m used to using. Having no clue about partition sizes for a laptop, I googled a little bit but ended up leaving it with one of the defaults - the one that worked ('workstation', I think it was). I'll figure that out later: it's not important for now.

Onto the fun stuff, then. This meant trying to get sound and wireless and function keys and other exciting mac extras working. Sound was fine, it "just worked" which is always good, when I put a CD in. Although, to be honest, it played the default application rather than XMMS which is what I had tried to get it to open. Anyway, I could listen to music whilst figuring other stuff out.

So, wireless. This was where I knew there would be a problem, as I'd struggled with this once before. Powerbooks use the proprietary Broadcom internal wireless card, which does not have a publicly available driver. Instead, one has been reverse engineered and, if you find the instructions alright, it seems pretty straightforward. The one catch being that you need to get bcm43xx-fwcutter which seems to only be available for gentoo. That said, it is designed to work on OSX so it shouldn't really matter. I will need, however, to get apple installed on this computer again, which is a drag. I wonder if I still have those DVDs...

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