From OS X to Debian on a iBook
About two years ago I bought a new laptop. I wanted a unix without messing around with drivers for graphics and wireless, so I choose a Apple iBook with OS X. I havn’t regretted but the inflexibilities of Apples user interface is a burden. So I’m playing with installing Debian on a Firewire-drive.
The installation (etch debian-installer RC2) worked fine until the installation of yaboot (the lilo and grub equivalent on powerpc). Google knew the solution: http://howtoforge.org/boot_debian_from_external_firewire (not really, Google found the same howto somewhere else). Problem number two was network: My wireless uses WPA-PSK and I don’t have a free cabled connection. More googling: wpa_supplicant was the solution but it wasn’t on the netinstall cd. Boot into OS X and download wpa_supplicant and some other usefull packages. Problem solved.
So now I have a firewire-drive with a pretty basic Debian install with X11 running. But I actually used 2 Apple applications (Safari and iTunes) and 2 other pieces of Apple hardware (iPod and Airport Express).
Safari is a minor problem, I just have to convince myself that my banking is just as (un)suportted with Firefox as it is with Safari. More interesting is the iTunes/iPod/Airport Express problems. iTunes is easily replaced by xmms but I really likes playing music through AirTunes and I need to keep my iPod updated. So it will porbally take some nore evenings to get completely rid of OS X.
And the I need two more mouse buttons…
Update 2007-04-16: Changed link to boborosso’s howto as requested in the comments.
Zhenech said,
April 2, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
I don’t own an iPod, but I think Amarok has some nice features for mobile-players like the iPod.
If you don’t want to have kdelibs installed, maybe try gtkpod? ;-)
JW said,
April 2, 2007 @ 10:36 pm
One button does NOT rule them all…
Take a look at Amarok — it can manage iPod content.
Drizzt said,
April 2, 2007 @ 10:53 pm
As a replacement for iTunes I would recommend Amarok. I does nearly all the things iTunes does and some other things too. Is (in my experience) much faster than iTunes and is extendable by Scripts. Maybe there is something for broadcasting via AirTunes already available (have a look at http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Scripts (there is a pretty useful list) or you can search http://www.kde-apps.org/ directly).
Greetings,
Drizzt
Neil Williams said,
April 3, 2007 @ 12:21 am
I’m using Debian on a 12inch iBook, installed via the CD drive. One little tip of the mouse buttons - USB mice, even the really cheap ones - seem to work fine. As for Safari, I’ve found Galeon to be a much better browser. One the move, the single mouse button grows on you after a while but a “travel USB” mouse helps on those occasions when you do actually have the laptop on some kind of flat surface. I removed OSX to install Debian and gained 8Gb of free space! Part of my Debian development is now done on this powerpc machine.
Don Armstrong said,
April 3, 2007 @ 12:40 am
To get two mouse buttons is actually fairly simple:
You can use RTCornerButton LTCornerButton in your synatpics configuration section, or you can just use two and three fingers for the middle and right buttons. Makes it simple enough, in my experience.
Itai Seggev said,
April 3, 2007 @ 5:59 am
I’m assuming you have a post July 2005 ibook (with a scrolling touchpad), the driver emulates a synatpics touchpad so you can use two/three button taps and other gestures for buttons 2/3. man synaptics for the details.
Flemming Jacobsen said,
April 3, 2007 @ 9:22 am
I use gtkpod for updating my iPod - no problems whatsoever.
As for playing music on your stereo, I suggest http://slimdevices.com/
Fabian said,
April 3, 2007 @ 10:42 am
I think banshee is also capable to sync your iPod. It’s a mono-based gtk-application in case you do not like amarok.
peter.makholm.net » Blog Archive » From OS X to Debian on a iBook said,
April 4, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
[...] My previous post generated a lot of useful comments. Some of them was about using the synaptics trackpad driver. Unfortunately it only works, as Itai Seggev says, on post July 2005 iBooks and my iBook seems to be from August 2004 (this fact took me a long time to realize). [...]
Boborosso said,
April 12, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
I suggest linking to the copy of boborosso.com articole on howtoforge or getting the article itself (it’s Creative Commons licensed) I won’t be renewing the boborosso domain so the link will eventually break. I tested with the official etch installer and it still works. Have a nice day