ppc (tibook) install report and suggestions

[Kapil Thangavelu]

hi folks,

 i've been a gentoo user for the last few years, and i'm strictly 
 a debian newb, not for lack of trying, just every debian based distro
 i've tried has gone belly up soon after me installing (storm, progeny.)

 considering how nice the installation and how quick the community 
 growth of ubuntu i think my luck with debian is about to change ;-)

 i've been using ubuntu for the last week, and i wanted to convey my 
 experiences. first let me say that ubuntu is one of the better distros
 i've encountered as well as the first to officially support gnome2.8.
 kudos to the dev team!

 hardware 4 installation

  powerbook titanium rev 4 (nov 2002)
  last apple hardware afaik, thats well supported under linux.
  ie. wifi, accelerated 3d all work. g4 1ghz / 1g ram / 60g hd  

  already setup as dual boot gentoo and osx

 installation.

  flawless! detected and setup my wifi card, did the install
  wirelessly. correctly installed over the gentoo partitions
  (reformatted) without affecting the osx dual boot setup.
  did the install with a daily cdimage.
  
 okay the rest of this email, are various things that i think could
 be done to improve the ubuntu from packages for the system to
 bugs encountered. i understand that things are in freeze mode, these
 are just suggestions for the future.


Packages

 some packages off the back that i was missing.
 - keychain - no ssh user should be without imho.
 - gcj-3.4 should be preferred 3.3 it fixes lots of serious
shortcomings.
 - gpdf over xpdf, better integrated with the desktop.
 - any gpg frontend
 - inkscape - very nice vector drawing app compliments the gimp well.

 powerbook items (although i believe they apply generically to several
 laptops models).
 - gtkpbbuttons 
 - powerprefs

 notebook items
 - metalog (buffer writes to log, better bat life)

Issues - end user oriented
 
 hardware 
 
 usb handling
 - when plugging in a keyboard hub with a mouse can
   lockup the usb subsystem.
 - ideally this should usb-hid should be in the core
   the notes in the /etc/hotplug.d usb files make this clear,
   as the problem seems to be a race condition thats alleviated
   by having this in kernel.
 - ugly workaround unplug the mouse, plug keyboard, plug
   mouse. ick.
 
 firewire and hotplug
 - i was pleasantly surprised to be able to plug in my ipod and 
   have it recognized. i setup the fstab and mounted it hfsplus and
   was able to play music off it. all in all very cool, as an end user 
   though it would be nice to have it detected and mounted automatically
   like the hotplug for cd. i see support in the hotplug scripts for 
   rewriting fstab on the fly and mounting, how would i go about setting
   this up for a firewire drive?

 - not so lucky with the isight, firewire video capture seems to be
   non existent, is v4linux installed? the packages in universe for 
   coriander is very old.. 
  
 more hotplug
 - plugging in firewire works well, except it would be
   nice to have 

 battery life
 - i consistently had 3.5 hrs on linux and osx previously with ubuntu
   its down to 1 :-( i'm still trying to figure out why. any hints would
   be appreciated.
  
 wireless
 
 - twould be really nice to have the orinco/airport scanning mode
patches added in.  
  
 sleep
 - is very inconsistent, a bit like playing russian roulette. i had
   this working flawlessly with a 2.4 kernel and gentoo, utilizing only
   pbbuttonsd. i'm still trying to work my way through the power  
   management stack under ubuntu to figure out the problem, but i
   consider it a serious issue. granted, sleep is a not fun topic in
   general for linux laptops, but its a crucial item.

 - it would be really nice to have a sleep menu option under computer.

 powerbook mouse emulation buttons

 - i see the appropriate settings in /etc/sysctl.conf 

  # Emulate the middle mouse button with F11 and the right with F12.
  dev/mac_hid/mouse_button_emulation = 1
  dev/mac_hid/mouse_button2_keycode = 87
  dev/mac_hid/mouse_button3_keycode = 88

  however the right button mouse emulation doesn't work with those
  defaults, i think its some sort of conflict w/ f12 as the eject button
  and pbbuttons perhaps.. not sure.

 Applications 

 screem install
 - messes up the mime type handling, no way afaics to fix
   the default text editor seems to get reset any time 
   screem is started up. no obvious gconf keys... not sure
   how the new gnome mime db is being handled, but screem
   seems to have it fubared such that every text file (xml/css/code/etc)
   wants to be opened in screem.

 gnome meeting

 - crashed and burned everytime i tried to make a connection, seemed to
   be audio/alsa related from the stack traces.

 gstreamer+totem

 - ummm.. didn't work for playing music or video. lamo. after a
   suggestion on #dev i installed totem-xine. still, if this is the
   default thats problematic, imho. getting realplayer/helix as a
   default player would be nicer assuming the legal encumberance of
   xine/mplayer front/backends is overwhelming.

 all in all its a very nice system, and i'll be sticking with it.

 cheers,

 -kapil