Powerbook. Linux. Oh yes.

I just installed gentoo 2005.1 on my powerbook. So shiny. Even though there's no airport extreme drivers yet and I haven't gotten the touchpad to play nicely, it seems like it'll be great. It automatically dims/brightens the keyboard and LCD just like in OSX, the eject button on the keyboard works, and everything seems just like it's supposed to. I emerged fluxbox so I'd have a gui to poke while I wait for kde to compile.

One thing I've noticed is that it compiles like a celly. It's been going at kde for almost 9 hours now and still going. Or maybe I'm used to 64-bit compiles now. Either way, it's far from blazing.

Fluxbox is nice for a lightweight WM, still a KDE fanboy though Since I'm compiling KDE but wanted to get on the forums I installed links, and I noticed that in the fluxbox menu there was links and links-graphic. Links-graphic is worth a try if you're looking for a very basic graphic webbrowser! The forums look funny through it

Anyone else have any experience with linux on a powerbook? I'm curious to see if there's any good tips out there.

PhoenixMDM said:

One thing I've noticed is that it compiles like a celly. It's been going at kde for almost 9 hours now and still going. Or maybe I'm used to 64-bit compiles now. Either way, it's far from blazing.

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Jeeze dude, i'm getting the same crap on my system in sig, kde has been going for atleast 9 hours and all this waitin' in driving me nuts.

Macs, Peagsos, and any other computer/CPU that are under the PPC arcitecture, generally take longer to compile gcc/g++ code, simply due how the PPC architecture process instructions.

But a big factor I've noticed regarding the time to compile a program is what compiler optimizations you've chosen.

thats the main reason why i do not like gentoo . I do not want to wait all day to compile stuff
I tried it once. emerge kde took 16 hours on a system with a 3.2Ghz and 1gb ram

The compiling really sped up for me when I upgraded to GCC 3.4.4 and started using CCache.

KDE only took about an hour or two on my machine (minimal, the split ebuilds). That was just to get kdebase-startkde, kicker, konqueror, qt, and konsole.

I don't know why ppl complain about compile times, you do it 1 big time (install) then 1 small time during the month (perferrably while you're sleeping) you could even make a shell script to update and have cron run it at the end of each month.
Anyways the way I see it, I've been running the same "install" for almost 4 yrs but have a system more up-to-date than SuSE9.3 or Mandriva10.x.

Phoenix, I installed Gentoo on my powerbook a while ago and got deplorable compile times as well, one of the limitations of PPC I guess or GCC. I think it took mine close to 24 hours to build KDE . In the end I found it easier to just use FINK and installed KDE in OSX . As for those of you getting 16 hour builds USE THE SPLIT BUILDS! will give a perfectly functioning desktop in an hour or two (assuming X is already built) you can add as you see fit in the future

seems to me (about your airport issue) you should be able to get the xdarwin source code, and compile it over...justa thought, its gotta be sweet..if i had a spare HDD id slap it on my dual G5

xdarwin source code? I'm confused, I thought apple kept their source under lock and key
Kde is almost done. I had to stop compile for awhile because a thunderstorm came, but it's on the second-to-last package.

About the compile times, yeah, they're nastily huge, but since things only need to compile once, it probably won't be that bad. Worse than that though is the radeon driver. I've got 128mb of ddr vram, i should be able to get more than 300fps in glxgears...

I'm going to install MOL so that I can poke OSX and enjoy it, but still have the gorgeousness that is linux.

Xdarwin is the open source version of mac osx, thats why its free...however i could be wrong about tinkering with the source code