On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 11:06, Orion Buckminster Montoya wrote: > > My G3 iBook has died a premature death due to video card failure > > and I am seeking to replace it with a Powerbook. I have read that Airport > > Extreme is not supported due to driver license issues, is that correct ? > > Broadcom makes the chip in the Airport Extreme cards, and they are > bastards who don't release specs.
that is a real problem. Some people are trying to reverse engineer the driver somewhere, but I don't think they are far yet. > > Also, is the ATI Radeon 9600 found in the 15" and 17" AlBooks any > > better supported than the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5200 as installed in the > > 12" PB ? > > I sold my G3 iBook and bought a 12" PB when they first came out and I > regret it. The G3 iBook remains a wonderful machine with everything > supported; the 12" PB G4 is not yet supported for sleep or Airport > Extreme, which is a huge problem for me since I'd completely built my > (computing) life around 802.11b and portability. I long for a system > that supports these things again. If I could have one feature and not > the other, I might be able to use it, but for now (10 months?) I've > been booting OS X 95% of the time and taking refuge in my x86 Sid box > at work. I trust that in time all the hard coding work necessary to > support these chips will be done (and I wish I could do it myself), > but it remains in the distant, hardly-foreseeable future. > > If you want to run GNU/Linux right now, don't get the 12". If anyone > wants to trade me a decent, recent iBook for my 12", I will seriously > consider it. Or an earlier model of titanium PowerBook. The earlier 1Ghz tipb was fully supported. I have one of the new G4 iBooks at hand on loan from Apple at the moment, I'll let you know if I can get things to work on it. Regarding sleep support, there's always hope as far as ATI chips are concerned as ATI has always been helpful with that in the past, though it takes time. For nVidia chips, there is no hope. However, I do plan at one point in the future to implement suspend-to disk for all PowerMacs, that would be a good fallback solution for machines that don't have sleep support. I don't know when I'll have this done though, I hope not too far away from now, maybe a couple of monthes. Ben.
