The Powerbook Files

I have a Powerbook G3 (code-named Lombard), which really is a nice laptop; however, in order to have it work the way I really wanted it to, I had to do a few things:

Find a Real OS

The Lombard came with MacOS 9. While running it (for a couple of monthes), I never managed to get it run past 2 days uptime or so. Really unstable, I was unable to do anything really useful using it.
Then MacOS X.1 came out, and I tried it for about one week. On the contrary to OS9, it was quite stable, powerful, but really, really slow. Having an mp3 playing was eating 30-40% of a 333MHz G3 cpu, really unacceptable !

While I was at reinstalling the laptop, I tried out Linux (which was already running on my PC and some servers I manage). Linux installation was quite tricky compared to a PC install, but after that everything went well - stability, efficiency.

Install the OS howtos

So here is how I installed Linux on my lombard. The first howto is in French now, sorry about this english people ;-), but I guess I won't have time to translate it anytime soon.
·Howto install Linux on the G3 Lombard - basics.
·Howto get DRI (Direct Rendering OpenGL) and XV (XVideo) running.
·Another howto, regarding my latest computer, an iBook G4. I installed Gentoo on it.
·This howto describes how I set up a CVS mirror of the rsync mirror of BenH's linuxppc tree.
·This howto describes how to set up a GPRS connection under Linux.

The Overclock Project

I finally motivated myself and tried to overclock my laptop, following the instructions found on this page.
Here is the experience report (french). To be continued ;-)

The Pcmcia-powered Fan

The problem with Apple computers is that they get quite hot, particularly their laptops. While I didn't fear feeling the heat under the keyboard when the computer ran at its factory settings, overclocking it turned me a bit paranoid.
The fan was never running, even with a really hot cpu (after watching a movie or compiling a kernel, for example), so I fixed it (french).

Pmudmon battery monitor

I use Pmudmon, a little Gnome applet by Michal Palczewski, to monitor my battery status. As Michal doesn't have the time, nor the hardware anymore, to maintain it, I volunteered for maintainance and his project is now hosted here.

Mouse button emulation ("mouseemu")

This userland tool replaces the kernel mouse button emulation for kernels 2.6.
You can download it here. It is, of course, GPL. Gentoo users can simply type "emerge mouseemu" :-)
Due to lack of hardware, I can't maintain it anymore. You may find more uptodate versions here.