Menu after right clicking on the speaker icon
It's cool, stable and I don't have to compile everything from source (which would take days on my poor 500mhz iBook). It's also available on PowerPC at a level that's just about equal to x86. This is a good thing! Plus, just about everyone doing PowerPC linux stuff uses it.
It's scalable, fast and reliable. Using ext3 with dir_index could have been an option, but I'm an XFS junkie - my honors project is dealing with data storage systems, I'm allowed to have filesystem bias :)
To install Debian on PowerPC with the XFS file system, grab the install CDs from http://penguinppc.org/~eb/files/. After installing though, put on a benh based kernel.
Partly so I could toy with MacOS X, partly because Apple hardware is cool, and PowerPC is a nice architecture (read: better than x86). It also won't cook my lap and I can actually watch a DVD on a single battery charge.
It should also be noted that Apple laptops seem to have higher sex appeal than any other laptop out there. You don't get attention carrying a Dell, an Apple makes you look cool.
By editing /etc/sysctl.conf with a couple of things recommended by Lashi, I've got Fn+Ctrl being the middle button and Fn+Alt (otherwise known as Option) acting as the right mouse button. With the /dev/input/mice device, I can plug and unplug my USB logitech without a problem. There is a kernel patch floating around (for 2.6, and i think there is a 2.4 backport around) that lets you use ctrl-click as right click (much like MacOS). I haven't used it yet - although it does sound kinda cool.
USB Audio (Griffin iMic) works fine, and with the latest 2.6 kernel (no doubt older ones as well, but I keep up to date) the snd-powermac driver works fine for the internal sound. NOTE: I have been having problems with the dmasound_pmac driver, replacing it with snd-powermac fixes this.
My current gripe is the lack of seemless audio device switching. When my USB audio is plugged in, I want to use it, but when I unplug it, I want to use internal sound. This doesn't happen very automatically - in fact, I have to go and do symlink stuff. icky. I doubt this will be fixed soon, although it would be a great thing for the ALSA people to get onto.
The trick is: 16 bit color only! Yes, that will get DRM going on an 8MB Rage128 Mobility. It's a bitch, OSX can do it in Millions of Colors, so why can't X?
You may also want to check out the latest DRI drivers by adding the following to you /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://people.debian.org/~daenzer/dri-trunk/ ./
With acme running in GNOME (also known as "Multimedia Buttons", I'm able to get all my lovely buttons to do useful things. Very pretty, although not quite as cool as the fading translucent stuff under OS X. It should be noted that when you change audio devices, acme does not automatically pick this up, and you have to do killall acme; acme & to get it behaving properly again. The Volume Control in GNOME (which you can launch by right clicking on the speaker icon in the top right of your screen and
Menu after right clicking on the speaker icon
I'm currently running Linux 2.4.22 (from kernel.org) plus the 2.4.22 benh patch (rev 2), one of my own (to stop messages being printed on console when using the brightness keys) and a snapshot of the SGI XFS patches. Tweaking 2.4.22-ben2 to get it going with xfs took a lot less work than 2.4.21 (which is a good thing). The full patch against the stock 2.4.22 kernel is avaiable here, patch-2.4.22-ben2-stew1-xfs.bz2.
Although it's taken a little longer, 2.6 seems to be just about ready for PowerPC - although i haven't tried it yet.
The gnome-bluetooth and phonemgr projects look promising, and may offer cool GUI stuff soon(er) or later - check out the sites and mailing lists
The excellent Multisync can synchronise the T68i via Bluetooth with Evolution. I also use it to synchronise my laptop with my desktop via SyncML. This is very cool!
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